According to their quarterly report, which was released earlier this week, the iTunes music store did make a small profit. I don't think details were released as to how much of a profit, but they did say it was.
Presumably, the more they can grow the user base of the store, the more money they can make on it. Allowing Real to set up shop in their turf with their tools would only likely decrease the user base of their store.
Real just wants a free ride, but Apple wisely won't give it to them.
GForge doesn't actually host projects (besides its own). It is simply a software package used to maintain and coordinate development efforts. If/when the FSF switches to GForge, it will be up to them to provide the resources necessary to handle the large amounts of traffic and projects. That responsibility does not fall on GForge.
Anyone know if they can get subversion support in their as long as they are going through the effort to switch? I'd really like to see a free OSS hosting solution using all the latest and greatest tools. That and I'm not to sure about trusting the future of SourceForge, given VA's seemingly complete retraction from the open source community.
Well, we'd probably end up with innovations such as the "dictator flag." Saddam can be our first test subject. We will simply tattoo a "D" on his right hand and release him. To conform to standards, no country should allow anyone with said "D" tattoo to run their country. If they do, they will incur UN punishments. Yep, that should be effective.
On second thought, lets let these people stick to doing relatively unimportant tasks.
No, they don't. You just misunderstood my use. By run-time, I was referring to the OS itself. You have to buy a license to be able to use Windows. That's the lowest denominator. If you are trying to build a network, you also need liceses to access the servers, etc, etc.
I'd rather get all this for free by using Linux/Open Source and pay Trolltech for Qt development licenses than pay Microsoft for stuff which is mediocre at best.
Any upfront, fixed fee licensing cost can be amortized out across the number of units you sell and seen as a per unit fee. It just depends on where accounting adjusts your balance sheet.
How is "free to GPL your program or pay huge per-seat developer fees, your choice" any freer than "free to do whatever you want"?
I'm reminded of a line from a Pearl Jam song: "I can't buy what I want because its free." All joking aside, I'll concede that the QPL has nothing on the LGPL. I just reread them both to refresh my memory.
In any case, I'd much rather pay Trolltech for development licenses than Microsoft for run-time licenses on principal alone. For open source work, that point is moot and I consider Qt to be the superior toolkit.
It's not necessary at all. There are a lot of good free-software development tools for the Windows platform.
Every place I've ever seen that does commercial development for Windows uses Visual Studio for development. The only people I've ever seen use the free/open compilers were doing open source work.
We are just splitting hairs here, but if a company is serious about using open tools to do development work on Windows, they'd be further ahead to pay the reasonable fees to trolltech and could write code to target Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
You may in fact be more free under a license such as the QPL than you would be under LGPL'd GTK and wx. Qt is an extremely high quality toolkit and you are not being forced into anything that you yourself don't choose.
It is entirely different in the Windows world. You can use win32, MFC, or.NET without any royalties or super-expensive tools.
Well, it still costs the company and the consumer, just in different areas. With Trolltech, you pay a per developer license and be done with it. Free to distribute to whoever you want for whatever you want.
If you develop a Microsoft solution, the the consumer has to pay for Windows licenses and the developer has to pay for Windows licenses and likely Visual Studio licenses as well (though this isn't strictly necessary). If you use one MS product, you likely use others too, so start paying out money for SQL Server, Exchange, and whatever other traps you get yourself into.
By the way, you are entirely free to develop with Qt without paying any royalties or super-expensive tools as well.
I personally have been hoping for a while now something like this would happen for the Linux desktop. It's going to take a corporation to step up and unify this effort in order to gain mass acceptance. I'm sure there will be some grumbling in the community, but open source is open so feel free to customize to your hearts content if you don't like it. Most people don't want to have to go to this effor though.
The only potential problem I see is Trolltech's insistance on license fees for commercial development. Not that this is any different in the Windows world, but it'd be nice to give ISVs a completely royalty free solution. I'd like to see Novell take that $50 million that IBM gave them and purchase TT outright and put Qt under a more liberal open license. The wording on the KDE Free Qt clause seems a bit unclear to me. Does Qt get automatically BSD'ed when any company buys Trolltech. What if the purchasing company doesn't make the license any more closed that currently, does that have an effect.
Anyway, I've never understood the reasons people chose to write a whole desktop environment in straight C. C++ just seems a far more natural fit. I've looked over both GNOME and KDE fairly extensively, and there is no doubt in my mind that KDE has a cleaner code base and architecture. With all the "higher level language" rumblings going on in the GNOME community, I suspect that those developers are hitting a brick wall in terms of where they want to go and what the current code is capable of becoming. That sort of thing isn't happening in the KDE world, so I think that speaks volumes.
Good luck Novell, you've got at least one supporter here.
While I think the usefulness of this is somewhat limited, things like these are made to be disruptive and are aimed somewhat at the more political dissidents among us.
For instance, let's say you ride the bus or subway to work. You hop the subway and power up this backpack and encourage fellow riders to start swapping movies, music, whatever for a half hour. It's a grassroots sort of way to make a statement against the *IAA. This applies the same way if you meet at a local coffeeshop, pub, bookstore, etc.
Again, marginally useful, but no doubt you will read about these sort of situations happening in bigger cities across the country.
Let's say there was a fork, Sun holds the trademark to the Java name so said fork could not promote itself as "Java." If it did, it would have a lawsuit on its hands that is a guaranteed loss.
If it forked, it would become some other language, and people could decide to use it or not based on its merits. However, those in the Java camp would know where to look for the Java they want.
Furthermore, example proves this point. We have languages like Perl, Python, Ruby and countless others that are doing just fine in the open source world.
I realise this is a joke, but a simple rule system would filter out these errors.
First, you probably wouldn't need to speak the protocol part, as http:// would be the default. Say you needed FTP, then the rule system would like in and realize that any spoken "slash" after the second would be spelled out. Better yet, don't require the "://" as it should be appended automatically after the protocol.
The "dot" problem should be obvious too because it is against the rules to have two.s in a row. So, any time "dot"s are spoken consecutively, you'd spell out each one except the last.
I just wanted to share my experiences with you from a slightly different perspective.
I know 3 Mac users: me, a good friend, and my mother. My friend and I are both avid Windows haters and have run Linux for the greater portion of at least 3 years now. My mother is a teacher and has, more or less, always used Macs except where various traning required use of Windows....6 others say they'll guess they'll have to upgrade eventually. But they're not real enthusiastic about it, at least not yet. Maybe that will change.
I'm betting it will change. My mother just upgraded from OS 8.something. She bought a G3 eMac, 800 MHz if I recall. It's no screamer, but it handles OS X just fine and doesn't feel any slower to me than your average Windows 2000/XP system. She has taken to OS X so well that she abhors going back to OS 9, which she has to every day at the school she teaches at. In addition, she was dreading going through the uprade, but found it relatively painless....7 OSX users I know, four are G3 Ibook users that have since added YellowDog Linux, because they think OSX is too slow on the G3. The other 3 have PowerBook G4s, and are relatively happy with their performance.
I've used the G3 eMac and find its performance at least as reasonable as most computers. I wouldn't use it, but its fine for the not technically inclined. Your YD Linux friends obviously are more technically minded than most, so are probably concerned with performance. I have a Al PowerBook and am considering dual booting Linux just to tinker. This is technical curiosity, rather than any spite for OS X.
As of yet, I don't know anyone that owns a G5.
I own one and am incredibly happy. Not too much difference in every day performance than my PowerBook, but it chews through CPU intensive tasks. Easily the best computer I've ever used.
I got the G5 first, around the end of October, and that was my first Mac. I bought the PowerBook in January. I haven't run Windows on a personal machine (I do at work) in about 3 years, sticking solely with Linux. Hands down, OS X is the best all around OS available.
I've since encouraged a few people to buy Macs, and I may get a couple converts. I refuse to encourage Windows adoption, as it leads to big hassles. I wan't to encourage Linux, but it needs to mature in the end-user usability and reliability areas.
This is a good thing, just like KDE vs. Gnome is a good thing.
This rant may be slightly off topic, but I can't beleive this gets said anymore.
There is exactly one thing holding Linux back from mainstream corporate and personal use: the lack of any unified and consistent message.
Now, when I first discovered Linux and open source I thought the diversity was great. But, as time has passed, I've given up this opinion and think proper analysis shows its flaws.
First, lets take some sucessful open source projects: Linux (kernel) and Apache. If we had two competing Linux implementations, similar to the BSD world, you would see a lot less progress and corporate backing than you do now. Apache sees its high penetration rates because it is seen as the "one true" open source web server, in addition to the fact that it is technically superior. Yes, there are other web servers, but they target niche markets.
Now, why is Windows (or to a lesser extent Mac OS X) sucessful? Because people can point at it and refer to its characteristics. Developers can write an app and be reasonably confident as to how it will run, what environment it will run in, etc.
You cannot say that as long as this whole KDE vs. GNOME thing is raging on. For one thing, I usually need both installed if I want to be able to run any application without too many problems (and people complain about Windows bloat, two desktops is my definition of bloat). In addition, the Linux development I do rarely has any graphical front end, because I'm at a loss of what front end to support (and no I don't want to support two).
The fact becomes more important when a corporation is paying me to do the work. Personal things are one thing, corporate development is another. This is a real double edged sword, as it means we will see less development of commercial applications, and in the case that we do, the interface is not going to be consistent or friendly. As soon as corporations realise the support nightmares this generates, they are likely to cease development all together.
So, to conclude this meandering ramble, I must say to everyone that if you really want to see Linux take off on the desktop, put petty squabbles aside and focus on creating a consistent and standard desktop experience.
That's why we have the X11 protocol -- so there can be multiple implementations that remain compatible. The end user will never be aware of the switch, assuming the previous and current X server correctly implements the protocol.
I wouldn't dare to imagine the number of times that MS has replaced or retrofitted (read: ugly hacks) technologies found in previous versions of Windows. Only in there case, its all closed so you aren't aware of it. In all liklihood, the MS situation is worse, since it leads to bloat and security risks.
Just because open source development airs its dirty laundry in the wind does not mean it yeilds worse software than closed source development. Quite the contrary, I think if you researched your position you would find better software.
Slashdot Mirror
According to their quarterly report, which was released earlier this week, the iTunes music store did make a small profit. I don't think details were released as to how much of a profit, but they did say it was.
Presumably, the more they can grow the user base of the store, the more money they can make on it. Allowing Real to set up shop in their turf with their tools would only likely decrease the user base of their store.
Real just wants a free ride, but Apple wisely won't give it to them.
What were you expecting? Their first choice was Lindows. That name caused me to instantly and irreversibly lose any respect for the company.
GForge doesn't actually host projects (besides its own). It is simply a software package used to maintain and coordinate development efforts. If/when the FSF switches to GForge, it will be up to them to provide the resources necessary to handle the large amounts of traffic and projects. That responsibility does not fall on GForge.
Anyone know if they can get subversion support in their as long as they are going through the effort to switch? I'd really like to see a free OSS hosting solution using all the latest and greatest tools. That and I'm not to sure about trusting the future of SourceForge, given VA's seemingly complete retraction from the open source community.
BTW, I use a Linksys WAP-Router for internet. It didn't so much as burp when we plugged it into the gigabit switch.
Good thing too, might be cancer causing.
Here you go:
broadcast_flag & 0;
There is your less that zero day warez. Damn I'm 1337.
Well, we'd probably end up with innovations such as the "dictator flag." Saddam can be our first test subject. We will simply tattoo a "D" on his right hand and release him. To conform to standards, no country should allow anyone with said "D" tattoo to run their country. If they do, they will incur UN punishments. Yep, that should be effective.
On second thought, lets let these people stick to doing relatively unimportant tasks.
Probably the same thing that happened to your two closing parenthesis.
Real used to be a terrible technology company, and recently have gotten better.
Anyone remember: Buffering.. buffering...
Bandwidth used to be extremely limiting, but recently broadband access has become increasingly prevalent.
Anyone remember 28.8Kbps?
No, given Microsoft's history on releases, it's right on time for April Fools according to MS timetables.
You mean the April Fools from two years ago, right?
Ahhhh... dogma. And here I thought we were talking about development tools.
;-)
There's a difference?
No, they don't. You just misunderstood my use. By run-time, I was referring to the OS itself. You have to buy a license to be able to use Windows. That's the lowest denominator. If you are trying to build a network, you also need liceses to access the servers, etc, etc.
I'd rather get all this for free by using Linux/Open Source and pay Trolltech for Qt development licenses than pay Microsoft for stuff which is mediocre at best.
Any upfront, fixed fee licensing cost can be amortized out across the number of units you sell and seen as a per unit fee. It just depends on where accounting adjusts your balance sheet.
How is "free to GPL your program or pay huge per-seat developer fees, your choice" any freer than "free to do whatever you want"?
I'm reminded of a line from a Pearl Jam song: "I can't buy what I want because its free." All joking aside, I'll concede that the QPL has nothing on the LGPL. I just reread them both to refresh my memory.
In any case, I'd much rather pay Trolltech for development licenses than Microsoft for run-time licenses on principal alone. For open source work, that point is moot and I consider Qt to be the superior toolkit.
It's not necessary at all. There are a lot of good free-software development tools for the Windows platform.
Every place I've ever seen that does commercial development for Windows uses Visual Studio for development. The only people I've ever seen use the free/open compilers were doing open source work.
We are just splitting hairs here, but if a company is serious about using open tools to do development work on Windows, they'd be further ahead to pay the reasonable fees to trolltech and could write code to target Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
You may in fact be more free under a license such as the QPL than you would be under LGPL'd GTK and wx. Qt is an extremely high quality toolkit and you are not being forced into anything that you yourself don't choose.
Saying "jumped the shark" has sooo jumped the shark.
It is entirely different in the Windows world. You can use win32, MFC, or .NET without any royalties or super-expensive tools.
Well, it still costs the company and the consumer, just in different areas. With Trolltech, you pay a per developer license and be done with it. Free to distribute to whoever you want for whatever you want.
If you develop a Microsoft solution, the the consumer has to pay for Windows licenses and the developer has to pay for Windows licenses and likely Visual Studio licenses as well (though this isn't strictly necessary). If you use one MS product, you likely use others too, so start paying out money for SQL Server, Exchange, and whatever other traps you get yourself into.
By the way, you are entirely free to develop with Qt without paying any royalties or super-expensive tools as well.
I personally have been hoping for a while now something like this would happen for the Linux desktop. It's going to take a corporation to step up and unify this effort in order to gain mass acceptance. I'm sure there will be some grumbling in the community, but open source is open so feel free to customize to your hearts content if you don't like it. Most people don't want to have to go to this effor though.
The only potential problem I see is Trolltech's insistance on license fees for commercial development. Not that this is any different in the Windows world, but it'd be nice to give ISVs a completely royalty free solution. I'd like to see Novell take that $50 million that IBM gave them and purchase TT outright and put Qt under a more liberal open license. The wording on the KDE Free Qt clause seems a bit unclear to me. Does Qt get automatically BSD'ed when any company buys Trolltech. What if the purchasing company doesn't make the license any more closed that currently, does that have an effect.
Anyway, I've never understood the reasons people chose to write a whole desktop environment in straight C. C++ just seems a far more natural fit. I've looked over both GNOME and KDE fairly extensively, and there is no doubt in my mind that KDE has a cleaner code base and architecture. With all the "higher level language" rumblings going on in the GNOME community, I suspect that those developers are hitting a brick wall in terms of where they want to go and what the current code is capable of becoming. That sort of thing isn't happening in the KDE world, so I think that speaks volumes.
Good luck Novell, you've got at least one supporter here.
While I think the usefulness of this is somewhat limited, things like these are made to be disruptive and are aimed somewhat at the more political dissidents among us.
For instance, let's say you ride the bus or subway to work. You hop the subway and power up this backpack and encourage fellow riders to start swapping movies, music, whatever for a half hour. It's a grassroots sort of way to make a statement against the *IAA. This applies the same way if you meet at a local coffeeshop, pub, bookstore, etc.
Again, marginally useful, but no doubt you will read about these sort of situations happening in bigger cities across the country.
Let's say there was a fork, Sun holds the trademark to the Java name so said fork could not promote itself as "Java." If it did, it would have a lawsuit on its hands that is a guaranteed loss.
If it forked, it would become some other language, and people could decide to use it or not based on its merits. However, those in the Java camp would know where to look for the Java they want.
Furthermore, example proves this point. We have languages like Perl, Python, Ruby and countless others that are doing just fine in the open source world.
I realise this is a joke, but a simple rule system would filter out these errors.
.s in a row. So, any time "dot"s are spoken consecutively, you'd spell out each one except the last.
First, you probably wouldn't need to speak the protocol part, as http:// would be the default. Say you needed FTP, then the rule system would like in and realize that any spoken "slash" after the second would be spelled out. Better yet, don't require the "://" as it should be appended automatically after the protocol.
The "dot" problem should be obvious too because it is against the rules to have two
I just wanted to share my experiences with you from a slightly different perspective.
...6 others say they'll guess they'll have to upgrade eventually. But they're not real enthusiastic about it, at least not yet. Maybe that will change.
...7 OSX users I know, four are G3 Ibook users that have since added YellowDog Linux, because they think OSX is too slow on the G3. The other 3 have PowerBook G4s, and are relatively happy with their performance.
I know 3 Mac users: me, a good friend, and my mother. My friend and I are both avid Windows haters and have run Linux for the greater portion of at least 3 years now. My mother is a teacher and has, more or less, always used Macs except where various traning required use of Windows.
I'm betting it will change. My mother just upgraded from OS 8.something. She bought a G3 eMac, 800 MHz if I recall. It's no screamer, but it handles OS X just fine and doesn't feel any slower to me than your average Windows 2000/XP system. She has taken to OS X so well that she abhors going back to OS 9, which she has to every day at the school she teaches at. In addition, she was dreading going through the uprade, but found it relatively painless.
I've used the G3 eMac and find its performance at least as reasonable as most computers. I wouldn't use it, but its fine for the not technically inclined. Your YD Linux friends obviously are more technically minded than most, so are probably concerned with performance. I have a Al PowerBook and am considering dual booting Linux just to tinker. This is technical curiosity, rather than any spite for OS X.
As of yet, I don't know anyone that owns a G5.
I own one and am incredibly happy. Not too much difference in every day performance than my PowerBook, but it chews through CPU intensive tasks. Easily the best computer I've ever used.
I got the G5 first, around the end of October, and that was my first Mac. I bought the PowerBook in January. I haven't run Windows on a personal machine (I do at work) in about 3 years, sticking solely with Linux. Hands down, OS X is the best all around OS available.
I've since encouraged a few people to buy Macs, and I may get a couple converts. I refuse to encourage Windows adoption, as it leads to big hassles. I wan't to encourage Linux, but it needs to mature in the end-user usability and reliability areas.
There's a typo in the article. "N-Gage Killer" is misspelled.
There's an error the comment. "N-Gage Killer" is self-referential, and is more concisely stated "N-Gage."
This is a good thing, just like KDE vs. Gnome is a good thing.
This rant may be slightly off topic, but I can't beleive this gets said anymore.
There is exactly one thing holding Linux back from mainstream corporate and personal use: the lack of any unified and consistent message.
Now, when I first discovered Linux and open source I thought the diversity was great. But, as time has passed, I've given up this opinion and think proper analysis shows its flaws.
First, lets take some sucessful open source projects: Linux (kernel) and Apache. If we had two competing Linux implementations, similar to the BSD world, you would see a lot less progress and corporate backing than you do now. Apache sees its high penetration rates because it is seen as the "one true" open source web server, in addition to the fact that it is technically superior. Yes, there are other web servers, but they target niche markets.
Now, why is Windows (or to a lesser extent Mac OS X) sucessful? Because people can point at it and refer to its characteristics. Developers can write an app and be reasonably confident as to how it will run, what environment it will run in, etc.
You cannot say that as long as this whole KDE vs. GNOME thing is raging on. For one thing, I usually need both installed if I want to be able to run any application without too many problems (and people complain about Windows bloat, two desktops is my definition of bloat). In addition, the Linux development I do rarely has any graphical front end, because I'm at a loss of what front end to support (and no I don't want to support two).
The fact becomes more important when a corporation is paying me to do the work. Personal things are one thing, corporate development is another. This is a real double edged sword, as it means we will see less development of commercial applications, and in the case that we do, the interface is not going to be consistent or friendly. As soon as corporations realise the support nightmares this generates, they are likely to cease development all together.
So, to conclude this meandering ramble, I must say to everyone that if you really want to see Linux take off on the desktop, put petty squabbles aside and focus on creating a consistent and standard desktop experience.
That's why we have the X11 protocol -- so there can be multiple implementations that remain compatible. The end user will never be aware of the switch, assuming the previous and current X server correctly implements the protocol.
I wouldn't dare to imagine the number of times that MS has replaced or retrofitted (read: ugly hacks) technologies found in previous versions of Windows. Only in there case, its all closed so you aren't aware of it. In all liklihood, the MS situation is worse, since it leads to bloat and security risks.
Just because open source development airs its dirty laundry in the wind does not mean it yeilds worse software than closed source development. Quite the contrary, I think if you researched your position you would find better software.