I think this basically means the simple fact. Most people don't have a problem with Microsoft, and are perfectly happy with their products.
Do you work for MS? That is a stupid assumption that they are making.
How many people actually _heard_ about the rebate?
How many people will bother with the rebate?
MS is not giving people CASH.
People can only get MS software with this rebate
This whole "settlement" is a scam that is only going to HELP MS, it is not going to be a punishment. It will cost MS very little _real_ cash. They can duplicate their software for very little. I would be surprised if this 1.1 Billion costs them more then $10,000 when all is said and done. Also, what "money" isn't claimed goes to CA schools in the form of MS software. Again, this will not cost MS anything more then the chump-change for CD's and duplication. This settlement will actually probably make MS money from schools that get this MS software deal and then get locked into more MS software in a few years.
For those who didn't RTFA, to get this rebate will require work on the part of companies:
Individuals can claim up to five eligible software purchases without providing any proof of purchase. Companies, which are projected to receive around 80-percent of the settlement funds,
must submit software licensing forms and other documentation to get their refunds.
I think the reasons people are not doing this are simple. They don't know about it or don't feel they are getting any real VALUE from the rebate. Now, if MS was forced to send REAL money to people who filled in a claim, I bet we would have seen a huge percentage of claims. So MS gets away with a slap-on-the-wrist and instead of a any real punishments, the government has given MS a brand new jar of Vaseline.
I think we will have the "PC of the future" before we have the "storage of the future". How will we store all this data? We currently do not have any consumer level storage that can last 70+ years. CD and DVD don't last 70+ years and hard disks don't even come close.
The only current possiblities are paper, film or vinyl. Maybe everyone could pay some company to store the data and handle copying the data to new disks every so many years? I just don't see any data storage technology on the horizon that could handle a "life recorder".
In the same sense that you do not want people to "lock up your source code" without compensation (credit), closed source developers do not want you to share the.exe without compensation (money).
If I share code under the GPL/LGPL, my form of payment required is that all changes to the code stay with the code. Not for my benefit but a community benefit. This is no different then others requiring money for their source code. I just think code sharing is better for the IT ecosystem then code hiding.
First figure out if your app is going to be totally web delivered. If it is a web app, your managers points are moot. A J2EE web app is _not_ any slower then a ASP.Net web app. Second, why would you pay for an app server? What small office will have money for that? You can use Tomcat or JBoss both are excellent. If you went with an ASP.Net web app, your customers will now have to buy some MS Windows _server_. Well, you could run your ASP.Net app on Linux with Apache and Mono. Mono is great under Linux for ASP.Net apps in C# or VB.Net (uggh).
Heck, you could offer your customers a "turn-key" solution. Put together a cheap server running Linux with Tomcat for J2EE or Apache/Mono for.Net. Sell that for a fair price. Your customers just have to plug it in and turn it on. Your customers will have no extra license fees from MS to worry about. If you have any half decent developers on your team, they could write _standards compliant_ HTML and then you don't need to worry if your clients are hitting your web app with IE, Firefox or Safari. If your customers have a net connection, you can plug it into this Linux server you sell them and charge a small annual maintenance fee for support. If there is a problem, just VNC or SSH in and fix it.
If you go with a fat GUI client, then I personally would do it in Java with SWT (the toolkit used by Eclipse) for the GUI. SWT is very fast and lightweight. You can even get good SWT GUI designers to make coding easy. By going with Java for the GUI, you don't have to worry about what OS your customers use.
If you go with.Net, then you should use Mono and GTK# or QT# for the GUI. That won't lock you into just MS Windows for your customers. You would be able to deploy to Mac, Linux and Windows. I know my doctor uses an iBook. She carries it into the exam room all the time and manages all her patient records from it. So if you went with an MS-only solution, you would lose customers like her.
If you are developing an internal only solution, then use what you want. However, if you want to sell software (especially as a small company), you really should give your customers the most choice. If you went with a fat GUI client, you could sell a turn-key solution that ran Linux with Mono. Again, your customers will have no license fees to worry about, just your bill : )
I work as a senior programmer for a fortune 500. A few months back we went through a similar situation. However, we don't sell software, so everything we develop is for corporate use only. We had two camps. The J2EE camp and the.Net camp. We even hired three outside consulting companies to help make the choice. All three companies said that our web apps should be done in J2EE. However, politics won out and now we have different groups doing different things. Some are doing J2EE and some are doing ASP.Net C# and I get to be involved with both.
IMO, your senior manager should have no say in the technology used, just the features. The technology choice should be done by those who are going to _implement_ the technology.
"My senior manager recommended using.NET. His argument is that most desktops he has seen in hospitals already run Windows, the development time will be cut down for this small to mid-size project, rich desktop clients are possible and there will be no application server costs involved. He also contends that.NET has more templates and abilities than J2EE (which is simply 'web targeted' in his opinion.
That sounds like he has already be "won over" by some MS sales guy..Net development is not going to be any faster then J2EE..Net might even be a little slower at the start because you have
What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.
Am I the only geek to get goose-bumps over that? My utopia is a world of geeks working together. Maybe one day we will achieve that. I guess we have to kill a lot of non-geeks first ; P
Maybe all that doom training will be worth something!
This is exactly the purpose. Most GPL projects don't want money, they want time. To a PHB, time is money, so by that definition, a GPL product will cost money.
The time of a developer for a community is _FAR_ more important then an hourly wage. If you add up the average USA salary for a programmer and applied it to every OSS project, there is not one company in the world that could afford to pay the salary of every OSS project available. Heck, there is not one company in the world that could pay the salaries of just the _major_ OSS projects like the Linux Kernel, Apache, Samba, etc. Not MS, not Oracle, not even Walmart could afford this staff! ; P
And what modern, general purpose OS does not have a dynamic library mechanism? Maybe for embedded OSes it may not be the best license. However for any modern OS developed by a commnunity, it is very good. Can you list one _modern_ OS that does _not_ have a dynamic library mechanism? If you can, it wouldn't be a very useful OS IMO.
we've turned it into a democracy... aka the tyranny of the majority.
I wouldn't call it that either. The majority often doesn't have a say, especially when you consider the big financial influence of a very small minority, that minority being the large corporations in the USA.
Do you think the morjority of the USA wanted the DMCA? Do you think the majority wanted the extreme length of copyright? The majority picked picked Gore for the 2000 Presidential election, but I hope I don't have to tell you who became president. If anything, I would say we are becoming a Corporatism
The GP didn't say commercial == bad. He was stating that there really is _no_ room for another commercial OS. No commercial OS is going to take out MS. And if you don't like MS, there is the commercial Mac OS. After that, we have a bunch of very good quality OSS OSes.
I agree with the GP. I don't see any point in making a _hobby_ OS closed source. Maybe an embedded OS, but not a general purpose OS. IMO, it is a shame the developers of SkyOS do not use their abilities for an open source OS or even send a job application to MS or Apple.
I don't want to sound like I am dissing the entrepreneurial spirit, that is what drives our nation. But I am sure if I were developing a closed/proprietary Widget that there would never be a need for, I would have a fair amount of vocal feedback about using my talents where it may be more productive/profitable.
by and large, SkyOS's major online advocates are a bunch of loud-mouthed jerks who'll accuse anyone of being a free software "zealot" for pointing out the obvious
Wasn't there some article on/. about SkyOS using a lot of OSS and not releasing the changes? Or did I just dream that up : )
No, they go after the free sites because they are far less likely to try to fight this out in court. A quick "victory" for the **AA. The **AA surely do not want a judge to say it is OK to just host the.torrents as long as you don't actually host the REAL content. This is exactly what all these torrent link sites do. I don't know of any that actually host the content, which would be pretty stupid.
It would be nice to see one of these sites get the EFF on their side to fight this out. I am not sure how a judge would rule. For example, is it illegal for someone to tell another person where to go and get illegal drugs or where to go to get stolen goods? I don't know since IANAL.
One other thing I think some of these sites that have closed shop should do is stay open and just allow legit.torrents. For example,.torrents of tons of OSS software. Obviously this wouldn't attract all the warez kiddies but would give strong proof of the benefits of P2P.
If any lawyer reads this, I have a Q? Is it legal to share a TV show that you recorded on P2P? I can record my favorite show and give it my friends to watch, so how would doing the same thing electronically be illegal?
Nah, just get the SpellBound extension for Firefox 1.0 and then you can right click in any textarea/inputbox and select "Check Spelling". Nice and easy ; P
Red Hat provides far more then just "packaging it up nicely". Can you get a certification in "White Box Linux"? That might not matter to geeks, but to PHB's it does. Oracle and our other enterprise apps we run on Red Hat are not certified and not supported on "White Box Linux". That means the 10's of thousands we pay every year for 24x7 support goes out the window. Does "White Box Linux" have partnerships with all these big enterprise software providers? Nope. Again, that might not mean much to a geek, but it makes all the difference in the world to the PHB's who approve the software.
No where did I imply that your belief in one license over the other was some type of religious zealotry.
You believe that one license is better then another for one purpose or another. That is your belief/opinion. Is there really a big difference between saying "I believe the LGPL is better then the BSD for XYZ" vs. "It is my opinion that the LGPL is better then the BSD for XYZ"? To you there may be a bid difference, to me both sentences say the same thing.
This is the _whole_ point of the LGPL (Lesser General Public License). It allows the code to be used in proprietary, closed source projects. The only thing it asks for in return is if changes are made to the library itself. You are never required to give your own code away.
and it certainly wouldn't be a part of nearly every Mac application if it was LGPLed
Huh? Why not? The LPGL would not require any one of those applications that use it to give out _their_ source. How many people used the morefiles vs. modifing it? The only time code would have had to come back to the community was if someone change morefiles and that would be the _only_ code required. If morefiles was so helpful to so many, don't you think it would be better for all those users of morefiles if improvements to morefiles and morefiles only, came back to the community? I do.
I agree that the GPL is not right for libraries, small utility snippets, etc. That is exactly what the LGPL was made for.
You know, I'm a developer, and when I choose a license, it has never had anything at all to do with belief. Instead, it has to do with how I see one particular project and how I want it to be used.
But that _is_ belief. You believe that one license will offer more "freedom" then the other. It just comes down to what you think that freedom should be or most importantly _who_ it should go to. I respect all of the OSS licenses. They each serve a different point. Pick the one you like best : P
I am looking at DotGnu now. I have only used Mono so far under Linux. The app is pretty simple. How complete is DotGnu's Windows.Forms? The only part of this small app that should be a problem is a C# class I found to play MP3's that uses DirectX. I only use this to play a few seconds of CTC's theme song when the app start, which is not very important.
Oh, one other thing that would need to be changed is that the code uses the win registry to store the last save path selected, username and encrypted password.
Hmm, looking at the Portable.NET Namespaces, it seems to be missing a lot of namespaces I use (2,094 methods to according to them). System.Collections, System.Threading, System.Net.HttpWebRequest (this is the main part of the app to download MP3's), according to the Portable.NET Namespaces, System.Net.HttpWebRequest is MISSING. The program also needs System.Net.HttpWebResponse to download the MP3 and according to DotGnu's site, System.Net.HttpWebResponse is MISSING. I don't even see System.IO.Stream which I use to download the stream from the System.Net.HttpWebResponse. I use System.Security.Cryptography to securly store the users password and this namespace is totally missing from the Portable.NET Namespaces.
Even if I switched to GTK# or QT#, this little app would need to be totally rewritten to work with DotGnu. I have a lot of hope for Mono and DotGnu, but as it is now, DotGnu doesn't cut it for production deployment. Mono is great on the web app side, but is missing the GUI side unless you use something like GTK#, wx.Net or QT#.
No, there is a _huge_ difference between the GPL and the MPL. Adium is under the GPL. Do you think MS would allow me to take _their_ code and release it under my own license? No, I would have to license it according to their requirements. Adium is doing nothing different. The Adium developers must believe in the GPL and don't believe in the MPL. The MPL does not encourage any type of redistribution of the original code. You can take MPL code and make it proprietary, while you cannot take GPL code and make it proprietary. A _very_ important difference to some.
Some developers don't want their code taken and "locked" away in some proprietary app, while others don't care. I happen to go along with the GPL camp for the most part. If I give my time and effort to a community project, I don't want someone to be able to take that effort away and not have to give back to that community. Note that the GPL and people who believe in the GPL don't care about profits. If you can take a GPL app (like MySQL) and make money, so be it. Just don't try to take the code away.
The GPL is all about the code and the end-user rights to the code. Other licensees like the MPL, BSD, etc are not about the code or the rights of others with the code. The MPL and BSD allow you to take the code and derive from it and keep that derived code locked away. Again, some people feel that is OK and others don't. It all comes down to where you stand on that issue. I personally think both sides have good points, I just favor the GPL/LGPL for a stronger community. IMO, the GPL/LGPL foster sharing of knowledge better then the other OSS licenses. And to me, sharing of knowledge is the most important thing.
Right now, there are hundreds or even thousands of file sharers being sued (or being threatened, or getting letters etc). That threat serves as a real deterrent.
Actully, if you just look at the number, it is not a real deterrent. Say there is 20 million people on Kazaa (not counting the millions of others on other P2P. The **AA has sued a few thousand. Lets make it an even 10,000 to make the numbers easy to work with. ((10,000 / 20,000,00) * 100) = 0.05%. You have a 0.05% (500th of a percent) chance of being sued! Not very much of a deterrent. You have a higher chance of being bitten by a shark in the Atlantic Ocean down here in Sunny Florida while on vacation then being sued by the **AA.
I'll take a bet you get bit by a shark over being sued by the **AA any day. : P
Is.be Belgium? Those laws sound pretty fair on _both_ sides. I agree that someone should not be allowed to SELL copyrighted material. However, backing up for personal use should be allowed. To bad that is not the situation here in the USA.
I just finished a small C# GUI application that connects into Coast to Coast AM with a StreamLink userName and Password and downloads the daily MP3's of the most recent show (or any date you pick). I would be interested to see if it can run in DotGnu on MS Windows and Linux.
I haven't tried dotgnu yet, just Mono under non-MS systems. One thing I don't agree with WRT the DotGnu approach is that they are re-implementing their own tool-kit instead of wrapping the native toolkit for each platform. That leads to non-native feeling applications. It also has the draw-back of starting from scratch and throwing the _years_ of development effort MS put into Win32, the years of development effort put into GTK, QT, etc.
It looks like it will be _many_ moons before a usuable DotGnu platform comes out. I think a better approach would be Mono using GTK# or QT#. Though that has drawbacks as well, like getting the hoard of MS-only programmers to program against GTK# or QT#.
They at least targeted the two most popular Server and Desktop OSes from the start. Why did MS leave Linux out of the loop? It is certainly one of the top server platforms and currently the fastest growing server platform. And today we have very good ports for Linux, Mac, Solaris and MS Windows. I use tons of Java GUI applications that work seemlessly on Linux, Solaris and Windows (I don't have access to a Mac). You can't say the same about.Net.
I am not bashing.Net. I like it and use it professionally daily along with Java. I have some GUI.Net apps I am working on and.Net web applications. The web apps run great under Linux/Apache or Windows/IIS thanks to Mono. However, the GUI apps don't work anywhere but MS, thanks to MS. I am sorry, I just don't agree that.Net is cross-platform util there is a full.Net stack with the all-imortant framework that can allow GUI applications to run on more then just MS.
Thanks for the Gimp history link. I use Gimp all the time on Linxu and MS Windows. I use it over photoshop on MS windows because it does everyting I need it to do and I only have one interface to learn.
I personally don't know why peopel complain about the Gimp UI. You can drag any tool window to the _main_ window and dock it in tabs. This give you just one nice main window with a buch of convienent tabs to get to your tools.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole "settlement" is a scam that is only going to HELP MS, it is not going to be a punishment. It will cost MS very little _real_ cash. They can duplicate their software for very little. I would be surprised if this 1.1 Billion costs them more then $10,000 when all is said and done. Also, what "money" isn't claimed goes to CA schools in the form of MS software. Again, this will not cost MS anything more then the chump-change for CD's and duplication. This settlement will actually probably make MS money from schools that get this MS software deal and then get locked into more MS software in a few years.
For those who didn't RTFA, to get this rebate will require work on the part of companies:
I think the reasons people are not doing this are simple. They don't know about it or don't feel they are getting any real VALUE from the rebate. Now, if MS was forced to send REAL money to people who filled in a claim, I bet we would have seen a huge percentage of claims. So MS gets away with a slap-on-the-wrist and instead of a any real punishments, the government has given MS a brand new jar of Vaseline.
The only current possiblities are paper, film or vinyl. Maybe everyone could pay some company to store the data and handle copying the data to new disks every so many years? I just don't see any data storage technology on the horizon that could handle a "life recorder".
Heck, you could offer your customers a "turn-key" solution. Put together a cheap server running Linux with Tomcat for J2EE or Apache/Mono for .Net. Sell that for a fair price. Your customers just have to plug it in and turn it on. Your customers will have no extra license fees from MS to worry about. If you have any half decent developers on your team, they could write _standards compliant_ HTML and then you don't need to worry if your clients are hitting your web app with IE, Firefox or Safari. If your customers have a net connection, you can plug it into this Linux server you sell them and charge a small annual maintenance fee for support. If there is a problem, just VNC or SSH in and fix it.
If you go with a fat GUI client, then I personally would do it in Java with SWT (the toolkit used by Eclipse) for the GUI. SWT is very fast and lightweight. You can even get good SWT GUI designers to make coding easy. By going with Java for the GUI, you don't have to worry about what OS your customers use.
If you go with .Net, then you should use Mono and GTK# or QT# for the GUI. That won't lock you into just MS Windows for your customers. You would be able to deploy to Mac, Linux and Windows. I know my doctor uses an iBook. She carries it into the exam room all the time and manages all her patient records from it. So if you went with an MS-only solution, you would lose customers like her.
If you are developing an internal only solution, then use what you want. However, if you want to sell software (especially as a small company), you really should give your customers the most choice. If you went with a fat GUI client, you could sell a turn-key solution that ran Linux with Mono. Again, your customers will have no license fees to worry about, just your bill : )
I work as a senior programmer for a fortune 500. A few months back we went through a similar situation. However, we don't sell software, so everything we develop is for corporate use only. We had two camps. The J2EE camp and the .Net camp. We even hired three outside consulting companies to help make the choice. All three companies said that our web apps should be done in J2EE. However, politics won out and now we have different groups doing different things. Some are doing J2EE and some are doing ASP.Net C# and I get to be involved with both.
IMO, your senior manager should have no say in the technology used, just the features. The technology choice should be done by those who are going to _implement_ the technology.
That sounds like he has already be "won over" by some MS sales guy. .Net development is not going to be any faster then J2EE. .Net might even be a little slower at the start because you have
Maybe all that doom training will be worth something!
This is exactly the purpose. Most GPL projects don't want money, they want time. To a PHB, time is money, so by that definition, a GPL product will cost money.
The time of a developer for a community is _FAR_ more important then an hourly wage. If you add up the average USA salary for a programmer and applied it to every OSS project, there is not one company in the world that could afford to pay the salary of every OSS project available. Heck, there is not one company in the world that could pay the salaries of just the _major_ OSS projects like the Linux Kernel, Apache, Samba, etc. Not MS, not Oracle, not even Walmart could afford this staff! ; P
And what modern, general purpose OS does not have a dynamic library mechanism? Maybe for embedded OSes it may not be the best license. However for any modern OS developed by a commnunity, it is very good. Can you list one _modern_ OS that does _not_ have a dynamic library mechanism? If you can, it wouldn't be a very useful OS IMO.
Do you think the morjority of the USA wanted the DMCA? Do you think the majority wanted the extreme length of copyright? The majority picked picked Gore for the 2000 Presidential election, but I hope I don't have to tell you who became president. If anything, I would say we are becoming a Corporatism
I agree with the GP. I don't see any point in making a _hobby_ OS closed source. Maybe an embedded OS, but not a general purpose OS. IMO, it is a shame the developers of SkyOS do not use their abilities for an open source OS or even send a job application to MS or Apple.
I don't want to sound like I am dissing the entrepreneurial spirit, that is what drives our nation. But I am sure if I were developing a closed/proprietary Widget that there would never be a need for, I would have a fair amount of vocal feedback about using my talents where it may be more productive/profitable.
It would be nice to see one of these sites get the EFF on their side to fight this out. I am not sure how a judge would rule. For example, is it illegal for someone to tell another person where to go and get illegal drugs or where to go to get stolen goods? I don't know since IANAL.
One other thing I think some of these sites that have closed shop should do is stay open and just allow legit .torrents. For example, .torrents of tons of OSS software. Obviously this wouldn't attract all the warez kiddies but would give strong proof of the benefits of P2P.
If any lawyer reads this, I have a Q? Is it legal to share a TV show that you recorded on P2P? I can record my favorite show and give it my friends to watch, so how would doing the same thing electronically be illegal?
Red Hat provides far more then just "packaging it up nicely". Can you get a certification in "White Box Linux"? That might not matter to geeks, but to PHB's it does. Oracle and our other enterprise apps we run on Red Hat are not certified and not supported on "White Box Linux". That means the 10's of thousands we pay every year for 24x7 support goes out the window. Does "White Box Linux" have partnerships with all these big enterprise software providers? Nope. Again, that might not mean much to a geek, but it makes all the difference in the world to the PHB's who approve the software.
You believe that one license is better then another for one purpose or another. That is your belief/opinion. Is there really a big difference between saying "I believe the LGPL is better then the BSD for XYZ" vs. "It is my opinion that the LGPL is better then the BSD for XYZ"? To you there may be a bid difference, to me both sentences say the same thing.
I agree that the GPL is not right for libraries, small utility snippets, etc. That is exactly what the LGPL was made for.
Oh, one other thing that would need to be changed is that the code uses the win registry to store the last save path selected, username and encrypted password.
Hmm, looking at the Portable.NET Namespaces, it seems to be missing a lot of namespaces I use (2,094 methods to according to them). System.Collections, System.Threading, System.Net.HttpWebRequest (this is the main part of the app to download MP3's), according to the Portable.NET Namespaces, System.Net.HttpWebRequest is MISSING. The program also needs System.Net.HttpWebResponse to download the MP3 and according to DotGnu's site, System.Net.HttpWebResponse is MISSING. I don't even see System.IO.Stream which I use to download the stream from the System.Net.HttpWebResponse. I use System.Security.Cryptography to securly store the users password and this namespace is totally missing from the Portable.NET Namespaces.
Even if I switched to GTK# or QT#, this little app would need to be totally rewritten to work with DotGnu. I have a lot of hope for Mono and DotGnu, but as it is now, DotGnu doesn't cut it for production deployment. Mono is great on the web app side, but is missing the GUI side unless you use something like GTK#, wx.Net or QT#.
Some developers don't want their code taken and "locked" away in some proprietary app, while others don't care. I happen to go along with the GPL camp for the most part. If I give my time and effort to a community project, I don't want someone to be able to take that effort away and not have to give back to that community. Note that the GPL and people who believe in the GPL don't care about profits. If you can take a GPL app (like MySQL) and make money, so be it. Just don't try to take the code away.
The GPL is all about the code and the end-user rights to the code. Other licensees like the MPL, BSD, etc are not about the code or the rights of others with the code. The MPL and BSD allow you to take the code and derive from it and keep that derived code locked away. Again, some people feel that is OK and others don't. It all comes down to where you stand on that issue. I personally think both sides have good points, I just favor the GPL/LGPL for a stronger community. IMO, the GPL/LGPL foster sharing of knowledge better then the other OSS licenses. And to me, sharing of knowledge is the most important thing.
Hey, why did you have to point that out? : ) Aren't we all allowed to make mistakes? I just finished my crak-pipe right before that post!
I'll take a bet you get bit by a shark over being sued by the **AA any day. : P
Is .be Belgium? Those laws sound pretty fair on _both_ sides. I agree that someone should not be allowed to SELL copyrighted material. However, backing up for personal use should be allowed. To bad that is not the situation here in the USA.
I just finished a small C# GUI application that connects into Coast to Coast AM with a StreamLink userName and Password and downloads the daily MP3's of the most recent show (or any date you pick). I would be interested to see if it can run in DotGnu on MS Windows and Linux.
It looks like it will be _many_ moons before a usuable DotGnu platform comes out. I think a better approach would be Mono using GTK# or QT#. Though that has drawbacks as well, like getting the hoard of MS-only programmers to program against GTK# or QT#.
I am not bashing .Net. I like it and use it professionally daily along with Java. I have some GUI .Net apps I am working on and .Net web applications. The web apps run great under Linux/Apache or Windows/IIS thanks to Mono. However, the GUI apps don't work anywhere but MS, thanks to MS. I am sorry, I just don't agree that .Net is cross-platform util there is a full .Net stack with the all-imortant framework that can allow GUI applications to run on more then just MS.
I personally don't know why peopel complain about the Gimp UI. You can drag any tool window to the _main_ window and dock it in tabs. This give you just one nice main window with a buch of convienent tabs to get to your tools.