"In fact, they wouldn't have half their navigation tech"
So where'd the other half come from?
The same could be said about the early American and Soviet space programs - they really needed the experience the Germans had. Or are you going to argue that the scientists and engineers from Peenemunde were not important?
I fully expect them to die a slow death over the next 2 decades. It's the other side of the "revenue explosion" Charles Simonyi spoke about when talking about Window's future in the early '80s. He was right then, and the same principle holds true today. Sharp rise, plateau, then descent is the way that curve works, and Microsoft is right on course.
Anyone who believes that Microsoft will still be the dominant player in the market doesn't understand commoditization, growth curves, and market saturation.
Microsoft currently has about $3/share in cash holdings. That is going to go down as the share buyback continues, and as their revenues continue to decline.
One of the problems of evaluating how much Microsoft would be worth in a sale is that there aren't too many people who wold be potential buyers. Its too big. So it would have to be split up, and that causes a further problem - they've spent so much time pushing the "its so integrated" angle that there isn't any easy way to do a proper split-up of assets to sell off the individual divisions. There's going to be imparement no matter what.
Then there are the parts that look like they'll never make money - Xbox being one of them. Nobody will buy that, even for the proverbial "$1.00 + future considerations".
The Office division? Without any tie-in from the OS, there's no real incentive to go Ms-Office as opposed to Corel, or OpenOffice, or any other suite.
The server division? Competition there is fierce, and linux and bsd both have better reputations in terms of cost and reliability.
The consumer OS (Vista) division (because lets face it, Microsoft's XP and Vista are consumer OSes) Support is an ongoing expense, and the cost is going to continue to rise. We saw this with XP - the more complicated the code base, the more bodies you have to throw at it. Vista is going to be a code support nightmare (okay, it already is).
Nope, the shareholders are on a roller-coaster ride. They've gotten to the top, and now they're on the way downhill. There'll be other peaks, but none will be as high as that first one, and the overall trend is downhill from now on.
Percent is a quantifier, not the subject. The subject/object it is quantifying is "people". People is plural. Have, not has.
You don't know anything about grammar if you believe that the sentence "99% of the CEO / CIO / Ballmer-esque level people I've electronically communicated with has had grammar just as bad in un-spun, non-PR whitewashed exchanges" has only one noun. Or only one subject, for that matter. Further, you know nothing about grammar if you believe that all nouns are subjects.
Never said any of thst, so stop with the straw-man arumewnts; better yet, just fuck off and die, like the good little troll you are. You bore me.
I'm not worried. I just think that gplv3 will ultimately be counter-productive.
Its also going to be a bone of contention for those who included the "this version or higher" in their license. Many of them will never do that again, just on principle. They'll specify only a specific gpl version. Or they'll go to another license. If yu were worried about license proliferation before, "you ain't seen nothin' yet!"
Revenue will increase in the next year with new releases."
Not certain, and definitely not equating to profits, which are down.
2. Xbox will eventually kill PS3
Wii is the one to watch.
3. More workers = more products = more profits.
Total bullshit. What's happened was predicted a decade ago. Microsoft has already picked all the "low-hanging fruit", and now needs more bodies to squeeze more revenue out of marginal products.
4. Higher stock value
The current prediction is a flat stock value, because of the buyback. Its been estimated that without the buyback, the stock would have lost about 20%. This buyback is confverting an asset with actual value (cash) into an asset with no intrinsic value(stock). But it was either do the buyback or lose even more, as the assets that are held as stock would have lost even more value.
Heck, even a year after they "deliver" Vista, they still won't have delivered what was slated to go into it originally under the name "blackcomb".
6. New office features and lower price point will = rapid adoption.
Nope. They're in a bind on Office pricing. Lower the price, cannibalize revenues from existing customers. Maintain the price, lose existing customers. Besides, there are no "must haves" for the vast majority of users in the current version, never mind a hypothetical future upgrade. Their only option at this point is to continue to bleed slowly.
7. Lower upgrade prices = rapid adoption.
Same problem as #6 above. They simply can't afford to lower the price - it will mean less $$$, without increasing sales. That's the problem with being a near-monopoly - you're your own worst competitor. Even Microsofts' own employees are saying there's no real reason to upgrade.
8. You should have said "Macs are hot again" after the fan problems.
And yet they've doubled their laptop sales, then doubled them again. They're now 12% of all laptops sold. Microsoft is going to miss the "back-to-school" surge next month, so expect to see mac laptops rise to between 15 and 20% by year-end, as Microsoft also misses the pre-Christmas sales. Expect desktops to follow, as users begin to demand seamless compatibility between their mac laptops and their home desktops.
9. First MacOS worm to wipe out 50% of all connected Macs by 2008.
... as compared to the current crop of viruses and trojans, which have, on a statistical basis, either wiped out, or caused their owners to wipe out, Windows several 100%? Dream on
10. IE 7.5 wipes out Mozilla.
IE is bleeding market share every month. The people who have changed will never go back, because the trust is gone. Microsoft has actually already lost the browser wars - its just taking tie for the news to spread from the head (early adopters) to the rest of the body.
11. Additional features will set Vista apart from XP.
People don't care any more. They don't buy an OS for its features - they just want to use it to do their work, play games, surf the net, etc. Windows95 was the last "gee whiz" release. Those days are gone. They'll never be back. Even the features that wer yanked from vista are not "must-haves" any more - and there will be free 3rd-party replacements for anyone who doesn't wan
Its getting crazy. I've got 2/3 of a TB of storage, and most of it is just sitting there, a lot of it not even partitioned (every once in a while, I throw a new distro on a spare partition and give it a test-drive).
I can buy a terabyte for less than I paid for my original 80 gig.
They should be backing their stuff up anyway - so why not to a nice new drive running linux?
"You don't get it, I *WANT* to buy a Tivo (or gameconsole, or DVD player, or whatever), it is however impossible to buy those without some sort of DRM attached,"
Oh, I "get it" all right...
I *WANT* to have an SUV, but I don't want to pay $4/gallon and shell half my pay to run it
I *WANT* to have a lots of money, but I don't want to actually work for it
I *WANT* to have a whole tub of ice cream for dessert, but I don't want to get fat
I *WANT* to drink like a fish, but not have a hangover or get cirossis of the liver
I *WANT* to smoke my lungs out, but its not my fault if I get cancer
I *WANT* to zoom down the highway at 100mph because I'm a better driver than everyone else
I *WANT* to have sex without a condom, because AIDS is something other people get
Remember the Rolling Stones? "You can't always get what you wah-ant!"
"Now of course GPLv3 won't stop those devices, but it will at least make sure that no GPLv3 code ends up on those devices."
So, in other words, there's no real point to changing the GPL, as far as either the market or your actual wants are concerned.
All this will do is push BSD code into the same devices.
The only way to stop DRM is to not buy the product. That the market doesn't currently supply what you want is because you, and people just like you, won't stop buying DRM'd products. You're the problem.
Linus pointed this out, as well as pointing out it may take a decade or two, just like it took time for the full effects of the current GPL to be felt. Why people don't "get" this obvious fact is beyond me. Oh, yeah... you want it, you want it YOUR WAY, and you want it NOW! But if you can't have it your way, you'll take whatever shit is offered instead.
"According to Microsoft".... yeah, tell that to all the banks whe were GUARANTEED support for NT2K, and Microsoft cut it off prematurely because "it wasn't worth it to fix the security issues so close to the end of the products' lifetime" - 2 months.
The same policy will be applied, much more aggresively, with Vista, because of economics.
their first decline in revenue
continue to bleed money from the XBox
just gone through their biggest hiring expansion - more salaries to put more pressure on the bottom line
stock buyback is also putting a crimp on the cash horde
vista aka longhorn aka blackcomb is now 5 years late, and what's worse, they don't have a clue as to what will cme after Vista
credible threat to their biggest cash cow - ms-office - from openoffice
most people don't need to upgrade, they're more-or-less happy with what they have, they just want it to work better
macs are cool again
continued security exploits == zero credibility
the continual erosion of browser share indicates a growing acceptance of 3rd-party software as "just being better"
removal of almost all the significant features that set vista apart from xp
linux desktops are now more useable, as well as much more secure, than windows, and trying one out is as simple as sticking a live cd in the tray
cash and resources diverted to trying to get zune off the ground
the PIPE Fairy deal with SCO may very well end up leading back to Redmond HQ next fall
There's a lot of speculation that Microsoft will have to orphan the Xbox - the 360 will be the end-of-the-line. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, but the financial situation has changed a lot, and a recession would pretty much seal its fate.
Couldn't agree more. Why someone would want a computer with a Fisher-Price UI and a joke for security is beyond me... oh, wait, that's XP.
Don't forget to keep this in mind: Microsoft will be dropping retail support for XP in December 2007 or January 2008, and corporate support in December 2008. It's Vista or nothin' for your folks in just over a year, if you stick with the Beast.
Look, they're better off with a Mac. If all they're doing is surfing the net, email, and writing letters, they're also way better off with Ubuntu or SuSE.
So why not take a small portion of the money that you'd spend on a soon-to-be-dead WinXP disk, and buy a nice big shiney 250 gig hd ($100) and load ubuntu, suse, or another real OS on it?
You don't want DRM'd products. Fine, neither do I. But the ONLY way to combat them is to stop buying them. Modifications to kicenses will always have loopholes. Besides, once someone releases equivalent code under a BSD-like license, the leverage of the GPL is gone, because you can DRM the shit out of BSD code. The license allows it. So license changes will only force those who want to incorporate DRM into their products to invest in BSD-style development. However, if there were no market for DRM'd products, this wouldnt happen.
Now for some Rant Time...
1. "The choice to not use their own hardware is not what I call choice, because its not what people chose, but which the DRM forces them to."
DRM doesn't "force" people to buy a specific printer. Or Tivos. People have a choice. One of those choices is to say "not now."
2. "Only reason why those have less locked up cadriges is a matter of market share, if that changes in the future, expect cadrige lookup there too."
Check out your local store - or better yet, check out the people around you. How many of the them *don't* have a leser printer now? Lasr printers are now so cheap ($100) that a lot of times, people will pick one up rather than pay the price for another ink cartridge, so lasers certainly have significant market share.
3. "Many piece of hardware require some firemware to boot, which happens to be shipped with the driver, without that firmware the hardware won't work, if hardware happens to check for signature on that firmware (not sure if any actually do that), it would be *impossible* to make an OpenSource driver for that hardware."
Firmware downloaded from the OS is easy to study - you have a copy on your hard drive. But if you're worried about the lack of an open-source driver, DON'T BUY THE FUCKING THING!!! Send a message to ATI. Speak with your wallet. Money talks, bullshit just whines on the internet.
4. RE: cotent-scrambling on dvds and deCSS:
"Yeah, its broken and illegal in plenty of countries to either use or ship."
Find me a country where you can't get a copy of decss (hint - google for decss download - you'll get over a quarter-million hits)... and where the government will actually throw you in jail for using it. They tried with DVD John, and the **AA ended up with egg on their faces.
5. "You call being forced to not do what I want "choice", I don't."
Nobody is *forcing* you to accept products with DRM. Nobody is *forcing* you to buy a Tivo. When you go "I can't have it the way I want, so that's not a real choice" you come off as a spoilt brat. You want your shiney toys, you're addicted to them, and you're angry because they're not being offered on YOUR terms; you can't have it all.
Awwwww, poor baby.
A free market only works if people "suck it up" and boycott products they don't approve of. All the people whining about Tivo should really get a fucking life. If the product is so evil, so offensive, then don't buy it!. But don't sit there and whine about how "wrong" it is, when you clearly always have a choice. Don't like that they've done an end-run arund the GPL, legally? Then put your money where your mouth is. Boycott them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Boycott products tht have DRM, support those that don't. This might mean not having the "latest and greatest", but that never killed anyone.
There are legitimate concerns about DRM. I think it sucks. It implies the customer is a crook. It penalizes the honest, while not harming pirates. Its dumb. It will always be possible to work around it if there's enough incentive (eg: money).
But to look at what people are complaining about, it looks more and more like a bunch of children who don't have the self-respect to be able to say no to anything, and want others to help protect them from their own inability to do so.
The number of flops: (10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852 flops per chip, - from a previous poster.
The number of watts: 300,000 - from the manufacturers' site = 62 watts/chip
207,986,688,852 / 62 = 33,546,240 flops (33 MFlops) / watt.
Its not just the ps3. A lot of devices can be tied to individual numbers.
Upgrading would be done by chip replacement. They'd turn it into a revenue generator. "Want to upgrade to the BarfleGrap 2390? Order your replacement today... only $49.95 + S/H"
People would pay it because of the "perceived" value of a "hardware" upgrade.
GPLv3 doesn't prevent me from designing a system that uses GPLv3-licensed software. Even if I hand over the keys, as required by GPLv3, I can still design my system so that your recompiled software, even signed with those keys, won't run.
Verifying hash values isn't the only way to ensure that software won't load/run. Thinking otherwise, and concentrating on keys and their being handed over, is a bit naive.
Also, by using multiple hashing functions, and requiring that all those multiple hashes result in specific absolute values, results in a return to the Tivo situation; its now GPL3 compliant, but you can only run the "official" binary. No field upgrades possible, by anyone.
I read it, and its an interesting concept. I was wondering if it was a type (copywrite) but then I noticed further on that its spelled properly in the text itself.
I can understand the 3 years provision, but it should only be on the code you actually "touch" or modify. Anything you pass on, you're just helping the original author get a wider audience. You shouldn't be penalized for doing something good.
For the time being, I'm using v2, and I don't see a compelling reason to switch to v3. The few things I've released I specifically limited to v2 (I removed the "or later version" text becauee I'm a bit of a cynic, and I don't like the idea of open-ended one-sided agreements:-).
Heck, if it gets too messy, we can all just redo everything in c and java and go binary-only, and just swap the source with people who email and ask nicely. Not the best solution... but we may very well end back up there in a few years if too many people get bit by the 3-year bug.
Lets face it, for small stuff, its not a problem, but for something that takes a lot of space on a server, you could run into significant costs. Someone who's doing this as a good-will gesture and then runs into financial problems (from, say, job loss or divorce) doesn't need people suing him because he/she can no longer afford to pay for hosting all the files.
With distros now taking up a full dvd (I'm wondering when we're going to see the first "doesn't fit on only 1 dvd" distro), we can be talking serious coin.
I agree that the 3-year without allowing a "pass-thru" from upstream providers is dumb, especially if it prevents someone with retiring a broken distro that they're quite willing to replace for free with an up-to-date one.
By being overly anal, they invite the following scenario:
FSF: You have to continue distribution of version a.b.xx source code for 3 years.
Peon: But that particular version had a serious bug in it, a real showstopper. We replaced it with a.b.xy.
FSF: Doesn't matter. 3 years.
Now in v3 it "sort of looks like" they're giving the green light to upstream sources,
[If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you have explicitly arranged with the operator of that server to keep the Corresponding Source available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements, and provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source.]
It looks like you can make a deal with whoever's hosting the source... but you have to make an explicit deal - no casual linkies.
At this point, who knows what's going to happen... its a royal mess.
"If there are vendors that make drivers under the GPL2 or another another non-GPL3 compatible license, you don't buy from them."
Does this mean you're going to avoid linux, because all the core system drivers are GPLv2, and won't be released under any other license?:-)
Okay, seriously... The first draft of GPLv3 placed restrictions on all types of DRM, to the point of seeming to require you hand over your private key for signing stuff. The second draft has backed down quite a lot.
However, they still don't fix the problem of hardware that runs only a specific key.
However, the fact that a key is generated based on the object code of the work or is present in hardware that limits its use does not alter the requirement to include it in the Corresponding Source.
All the manufacturer has to do is hardcode a set of key values into their device, and have any attempt to load a value that's not there turn the device into a brick (this is actually allowed behaviour under GPLv3, since it states that manufacturers are not required to warrant modifications). On boot, the device runs the software through the hash function. Even if you have the key they used to generate their hash function, that doesn't help you attempting to upload your new software, because its no longer looking for a value generated by the hash function - its looking for the specific hash. Think about it with passwords. You're not validating that resultant hash value is a valid hash for a name, but a valid hash for YOUR name.
Now extend it further. If they use 4 different hash functions, and get 4 different key values in return, you'll take a lifetime to find out which bits to append to the source to get a binary that gives the same 4 hashes.
The proper way is to not support DRM in any form. Just don't buy it. This is part of what Torvalds was saying, but it got lost in the general uproar.
Think of it. A manufacturer produces a device that only allows their version of GPL'd software to run. We'll call it Tivo, for the sake of argument. They make the source available, and you can modify it, but your mods don't run on the original hardware.
What is there to keep anyone else from building the same hardware, and running their mods on that? Nothing. They can even sell it. The only difference is that they'll probably be more expensive initially, since they won't have the economies of scale.
That its not practical is a marketplace education problem, and not something the GPLv3 will cure.
This is true, but you'd be surprised at how, if you get a group of people together, they'll invariably miss that point.
And when you try to explain it to them, there are those who "get it", and those who go "that doesn't make sense! why can't he still marry his former sister-in-law".
People in the latter group also don't grok indirection, pointers to pointers, array math, or recursion, at least not very well.
I think you missed the joke... anyone can marry a sister anywhere - just not their own sister. Read the rest of the comments, and note the reply to the question of whether its legal for a man to marry his widow's sister - his former sister-in-law:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"In fact, they wouldn't have half their navigation tech"
So where'd the other half come from?
The same could be said about the early American and Soviet space programs - they really needed the experience the Germans had. Or are you going to argue that the scientists and engineers from Peenemunde were not important?
You've always been able to reboot ANY os by giving it a swift kick. Isn't that why they call it "booting"?
I fully expect them to die a slow death over the next 2 decades. It's the other side of the "revenue explosion" Charles Simonyi spoke about when talking about Window's future in the early '80s. He was right then, and the same principle holds true today. Sharp rise, plateau, then descent is the way that curve works, and Microsoft is right on course.
Anyone who believes that Microsoft will still be the dominant player in the market doesn't understand commoditization, growth curves, and market saturation.
Microsoft currently has about $3/share in cash holdings. That is going to go down as the share buyback continues, and as their revenues continue to decline.
One of the problems of evaluating how much Microsoft would be worth in a sale is that there aren't too many people who wold be potential buyers. Its too big. So it would have to be split up, and that causes a further problem - they've spent so much time pushing the "its so integrated" angle that there isn't any easy way to do a proper split-up of assets to sell off the individual divisions. There's going to be imparement no matter what.
Then there are the parts that look like they'll never make money - Xbox being one of them. Nobody will buy that, even for the proverbial "$1.00 + future considerations".
The Office division? Without any tie-in from the OS, there's no real incentive to go Ms-Office as opposed to Corel, or OpenOffice, or any other suite.
The server division? Competition there is fierce, and linux and bsd both have better reputations in terms of cost and reliability.
The consumer OS (Vista) division (because lets face it, Microsoft's XP and Vista are consumer OSes) Support is an ongoing expense, and the cost is going to continue to rise. We saw this with XP - the more complicated the code base, the more bodies you have to throw at it. Vista is going to be a code support nightmare (okay, it already is).
Nope, the shareholders are on a roller-coaster ride. They've gotten to the top, and now they're on the way downhill. There'll be other peaks, but none will be as high as that first one, and the overall trend is downhill from now on.
Percent is a quantifier, not the subject. The subject/object it is quantifying is "people". People is plural. Have, not has.
Never said any of thst, so stop with the straw-man arumewnts; better yet, just fuck off and die, like the good little troll you are. You bore me.
I'm not worried. I just think that gplv3 will ultimately be counter-productive.
Its also going to be a bone of contention for those who included the "this version or higher" in their license. Many of them will never do that again, just on principle. They'll specify only a specific gpl version. Or they'll go to another license. If yu were worried about license proliferation before, "you ain't seen nothin' yet!"
Not certain, and definitely not equating to profits, which are down.
Wii is the one to watch.
Total bullshit. What's happened was predicted a decade ago. Microsoft has already picked all the "low-hanging fruit", and now needs more bodies to squeeze more revenue out of marginal products.
The current prediction is a flat stock value, because of the buyback. Its been estimated that without the buyback, the stock would have lost about 20%. This buyback is confverting an asset with actual value (cash) into an asset with no intrinsic value(stock). But it was either do the buyback or lose even more, as the assets that are held as stock would have lost even more value.
No its not, and it won't be within the foreseable future. http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/28/HNwinsuc cessor_1.html They haven't even got a clue as to where they want it to go, except for some vague mumblings about "better multiprocessor support".
Heck, even a year after they "deliver" Vista, they still won't have delivered what was slated to go into it originally under the name "blackcomb".
Nope. They're in a bind on Office pricing. Lower the price, cannibalize revenues from existing customers. Maintain the price, lose existing customers. Besides, there are no "must haves" for the vast majority of users in the current version, never mind a hypothetical future upgrade. Their only option at this point is to continue to bleed slowly.
Same problem as #6 above. They simply can't afford to lower the price - it will mean less $$$, without increasing sales. That's the problem with being a near-monopoly - you're your own worst competitor. Even Microsofts' own employees are saying there's no real reason to upgrade.
And yet they've doubled their laptop sales, then doubled them again. They're now 12% of all laptops sold. Microsoft is going to miss the "back-to-school" surge next month, so expect to see mac laptops rise to between 15 and 20% by year-end, as Microsoft also misses the pre-Christmas sales. Expect desktops to follow, as users begin to demand seamless compatibility between their mac laptops and their home desktops.
IE is bleeding market share every month. The people who have changed will never go back, because the trust is gone. Microsoft has actually already lost the browser wars - its just taking tie for the news to spread from the head (early adopters) to the rest of the body.
People don't care any more. They don't buy an OS for its features - they just want to use it to do their work, play games, surf the net, etc. Windows95 was the last "gee whiz" release. Those days are gone. They'll never be back. Even the features that wer yanked from vista are not "must-haves" any more - and there will be free 3rd-party replacements for anyone who doesn't wan
Its getting crazy. I've got 2/3 of a TB of storage, and most of it is just sitting there, a lot of it not even partitioned (every once in a while, I throw a new distro on a spare partition and give it a test-drive).
I can buy a terabyte for less than I paid for my original 80 gig.
They should be backing their stuff up anyway - so why not to a nice new drive running linux?
"You don't get it, I *WANT* to buy a Tivo (or gameconsole, or DVD player, or whatever), it is however impossible to buy those without some sort of DRM attached,"
Oh, I "get it" all right ...
Remember the Rolling Stones? "You can't always get what you wah-ant!"
"Now of course GPLv3 won't stop those devices, but it will at least make sure that no GPLv3 code ends up on those devices."
So, in other words, there's no real point to changing the GPL, as far as either the market or your actual wants are concerned.
All this will do is push BSD code into the same devices.
The only way to stop DRM is to not buy the product. That the market doesn't currently supply what you want is because you, and people just like you, won't stop buying DRM'd products. You're the problem.
Linus pointed this out, as well as pointing out it may take a decade or two, just like it took time for the full effects of the current GPL to be felt. Why people don't "get" this obvious fact is beyond me. Oh, yeah ... you want it, you want it YOUR WAY, and you want it NOW! But if you can't have it your way, you'll take whatever shit is offered instead.
The same policy will be applied, much more aggresively, with Vista, because of economics.
There's a lot of speculation that Microsoft will have to orphan the Xbox - the 360 will be the end-of-the-line. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, but the financial situation has changed a lot, and a recession would pretty much seal its fate.
But first, why not try a livecd of ubuntu or suse. If it does what they need, save the money, and spend some of it on hardware upgrades.
Couldn't agree more. Why someone would want a computer with a Fisher-Price UI and a joke for security is beyond me ... oh, wait, that's XP.
Don't forget to keep this in mind: Microsoft will be dropping retail support for XP in December 2007 or January 2008, and corporate support in December 2008. It's Vista or nothin' for your folks in just over a year, if you stick with the Beast.
Look, they're better off with a Mac. If all they're doing is surfing the net, email, and writing letters, they're also way better off with Ubuntu or SuSE.
So why not take a small portion of the money that you'd spend on a soon-to-be-dead WinXP disk, and buy a nice big shiney 250 gig hd ($100) and load ubuntu, suse, or another real OS on it?
You don't want DRM'd products. Fine, neither do I. But the ONLY way to combat them is to stop buying them. Modifications to kicenses will always have loopholes. Besides, once someone releases equivalent code under a BSD-like license, the leverage of the GPL is gone, because you can DRM the shit out of BSD code. The license allows it. So license changes will only force those who want to incorporate DRM into their products to invest in BSD-style development. However, if there were no market for DRM'd products, this wouldnt happen.
Now for some Rant Time ...
There are legitimate concerns about DRM. I think it sucks. It implies the customer is a crook. It penalizes the honest, while not harming pirates. Its dumb. It will always be possible to work around it if there's enough incentive (eg: money).
But to look at what people are complaining about, it looks more and more like a bunch of children who don't have the self-respect to be able to say no to anything, and want others to help protect them from their own inability to do so.
"Show me the MFlops/Watt rating of this?"
No problemo!
The number of flops: (10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852 flops per chip, - from a previous poster.
The number of watts: 300,000 - from the manufacturers' site = 62 watts/chip
207,986,688,852 / 62 = 33,546,240 flops (33 MFlops) / watt.
Its not just the ps3. A lot of devices can be tied to individual numbers.
Upgrading would be done by chip replacement. They'd turn it into a revenue generator. "Want to upgrade to the BarfleGrap 2390? Order your replacement today ... only $49.95 + S/H"
People would pay it because of the "perceived" value of a "hardware" upgrade.
I think the government has a monopoly on f*cking the dead.
GPLv3 doesn't prevent me from designing a system that uses GPLv3-licensed software. Even if I hand over the keys, as required by GPLv3, I can still design my system so that your recompiled software, even signed with those keys, won't run.
Verifying hash values isn't the only way to ensure that software won't load/run. Thinking otherwise, and concentrating on keys and their being handed over, is a bit naive.
Also, by using multiple hashing functions, and requiring that all those multiple hashes result in specific absolute values, results in a return to the Tivo situation; its now GPL3 compliant, but you can only run the "official" binary. No field upgrades possible, by anyone.
I read it, and its an interesting concept. I was wondering if it was a type (copywrite) but then I noticed further on that its spelled properly in the text itself.
I can understand the 3 years provision, but it should only be on the code you actually "touch" or modify. Anything you pass on, you're just helping the original author get a wider audience. You shouldn't be penalized for doing something good.
For the time being, I'm using v2, and I don't see a compelling reason to switch to v3. The few things I've released I specifically limited to v2 (I removed the "or later version" text becauee I'm a bit of a cynic, and I don't like the idea of open-ended one-sided agreements :-).
Heck, if it gets too messy, we can all just redo everything in c and java and go binary-only, and just swap the source with people who email and ask nicely. Not the best solution ... but we may very well end back up there in a few years if too many people get bit by the 3-year bug.
Lets face it, for small stuff, its not a problem, but for something that takes a lot of space on a server, you could run into significant costs. Someone who's doing this as a good-will gesture and then runs into financial problems (from, say, job loss or divorce) doesn't need people suing him because he/she can no longer afford to pay for hosting all the files.
With distros now taking up a full dvd (I'm wondering when we're going to see the first "doesn't fit on only 1 dvd" distro), we can be talking serious coin.
I agree that the 3-year without allowing a "pass-thru" from upstream providers is dumb, especially if it prevents someone with retiring a broken distro that they're quite willing to replace for free with an up-to-date one.
By being overly anal, they invite the following scenario:
Now in v3 it "sort of looks like" they're giving the green light to upstream sources,
It looks like you can make a deal with whoever's hosting the source ... but you have to make an explicit deal - no casual linkies.
At this point, who knows what's going to happen ... its a royal mess.
"If there are vendors that make drivers under the GPL2 or another another non-GPL3 compatible license, you don't buy from them."
Does this mean you're going to avoid linux, because all the core system drivers are GPLv2, and won't be released under any other license? :-)
Okay, seriously ... The first draft of GPLv3 placed restrictions on all types of DRM, to the point of seeming to require you hand over your private key for signing stuff. The second draft has backed down quite a lot.
However, they still don't fix the problem of hardware that runs only a specific key.
All the manufacturer has to do is hardcode a set of key values into their device, and have any attempt to load a value that's not there turn the device into a brick (this is actually allowed behaviour under GPLv3, since it states that manufacturers are not required to warrant modifications). On boot, the device runs the software through the hash function. Even if you have the key they used to generate their hash function, that doesn't help you attempting to upload your new software, because its no longer looking for a value generated by the hash function - its looking for the specific hash. Think about it with passwords. You're not validating that resultant hash value is a valid hash for a name, but a valid hash for YOUR name.Now extend it further. If they use 4 different hash functions, and get 4 different key values in return, you'll take a lifetime to find out which bits to append to the source to get a binary that gives the same 4 hashes.
The proper way is to not support DRM in any form. Just don't buy it. This is part of what Torvalds was saying, but it got lost in the general uproar.
Think of it. A manufacturer produces a device that only allows their version of GPL'd software to run. We'll call it Tivo, for the sake of argument. They make the source available, and you can modify it, but your mods don't run on the original hardware.
What is there to keep anyone else from building the same hardware, and running their mods on that? Nothing. They can even sell it. The only difference is that they'll probably be more expensive initially, since they won't have the economies of scale.
That its not practical is a marketplace education problem, and not something the GPLv3 will cure.
For those who don't get the references
Awsome quotes ...
"Most people don't know or don't care about the difference. They'll go with anything that looks the shiniest."
That's their right. We have these prizes for the winners
Of course. IQ == Idiot Quotient.
Didn't you get the memo? If you can't fix it, feature it!
This is true, but you'd be surprised at how, if you get a group of people together, they'll invariably miss that point.
And when you try to explain it to them, there are those who "get it", and those who go "that doesn't make sense! why can't he still marry his former sister-in-law".
People in the latter group also don't grok indirection, pointers to pointers, array math, or recursion, at least not very well.
I think you missed the joke ... anyone can marry a sister anywhere - just not their own sister. Read the rest of the comments, and note the reply to the question of whether its legal for a man to marry his widow's sister - his former sister-in-law :-)