A lot of small-time hardware developers (and even many employees of large hardware developers) are very naive when it comes to codec licensing. They often believe they can download any old open source MP3 application and have a free and legal way of playing MP3s on their device. If they want to sell their device in the U.S. (they often do), they've got a problem.
Real is solving this problem by licensing MP3 to the community under the RPSL (which is OSI certified), and paying for an MP3 license. It's not a perfect solution (we would like to include it in the GPL'd code), but it's better than not having MP3 playback.
I suppose many Linux users who are used to compiling and installing their own software will find this a yawner, since there's plenty of grey market software out there. However, companies that want to make a business distributing Linux-based products should really find this good news.
Rob Lanphier Development Support Manager RealNetworks
Sun doing well with Solaris helps Linux in many ways. Thanks to both supporting many of the same APIs, apps are reasonably portable between the two operating systems. In particular, Novell, Red Hat and Sun are all pushing GNOME and OpenOffice, not to mention (shameless plug) Helix. So, regardless of whether Linux or Solaris wins, a lot of end users really benefit with more open source applications.
Projects like this also allow a distibution to make a migration from one package format to another, simultaneously supporting two package formats at once while the migration occurs.
You must have pretty low ambitions to consider what the Libertarians have "traction". Given the amount of effort made and the sizable minority that considers themselves Libertarian, there's nothing even close to proprortionality in representation or even influence. As third parties go, Libertarians are the most successful, but that's "as third parties go".
I was somewhat involved in the creation of electionmethods.org, and I'm glad the site exists. I disagreed with some of the rhetorical tactics that the site has taken, because I knew that it would be subject to this sort of critique. That's why most of my productive energies in this area have been focused on the Wikipedia Voting Systems Project.
That said, I think the positions they take are correct. There are some great theoretical results showing how poorly IRV performs in situations where Condorcet is a stable, rational system. Though there's not many elections that you can analyze to see this "in the wild", a recent Debian project leader election was a great example of where IRV would have been bad.
IRV isn't so bad, but it's also sadly inferior to many other better choices.
I, for one, don't really advocate Condorcet for multi-seat elections. However, for single seat elections (what it was designed for), "proportional representation" is moot.
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make the President of the U.S. elected via Condorcet, Senators also elected per state via Condorcet, and the House of Representatives elected proportionally. For the House, I'd use Single Transferable Vote (STV) and it wouldn't be one big nationwide proportional pool, but rather, multimember districts of 5-9 seats.
Rob
(who's lying...if he could wave a magic wand, there's a lot of other things that would be too much more fun to do than change the electoral system)
We've had some discussions on the election methods list about this, kicked off here. "Instant Runoff Voting - Pairwise (IRV-P)" and "Instant Round Robin Voting (IRRV)" have been proposed. I kinda like the "round robin" bit.
No one disputes that Arrow is a brilliant economist, who came up with a very mathematically interesting theorem. However, "reasonable" is entirely subjective, and there's a case to be made that one of his criteria (independence of irrelevant alternatives) is not entirely reasonable.
The system you are referring to is cumulative voting. The problem is that the strategy are very complicated in this system, and the "spending" metaphor doesn't entirely hold up. When you spend money, you get what you pay for (literally). When you vote, you're not actually buying 75% of one candidate, and 25% of another candidate. Your vote, along with everyone else's vote, is mixed up in a big pool, and a winner is chosen. Thus, the consequences and benefits of spending all your money in one place versus spending a little here and a little there aren't clear. I think, from a strategic perspective, smart voters end up spending all of their money on one candidate, and it just devolves into plurality voting from a strategic perspective.
It occasionally comes up as a subject on the election-methods mailing list. I haven't followed the discussions there so much lately, but my recollection is that there's never been someone emerge who's a big champion of the method in the eight years or so the mailing list has been around.
Because the major distros come with different: * versions of X Windows * versions of GNOME or KDE * versions of glibc * versions of the ABI * package management systems
When you are distributing your software in source code form for developers to compile themselves, it's no big deal. When you are trying to release a binary that works in a supported way, it's a hassle.
This hassle isn't limited to closed source software. For example, look how many download options Abiword has. Regardless of what "should" work, there's been enough hassles in the past that most folks want binaries tailored to their specific platform.
I'm not sure what the problem is, and I apologize for the bad experience. As far as being on IRC goes, that's generally not the most reliable way of getting in touch with us, since we can't monitor it 24x7.
The best way of reaching us for problems with the Helix Community site is to email admin@helixcommunity.org. To reach the Helix Player team, you can post to one of their forums: https://helixcommunity.org/forum/?group_id=154
As far as what went wrong in this specific instance, my guess is that you tried the frame-free version of the bug tracker without being authenticated. It's an annoying side effect of how we do authentication, which we hope to clear up in the future. At any rate, try doing the following steps in this exact order and see if you still have the problem:
As I pointed out in an earlier comment (which you responded to...pointing me to this), a company is a big collection of individuals, which changes over time. Ergo, it's hard to know how much you should trust ANY company.
Moreover, we're not asking for unconditional trust. Read reviews, inspect the source code, do what you need to do, ask for expert opinions.
Real 10 has been out in the wild since the beginning of the year. Given the eagle eye people have had on our company, and given that there hasn't been many informed critiques of that technology, I would think as an outsider it's as safe as anything else.
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
I'm not going to respond to the specific grievances you lay out. I could try to step up as a spokesman for the teams responsible for that stuff, but I'm not going to, other than to say the following. Most of these things have not affected me personally, and for the stuff that has, I've spent a lot of personal political equity complaining about to those folks. However, I think a lot of the charges against of are blown WAY out of proportion to what actually happened. But, I don't want to get into a big argument about that stuff, because it's not what I'm personally involved with.
What I'm personally involved with is a lot of great initiatives that should mean a lot to this community. Getting open source media playback on cell phones. Making the Linux desktop a viable alternative to Windows by providing world-class media solutions.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit. You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it. Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Thanks for the encouragement. When I have face-to-face conversations with folks (trade shows, Linux user group meetings, etc) this is usually the tenor of the conversation. It's usually only when people get online that people sport their tinfoil hats come out.
That's why I'm often told "ignore the Slashdotters". While I don't let it get under my skin, I have a hard time ignoring it outright, because that's the only exposure a lot of folks have to the hard-core technologist (read "geek") community. I, of course, say that as a geek who has been reading Slashdot/Chips-n-Dips since 1997.
What's interesting to me is that I wonder how many of these people are just as frightening in person as they are online, or if they are paper tigers. I suspect it's a little of both.
That leads to the followup question: how does the geek community take back this bullhorn from the most shrill among us?
I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.
I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.
There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.
As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.
We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL
If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.
It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.
At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.
Condorcet's method - less momentum, solid system. The Debian project uses it to elect their project leader. 'Nuff said.
Rob
Re:Apple and Mozilla are both missing the point...
on
Mozilla's Sunbird Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I believe that's the point of Open-Xchange. However, I haven't been able to assertain whether or not the system allows for the type of group scheduling that CorporateTime does. It would seem that the WebDAV protocol would be a bottleneck, but perhaps there's enough backend smarts to make the integration/permissions management of multiple calendars rather seamless.
The mental hurdle that I have with WebDAV systems is how to implement the ability for someone else to add an unconfirmed meeting to your calendar. With WebDAV, it would seem you either have read access (no additions at all), or write access (add anything you want, including confirmed meetings and deleting other meetings). Specialized calendaring protocols can compartmentalize this type of thing.
What Washington et al practiced was open rebellion. Henry David Thoreau was the first to dub the term "civil disobedience" and to pontificate on the topic in a concrete way, well after Washington's time.
As it turns out, we'll never know if civil disobedience would have worked. It worked for Gandhi, who, as it turned out did willingly surrender himself many times to the British government on the charges they brought against him.
So, you may think that civil disobedience is stupid, and it may very well be ineffective or not worth it in this case. However, the term is pretty well defined, and thus practicing "civil disobedience" pretty much means you do need to accept the punishment for the crime.
You assume that many of these people want to learn to read (or at least, want to learn badly enough to put the time and energy into it to make it happen). If you tell an illiterate farmer "you need to learn how to read", I can easily imagine the reply being "I've gotten this far in life without learning to read, and I've got a family to feed, so buzz off". However, you tell that farmer "I've got a tool that'll help you double the price you get for your crop", and he'll figure out how to use it, if that means learning to read, or having his literate kid run it for him, or sending his illiterate kid to school to learn how.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if Real are positioning themselves to get their client distributed with distributions.
Yes, we are.
Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks
A lot of small-time hardware developers (and even many employees of large hardware developers) are very naive when it comes to codec licensing. They often believe they can download any old open source MP3 application and have a free and legal way of playing MP3s on their device. If they want to sell their device in the U.S. (they often do), they've got a problem.
Rob
To elaborate on the problem that we're trying to solve here, take a look at this post about GPL and MP3.
Real is solving this problem by licensing MP3 to the community under the RPSL (which is OSI certified), and paying for an MP3 license. It's not a perfect solution (we would like to include it in the GPL'd code), but it's better than not having MP3 playback.
I suppose many Linux users who are used to compiling and installing their own software will find this a yawner, since there's plenty of grey market software out there. However, companies that want to make a business distributing Linux-based products should really find this good news.
Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks
Sun doing well with Solaris helps Linux in many ways. Thanks to both supporting many of the same APIs, apps are reasonably portable between the two operating systems. In particular, Novell, Red Hat and Sun are all pushing GNOME and OpenOffice, not to mention (shameless plug) Helix. So, regardless of whether Linux or Solaris wins, a lot of end users really benefit with more open source applications.
Rob
I would hope the handle it in just like catalog.google.com
Projects like this also allow a distibution to make a migration from one package format to another, simultaneously supporting two package formats at once while the migration occurs.
Rob
You must have pretty low ambitions to consider what the Libertarians have "traction". Given the amount of effort made and the sizable minority that considers themselves Libertarian, there's nothing even close to proprortionality in representation or even influence. As third parties go, Libertarians are the most successful, but that's "as third parties go".
Rob
Why not?
That said, I think the positions they take are correct. There are some great theoretical results showing how poorly IRV performs in situations where Condorcet is a stable, rational system. Though there's not many elections that you can analyze to see this "in the wild", a recent Debian project leader election was a great example of where IRV would have been bad.
IRV isn't so bad, but it's also sadly inferior to many other better choices.
Rob
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make the President of the U.S. elected via Condorcet, Senators also elected per state via Condorcet, and the House of Representatives elected proportionally. For the House, I'd use Single Transferable Vote (STV) and it wouldn't be one big nationwide proportional pool, but rather, multimember districts of 5-9 seats.
Rob
(who's lying...if he could wave a magic wand, there's a lot of other things that would be too much more fun to do than change the electoral system)
Rob
I didn't
Rob
There's a fairly good rebuttal of this on the electionmethods.org website.
Rob
It occasionally comes up as a subject on the election-methods mailing list. I haven't followed the discussions there so much lately, but my recollection is that there's never been someone emerge who's a big champion of the method in the eight years or so the mailing list has been around.
Rob
Because the major distros come with different:
* versions of X Windows
* versions of GNOME or KDE
* versions of glibc
* versions of the ABI
* package management systems
When you are distributing your software in source code form for developers to compile themselves, it's no big deal. When you are trying to release a binary that works in a supported way, it's a hassle.
This hassle isn't limited to closed source software. For example, look how many download options Abiword has. Regardless of what "should" work, there's been enough hassles in the past that most folks want binaries tailored to their specific platform.
Rob
I'm not sure what the problem is, and I apologize for the bad experience. As far as being on IRC goes, that's generally not the most reliable way of getting in touch with us, since we can't monitor it 24x7.
The best way of reaching us for problems with the Helix Community site is to email admin@helixcommunity.org. To reach the Helix Player team, you can post to one of their forums:
https://helixcommunity.org/forum/?group_id=154
As far as what went wrong in this specific instance, my guess is that you tried the frame-free version of the bug tracker without being authenticated. It's an annoying side effect of how we do authentication, which we hope to clear up in the future. At any rate, try doing the following steps in this exact order and see if you still have the problem:
- Log in
- Visit the Helix Player bug tracker tab
- Click on "Enter a new report"
If you are still having problems logging a bug after that, send mail to the admin@helixcommunity.org and we'll take a look at it.Rob
As I pointed out in an earlier comment (which you responded to...pointing me to this), a company is a big collection of individuals, which changes over time. Ergo, it's hard to know how much you should trust ANY company.
Moreover, we're not asking for unconditional trust. Read reviews, inspect the source code, do what you need to do, ask for expert opinions.
Real 10 has been out in the wild since the beginning of the year. Given the eagle eye people have had on our company, and given that there hasn't been many informed critiques of that technology, I would think as an outsider it's as safe as anything else.
Rob
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
I'm not going to respond to the specific grievances you lay out. I could try to step up as a spokesman for the teams responsible for that stuff, but I'm not going to, other than to say the following. Most of these things have not affected me personally, and for the stuff that has, I've spent a lot of personal political equity complaining about to those folks. However, I think a lot of the charges against of are blown WAY out of proportion to what actually happened. But, I don't want to get into a big argument about that stuff, because it's not what I'm personally involved with.
What I'm personally involved with is a lot of great initiatives that should mean a lot to this community. Getting open source media playback on cell phones. Making the Linux desktop a viable alternative to Windows by providing world-class media solutions.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit. You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it. Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Rob
Thanks for the encouragement. When I have face-to-face conversations with folks (trade shows, Linux user group meetings, etc) this is usually the tenor of the conversation. It's usually only when people get online that people sport their tinfoil hats come out.
That's why I'm often told "ignore the Slashdotters". While I don't let it get under my skin, I have a hard time ignoring it outright, because that's the only exposure a lot of folks have to the hard-core technologist (read "geek") community. I, of course, say that as a geek who has been reading Slashdot/Chips-n-Dips since 1997.
What's interesting to me is that I wonder how many of these people are just as frightening in person as they are online, or if they are paper tigers. I suspect it's a little of both.
That leads to the followup question: how does the geek community take back this bullhorn from the most shrill among us?
Rob
Hi folks,
I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.
I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.
There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.
As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.
We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL
If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.
It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.
At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.
Rob
Rob
I believe that's the point of Open-Xchange. However, I haven't been able to assertain whether or not the system allows for the type of group scheduling that CorporateTime does. It would seem that the WebDAV protocol would be a bottleneck, but perhaps there's enough backend smarts to make the integration/permissions management of multiple calendars rather seamless.
The mental hurdle that I have with WebDAV systems is how to implement the ability for someone else to add an unconfirmed meeting to your calendar. With WebDAV, it would seem you either have read access (no additions at all), or write access (add anything you want, including confirmed meetings and deleting other meetings). Specialized calendaring protocols can compartmentalize this type of thing.
Rob
Before going off on a rant about the definition of "civil disobedience", you should perhaps learn what it means. Here's the Wikipedia article on civil disobedience.
What Washington et al practiced was open rebellion. Henry David Thoreau was the first to dub the term "civil disobedience" and to pontificate on the topic in a concrete way, well after Washington's time.
As it turns out, we'll never know if civil disobedience would have worked. It worked for Gandhi, who, as it turned out did willingly surrender himself many times to the British government on the charges they brought against him.
So, you may think that civil disobedience is stupid, and it may very well be ineffective or not worth it in this case. However, the term is pretty well defined, and thus practicing "civil disobedience" pretty much means you do need to accept the punishment for the crime.
Rob
That work is already underway
You assume that many of these people want to learn to read (or at least, want to learn badly enough to put the time and energy into it to make it happen). If you tell an illiterate farmer "you need to learn how to read", I can easily imagine the reply being "I've gotten this far in life without learning to read, and I've got a family to feed, so buzz off". However, you tell that farmer "I've got a tool that'll help you double the price you get for your crop", and he'll figure out how to use it, if that means learning to read, or having his literate kid run it for him, or sending his illiterate kid to school to learn how.
Rob