The original poster said "If you use the open license, you can't contribute back". Not "it DISCOURAGES contributing back", which is what you are arguing. I was complaining that they seemed to have some reason it was IMPOSSIBLE, not less likely.
I personally have seen zero effect on this and certainly have seen much more work done on code that requires copyright assignments. Look at all the people here arguing that BSD code gets just as much or more feedback and contributions, that would require the contributor giving up just as many rights as to a dual-licensed project, and far more than to a GPL project.
So you are saying that you are better off with NO possibility of anybody else fixing your code, than with the people who are willing to assign the rights back to you?
You are being stupid. Yes you have to assign rights over if you want to contribute back to a dual-licensed project, but the fact that you "used the open license" does not mean this is impossible.
I would like to see an officially-named and popular license that basically is "what people think the LGPL means". It says you can "use" the code for anything. In particular you are free to statically-link with other software and distribute the resulting binary. But modifications to the code itself must be redistributed with a matching license (you can still statically-link the result with your closed source, but you must include the changes you made to that code). There could be some minor restrictions, like the reverse-engineering-is-allowed clause, and possibly some clause to prevent the modification being to add a callback to a piece of secret code, though I really think people trying to cheat will be called out and lambasted so there is no real reason for such restrictions.
I believe this eliminates all the problems BSD proponents have with the GPL, in particular it is not "viral". It still prevents the embrace-and-extend problems the GPL tries to prevent.
The only accurate version is called "GPL with a linking exception", but this has a lenghty name, makes people think it is GPL, and there is no official wording of the "linking exception" so there are a hundred different versions.
The LGPL is not correct because of some strange effects that basically means your code must be a shared library. This is pointless for making a library that you want to be popular, as it pretty much requires it to be already installed on systems. It also locks down the ABI which is pretty bad if you are trying to improve the software. You can put a "linking exception" on the LGPL but then it is equivalent to the GPL plus linking exception and I prefer the shorter one.
Several people have suggested the MLPL (sp?) and similar ones. But all of them seem to have been written by GPL-haters and have added text to purposely make it incompatible with the GPL. I certainly do not want this, as I want my library to be popular and thus I want it to be usable by GPL code.
It does appear RMS likes the viral idea as the FSF refuses to put a short name on a license that does this.
What I really want to see is a popular 3/4-letter named license that says this, possibly endorsed by the FSF or another organization. There must be hundreds of proliferated licenses because software writers try to achieve this, where is the official one?
Much more of a problem is that the X design assumed latency would be small compared to bandwidth.
Far too many X calls require a value returned by the server, which means two latencies no matter how tiny the messages are.
I suspect most of NX's speedup is due to it emulating a lot of the server on the local end so that a lot of answers are sent back from the local copy. Unfortunately this can't be used for everything, as it will defeat the cooperative nature of X, for instance you can't get an answer that depends on what another program is doing from another host. If you go all the way you end up with the entire screen emulated locally and thus the remote display exactly matches the local screen, this is the solution used by VNC and Remote Desktop.
A well-designed X-like protocol with all asynchronous interaction would be much faster and better than VNC assuming it was properly implemented, even if the only graphic call was "draw this image here" (it could use VNC's compression of changes and image compression to reduce the bandwidth).
Damn right they should fix Metacity, or replace it.
In particular, fix the "don't raise windows on click" option. Currently you can get it in this mode, but that causes it to ignore raises made by the application itself!!! Those idiots then say "not a bug" because they have some bogus excuse that raises from the app should always be ignored, but that is obviously bogus because they pay attention to them when the "don't raise on click" is off!
They also need to realize that working point-to-type and dont-raise-on-click is probably the one area where Linux desktops are vastly superior to Windows and OS/X. Instead they seem intent on breaking it as much as possible.
I think the word 'file' has its roots from the days when a 'record' was still a fundamental concept. So a 'record' is a sheet of paper, a 'file' contains a bundle of records.
This makes sense, some historical information can be found by looking at the ASCII control character assignments. Look at the end of the control characters, in reverse order they were supposed to be larger and larger block separators:
SPACE (word separator) US (unit separator, like between columns in a table) RS (record separator, a row in a table) GS (group separator, equivalent to an XML grouping, but they never thought of hierarchy?) FS (file separator)
I think the figuring was that any larger grouping than "bunch of files" would be "a different tape" so there was no need for a larger separator.
I think it would be nice to reuse these control characters for markup so we don't have to worry about escaping things all the time, too.
Smooth Streaming, an adaptive technology for playing the same H.264 video stream at the highest bitrate the device and its bandwidth limitations will allow
Though this works pretty well, the marketing description is extremely misleading. There is not "one" video stream. Instead the source video has been pre-encoded at several different qualities, into different files on the source, and these are switched between (I think glitchless-switching is a bit tricky so they deserve some credit there). This all according to the Microsoft representatives at NAB where they were demoing this. This does not work for live video due to the delay (it also would require multiple encoder cards). Switching according to their demo app is about once per second in very regular periods.
Another mystery is that "silverlight 1" is actually Javascript and not.net. This makes me very mystified as to how Mono could have anything to do with Silverlight 1 working at all, when in fact it should only help Silverlight 2 and that is in much worse shape than Silverlight 1. Any explanation for this?
The NAB booth prominantly displayed that SIlverlight 3.0 video was cross-platform with "Windows, OS/X, Linux" listed by name. Interesting, but this was a booth directed at video professionals. The Microsoft rep said they are doing zero about supporting Moonlight but that "the Novell people will be working on it soon".
Imagine if your flash could create a new browser window, turn off the menu and toolbars, and resize itself to fill the window. This is what Silverlight is doing. Microsoft calling this "outside the browser" is just misleading marketing hype.
Microsoft defenders rightly are saying that most people's here perception is wrong. I do see problems with the great ease this allows web sites to look like dialogs from local programs, but nowhere near the danger you think there is from this.
Actually "IBM Compatible" was not Microsoft's idea. MSDOS ran on a number of non-compatible machines, such as the Z100 and WangPC, and Microsoft certainly intended this, as they were modelling their system on CP/M which ran on many machines.
A lot of the blame for "IBM Compatible" can be laid on IBM's design. They wrote the "BIOS" which was complete trash and Microsoft's people probably did not dare to stand up to them and tell them that. IBM managed to require TWO calls to the BIOS to draw a single letter on the screen, which is twice as bad as the stupidest possible interface I would imagine somebody writing (they had one interface to put a letter at the cursor and a second one to move the cursor!). IBM's terrible design meant that nobody in their right mind would call MSDOS for any purpose other that reading/writing the disk and thus direct hardware I/O was done for everything else and thus software required exact emulation of that hardware to work (note that for about 5 years the only change in machines was improved disks and hard disks, due to the fact that it was the only part that went through the OS).
Compaq is probably the first to realize this after all the other MSDOS machines failed on the market, and the clone market is really due to them.
We still have "NumLock" and arrows written on the numeric keypad because of the IBMPC, so this crap still remains with us even today.
Anyway Microsoft certainly has their problems but they are not to blame for the Compatibles, other than perhaps not standing up to IBM's designers.
I think he is talking about "powershell" though that is an option and normal Vista only gives you cmd.exe.
Rather than reinventing the wheel they could have put one programmer to work for a day and included a BSD-licensed shell and some BSD or even GNU utilities included that would have made everybody much happier than "powershell". Powershell's "object oriented" system could have been added on by provided as a serializing library.
But that would have made them compatible with existing software, something that seems to give them hives, even when it would probably improve their market position. Linux would not exist if they had made NT compatible with Unix, and they seem unwilling to admit this and are actively hurting themselves with useless incompatibility.
Since Google controls Youtube they could easily make it send the video in their own format, no flash involved, when talking to ChromeOS. Same thing as the iPhone does. So the fact that they own Youtube makes the desire for flash support *less*, not more.
I am somewhat doubtful that flash support can be improved. I suspect the original code is a mess and in fact Adobe is trying fairly hard. If Adobe was ignoring Linux there would not be anything that worked at all.
What you are encountering is a typical moron implementatin of UTF-8.
For some reason otherwise intelligent programmers lose their minds when presented with UTF-8. They act as though the program will crash instantly if they ever make a pointer that points at the middle of a character, or if they fail to correclty count the "characters" in a string and dare to use an offset or number of bytes. I am not really certain what causes these diseases but being exposed to decades of character==byte ASCII programming seems responsible.
One way I try to correct this is to get them to thing about "words" the same way they are thinking about "characters". Do they panic that there is not a fast method of moving by N words? Do they panic that it is possible to split a string in the middle of a word and thus produce two incorrectly-spelled words? Do they think that copying text in fixed-sized blocks from one location to another will somehow garble it because at the midpoint a word got split into two parts? No, not if they have any brains at all. However for some reason when they see multibyte characters all sense goes out the window.
Here is how you solve it: you keep the text as UTF-8 and you treat it as an array of BYTES!. Smoke will NOT come out of your computer because you don't continuously think about the "characters", in fact it will, amazingly enough, be remembered and the bits will not change because you failed to continuously look at the character boundaries or you dared to not count how many there were! When it gets to time to display it, you parse out each UTF-8 character and draw it on the screen (and also do all that complex Pango-like layout). At the same time, through an amazing ability of the UTF-8 decoder to recognize that it can't decode something, you will, FOR FREE, find the errors. You can then render the bytes of the error sequence in another way, perhaps by choosing the matching character from CP1252.
This completely avoids the need for "metadata" and "BOM" and all that other crap, and magically works when the users accidentally pastes text from different encodings together, something that no metadata can ever solve.
This isn't rocket science or magic, but for some reason it appears to be for a lot of people. You included, and many many other intelligent people. Comon, everybody, please think a little!
For that to explain it then IE8 would have to look like Firefox to this statistic counter. If it was just unrecognized there would instead be an 8% rise in "unknown/other".
However it does seem possible that this counter uses some strange method to indicate the browser so that IE8 looks like Firefox to it.
I think it was Yahoo who tried that, but unfortunatly there are far too many people who hit "spam" when they really mean to hit "delete". The end result for them is the same so they don't care, and thus the spam classification is pretty useless.
The patent is (or should not be) on the obvious parts of the system. There is a clever thing in VFAT, in that they use hidden "volume label" directory entries to store the long name, and this work-around does not change that.
This is not just long filenames (unless the patent system is broken much worse than anybody thinks). It is blatently obvious how to add long filename support to a file system that has short filenames. However the "obvious" solution would be to use a single hidden file to store all the names. Microsoft chose another solution, and for a good reason (their solution has an advantage that if an "old" system deletes all the files in a directory, the directory looks empty. A hidden file would either be too easy to delete by accident or would be "locked" and thus the old system would be unable to empty the directory).
It is also blatently obvious that an 8.3 replacement filename must be made for the file, so that can't be patented. They may have patented the pattern but I'm fairly certain that any unique pattern of characters with the same extension would not break any software (they could have made a system where "part" of the long filename is stored in the 8.3 name, but they did not because they were probably worried about handling collisions of these short names, or just rushed with their implementation).
So I really don't see how this works around the actually patentable part of this, since the use of volume label directory entries is still being done.
It also appears that *reading* the long filenames is allowed without a license. So anybody can read these disks.
My suggestion would be to use a new method to store the long names. Users of Windows looking at the disk would see only the short names. People say that the users will blame Linux for that, but they are seriously underestimating the stupidity of users, they will blame the Windows machine, since when they put the disk back in the Linux machine the filenames work!
Wrong. vfat is not reverse-engineered. Microsoft documented it quite well enough to implement both it and FAT. You may be thinking of NTFS.
Also nobody is concerned about the C# language itself, but about the *libraries* that programs use. You are basically claming that there is no problem cloning Windows because most software for it uses C++.
I own hundreds of DVDs and also rent them from Netflix. I have NEVER watched a downloaded DVD and in fact I'm not even sure if I could set up a bittorrent client, I never tried, and I don't have any idea how you would look for real DVD copies.
You are seriously mistaken if you think the reason we are complaining is because we want free copies. In fact copy protection is probably the main reason I am not buying more. Until we searched and bought a region-free DVD player I had to play some of the European DVDs, purchased at great expense in France, on a Linux laptop because only it would ignore the region, and some of them did not work or at least the menus did not.
Once we broke some of the copy protection (the region encoding) we feel confident about buying full-price English and French PAL disks rather than pirated copies on the street. Before it was not worth the risk that the disk would not work.
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The original poster said "If you use the open license, you can't contribute back". Not "it DISCOURAGES contributing back", which is what you are arguing. I was complaining that they seemed to have some reason it was IMPOSSIBLE, not less likely.
I personally have seen zero effect on this and certainly have seen much more work done on code that requires copyright assignments. Look at all the people here arguing that BSD code gets just as much or more feedback and contributions, that would require the contributor giving up just as many rights as to a dual-licensed project, and far more than to a GPL project.
I guess this is the first time you bothered to click on any energy topics in Slashdot, then. Probably a good move on your part.
That makes absolutely no sense!
So you are saying that you are better off with NO possibility of anybody else fixing your code, than with the people who are willing to assign the rights back to you?
You really really did say that just now? WTF?
You are being stupid. Yes you have to assign rights over if you want to contribute back to a dual-licensed project, but the fact that you "used the open license" does not mean this is impossible.
I would like to see an officially-named and popular license that basically is "what people think the LGPL means". It says you can "use" the code for anything. In particular you are free to statically-link with other software and distribute the resulting binary. But modifications to the code itself must be redistributed with a matching license (you can still statically-link the result with your closed source, but you must include the changes you made to that code). There could be some minor restrictions, like the reverse-engineering-is-allowed clause, and possibly some clause to prevent the modification being to add a callback to a piece of secret code, though I really think people trying to cheat will be called out and lambasted so there is no real reason for such restrictions.
I believe this eliminates all the problems BSD proponents have with the GPL, in particular it is not "viral". It still prevents the embrace-and-extend problems the GPL tries to prevent.
The only accurate version is called "GPL with a linking exception", but this has a lenghty name, makes people think it is GPL, and there is no official wording of the "linking exception" so there are a hundred different versions.
The LGPL is not correct because of some strange effects that basically means your code must be a shared library. This is pointless for making a library that you want to be popular, as it pretty much requires it to be already installed on systems. It also locks down the ABI which is pretty bad if you are trying to improve the software. You can put a "linking exception" on the LGPL but then it is equivalent to the GPL plus linking exception and I prefer the shorter one.
Several people have suggested the MLPL (sp?) and similar ones. But all of them seem to have been written by GPL-haters and have added text to purposely make it incompatible with the GPL. I certainly do not want this, as I want my library to be popular and thus I want it to be usable by GPL code.
It does appear RMS likes the viral idea as the FSF refuses to put a short name on a license that does this.
What I really want to see is a popular 3/4-letter named license that says this, possibly endorsed by the FSF or another organization. There must be hundreds of proliferated licenses because software writers try to achieve this, where is the official one?
Much more of a problem is that the X design assumed latency would be small compared to bandwidth.
Far too many X calls require a value returned by the server, which means two latencies no matter how tiny the messages are.
I suspect most of NX's speedup is due to it emulating a lot of the server on the local end so that a lot of answers are sent back from the local copy. Unfortunately this can't be used for everything, as it will defeat the cooperative nature of X, for instance you can't get an answer that depends on what another program is doing from another host. If you go all the way you end up with the entire screen emulated locally and thus the remote display exactly matches the local screen, this is the solution used by VNC and Remote Desktop.
A well-designed X-like protocol with all asynchronous interaction would be much faster and better than VNC assuming it was properly implemented, even if the only graphic call was "draw this image here" (it could use VNC's compression of changes and image compression to reduce the bandwidth).
Damn right they should fix Metacity, or replace it.
In particular, fix the "don't raise windows on click" option. Currently you can get it in this mode, but that causes it to ignore raises made by the application itself!!! Those idiots then say "not a bug" because they have some bogus excuse that raises from the app should always be ignored, but that is obviously bogus because they pay attention to them when the "don't raise on click" is off!
They also need to realize that working point-to-type and dont-raise-on-click is probably the one area where Linux desktops are vastly superior to Windows and OS/X. Instead they seem intent on breaking it as much as possible.
I think the word 'file' has its roots from the days when a 'record' was still a fundamental concept. So a 'record' is a sheet of paper, a 'file' contains a bundle of records.
This makes sense, some historical information can be found by looking at the ASCII control character assignments. Look at the end of the control characters, in reverse order they were supposed to be larger and larger block separators:
SPACE (word separator)
US (unit separator, like between columns in a table)
RS (record separator, a row in a table)
GS (group separator, equivalent to an XML grouping, but they never thought of hierarchy?)
FS (file separator)
I think the figuring was that any larger grouping than "bunch of files" would be "a different tape" so there was no need for a larger separator.
I think it would be nice to reuse these control characters for markup so we don't have to worry about escaping things all the time, too.
Smooth Streaming, an adaptive technology for playing the same H.264 video stream at the highest bitrate the device and its bandwidth limitations will allow
Though this works pretty well, the marketing description is extremely misleading. There is not "one" video stream. Instead the source video has been pre-encoded at several different qualities, into different files on the source, and these are switched between (I think glitchless-switching is a bit tricky so they deserve some credit there). This all according to the Microsoft representatives at NAB where they were demoing this. This does not work for live video due to the delay (it also would require multiple encoder cards). Switching according to their demo app is about once per second in very regular periods.
Another mystery is that "silverlight 1" is actually Javascript and not .net. This makes me very mystified as to how Mono could have anything to do with Silverlight 1 working at all, when in fact it should only help Silverlight 2 and that is in much worse shape than Silverlight 1. Any explanation for this?
The NAB booth prominantly displayed that SIlverlight 3.0 video was cross-platform with "Windows, OS/X, Linux" listed by name. Interesting, but this was a booth directed at video professionals. The Microsoft rep said they are doing zero about supporting Moonlight but that "the Novell people will be working on it soon".
It's not really "outside the browser".
Imagine if your flash could create a new browser window, turn off the menu and toolbars, and resize itself to fill the window. This is what Silverlight is doing. Microsoft calling this "outside the browser" is just misleading marketing hype.
Microsoft defenders rightly are saying that most people's here perception is wrong. I do see problems with the great ease this allows web sites to look like dialogs from local programs, but nowhere near the danger you think there is from this.
Actually "IBM Compatible" was not Microsoft's idea. MSDOS ran on a number of non-compatible machines, such as the Z100 and WangPC, and Microsoft certainly intended this, as they were modelling their system on CP/M which ran on many machines.
A lot of the blame for "IBM Compatible" can be laid on IBM's design. They wrote the "BIOS" which was complete trash and Microsoft's people probably did not dare to stand up to them and tell them that. IBM managed to require TWO calls to the BIOS to draw a single letter on the screen, which is twice as bad as the stupidest possible interface I would imagine somebody writing (they had one interface to put a letter at the cursor and a second one to move the cursor!). IBM's terrible design meant that nobody in their right mind would call MSDOS for any purpose other that reading/writing the disk and thus direct hardware I/O was done for everything else and thus software required exact emulation of that hardware to work (note that for about 5 years the only change in machines was improved disks and hard disks, due to the fact that it was the only part that went through the OS).
Compaq is probably the first to realize this after all the other MSDOS machines failed on the market, and the clone market is really due to them.
We still have "NumLock" and arrows written on the numeric keypad because of the IBMPC, so this crap still remains with us even today.
Anyway Microsoft certainly has their problems but they are not to blame for the Compatibles, other than perhaps not standing up to IBM's designers.
I think he is talking about "powershell" though that is an option and normal Vista only gives you cmd.exe.
Rather than reinventing the wheel they could have put one programmer to work for a day and included a BSD-licensed shell and some BSD or even GNU utilities included that would have made everybody much happier than "powershell". Powershell's "object oriented" system could have been added on by provided as a serializing library.
But that would have made them compatible with existing software, something that seems to give them hives, even when it would probably improve their market position. Linux would not exist if they had made NT compatible with Unix, and they seem unwilling to admit this and are actively hurting themselves with useless incompatibility.
Google can pay for the license to distribute the codecs with the system.
Since Google controls Youtube they could easily make it send the video in their own format, no flash involved, when talking to ChromeOS. Same thing as the iPhone does. So the fact that they own Youtube makes the desire for flash support *less*, not more.
I am somewhat doubtful that flash support can be improved. I suspect the original code is a mess and in fact Adobe is trying fairly hard. If Adobe was ignoring Linux there would not be anything that worked at all.
Fake.
I would think a better fake would be to full-screen the Chrome browser (make sure there are no window title bars).
WTF?
If you really want to do this write "$oogle". Or use "Google $earch" or something where an 's' is available.
Your attempt to replace 'o' with '$' is a pretty complete failure.
How about that, you have explained why the iPhone does not sell! How could anybody want it when boxed software bought in a store does not work on it?
Brilliant!
What you are encountering is a typical moron implementatin of UTF-8.
For some reason otherwise intelligent programmers lose their minds when presented with UTF-8. They act as though the program will crash instantly if they ever make a pointer that points at the middle of a character, or if they fail to correclty count the "characters" in a string and dare to use an offset or number of bytes. I am not really certain what causes these diseases but being exposed to decades of character==byte ASCII programming seems responsible.
One way I try to correct this is to get them to thing about "words" the same way they are thinking about "characters". Do they panic that there is not a fast method of moving by N words? Do they panic that it is possible to split a string in the middle of a word and thus produce two incorrectly-spelled words? Do they think that copying text in fixed-sized blocks from one location to another will somehow garble it because at the midpoint a word got split into two parts? No, not if they have any brains at all. However for some reason when they see multibyte characters all sense goes out the window.
Here is how you solve it: you keep the text as UTF-8 and you treat it as an array of BYTES!. Smoke will NOT come out of your computer because you don't continuously think about the "characters", in fact it will, amazingly enough, be remembered and the bits will not change because you failed to continuously look at the character boundaries or you dared to not count how many there were! When it gets to time to display it, you parse out each UTF-8 character and draw it on the screen (and also do all that complex Pango-like layout). At the same time, through an amazing ability of the UTF-8 decoder to recognize that it can't decode something, you will, FOR FREE, find the errors. You can then render the bytes of the error sequence in another way, perhaps by choosing the matching character from CP1252.
This completely avoids the need for "metadata" and "BOM" and all that other crap, and magically works when the users accidentally pastes text from different encodings together, something that no metadata can ever solve.
This isn't rocket science or magic, but for some reason it appears to be for a lot of people. You included, and many many other intelligent people. Comon, everybody, please think a little!
You don't need a windowing system. If the browser can draw all over the screen, it certainly can draw it's own windows and window borders.
I think the plug-in modification includes new batteries.
For that to explain it then IE8 would have to look like Firefox to this statistic counter. If it was just unrecognized there would instead be an 8% rise in "unknown/other".
However it does seem possible that this counter uses some strange method to indicate the browser so that IE8 looks like Firefox to it.
I think it was Yahoo who tried that, but unfortunatly there are far too many people who hit "spam" when they really mean to hit "delete". The end result for them is the same so they don't care, and thus the spam classification is pretty useless.
The patent is (or should not be) on the obvious parts of the system. There is a clever thing in VFAT, in that they use hidden "volume label" directory entries to store the long name, and this work-around does not change that.
This is not just long filenames (unless the patent system is broken much worse than anybody thinks). It is blatently obvious how to add long filename support to a file system that has short filenames. However the "obvious" solution would be to use a single hidden file to store all the names. Microsoft chose another solution, and for a good reason (their solution has an advantage that if an "old" system deletes all the files in a directory, the directory looks empty. A hidden file would either be too easy to delete by accident or would be "locked" and thus the old system would be unable to empty the directory).
It is also blatently obvious that an 8.3 replacement filename must be made for the file, so that can't be patented. They may have patented the pattern but I'm fairly certain that any unique pattern of characters with the same extension would not break any software (they could have made a system where "part" of the long filename is stored in the 8.3 name, but they did not because they were probably worried about handling collisions of these short names, or just rushed with their implementation).
So I really don't see how this works around the actually patentable part of this, since the use of volume label directory entries is still being done.
It also appears that *reading* the long filenames is allowed without a license. So anybody can read these disks.
My suggestion would be to use a new method to store the long names. Users of Windows looking at the disk would see only the short names. People say that the users will blame Linux for that, but they are seriously underestimating the stupidity of users, they will blame the Windows machine, since when they put the disk back in the Linux machine the filenames work!
Wrong. vfat is not reverse-engineered. Microsoft documented it quite well enough to implement both it and FAT. You may be thinking of NTFS.
Also nobody is concerned about the C# language itself, but about the *libraries* that programs use. You are basically claming that there is no problem cloning Windows because most software for it uses C++.
I own hundreds of DVDs and also rent them from Netflix. I have NEVER watched a downloaded DVD and in fact I'm not even sure if I could set up a bittorrent client, I never tried, and I don't have any idea how you would look for real DVD copies.
You are seriously mistaken if you think the reason we are complaining is because we want free copies. In fact copy protection is probably the main reason I am not buying more. Until we searched and bought a region-free DVD player I had to play some of the European DVDs, purchased at great expense in France, on a Linux laptop because only it would ignore the region, and some of them did not work or at least the menus did not.
Once we broke some of the copy protection (the region encoding) we feel confident about buying full-price English and French PAL disks rather than pirated copies on the street. Before it was not worth the risk that the disk would not work.