DRM is more of a hassle to legitimate purchasers than it is to pirates.
That really does depend on the DRM, though. I quite agree that the best option is no DRM, but that's not to say that all DRM is equally bad.
The DRM in Mass Effect was a right pain. Forget the limited-activations issue -- it nearly prevented me from activating the game once, thanks to a locale-related bug that suggests that the underlying code is incredibly poorly written. I shall never play another game that uses SecuROM, period.
On the other hand, the only way I know Valve's games have DRM is because I've been told it. I'd never have noticed otherwise, because buying from Steam has been completely hassle-free.
Yes, there are lots of impressionable people in the world who are easily persuaded by advertising to choose their drink based on perceived coolness rather than on what's actually enjoyable to drink.
The other thing to bear in mind is that most quality beers are not brewed in great quantities. Carbonated urine is always going to sell vastly more by volume than anything worth drinking, simply because there's so much more of it on the market and fewer brands to choose from.
The modern mainstream games media caters to the modern mainstream gamer, and the modern mainstream gamer doesn't realise there were any games before the XBox.
TIE Fighter never existed. The Dark Forces series never existed (not even after it was rebranded as the Jedi Knight series because not enough people remembered Dark Forces). Don't even ask about the classic vector-based arcade game, you'd blow today's kids' minds with the revelation that there were 3D video games nearly thirty whole years ago...
annoyances get fixed, unlike on commercial software where the programmers are insulated from the users and have got used to the annoyances and so can't be bothered to fix them
Remind me, how many years did it take before the GIMP developers finally acknowledged the constant complaints about the interface annoyances in their program that they'd got used to and couldn't be bothered to fix?
Not that I'm criticising OSS interfaces. I don't think I've ever seen an OSS package with an interface as dire as some of the hideously expensive "enterprise" software I'm forced to use at work.
Indeed, it's sometimes a good thing that developers, even of OSS projects, may refuse to listen to users whining about annoyances. For example, Firefox has a much better interface today than it would have had if the developers had paid attention when users whined about the awesomebar, or about the replacement of the search dialog with the search bar, or the change away from Qute as default theme.
User testing is not needed in OSS as such, the users use it ask for changes or do the changes, there is no separate user testing phase...
Actually, many of the more successful OSS projects (particularly the big desktop environments) do quite a lot of user testing, which is the main reason they have pretty good interfaces on the surface -- most of the major interface flaws in Gnome and KDE are found in rarely-used configuration dialogs and suchlike (which always turn out to be the one thing that $skeptical_reviewer desperately needed to configure...)
The only drudge work that seems to be hard for OSS projects is documentation and help
This is also not entirely true. Some projects (GIMP again) do have dire documentation, but others, such as Perl and Emacs, have excellent documentation (but questionable interfaces).
I don't think all this proves much, except that all generalisations are wrong, and that commercial and open-source software don't differ that much in their strengths and weaknesses.
Perhaps it is. All those CTOs who bought into Microsoft's TCO concept would, however, beg to disagree.
(The theory goes that OSS is free to acquire, but costs more to support. For example, RHEL sure ain't free-as-in-beer. Maybe the downturn will make it easier to explain to shareholders why you've chosen a product without 8x5 vendor support lines?)
I've been unemployed. Searching for work was my biggest priority, but it's not like I spent 24/7 trudging the streets and knocking on doors. I had more free time then than I do now that I'm employed fulltime, and I took advantage of that free time to do things I enjoy, such as writing open-source software.
And there's a purely selfish reason to do it, too. Suppose the downturn does last a couple of years. Who is going to find it easier to get a job at the end of it -- the guy who says "I have not written a line of code since I was fired in 2008, because I've been too busy searching for a job", or the guy who says "I've been continuously involved in working on this major software product that you've heard of"?
I don't use the command line for my source control. IDE Integration means a lot...
You feel free to wait around for "integration". The command-line client is already nicely integrated into my IDE, which is the most mature, most stable, and most flexible one in widespread use: Unix.
when the British essentially decided to punish EVERYONE in retaliation, everyone effectively had no choice but to join in... some people did try to remain loyal to England but had their homes burned and family killed anyway. The more people saw that, the more they realized they had no choice and that England was most certainly the enemy whether they wanted to fight or not.
You've been reading too much grade-school propaganda, or watching "The Patriot" too oftenn.
Actually, according to Wikipedia (which is generally reasonably accurate on history), less than half the colonists were anti-British throughout, while up to 20% supported the British throughout, and the rest were entirely neutral. And for those who supported it, the primary reasons were generally political and economic -- nothing to do with atrocities.
But I realise it makes a better story in your version. Don't forget the bit where George Washington single-handedly defeated ten thousand redcoats armed only with his famous "little hatchet".
Linux users by and large respect other people's copyrights.* After all, the GPL only works because of copyright -- without it, there's no way we could stop companies taking GPL code and using it without giving anything back in return.
Most of the pirates who suck up bandwidth downloading illegal copies of music, movies, software, etc. are Windows users. (It's easy to tell where software is concerned: just look at what platform it runs on.)
Don't let the fact that both kinds of people post on Slashdot confuse you. There's lots of different overlapping communities here.
* Patents are a different matter -- plenty of Linux users have no problem openly violating patents on things like MP3 and MPEG4. But that's completely beside the point.
I'm confused: if we ask people why not run ZFS using FUSE, they reply because it's slow. And if we ask people which is better monolithic or microkernel, they reply microkernel. But ZFS using FUSE would be like a microkernel driver, so which is it?
Please provide your citations proving that there is a significant overlap between the "they"s who make these two claims, and your benchmarks proving that FUSE is not slower than a real microkernel driver. If you don't have those two things, then your confusion is ill-founded.
Wobbly window frames? Cubic desktops? I use Compiz and I have neither of those things. Just because a desktop can be tweaked to appeal to people with no taste doesn't mean that it's inherently attention-seeking. You might as well judge cars based on what happens to them in "Pimp My Ride".
So why do so many hardware manufacturers supply Linux drivers, then?
Just looking at the Linux box I'm posting this from. Graphics? Intel, open-source Linux drivers. Okay, but everyone has Linux graphics drivers, even if mostly they're closed source... what about wi-fi? Surely I'm at least being forced to use ndiswrapper? Nope, the manufacturer provides regularly-updated open-source Linux drivers.
About the only bit of hardware I have that doesn't have some kind of Linux driver is my printer, and, far from hurting Linux, all that does is provide an ISV opportunity: TurboPrint works a treat.
Maybe if you'd said "nobody does BSD drivers", you'd have had a point...;)
The constant puerile slashbot claims that everything is a government conspiracy are getting tedious.
Believe it or not, democratic governments are not evil machines dedicated to grinding the faces of their citizens in the dust, and their employees are not brainwashed drones. They're people, just like you and me. Often they make mistakes; occasionally they actually do something malicious. Rarely is either successfully covered up.
I think you didn't RTFA carefully enough. It says it's talking about private, password-protected sites. So even if they did provide links, all you could "verify" is either that they have indeed linked to a site that doesn't exist (and how would you be able to tell whether it really had been an al-Qaeda site before?), or to some kind of login page (and, without a password, how would you be able to tell whether it was really an al-Qaeda site or just a random anonymous login page?)
This is nothing to do with censorship. It's the owners and users of those sites themselves who have always been taking measures to prevent the public from finding them or reading their contents. Even if someone really has hacked these sites and taken them offline, that is not affecting what the public can see in the slightest.
This isn't Wikipedia. In the real world, some things really are unverifiable. Journalists really do have secret sources, and they really do sometimes report on things the public can't verify. It's your choice to decide whether you believe them or not, but it certainly isn't "ridiculous" to decide that, on balance, you think an unverifiable story is still credible.
Microsoft would either settle for a sum that was high, but not ridiculously high (one gazillion dollars), or sue, and if they sued, the judge would very likely deny any request to publish the entire source code
There would be no such request, and the judge would certainly deny it if there was such a request, because the law does not provide for making source code available as a remedy. The only remedies the law provides are financial damages and injunctions against further copyright infringement.
The OSS and Stallman would on the other hand want to see blood, because getting rid of proprietary software is a goal of many within the movement. Money wouldn't satisfy. They would press for maximum disruption to your company, maximum loss caused, maximum "making an example", and dance on your company's bankruptcy statement. Please, convince me otherwise.
Why not try looking at what they've actually done in the past, not feverishly fantasising about what you think they might do based on your own prejudices?
In reality, practically every single case of a company violating OSS copyrights has been settled amicably, out of court.
In reality, open-source copyright holders generally don't even want money. They just want the infringement to stop.
In reality, the outcome of infringing an open source license is generally just that you are forced to choose between following the license, or removing the open-source code from your product. If you choose the latter, then that's the end of the matter and your source code stays closed.
In reality, there is no way you could be forced to open-source your product, because that is not an option the law provides. If you refuse to obey the terms of the GNU GPL, then you are violating copyright law, and the only penalties a court can impose are those that copyright law permits: you can be forced to pay money, and you can be forced to stop selling the infringing product. Period.
Anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant, or deliberately spreading FUD.
In fact, the only other religion I can think of that has a problem with their religious text being reproduced is Scientology.
In general it depends on how the text is being reproduced. Try recording a song that includes you chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards, and see how long it takes before fundamentalist Christians start complaining. And given the long history of Hindu mob violence in India, it would very much surprise me if it was safe to use Hindu texts in profane Western contexts.
How confident are you that no Buddhists anywhere would be at all offended by any use of Buddhist texts? They might be less sensitive than Muslims, but even the most enlightened Buddhist is still only human.
Buddhism... that's the religion with not just one, but hundreds of hells, each more horrible than the last, right? (Of course, they prefer not to talk about that when they're busy pretending to be all different from Western religions.)
I dunno, maybe it's something to do with that announcement saying "the use of all electronic devices, including laptops, is prohibited during taxiing and takeoff"?
Unfortunately in that case I can't play it, (unless they do a Linux version).
Wine is really getting quite good these days. You still certainly can't expect a game to work in it, but it's at the stage now where it's usually worth a try, particularly for indie titles that are probably going to be concentrating on fun gameplay rather than pushing technical boundaries.
In principle it would probably be possible for Blizzard to implement a kind of LAN mode -- you could maybe have it connect to battle.net for protection purposes, then have the clients communicate directly over the local network for most of the actual gameplay. Maybe you could write to Blizzard about it. I wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know, they might listen.
Sadly this is going to impact disproportionately on long-term hardcore fans like yourself, as you're the only people who're used to LAN play at all. Most gamers now think "multiplayer" and "internet" are synonymous. And they will insist on playing them from the wifi hotspot on my lawn, however many times I tell them...
Even if WoW was distributed for Linux, most of the time, you couldn't install it off the CD on Linux and have it function correctly. Sorry, but Linux has too much TIMTOWTDI to reliably release functional commercial software.
Really? Because from where I'm sitting it looks like there's plenty of closed-source software that functions reliably on Linux. Opera, Flash, Skype, to name but three. Not so many games, sure, but there's certainly game-like technology in use -- Google Earth anyone? And the games that do exist, like the recent Penny Arcade one, all work fine on all the popular distros with zero hassle. It's really not that much harder than writing games that work on all the major consumer versions of Windows.
No, there's no technical reason why Linux couldn't be targetted by games. The real reasons are entirely financial: there simply aren't enough Linux gamers to justify the expense of porting and the increased customer-service costs of adding another supported platform.
Sad but true: WINE is the most stable, documented, and widespread API Linux has had for game development in a while.
It's true, but I don't see why it's sad. WINE lets me play some of my favourite games on Linux. Surely that's happy? Unless you're a Free Software zealot, but then you wouldn't like native Linux releases either, because they'd still be closed-source.
Observe that quite a few "native" OS X game releases recently have actually been using WINE technology behind the scenes... again, there's no reason why companies couldn't use that approach for Linux, except of course for the lack of a viable market.
Me: "omg ur so awesom" Elbot: "I've given the matter much thought, and if I were to compliment you, I'd say you were reasonable." Me: "lol wot ur naem" Elbot: "It's always lovely hearing the quaint ideas you human beings have about me."
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That really does depend on the DRM, though. I quite agree that the best option is no DRM, but that's not to say that all DRM is equally bad.
The DRM in Mass Effect was a right pain. Forget the limited-activations issue -- it nearly prevented me from activating the game once, thanks to a locale-related bug that suggests that the underlying code is incredibly poorly written. I shall never play another game that uses SecuROM, period.
On the other hand, the only way I know Valve's games have DRM is because I've been told it. I'd never have noticed otherwise, because buying from Steam has been completely hassle-free.
Since when did one need a rationale for paying for things that cost money?
It's pirates who have to go to extra lengths to justify their behaviour, not purchasers.
Yes, there are lots of impressionable people in the world who are easily persuaded by advertising to choose their drink based on perceived coolness rather than on what's actually enjoyable to drink.
The other thing to bear in mind is that most quality beers are not brewed in great quantities. Carbonated urine is always going to sell vastly more by volume than anything worth drinking, simply because there's so much more of it on the market and fewer brands to choose from.
The modern mainstream games media caters to the modern mainstream gamer, and the modern mainstream gamer doesn't realise there were any games before the XBox.
TIE Fighter never existed. The Dark Forces series never existed (not even after it was rebranded as the Jedi Knight series because not enough people remembered Dark Forces). Don't even ask about the classic vector-based arcade game, you'd blow today's kids' minds with the revelation that there were 3D video games nearly thirty whole years ago...
Remind me, how many years did it take before the GIMP developers finally acknowledged the constant complaints about the interface annoyances in their program that they'd got used to and couldn't be bothered to fix?
Not that I'm criticising OSS interfaces. I don't think I've ever seen an OSS package with an interface as dire as some of the hideously expensive "enterprise" software I'm forced to use at work.
Indeed, it's sometimes a good thing that developers, even of OSS projects, may refuse to listen to users whining about annoyances. For example, Firefox has a much better interface today than it would have had if the developers had paid attention when users whined about the awesomebar, or about the replacement of the search dialog with the search bar, or the change away from Qute as default theme.
Actually, many of the more successful OSS projects (particularly the big desktop environments) do quite a lot of user testing, which is the main reason they have pretty good interfaces on the surface -- most of the major interface flaws in Gnome and KDE are found in rarely-used configuration dialogs and suchlike (which always turn out to be the one thing that $skeptical_reviewer desperately needed to configure...)
This is also not entirely true. Some projects (GIMP again) do have dire documentation, but others, such as Perl and Emacs, have excellent documentation (but questionable interfaces).
I don't think all this proves much, except that all generalisations are wrong, and that commercial and open-source software don't differ that much in their strengths and weaknesses.
Perhaps it is. All those CTOs who bought into Microsoft's TCO concept would, however, beg to disagree.
(The theory goes that OSS is free to acquire, but costs more to support. For example, RHEL sure ain't free-as-in-beer. Maybe the downturn will make it easier to explain to shareholders why you've chosen a product without 8x5 vendor support lines?)
Why? Why do you think that?
I've been unemployed. Searching for work was my biggest priority, but it's not like I spent 24/7 trudging the streets and knocking on doors. I had more free time then than I do now that I'm employed fulltime, and I took advantage of that free time to do things I enjoy, such as writing open-source software.
And there's a purely selfish reason to do it, too. Suppose the downturn does last a couple of years. Who is going to find it easier to get a job at the end of it -- the guy who says "I have not written a line of code since I was fired in 2008, because I've been too busy searching for a job", or the guy who says "I've been continuously involved in working on this major software product that you've heard of"?
You feel free to wait around for "integration". The command-line client is already nicely integrated into my IDE, which is the most mature, most stable, and most flexible one in widespread use: Unix.
"Technological singularity" is a religious doctrine. It has no place in science.
You've been reading too much grade-school propaganda, or watching "The Patriot" too oftenn.
Actually, according to Wikipedia (which is generally reasonably accurate on history), less than half the colonists were anti-British throughout, while up to 20% supported the British throughout, and the rest were entirely neutral. And for those who supported it, the primary reasons were generally political and economic -- nothing to do with atrocities.
But I realise it makes a better story in your version. Don't forget the bit where George Washington single-handedly defeated ten thousand redcoats armed only with his famous "little hatchet".
Linux users by and large respect other people's copyrights.* After all, the GPL only works because of copyright -- without it, there's no way we could stop companies taking GPL code and using it without giving anything back in return.
Most of the pirates who suck up bandwidth downloading illegal copies of music, movies, software, etc. are Windows users. (It's easy to tell where software is concerned: just look at what platform it runs on.)
Don't let the fact that both kinds of people post on Slashdot confuse you. There's lots of different overlapping communities here.
* Patents are a different matter -- plenty of Linux users have no problem openly violating patents on things like MP3 and MPEG4. But that's completely beside the point.
Please provide your citations proving that there is a significant overlap between the "they"s who make these two claims, and your benchmarks proving that FUSE is not slower than a real microkernel driver. If you don't have those two things, then your confusion is ill-founded.
Wobbly window frames? Cubic desktops? I use Compiz and I have neither of those things. Just because a desktop can be tweaked to appeal to people with no taste doesn't mean that it's inherently attention-seeking. You might as well judge cars based on what happens to them in "Pimp My Ride".
So why do so many hardware manufacturers supply Linux drivers, then?
Just looking at the Linux box I'm posting this from. Graphics? Intel, open-source Linux drivers. Okay, but everyone has Linux graphics drivers, even if mostly they're closed source... what about wi-fi? Surely I'm at least being forced to use ndiswrapper? Nope, the manufacturer provides regularly-updated open-source Linux drivers.
About the only bit of hardware I have that doesn't have some kind of Linux driver is my printer, and, far from hurting Linux, all that does is provide an ISV opportunity: TurboPrint works a treat.
Maybe if you'd said "nobody does BSD drivers", you'd have had a point... ;)
The constant puerile slashbot claims that everything is a government conspiracy are getting tedious.
Believe it or not, democratic governments are not evil machines dedicated to grinding the faces of their citizens in the dust, and their employees are not brainwashed drones. They're people, just like you and me. Often they make mistakes; occasionally they actually do something malicious. Rarely is either successfully covered up.
I think you didn't RTFA carefully enough. It says it's talking about private, password-protected sites. So even if they did provide links, all you could "verify" is either that they have indeed linked to a site that doesn't exist (and how would you be able to tell whether it really had been an al-Qaeda site before?), or to some kind of login page (and, without a password, how would you be able to tell whether it was really an al-Qaeda site or just a random anonymous login page?)
This is nothing to do with censorship. It's the owners and users of those sites themselves who have always been taking measures to prevent the public from finding them or reading their contents. Even if someone really has hacked these sites and taken them offline, that is not affecting what the public can see in the slightest.
This isn't Wikipedia. In the real world, some things really are unverifiable. Journalists really do have secret sources, and they really do sometimes report on things the public can't verify. It's your choice to decide whether you believe them or not, but it certainly isn't "ridiculous" to decide that, on balance, you think an unverifiable story is still credible.
There would be no such request, and the judge would certainly deny it if there was such a request, because the law does not provide for making source code available as a remedy. The only remedies the law provides are financial damages and injunctions against further copyright infringement.
Why not try looking at what they've actually done in the past, not feverishly fantasising about what you think they might do based on your own prejudices?
In reality, practically every single case of a company violating OSS copyrights has been settled amicably, out of court.
In reality, open-source copyright holders generally don't even want money. They just want the infringement to stop.
In reality, the outcome of infringing an open source license is generally just that you are forced to choose between following the license, or removing the open-source code from your product. If you choose the latter, then that's the end of the matter and your source code stays closed.
In reality, there is no way you could be forced to open-source your product, because that is not an option the law provides. If you refuse to obey the terms of the GNU GPL, then you are violating copyright law, and the only penalties a court can impose are those that copyright law permits: you can be forced to pay money, and you can be forced to stop selling the infringing product. Period.
Anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant, or deliberately spreading FUD.
In general it depends on how the text is being reproduced. Try recording a song that includes you chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards, and see how long it takes before fundamentalist Christians start complaining. And given the long history of Hindu mob violence in India, it would very much surprise me if it was safe to use Hindu texts in profane Western contexts.
How confident are you that no Buddhists anywhere would be at all offended by any use of Buddhist texts? They might be less sensitive than Muslims, but even the most enlightened Buddhist is still only human.
Buddhism... that's the religion with not just one, but hundreds of hells, each more horrible than the last, right? (Of course, they prefer not to talk about that when they're busy pretending to be all different from Western religions.)
Why not? They could use NAT, and free up some IPs for the rest of us to use. It would be a nice gesture of support for the Internet.
I dunno, maybe it's something to do with that announcement saying "the use of all electronic devices, including laptops, is prohibited during taxiing and takeoff"?
Wine is really getting quite good these days. You still certainly can't expect a game to work in it, but it's at the stage now where it's usually worth a try, particularly for indie titles that are probably going to be concentrating on fun gameplay rather than pushing technical boundaries.
In principle it would probably be possible for Blizzard to implement a kind of LAN mode -- you could maybe have it connect to battle.net for protection purposes, then have the clients communicate directly over the local network for most of the actual gameplay. Maybe you could write to Blizzard about it. I wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know, they might listen.
Sadly this is going to impact disproportionately on long-term hardcore fans like yourself, as you're the only people who're used to LAN play at all. Most gamers now think "multiplayer" and "internet" are synonymous. And they will insist on playing them from the wifi hotspot on my lawn, however many times I tell them...
Really? Because from where I'm sitting it looks like there's plenty of closed-source software that functions reliably on Linux. Opera, Flash, Skype, to name but three. Not so many games, sure, but there's certainly game-like technology in use -- Google Earth anyone? And the games that do exist, like the recent Penny Arcade one, all work fine on all the popular distros with zero hassle. It's really not that much harder than writing games that work on all the major consumer versions of Windows.
No, there's no technical reason why Linux couldn't be targetted by games. The real reasons are entirely financial: there simply aren't enough Linux gamers to justify the expense of porting and the increased customer-service costs of adding another supported platform.
It's true, but I don't see why it's sad. WINE lets me play some of my favourite games on Linux. Surely that's happy? Unless you're a Free Software zealot, but then you wouldn't like native Linux releases either, because they'd still be closed-source.
Observe that quite a few "native" OS X game releases recently have actually been using WINE technology behind the scenes... again, there's no reason why companies couldn't use that approach for Linux, except of course for the lack of a viable market.
Apparently 25% of people think Elbot is human.
Apparently 25% of people have the IQ of a carrot.