No, that is my honest opinion of the code I have seen. Even for OSS projects, vendors have their existing documentation standards which their developers are used to following. They document their code by habit, and because it is required for a release.
The vast majority of OSS code has no such checks or requirements on the release process, and it shows. Without proper documentation, people cannot use the library properly.
For example, perhaps you could explain why the various config attribute strings available for Xerces (both Java and C/C++ versions) are not documented anywhere, forcing one to go through the code to find out what the options are. Yet that is what I consider a well documented OSS project.
Developers detest documentation. Fact. Unavoidable, plain, simple fact. After 20 years in the industry, I've never worked with anyone (myself included) who would do proper documentation unless it was mandated and monitored to make sure it was done.
Within 5 years in the industry, I'd learned the lesson that current documentation is critical to picking up and using or maintaining an application. No one except a home hacker has the time to read through code to figure out what an API is supposed to do, or what it's options mean.
Nor have I ever met anyone who had spent more than 10 years programming who hadn't realized that themselves. It's only the new programmers and those who have never had to maintain a system they'd never seen before who grasp the importance of documentation.
Eventually you will learn, but in the meantime, you're just totally out to lunch thinking it has to do with commercial backing. "Commercial" only comes into it in that they mandate documentation standards so they'll be able to use the software they've paid to help develop.
If it's "wrong" for investors to expect to be able to use the software they pay to help develop and maintain, OSS is a dead end. No one in their right mind gives away money to a bunch of coders just to create undocumented code.
There are exceptions -- I did paint an intentionally wide swath of projects as being problematic. Several GNU modules are well-documented, for example. But as you couldn't identify the obvious examples of good documentation, you've just shown how little you actully work with the code itself. Your little tantrum about commercial support is just red-herring flamebait, without the knowledge to back it up.
I've had to support far too many business laptop users over the past 5 years to believe for a second that such paltry memory was "top of the line". Maybe for an obsolete model discounted to get it off the shelves.
Aside from that, you can always spring the whole $30 it would cost to toss in another 256M.
If you knew my finances, you'd realize how far off base the "money lying around" comment is. Neither your poverty nor my finances justifies blaming products for requiring more resources than we can afford.
Complaining you don't have the computer power is like blaming a trailer manufacturer because you need to upgrade to an F250 from an Escort in order to be able to tow it. It's not the trailer manufacturer's fault you can't tow it.
Flamebait? Damn straight -- I'm tired of listening to users bitch that their ancient crap won't run new software, and whining that they can't afford to upgrade. That is neither mine nor any vendor's fault nor problem.
The hardware did what was needed when you bought it -- don't blame every one else just because your requirements changed. You should have allowed for that when you bought the machine in the first place. And I betcha it still does what you originally bought it for.
Sounds like the same whiners who complain if some ancient piece of hardware isn't supported in the kernel any more, even if it was off the market and essentially obsolete years ago.
When you have something vaguely resembling a 5-year old system with at least 256MB RAM, then you'll have a right to complain about performance. Until then, you're just penny-pinching junk hardware and it's your own damned fault you have performance problems.
While I do cross-platform C/C++ development as well, when I need to make sure it's cross platform, I use Java.
Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power. The community process has provided a reasonable pace of new feature integration, and has abandoned a few implementations that weren't really "ready", much as an orphaned code fork would be.
Open sourcing Java would be a mistake. Unless protected by a strong consortium of members (JCP) or by a strong backer who refuses to sell out to any one interest (M$ platform-specific extensions), Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks and become essentially useless.
It may take time to get features in through the JCP, but it also ensures there are no hastily implemented hacks making their way into the system. Quite frankly, the vast majority of OSS projects which don't come from Linus, Apache, Mozilla, or IBM have proven to be an absolutely disgusting mess of poorly and un-documented code. Java's embedded documentation is an elegant solution to the problem of keeping API manuals and source in sync, but it seems most OSS developers still haven't evolved past the "what, you can't read code?" mentality of the teenage "l33t" programming snob.
OSS means no sanity checks on feature creep, portability verification, documentation verification, regression testing, and all the other enterprise-project aspects of development that make it a useful technology. I've lost track of the number of times I've encountered platform-specific hacks in OSS code that weren't properly #ifdef-bracketed, or which just completely incompatible with other O/S implementations.
In short, Java is critical because it is portable and managed. The fact that Linux is supported is important from a rollout standpoint, but the underlying OS is (and should remain) irrelevant.
I'm not missing your point -- you are describing the purpose of legitimate patents.
I do not accept that any patent has a purely "defensive" position unless it has been assigned to an open source organization whose charter specifically forbids use of the patent portfolio to "attack" infringers.
I certainly am neither naive nor foolish enough to think for a second that Microsoft's motive is simply to prevent a future legal defense bill, especially for such bogus patents that attempt to claim common sense or prior art as being a creation or work worthy of any specific protection.
Patents are to protect creative works, and if Microsoft is worried about being tasked over bogus patents, their money would be far better spent if it were donated to allow more skilled patent reviewers to be hired. Alternatively, they could have spent those funds lobbying to have the problems in the patent system corrected to prevent bogus patents.
It is physically impossible for Microsoft to patent anything and everything which could possibly be used as a legal attack vector, and such broad-based "defense" through patents would be a severe abuse of the system. If anything, the flood of bogus patents from Microsoft are evidence they are trying to ensure the patent office is too overloaded to properly review applications in hopes that Microsoft may end up receiving a few "cash cow" patents that can be used for litigation against their competition and open source products/developers.
Bill may be an astute businessman with no fear of walking the razors edge between deceipt and legal fraud, but that certainly isn't any reason to trust them to "be nice" with their patent portfolio.
And if it happens to give you the chance to use your monopoly money to crush any potential competitor by flooding them with patent-infringement claims they are forced to spend money defending, that's just an "accidental" benefit, right?
The only "good" Microsoft could do with such obvious "patents" is if they were planning to force changes to the patent office by making them look like overworked, incompetent fools. Unfortunately, the patent office does that all by itself, so I don't think that's the motivation.
Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.
Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.
Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.
Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.
This is plain and simple theft, and a sixteen year old damned well knows what theft is and has no excuse whatsoever. If they don't, arrest the parents as well for the obvious abuse and neglect that creates a sixteen year old who doesn't know that theft is wrong.
It's amazing what rationalization media thieves go through to justify their actions. If you don't personally know the individual providing you with media, it cannot in any way be construed as a loan. It is theft. Expect the consequences, and stop whining about your so-called "rights" -- you have no right to steal.
After much Googling, it seems you are correct. The people who'd told me a few years back that you get "free postage" for letters sent to the government were obviously wrong.
I agree. There is a money trail, and that is the problem. Somewhere in back someone has to be spending some of those profits in kickbacks for protection.
The spam is illegal. The products are fraudulent. The trail exists. Nothing is done.
Why?
Because your politicians never actually read their own email, so they don't have to deal with it.
Start printing the spam and sending it in to Congress, making use of the free postage when contacting your representative, and keep doing that for a few months.
Flood them with paper as you are flooded with spam, and I guarantee they'll finally get off their asses and do something about the problem instead of just lip-service laws with no enforcement.
Good timing as I needed to lay out some new business cards, so I gave it a download and a try.
The package itself seems pretty much flawless, with no crashes or instability detected (prebuilt RPM on SuSE 8.1 with Ximian enhancements.) The only glitch I encountered is that trying to print to a.pdf fails. Print to a postscript file or to a printer and it works fine.
Much easier to work with than a word processor and label templates. It's not a daily use utility for 99% of the population, but it does it's one job rather well. The epitomy of a "utility program."
True enough, but standards can be changed, and have in the past. It's called "deprecation".
As to existing code, there are safe alternatives. Functionality is not being removed, therefore the code could be corrected.
Any product manufacturer who cares about their code quality and system security should have made plans to clean up those problems regardless of whether it's a "standard" API. Those who aren't doing so are foolishly leaving their applications vulnerable to security problems, and I'd expect their customers to hold them liable for the resulting problems.
Open source in particular has no excuse for continuing to use such APIs.
The poster below you mentioned having the compiler flag such security risks -- I don't leave warnings in my code. Having the compiler flag them is an excellant way of locating the problems so they can be fixed. The only warnings code should produce are very specific type casting issues under controlled conditions (e.g. numeric objects that are expected to truncate values that exceed the storage size.) Anything more is a sign of issues that can cause unexpected behavior on some platforms.
In all fairness, the APIs needed to ensure buffer checking is done have been available for quite some years now. It really is long past due for the maintainers and vendors to start pruning the old, vulnerable API's so people can't use them any more.
As you've mentioned, functions like gets() are a vulnerability. That being the case, why leave it in the API set when there are safe alternatives?
The most common victim of the dot-bomb were people with regular 401K's, RRSP's, mutuals, etc. Many of them only had a few tens of thousands of dollars as retirement funds, if that.
They were wiped out as effectively as the big dot-bomb traders.
Or were you under the impression that only people who played the stock market personally took a hit?
Why do you think insurance rates, bank fees, etc. were increased following the dot-bomb? All of those firms passed on their losses on stock market gambles, not merely losing the money, but then hitting up their own customers to cover the losses through extra and increased fees.
Tim's pointed out one of the most important issues with the "safe" feeling some get from OSS. Even if you build everything from source, you're vulnerable unless you inspect and anlyize every source package yourself.
Even the distro vendors have had stuff slip by, and they've got far more than one person keeping an eye on things.
Aren't most of the Windows infection vectors actually buggy buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in the various system APIs? i.e. Isn't it the underlying DHTML, DNS resolution, etc. that cause the Windows versions of products like Real's to be such a problem?
The one thing I'd like to see come out of this is a common framework for registering protocol and file handlers. It gets so very, very tiring to have to configure each email package, each browser, the file manager, the display manager, etc. to use the applications I want instead of their defaults.
Both Gnome and KDE try to provide APIs to address that issue, but even Mozilla doesn't properly hook itself in to either system. If Real's framework will clean up that mess, I'm all for using their open source implementation to resolve the problem.
While he worked his butt off and managed to get people to come together on the standard, he was compensated rather nicely. To the tune of several million dollars -- over $100M at one point.
I do not understand why anyone thinks they are "owed" when the lose their shirt gambling on the stock market. The only way he's got a claim is if he was prevented from selling the stock when he wanted to. Otherwise he's just another formerly rich dot-bomb victim, the same as a few million other people.
The only difference is he had direct control over $100M+ of stock, not a few thousand dollars in a "retirement plan" like most dot-bomb victims.
It seems he was raising hell throughout the company over his losses, blaming the company for the damage the stock value took after the merger. Again, if he had the option of selling his shares before the merger, he has no cause for complaint.
Regardless of whether he has a legitimite claim (because he wasn't allowed to sell his stocks), you just don't get issues resolved by ranting and raving throughout the company and making an overly public stink about it. You pick the key individuals who can provide resolution and badger them, not badmouth everyone who doesn't help you immediately.
If you make it as messy as he appears to have been doing, you get fired. Period. Any company, any nation, and industry. Nobody wants to keep an employee who spends their time bitterly complaining about how they're being abused, threatening to sue, or otherwise making it abundantly clear they don't want to work there.
I sympathize and think he deserved more at the end of the day, but did not handle the issue correctly. At worst, he should have initiated a quiet lawsuit for his damages instead of ranting.
...or someone who's willing to form a Political Action Committee and put their money where their mouth is?
Is that not what I just finished saying? If you don't have the money to buy senators and congressmen through influence, your opinion and your vote do not matter. Corps, groups which pool their finances, and the very rich are the only ones who get listened to by government.
I know I must be hitting a few nerves when someone has to resort to implying I'm crazy rather than defend a situation. Oddly enough, my post history would seem to be that of a rational person.
I supppose I could have recently gone insane and not noticed.
I think it's more likely you're just willfully blind to the fact that America stopped being a real democracy quite some time ago. The vote is a sham to keep select people in a visible position of power, while the corp financing pretty much dictates what actually happens.
Got a stubborn senator or congressman? Just threaten to shut down that particular plant or office in their voting district, and you have approval. Presuming, of course, they didn't respond to offers of campaign contributions if they'd support a particular pet bill.
Or are you actually naive enough to think politicians are honest, or that they care about anything beyond the next election and their personal payback after they "retire" from office?
If they can help the people without risking a vote or financing, sure, it's good publicity. But when it comes down to their career or what's good for the citizens and the country, you don't matter. You are only one vote, and it's all about keeping the majority, not your particular vote.
The environment became patentable when the US government was sold to the corporations through campaign contributions.
You and your vote don't matter to them anymore unless you've got the finances and clout to smack them with a serious lawsuit. Thanks to electronic voting which has no reliable paper trail, the embarassment of the Florida election recounts will be a thing of the past. Now they can just change the history records to ensure the talking head of choice has the presidency.
Looks like William Gibson was right about more than he should have been.
When the software causes so many hours of lost time, lost wages, lost data, and corrupt data as the Windows family of "operating systems", the vendor should be paying you to take the disks off their hands.
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No, that is my honest opinion of the code I have seen. Even for OSS projects, vendors have their existing documentation standards which their developers are used to following. They document their code by habit, and because it is required for a release.
The vast majority of OSS code has no such checks or requirements on the release process, and it shows. Without proper documentation, people cannot use the library properly.
For example, perhaps you could explain why the various config attribute strings available for Xerces (both Java and C/C++ versions) are not documented anywhere, forcing one to go through the code to find out what the options are. Yet that is what I consider a well documented OSS project.
Developers detest documentation. Fact. Unavoidable, plain, simple fact. After 20 years in the industry, I've never worked with anyone (myself included) who would do proper documentation unless it was mandated and monitored to make sure it was done.
Within 5 years in the industry, I'd learned the lesson that current documentation is critical to picking up and using or maintaining an application. No one except a home hacker has the time to read through code to figure out what an API is supposed to do, or what it's options mean.
Nor have I ever met anyone who had spent more than 10 years programming who hadn't realized that themselves. It's only the new programmers and those who have never had to maintain a system they'd never seen before who grasp the importance of documentation.
Eventually you will learn, but in the meantime, you're just totally out to lunch thinking it has to do with commercial backing. "Commercial" only comes into it in that they mandate documentation standards so they'll be able to use the software they've paid to help develop.
If it's "wrong" for investors to expect to be able to use the software they pay to help develop and maintain, OSS is a dead end. No one in their right mind gives away money to a bunch of coders just to create undocumented code.
There are exceptions -- I did paint an intentionally wide swath of projects as being problematic. Several GNU modules are well-documented, for example. But as you couldn't identify the obvious examples of good documentation, you've just shown how little you actully work with the code itself. Your little tantrum about commercial support is just red-herring flamebait, without the knowledge to back it up.
I call bullshit.
I've had to support far too many business laptop users over the past 5 years to believe for a second that such paltry memory was "top of the line". Maybe for an obsolete model discounted to get it off the shelves.
Aside from that, you can always spring the whole $30 it would cost to toss in another 256M.
If you knew my finances, you'd realize how far off base the "money lying around" comment is. Neither your poverty nor my finances justifies blaming products for requiring more resources than we can afford.
Complaining you don't have the computer power is like blaming a trailer manufacturer because you need to upgrade to an F250 from an Escort in order to be able to tow it. It's not the trailer manufacturer's fault you can't tow it.
Flamebait? Damn straight -- I'm tired of listening to users bitch that their ancient crap won't run new software, and whining that they can't afford to upgrade. That is neither mine nor any vendor's fault nor problem.
The hardware did what was needed when you bought it -- don't blame every one else just because your requirements changed. You should have allowed for that when you bought the machine in the first place. And I betcha it still does what you originally bought it for.
Sounds like the same whiners who complain if some ancient piece of hardware isn't supported in the kernel any more, even if it was off the market and essentially obsolete years ago.
When you have something vaguely resembling a 5-year old system with at least 256MB RAM, then you'll have a right to complain about performance. Until then, you're just penny-pinching junk hardware and it's your own damned fault you have performance problems.
While I do cross-platform C/C++ development as well, when I need to make sure it's cross platform, I use Java.
Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power. The community process has provided a reasonable pace of new feature integration, and has abandoned a few implementations that weren't really "ready", much as an orphaned code fork would be.
Open sourcing Java would be a mistake. Unless protected by a strong consortium of members (JCP) or by a strong backer who refuses to sell out to any one interest (M$ platform-specific extensions), Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks and become essentially useless.
It may take time to get features in through the JCP, but it also ensures there are no hastily implemented hacks making their way into the system. Quite frankly, the vast majority of OSS projects which don't come from Linus, Apache, Mozilla, or IBM have proven to be an absolutely disgusting mess of poorly and un-documented code. Java's embedded documentation is an elegant solution to the problem of keeping API manuals and source in sync, but it seems most OSS developers still haven't evolved past the "what, you can't read code?" mentality of the teenage "l33t" programming snob.
OSS means no sanity checks on feature creep, portability verification, documentation verification, regression testing, and all the other enterprise-project aspects of development that make it a useful technology. I've lost track of the number of times I've encountered platform-specific hacks in OSS code that weren't properly #ifdef-bracketed, or which just completely incompatible with other O/S implementations.
In short, Java is critical because it is portable and managed. The fact that Linux is supported is important from a rollout standpoint, but the underlying OS is (and should remain) irrelevant.
I'm not missing your point -- you are describing the purpose of legitimate patents.
I do not accept that any patent has a purely "defensive" position unless it has been assigned to an open source organization whose charter specifically forbids use of the patent portfolio to "attack" infringers.
I certainly am neither naive nor foolish enough to think for a second that Microsoft's motive is simply to prevent a future legal defense bill, especially for such bogus patents that attempt to claim common sense or prior art as being a creation or work worthy of any specific protection.
Patents are to protect creative works, and if Microsoft is worried about being tasked over bogus patents, their money would be far better spent if it were donated to allow more skilled patent reviewers to be hired. Alternatively, they could have spent those funds lobbying to have the problems in the patent system corrected to prevent bogus patents.
It is physically impossible for Microsoft to patent anything and everything which could possibly be used as a legal attack vector, and such broad-based "defense" through patents would be a severe abuse of the system. If anything, the flood of bogus patents from Microsoft are evidence they are trying to ensure the patent office is too overloaded to properly review applications in hopes that Microsoft may end up receiving a few "cash cow" patents that can be used for litigation against their competition and open source products/developers.
Bill may be an astute businessman with no fear of walking the razors edge between deceipt and legal fraud, but that certainly isn't any reason to trust them to "be nice" with their patent portfolio.
And if it happens to give you the chance to use your monopoly money to crush any potential competitor by flooding them with patent-infringement claims they are forced to spend money defending, that's just an "accidental" benefit, right?
The only "good" Microsoft could do with such obvious "patents" is if they were planning to force changes to the patent office by making them look like overworked, incompetent fools. Unfortunately, the patent office does that all by itself, so I don't think that's the motivation.
Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.
Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.
Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.
Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.
Of course once P4 and above are declared to be munitions, every one running a P4 or better is automatically in possession of a restricted weapon.
Then Microsoft could actually claim there are hordes of armed Linux terrorists across the nation, and have it be technically true.
Since when do you, an arbitrary nobody, get to tell the authors what they historically named their product/package?
You and the rest of the world (myself included) might consistently use the incorrect colloquial name, but the authors are not wrong. Everyone else is.
Prior art only matters if you can afford to buy congress.
Glad to see I've ticked off a few of you -- obviously you do have a conscience after all.
Now stop making excuses and follow it instead of trying to justify acting like 2 year olds that only understand "mine".
This is not a backup for personal use.
This is not a backup in case of media damage.
This is not a copy to lend to a friend.
This is plain and simple theft, and a sixteen year old damned well knows what theft is and has no excuse whatsoever. If they don't, arrest the parents as well for the obvious abuse and neglect that creates a sixteen year old who doesn't know that theft is wrong.
It's amazing what rationalization media thieves go through to justify their actions. If you don't personally know the individual providing you with media, it cannot in any way be construed as a loan. It is theft. Expect the consequences, and stop whining about your so-called "rights" -- you have no right to steal.
After much Googling, it seems you are correct. The people who'd told me a few years back that you get "free postage" for letters sent to the government were obviously wrong.
I agree. There is a money trail, and that is the problem. Somewhere in back someone has to be spending some of those profits in kickbacks for protection.
The spam is illegal. The products are fraudulent. The trail exists. Nothing is done.
Why?
Because your politicians never actually read their own email, so they don't have to deal with it.
Start printing the spam and sending it in to Congress, making use of the free postage when contacting your representative, and keep doing that for a few months.
Flood them with paper as you are flooded with spam, and I guarantee they'll finally get off their asses and do something about the problem instead of just lip-service laws with no enforcement.
Good timing as I needed to lay out some new business cards, so I gave it a download and a try.
The package itself seems pretty much flawless, with no crashes or instability detected (prebuilt RPM on SuSE 8.1 with Ximian enhancements.) The only glitch I encountered is that trying to print to a .pdf fails. Print to a postscript file or to a printer and it works fine.
Much easier to work with than a word processor and label templates. It's not a daily use utility for 99% of the population, but it does it's one job rather well. The epitomy of a "utility program."
True enough, but standards can be changed, and have in the past. It's called "deprecation".
As to existing code, there are safe alternatives. Functionality is not being removed, therefore the code could be corrected.
Any product manufacturer who cares about their code quality and system security should have made plans to clean up those problems regardless of whether it's a "standard" API. Those who aren't doing so are foolishly leaving their applications vulnerable to security problems, and I'd expect their customers to hold them liable for the resulting problems.
Open source in particular has no excuse for continuing to use such APIs.
The poster below you mentioned having the compiler flag such security risks -- I don't leave warnings in my code. Having the compiler flag them is an excellant way of locating the problems so they can be fixed. The only warnings code should produce are very specific type casting issues under controlled conditions (e.g. numeric objects that are expected to truncate values that exceed the storage size.) Anything more is a sign of issues that can cause unexpected behavior on some platforms.
In all fairness, the APIs needed to ensure buffer checking is done have been available for quite some years now. It really is long past due for the maintainers and vendors to start pruning the old, vulnerable API's so people can't use them any more.
As you've mentioned, functions like gets() are a vulnerability. That being the case, why leave it in the API set when there are safe alternatives?
The most common victim of the dot-bomb were people with regular 401K's, RRSP's, mutuals, etc. Many of them only had a few tens of thousands of dollars as retirement funds, if that.
They were wiped out as effectively as the big dot-bomb traders.
Or were you under the impression that only people who played the stock market personally took a hit?
Why do you think insurance rates, bank fees, etc. were increased following the dot-bomb? All of those firms passed on their losses on stock market gambles, not merely losing the money, but then hitting up their own customers to cover the losses through extra and increased fees.
Tim's pointed out one of the most important issues with the "safe" feeling some get from OSS. Even if you build everything from source, you're vulnerable unless you inspect and anlyize every source package yourself.
Even the distro vendors have had stuff slip by, and they've got far more than one person keeping an eye on things.
Aren't most of the Windows infection vectors actually buggy buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in the various system APIs? i.e. Isn't it the underlying DHTML, DNS resolution, etc. that cause the Windows versions of products like Real's to be such a problem?
The one thing I'd like to see come out of this is a common framework for registering protocol and file handlers. It gets so very, very tiring to have to configure each email package, each browser, the file manager, the display manager, etc. to use the applications I want instead of their defaults.
Both Gnome and KDE try to provide APIs to address that issue, but even Mozilla doesn't properly hook itself in to either system. If Real's framework will clean up that mess, I'm all for using their open source implementation to resolve the problem.
While he worked his butt off and managed to get people to come together on the standard, he was compensated rather nicely. To the tune of several million dollars -- over $100M at one point.
I do not understand why anyone thinks they are "owed" when the lose their shirt gambling on the stock market. The only way he's got a claim is if he was prevented from selling the stock when he wanted to. Otherwise he's just another formerly rich dot-bomb victim, the same as a few million other people.
The only difference is he had direct control over $100M+ of stock, not a few thousand dollars in a "retirement plan" like most dot-bomb victims.
It seems he was raising hell throughout the company over his losses, blaming the company for the damage the stock value took after the merger. Again, if he had the option of selling his shares before the merger, he has no cause for complaint.
Regardless of whether he has a legitimite claim (because he wasn't allowed to sell his stocks), you just don't get issues resolved by ranting and raving throughout the company and making an overly public stink about it. You pick the key individuals who can provide resolution and badger them, not badmouth everyone who doesn't help you immediately.
If you make it as messy as he appears to have been doing, you get fired. Period. Any company, any nation, and industry. Nobody wants to keep an employee who spends their time bitterly complaining about how they're being abused, threatening to sue, or otherwise making it abundantly clear they don't want to work there.
I sympathize and think he deserved more at the end of the day, but did not handle the issue correctly. At worst, he should have initiated a quiet lawsuit for his damages instead of ranting.
...or someone who's willing to form a Political Action Committee and put their money where their mouth is? Is that not what I just finished saying? If you don't have the money to buy senators and congressmen through influence, your opinion and your vote do not matter. Corps, groups which pool their finances, and the very rich are the only ones who get listened to by government.
I know I must be hitting a few nerves when someone has to resort to implying I'm crazy rather than defend a situation. Oddly enough, my post history would seem to be that of a rational person.
I supppose I could have recently gone insane and not noticed.
I think it's more likely you're just willfully blind to the fact that America stopped being a real democracy quite some time ago. The vote is a sham to keep select people in a visible position of power, while the corp financing pretty much dictates what actually happens.
Got a stubborn senator or congressman? Just threaten to shut down that particular plant or office in their voting district, and you have approval. Presuming, of course, they didn't respond to offers of campaign contributions if they'd support a particular pet bill.
Or are you actually naive enough to think politicians are honest, or that they care about anything beyond the next election and their personal payback after they "retire" from office?
If they can help the people without risking a vote or financing, sure, it's good publicity. But when it comes down to their career or what's good for the citizens and the country, you don't matter. You are only one vote, and it's all about keeping the majority, not your particular vote.
The environment became patentable when the US government was sold to the corporations through campaign contributions.
You and your vote don't matter to them anymore unless you've got the finances and clout to smack them with a serious lawsuit. Thanks to electronic voting which has no reliable paper trail, the embarassment of the Florida election recounts will be a thing of the past. Now they can just change the history records to ensure the talking head of choice has the presidency.
Looks like William Gibson was right about more than he should have been.
When the software causes so many hours of lost time, lost wages, lost data, and corrupt data as the Windows family of "operating systems", the vendor should be paying you to take the disks off their hands.