I agree with the sentiment of your post. However, your [implied] argument in favor of a bona fide free market for this drug, unhindered by government intervention such as patents, is unwise.
I should have made myself clearer perhaps. I'm not for free market distribution - I don't know what the answer is (yet). Clearly, patents were hacked onto capitalism for a reason, we can't simply scrap them without altering some of the underlying assumptions first.
The reason we have this resistant-bacteria problem in the first place is because of unrestricted "free market" distribution of antibiotics. We need smart scientific controls on how such drugs are administered, not free market madness.
The free market has little to do with it - people being prescribed antibiotics (or buying them themselves) when in reality they didn't need them is primarily what's caused this problem plus of course the very nature of antibiotics themselves.
Patents aren't the right way to carefully control anti-biotics, proper education and smart doctors are the best way to control that. What if they had discovered a bacteriophage instead? Patents could well still be applied, but because phage evolve, there wouldn't be the same need to restrict them (presumably, bear with me, IANAB)
Why would anyone expect that a company would spend all the time and resources to discover a new cure, only to release it to the public? If they weren't going to try and make money from the effort, they would probably never have attempted it in the first place.
That's not an argument for being able to artificially restrict supply of a potentially life saving drug, that's an argument for rethinking how R&D is performed in our economy.
Realistically, if people are dying because our brand of capitalism requires artificial scarcity in order to get research done, then we need to change our economic system sharpish, not just write it off as "oh well, life isn't fair".
Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.
But very often, no 3D support.
And no sound support.
And no ability to burn a CDs or DVDs.
And it's impossible to edit movies.
Real life isn't an Apple advert - remind me again why anybody would be editing movies or burning DVDs with any regularity at work?
And you can't install your own quirky software, without going through 6 months to get approval from the University (like your favorite email program, or word processor, or text editor, or compiler, or database, or whatever else it is you use to get your job done).
Well that's not a flaw of the terminal services approach per se, it's more an issue with the fact that Windows apps often require admin access to install. I've been bitten by this one on our Win2K/TS box at work more than once, often the installers don't even tell you they need admin access, they just die. Rather lame, to say the least.
If you have Nazi admins who make it hard to install software then yes, terminal services are nasty, but I know when I've wanted something put on our server I just walk across the corridor and ask the IT dept to do it for me. They're normally happy to do so.
Actually if I had to use Windows, a terminal services setup is probably what I'd want. Having used it at work (via rdesktop on linux) I'm pretty impressed with it. The fact that it's an SMP box with a gig of ram helps obviously, but Windows feels way more responsive on that box than on the literal zoo of different configurations we have lying around the department. That might simply be because not many people use it, maybe if everyone used that box it would die horribly, but somehow I doubt it.
In particular because all the sucky animations are switched off, it feels very fast - starting and minimizing explorer feels basically instant for example.
My company is a Windows shop. We have so much proprietary software that a switch to linux corporate wide would be far more costly than getting raped by M$. In our case, Windows is cheaper.
Well, other than that "the right tool for the job" is not by definition "the tool with path of least resistance", have you considered using WineLib?
Ok, maybe you're not sure what that entails. I'm assuming these proprietary programs are fairly run of the mill business type apps. Porting them to WineLib is pretty easy (simply altering the build system). Once they are running via WineLib, they have been made independant of Microsoft, and you are free to run them on Linux.
Now, WineLib isn't perfect. It's possible that along the way, you may need to improve it. That should be factored into the costs. However, I think you'd find the sums favorable.
There are a few things Wine can't do. Apps based on ActiveX/Internet Explorer combos for one. There isn't a full replacement for IE. Luckily, you don't need one, IE itself can be run under Wine.
No, sorry, Microsoft doesn't collect lists of softare, not even the article says that. What it does say is that if they wanted to, they could locate what software you have by looking for registry keys or files specific to that app.
In fact the article says the biggest privacy concern is the hardware list, which doesn't seem that big a deal to me.
On the other hand, I believe strongly in ethical use of language (as my/. sig implies), and I do think that the FSF is being less than honest with their constant appeals to "free as in freedom".
Yeah, that makes many (including me) a bit uncomfortable. A poor choice of words indeed. But what else would it be called? "Shared software" would have been a better choice I think, but now that's associated with MS-style "look but don't touch", and anyway it has far too much inertia to change today.
Just be glad you haven't seen Stallman sing the Free Software Song;)
GPL is but a fringe of the entire "open source" ecosystem, so it is rather sad that one cannot voice disagreement with GPL without being vociferously branded "anti open source".
Well the GPL is hardly a "fringe", in fact most of the software I use on my desktop every day is under either the LGPL or GPL. Very little is BSD licensed, except I think OpenSSH and XFree. A few others like Moz are under multiple licenses.
Voicing a dislike of the GPL is fine, plenty of people do that on slashdot all the time, unfortunately some of the execs at Microsoft decided to extend it to more general FUD like "the GPL will eat your intellectual property" which is a highly distorted view of things. Nobody is under any obligation to link with GPLd code, not even if you develop for Linux. If you do, then you must license your code under the GPL - for many that seems to be a fair deal.
I object to the way that the FSF so jealously attempts to control use of the word "free" (as in freedom) and associates freedom with GPL -- this is something I have discussed with Stallman; and I think it just comes down to a basic political difference.
Well possibly, but as I said Stallman considers other licenses (such as the BSD license) to be "free", I don't think he's ever claimed the GPL was more pure. He encourages people to use it, because it's a good way to ensure contributions are returned to the community. However when he went around talking to people who used BSDv1, he didn't try and persuade them to use the GPL, he just wanted them to move to BSDv2 (or the X11 license effectively) which removed the advertising clause.
However, I don't believe in systems which attempt to enforce, or which depend on, human altruism -- not even in software.
That's certainly your right, but so far some of the projects that I've seen which used the BSD license basically had their code used in ways they didn't intend. Wine would be one obvious example, after the DirectX fiasco, it was relicensed under the LGPL. That wasn't because of any radical ideology - it was simply what made sense, to ensure that companies couldn't do what TransGaming did and produce a proprietary fork of the project. So, the system works, regardless of whether it's believed in or not. With the BSD license, people might or might not contribute back their changes, but the ones who don't unfortunately have an advantage in the current economic system. The (L)GPL puts people on a level playing field.
it has a very serious political component which cannot be denied or dismissed, especially when its advocates also insist that it represents the purest form of the word "freedom".
Well, I don't really see what this component is. The GPL is simply a boilerplate set of conditions people can choose to impose upon their work, so autopackage is under the LGPL because I want contributions to be returned, but I don't really care about people needing to open source their package specs - what's the point?
The fact that the person who created these rather handy legally "well formed" licenses that meet my goals also happens to be walking the line between advocate and nut job is of little concern to me really.
I don't think that MSFT has ever been "anti-open-source"...... Some within the company have made negative comments about GPL specifically, but I don't think the facts in general bear out an "anti-open-source" mentality.
Well, when the people who make extremely negative comments about copyleft licenses are actually the people who run the company (a cancer? pacman-like?) then I think it's fair to say that Microsoft as corporate entity follows those views. They are in charge, after all. Clearly not all the employees will agree, but they aren't the boss. Ballmer and Gates are (amongst others).
I never claimed that the agenda is particularly hidden. FSF "agenda" is about abolishing intellectual property and, to a large extent, collectivism. Maybe you disagree, but that's how I see it.
Well this is kind of an arguable point. For starters the definition of "intellectual property" is extremely vague, and tends to confuse patents and copyrights (which are very different). I don't know what you're using it to mean here.
The FSF agenda, as I see it, is to promote free software (as the name implies). Free software, note, doesn't have to be copyleft, the BSD license is also classed as "free" software. Perhaps a poor choice of naming, it could be called Pineapple software for all I care, the tag of "free" is simply a set of principles that govern it.
Now, what Stallman (and by extension the FSF) wants to see is a world where all software is free. What that vision implies is that we make our money by some other means that controlling the distribution of the software we create - by selling services for instance.
Now, I believe that the end goal, which is to encourage a culture of sharing and co-operation in software, is a good one. The way we get there is still unclear (although it's becoming clearer). That doesn't make the end goal any less worthy. It simply means we have to think up new ways of being paid to write code. Red Hat managed it, now the challenge is to scale this down to the individual level.
You may not believe in such an end goal. In particular the comparison between the FSF and East Germany seems to indicate that. I believe the top level execs at Redmond were saying similar things about a year ago. Of course in reality that comparison doesn't seem to hold up - the type of economics practiced in communism was that of a state owned monopoly in every industry, and the oppression of deviant thought.
I don't see that happening in the free software movement, not to any meaningful extent. If anything, the monopoly of Microsoft seems to be more similar to communism, as opposed to the free market of code that Linux enjoys (and of course it causes problems as well, esp in relation to packaging *grin*). The market controls put in place through OEM agreements and so on seem to come close to oppression of deviant thinking, but it's not us doing that.
Now, was trying to stop your company talking a communist-style oppression of free speech? Again, arguable. You've got to draw the line somewhere, does Bush invite bin Laden to come and explain his views to the American people (nb, i'm european). No, of course not. If given a chance to talk to the nation, he would simply cause trouble, and what he stands for is repulsive to our society.
I'm not claiming Microsoft is like bin Laden, but I am pointing out that given the past rhetoric that has issued forth from MS PR, you can probably see why allowing them to talk about shared source could be less than constructive, in much the same way that I'm sure if the local LUG had gate-crashed the meeting of "Most Valued Professionals" they would have been quickly escorted off the premesis.
Most people in the industry are driven by practical concerns and tailor their decisions to the situation rather than pattern their lives based on absolutist ideaologies. (Of course, I am more biased than most, but you already guessed that).
Well, I see the ideology of free software as essentially addressing a practical concern of mine, which is a) how to restore the benefits of competition to the OS marketplace and b) how to encourage a society based on sharing. Long term practical concerns they may be, and on the face of it they might appear to be mutually exclusive, but I don't think they actually are.
Windows, go to add/remove software, add IIS. Run the microsoft management console, and tweak it to your delight, if you get stuck the help file is right there, or burn a call on the credit card to MS support.
Well, I dunno what you were using but on Red Hat you just go to System Settings|Packages, check the "apache" box, check any extra modules you want and hit Go. Then you use the Server Settings|HTTP Server config applet to set it up, and that's all there is to it. Oh, remember to run up2date every so often.
If you get stuck, you can use the net or IRC for free, or pay Red Hat and they'll help you.
Anyone who uses sign language will understand anyone else who uses sign language.
Eh? Yes yes, I'm a picky git, but actually sign language is tremendously fractured with many different "dialects" that can render it nearly unintelligable to people who only know one form.
Not that hard. I'm not sure Perl could be used for all of it, in particular you might need to use parts of Wine to interrogate the Win32 registry.
As for other operating systems, what exactly would they be? MacOS is tied to other forms of hardware, and the effort involved in shipping across the various files on cd or floppy simply wouldn't be worth it. I'd go for Win32->Linux first.
I've done a bit of Wine hacking, so can help you with that angle, feel free to contact me if you want to go for it.
For example, all the network settings, Outlook Express mail settings, time zones, IE favorites and cookies for major sites (e.g. Nytimes &/.), software packages installed, and hardware (for driver needs) could all be easily extracted from the Registry and other places.
I believe Lindows does this to a limited extent, but yes, a free one would be nice. So, are you up for it?
Linux needs a MUCH better graphical interface (anti-aliased fonts, copy-cut-paste between applications)
Well yes, AA and the clipboard are 95% of the way there now. Unfortunately most apps that use the new system are currently in their "unstable" phase, I tend to forget that my mostly GTK2 desktop is highly unusual and I'm running a lot of CVS software to get it.... oh, and clipboard is basically fixed except that we need a proper cache daemon (async clipboards are just stupid) and the few remaining broken apps (coughmozilla) need to be fixed.
a decent program manager (Pray for Autopackage [autopackage.org])
Well thanks:) Prayers are nice, but what we really need at the moment is somebody who knows C well and has the next few months free, so they can hack on adding group fixup semantics to the glibc runtime linker. It's a big project but very important if we're to sort out this whole mess.
I'm going to be plugging this job quite a bit, we can't start making portable packages (which is key to the rest of it) with any degree of reliability until we have this feature, and this feature is a big and complex project, which will need to be reviewed by everyone who knows the dynamic linker well. So, finding somebody to do this is pretty critical. Any takers?
Losing all the annoying bells and whistles (ala, the default installation of XP) would be a plus.
Heh, a default install of XP is much lighter than Win2K was:)
The real question is, which one will happen first.
Well, they'll both happen at once. The real question is really, who will go faster?
It always makes me giggle when I think of all these prim middle aged ladies sitting on the interweb to look for the latest vintage, only to come across "A free implementation of Windows on UNIX". I can see the "WTF?" thought bubbles appearing now;)
Apparently, Microsoft isn't anti-open-source now, and the FSF has a nefarious hidden agenda that somehow in over a decade and a half of consistantly sticking to its principles has yet to be revealed.
Of course, the author fails to enlighten us as to what this "agenda" might be.
Obviously you can't simply airbrush all MS employees together. Some of them are really into Linux. Many simply don't care, or don't see how it's relevant. A few are just curious (MS veep to me, "so, what apps do you guys use then?").
Then a few (probably the ones with heavy investments in MS stock) flip out over it. I think Bill Gates falls into the middle category - he simply doesn't care.
I mean does anybody else get the impression that Bill is pretty well insulated from what's going on in the company? I've read something like 3 interviews with him in the last few weeks, and none of them talk about anything other than his latest cool toys. He's practically never questioned hard about Linux for instance (although sometimes ballmer gets it), he just talks about how great the Tablet PC is, or how fab enormous computerised watches are.
I can't say I blame him. After all he's been through, with a passion for technology and practically unlimited funding I'd be very tempted to draw away from the business and simply focus on playing with cool stuff. But he's basically a figurehead these days, nothing more. An icon of what Microsoft once was.
I'm pretty sure that in the far future, a few people will look back and say "Well, it's a crying shame that Linux won, really MacOS was much better" in much the same way that people think of the video system wars of a decade or so ago.
In reality of course, they'll be wrong. In much the same way that when people remember VHS vs Betamax all they tend to think of was that Betamax tapes had higher quality pictures, but forget the smaller capacity/higher prices/sony control.
And so really, although I'm sure there are people out there who kind of regret the dominance of VHS, when you get down and argue the points through you tend to realise that a lot of what people remember about Betamax is rose-tinted. They think of only the good points, and forget why it really died.
I mean, when I read the points you make above, it's just like reading a VHS vs Betamax argument. There's the whole will-the-free-market-work thing going, there's the whole its-backed-by-a-megacorp thing and then there's a baseless assertion about the relative "goodness" of the kernels. I mean, maybe FreeBSD has a better VM system or something, I don't really know, and I don't care either. It's like video quality - 99.9% of people can't tell, don't know and wouldn't care even if they did.
Finally I'd point out that "less proprietary" isn't good enough: it's still proprietary, and that's a bad thing. It also condemns them to a minority marketshare for ever, something I'm sure they are aware of, but they're doing OK selling to a niche so that doesn't really matter.
Probably something along the lines of "I wish FireWire and USB2 were actually widespread, oh well, too bad, we'll use USB1.1 because that way all our customers can use it without buying an expansion card".
And how often do you ship 20gig of music around anyway?
Well, it looks just like a native app, so the fact that it uses IE to render its GUI is a tad unusual. OK, so "wierd" was the wrong word, perhaps "complex".
As an aside, IE is the king of undocumented usages of the API, so it kind of filters through.
Visual C++ doesn't do anything weird regarding Windows API.
I'm afraid a lot of programs, even seemingly trivial shareware apps, do wierd things regarding the Win32 API. It's not uncommon to find apps passing corrupted or bad data into the APIs, missing out vital calls, abusing COM/ActiveX etc.
For instance, look at RhymBox, a simple free chat app for Windows. Looks fairly innocent doesn't it? But this program is an IE DHTML application embedded using the WebBrowser control into an ATL C++ container. Hmmm.
In particular Microsoft apps have a greater tendancy than most to take shortcuts, or use badly defined behaviours of the API. Just because it looks simple, doesn't mean it actually is. When you've done some Wine debugging, maybe you'll rethink those assertions.
I'm curious, what exactly will the "milestone" of version 1.0 of Wine actually mean ?
It's mostly purely technical targets, for instance the wineserver protocol will be frozen, which means that (I think) you can build WineLib apps and upgrade Wine and they won't break. There are a few other targets, mostly esotoric.
Wine 0.9 is far more interesting, and will hopefully come out in the last part of 2003. It's focussed on being easy to use and setup.
A lot of problems people have with Wine are usually related to it being badly setup. Partly that's our fault, Wine isn't especially easy to setup right, and because it releases every month, distro packages are often out of date (and now redhat doesn't even ship it anymore). After being increasingly frustrated with Wine, I tried CrossOver (a slightly hacked up version of wine designed to be easy to use), and it worked so well I was blown away. Installing IE6 in Wine is a distinctly wierd experience:)
Anyway, I've been using WineHQ wine for quite some time now, but hopefully along with proper setups (DON'T use your pre-existing windows installation etc) Wine will get a much better reputation.
Of course the interesting thing about burning wood is that it doesn't contribute to CO2 buildup, because when the tree grew it took the same volume of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Problem is that although wood burning is a clean, renewable source of energy, it takes too much space, especially for the UK. I think offshore power is what is basically being focussed on at the moment, Blair is annoyed because Holland got ahead of us and now owns the wind farm industry basically.
ActiveX/ActiveScript - forget it, COM stuff on the Mac is not going to happen. Nor is it really a major feature of WinIE. Both have LiveObject support which is all you need to script embedded objects.
For sure it is a major feature. I've not heard of LiveObject, sure you don't mean LiveConnect? Unfortunately custom web apps with funky activex controls are waaay too common. Oh, and the NS plugin apis are too limited for some things, the Adobe SVG viewer doesn't work in Mozilla properly for that very reason.
DHTML applications - don't know what you're referring too here. You should be more specific.
Files that end in.hta (hypertext applications) use IE as the runtime host.
Don't know what DirectShow is, so can't comment.
Media pipelining, see below.
You also cite "various proprietary DOM/CSS extensions" and list no examples
document.all, dom.xml, things like that. Maybe Mac IE has them too, I dunno.
To turn the tables somewhat WinIE6 is missing one major thing that MacIE5 does support. Full support for PNG images.
IE can in fact do this, but you need to add some voodoo CSS to the website, to make it use the aforementioned DirectShow filters. Google for it, I've used the technique before and other than being a stupid hack it works great, and is pretty easy to use.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform. I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.
You're living on the moon.
Sorry, but Java is dead for desktop apps, Mozilla and OpenOffice were primarily designed to work well on Windows and have to be gutted through and through to make them even look like they're using native widgets, and Mono will only be capable of running either GTK2 (via X11) apps, or maybe Windows.NET apps if somebody ports Wine to MacOS (huge amount of effort). Regardless they will look and feel like piss poor windows ports.
The rest of your post is a rambling, frothing rant with little coherant argument.
There is NO major feature that I am aware of that is present in the current version of Windows IE that is missing from the Mac version of IE. If I'm mistaken about this, please point me in the direction of something that references such a feature.
Uhhhh, you haven't seen many IE web apps have you? A few features off the top of my head:
There are loads of IE only features, some of which are basically forgotten about today. I've only listed the ones that I know for a fact don't exist in Mac IE, there may well be others (like contentEditable) which don't exist.
And there most certainly IS a Mac version of OpenOffice [openoffice.org].
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. When a program doesn't actually use the native graphics layer of an OS, is it actually a "Mac version" or is it simply a half-finished port?
Slashdot Mirror
I should have made myself clearer perhaps. I'm not for free market distribution - I don't know what the answer is (yet). Clearly, patents were hacked onto capitalism for a reason, we can't simply scrap them without altering some of the underlying assumptions first.
The reason we have this resistant-bacteria problem in the first place is because of unrestricted "free market" distribution of antibiotics. We need smart scientific controls on how such drugs are administered, not free market madness.
The free market has little to do with it - people being prescribed antibiotics (or buying them themselves) when in reality they didn't need them is primarily what's caused this problem plus of course the very nature of antibiotics themselves.
Patents aren't the right way to carefully control anti-biotics, proper education and smart doctors are the best way to control that. What if they had discovered a bacteriophage instead? Patents could well still be applied, but because phage evolve, there wouldn't be the same need to restrict them (presumably, bear with me, IANAB)
That's not an argument for being able to artificially restrict supply of a potentially life saving drug, that's an argument for rethinking how R&D is performed in our economy.
Realistically, if people are dying because our brand of capitalism requires artificial scarcity in order to get research done, then we need to change our economic system sharpish, not just write it off as "oh well, life isn't fair".
this
or this
and of course my own desktop
There are a load more here.
Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.
Real life isn't an Apple advert - remind me again why anybody would be editing movies or burning DVDs with any regularity at work?
And you can't install your own quirky software, without going through 6 months to get approval from the University (like your favorite email program, or word processor, or text editor, or compiler, or database, or whatever else it is you use to get your job done).
Well that's not a flaw of the terminal services approach per se, it's more an issue with the fact that Windows apps often require admin access to install. I've been bitten by this one on our Win2K/TS box at work more than once, often the installers don't even tell you they need admin access, they just die. Rather lame, to say the least.
If you have Nazi admins who make it hard to install software then yes, terminal services are nasty, but I know when I've wanted something put on our server I just walk across the corridor and ask the IT dept to do it for me. They're normally happy to do so.
Actually if I had to use Windows, a terminal services setup is probably what I'd want. Having used it at work (via rdesktop on linux) I'm pretty impressed with it. The fact that it's an SMP box with a gig of ram helps obviously, but Windows feels way more responsive on that box than on the literal zoo of different configurations we have lying around the department. That might simply be because not many people use it, maybe if everyone used that box it would die horribly, but somehow I doubt it.
In particular because all the sucky animations are switched off, it feels very fast - starting and minimizing explorer feels basically instant for example.
Well, other than that "the right tool for the job" is not by definition "the tool with path of least resistance", have you considered using WineLib?
Ok, maybe you're not sure what that entails. I'm assuming these proprietary programs are fairly run of the mill business type apps. Porting them to WineLib is pretty easy (simply altering the build system). Once they are running via WineLib, they have been made independant of Microsoft, and you are free to run them on Linux.
Now, WineLib isn't perfect. It's possible that along the way, you may need to improve it. That should be factored into the costs. However, I think you'd find the sums favorable.
There are a few things Wine can't do. Apps based on ActiveX/Internet Explorer combos for one. There isn't a full replacement for IE. Luckily, you don't need one, IE itself can be run under Wine.
In fact the article says the biggest privacy concern is the hardware list, which doesn't seem that big a deal to me.
Yeah, that makes many (including me) a bit uncomfortable. A poor choice of words indeed. But what else would it be called? "Shared software" would have been a better choice I think, but now that's associated with MS-style "look but don't touch", and anyway it has far too much inertia to change today.
Just be glad you haven't seen Stallman sing the Free Software Song ;)
Well the GPL is hardly a "fringe", in fact most of the software I use on my desktop every day is under either the LGPL or GPL. Very little is BSD licensed, except I think OpenSSH and XFree. A few others like Moz are under multiple licenses.
Voicing a dislike of the GPL is fine, plenty of people do that on slashdot all the time, unfortunately some of the execs at Microsoft decided to extend it to more general FUD like "the GPL will eat your intellectual property" which is a highly distorted view of things. Nobody is under any obligation to link with GPLd code, not even if you develop for Linux. If you do, then you must license your code under the GPL - for many that seems to be a fair deal.
I object to the way that the FSF so jealously attempts to control use of the word "free" (as in freedom) and associates freedom with GPL -- this is something I have discussed with Stallman; and I think it just comes down to a basic political difference.
Well possibly, but as I said Stallman considers other licenses (such as the BSD license) to be "free", I don't think he's ever claimed the GPL was more pure. He encourages people to use it, because it's a good way to ensure contributions are returned to the community. However when he went around talking to people who used BSDv1, he didn't try and persuade them to use the GPL, he just wanted them to move to BSDv2 (or the X11 license effectively) which removed the advertising clause.
However, I don't believe in systems which attempt to enforce, or which depend on, human altruism -- not even in software.
That's certainly your right, but so far some of the projects that I've seen which used the BSD license basically had their code used in ways they didn't intend. Wine would be one obvious example, after the DirectX fiasco, it was relicensed under the LGPL. That wasn't because of any radical ideology - it was simply what made sense, to ensure that companies couldn't do what TransGaming did and produce a proprietary fork of the project. So, the system works, regardless of whether it's believed in or not. With the BSD license, people might or might not contribute back their changes, but the ones who don't unfortunately have an advantage in the current economic system. The (L)GPL puts people on a level playing field.
it has a very serious political component which cannot be denied or dismissed, especially when its advocates also insist that it represents the purest form of the word "freedom".
Well, I don't really see what this component is. The GPL is simply a boilerplate set of conditions people can choose to impose upon their work, so autopackage is under the LGPL because I want contributions to be returned, but I don't really care about people needing to open source their package specs - what's the point?
The fact that the person who created these rather handy legally "well formed" licenses that meet my goals also happens to be walking the line between advocate and nut job is of little concern to me really.
Well, when the people who make extremely negative comments about copyleft licenses are actually the people who run the company (a cancer? pacman-like?) then I think it's fair to say that Microsoft as corporate entity follows those views. They are in charge, after all. Clearly not all the employees will agree, but they aren't the boss. Ballmer and Gates are (amongst others).
I never claimed that the agenda is particularly hidden. FSF "agenda" is about abolishing intellectual property and, to a large extent, collectivism. Maybe you disagree, but that's how I see it.
Well this is kind of an arguable point. For starters the definition of "intellectual property" is extremely vague, and tends to confuse patents and copyrights (which are very different). I don't know what you're using it to mean here.
The FSF agenda, as I see it, is to promote free software (as the name implies). Free software, note, doesn't have to be copyleft, the BSD license is also classed as "free" software. Perhaps a poor choice of naming, it could be called Pineapple software for all I care, the tag of "free" is simply a set of principles that govern it.
Now, what Stallman (and by extension the FSF) wants to see is a world where all software is free. What that vision implies is that we make our money by some other means that controlling the distribution of the software we create - by selling services for instance.
Now, I believe that the end goal, which is to encourage a culture of sharing and co-operation in software, is a good one. The way we get there is still unclear (although it's becoming clearer). That doesn't make the end goal any less worthy. It simply means we have to think up new ways of being paid to write code. Red Hat managed it, now the challenge is to scale this down to the individual level.
You may not believe in such an end goal. In particular the comparison between the FSF and East Germany seems to indicate that. I believe the top level execs at Redmond were saying similar things about a year ago. Of course in reality that comparison doesn't seem to hold up - the type of economics practiced in communism was that of a state owned monopoly in every industry, and the oppression of deviant thought.
I don't see that happening in the free software movement, not to any meaningful extent. If anything, the monopoly of Microsoft seems to be more similar to communism, as opposed to the free market of code that Linux enjoys (and of course it causes problems as well, esp in relation to packaging *grin*). The market controls put in place through OEM agreements and so on seem to come close to oppression of deviant thinking, but it's not us doing that.
Now, was trying to stop your company talking a communist-style oppression of free speech? Again, arguable. You've got to draw the line somewhere, does Bush invite bin Laden to come and explain his views to the American people (nb, i'm european). No, of course not. If given a chance to talk to the nation, he would simply cause trouble, and what he stands for is repulsive to our society.
I'm not claiming Microsoft is like bin Laden, but I am pointing out that given the past rhetoric that has issued forth from MS PR, you can probably see why allowing them to talk about shared source could be less than constructive, in much the same way that I'm sure if the local LUG had gate-crashed the meeting of "Most Valued Professionals" they would have been quickly escorted off the premesis.
Most people in the industry are driven by practical concerns and tailor their decisions to the situation rather than pattern their lives based on absolutist ideaologies. (Of course, I am more biased than most, but you already guessed that).
Well, I see the ideology of free software as essentially addressing a practical concern of mine, which is a) how to restore the benefits of competition to the OS marketplace and b) how to encourage a society based on sharing. Long term practical concerns they may be, and on the face of it they might appear to be mutually exclusive, but I don't think they actually are.
Well, I dunno what you were using but on Red Hat you just go to System Settings|Packages, check the "apache" box, check any extra modules you want and hit Go. Then you use the Server Settings|HTTP Server config applet to set it up, and that's all there is to it. Oh, remember to run up2date every so often.
If you get stuck, you can use the net or IRC for free, or pay Red Hat and they'll help you.
Eh? Yes yes, I'm a picky git, but actually sign language is tremendously fractured with many different "dialects" that can render it nearly unintelligable to people who only know one form.
As for other operating systems, what exactly would they be? MacOS is tied to other forms of hardware, and the effort involved in shipping across the various files on cd or floppy simply wouldn't be worth it. I'd go for Win32->Linux first.
I've done a bit of Wine hacking, so can help you with that angle, feel free to contact me if you want to go for it.
I believe Lindows does this to a limited extent, but yes, a free one would be nice. So, are you up for it?
Well yes, AA and the clipboard are 95% of the way there now. Unfortunately most apps that use the new system are currently in their "unstable" phase, I tend to forget that my mostly GTK2 desktop is highly unusual and I'm running a lot of CVS software to get it.... oh, and clipboard is basically fixed except that we need a proper cache daemon (async clipboards are just stupid) and the few remaining broken apps (coughmozilla) need to be fixed.
a decent program manager (Pray for Autopackage [autopackage.org])
Well thanks :) Prayers are nice, but what we really need at the moment is somebody who knows C well and has the next few months free, so they can hack on adding group fixup semantics to the glibc runtime linker. It's a big project but very important if we're to sort out this whole mess.
I'm going to be plugging this job quite a bit, we can't start making portable packages (which is key to the rest of it) with any degree of reliability until we have this feature, and this feature is a big and complex project, which will need to be reviewed by everyone who knows the dynamic linker well. So, finding somebody to do this is pretty critical. Any takers?
Losing all the annoying bells and whistles (ala, the default installation of XP) would be a plus.
Heh, a default install of XP is much lighter than Win2K was :)
The real question is, which one will happen first.
Well, they'll both happen at once. The real question is really, who will go faster?
Try googling for Wine.
It always makes me giggle when I think of all these prim middle aged ladies sitting on the interweb to look for the latest vintage, only to come across "A free implementation of Windows on UNIX". I can see the "WTF?" thought bubbles appearing now ;)
Oh, absolutely agreed. Check this blog entry out from a Microsoft employee.
Apparently, Microsoft isn't anti-open-source now, and the FSF has a nefarious hidden agenda that somehow in over a decade and a half of consistantly sticking to its principles has yet to be revealed.
Of course, the author fails to enlighten us as to what this "agenda" might be.
Obviously you can't simply airbrush all MS employees together. Some of them are really into Linux. Many simply don't care, or don't see how it's relevant. A few are just curious (MS veep to me, "so, what apps do you guys use then?").
Then a few (probably the ones with heavy investments in MS stock) flip out over it. I think Bill Gates falls into the middle category - he simply doesn't care.
I mean does anybody else get the impression that Bill is pretty well insulated from what's going on in the company? I've read something like 3 interviews with him in the last few weeks, and none of them talk about anything other than his latest cool toys. He's practically never questioned hard about Linux for instance (although sometimes ballmer gets it), he just talks about how great the Tablet PC is, or how fab enormous computerised watches are.
I can't say I blame him. After all he's been through, with a passion for technology and practically unlimited funding I'd be very tempted to draw away from the business and simply focus on playing with cool stuff. But he's basically a figurehead these days, nothing more. An icon of what Microsoft once was.
I'm pretty sure that in the far future, a few people will look back and say "Well, it's a crying shame that Linux won, really MacOS was much better" in much the same way that people think of the video system wars of a decade or so ago.
In reality of course, they'll be wrong. In much the same way that when people remember VHS vs Betamax all they tend to think of was that Betamax tapes had higher quality pictures, but forget the smaller capacity/higher prices/sony control.
And so really, although I'm sure there are people out there who kind of regret the dominance of VHS, when you get down and argue the points through you tend to realise that a lot of what people remember about Betamax is rose-tinted. They think of only the good points, and forget why it really died.
I mean, when I read the points you make above, it's just like reading a VHS vs Betamax argument. There's the whole will-the-free-market-work thing going, there's the whole its-backed-by-a-megacorp thing and then there's a baseless assertion about the relative "goodness" of the kernels. I mean, maybe FreeBSD has a better VM system or something, I don't really know, and I don't care either. It's like video quality - 99.9% of people can't tell, don't know and wouldn't care even if they did.
Finally I'd point out that "less proprietary" isn't good enough: it's still proprietary, and that's a bad thing. It also condemns them to a minority marketshare for ever, something I'm sure they are aware of, but they're doing OK selling to a niche so that doesn't really matter.
Probably something along the lines of "I wish FireWire and USB2 were actually widespread, oh well, too bad, we'll use USB1.1 because that way all our customers can use it without buying an expansion card".
And how often do you ship 20gig of music around anyway?
As an aside, IE is the king of undocumented usages of the API, so it kind of filters through.
I'm afraid a lot of programs, even seemingly trivial shareware apps, do wierd things regarding the Win32 API. It's not uncommon to find apps passing corrupted or bad data into the APIs, missing out vital calls, abusing COM/ActiveX etc.
For instance, look at RhymBox, a simple free chat app for Windows. Looks fairly innocent doesn't it? But this program is an IE DHTML application embedded using the WebBrowser control into an ATL C++ container. Hmmm.
In particular Microsoft apps have a greater tendancy than most to take shortcuts, or use badly defined behaviours of the API. Just because it looks simple, doesn't mean it actually is. When you've done some Wine debugging, maybe you'll rethink those assertions.
It's mostly purely technical targets, for instance the wineserver protocol will be frozen, which means that (I think) you can build WineLib apps and upgrade Wine and they won't break. There are a few other targets, mostly esotoric.
Wine 0.9 is far more interesting, and will hopefully come out in the last part of 2003. It's focussed on being easy to use and setup.
A lot of problems people have with Wine are usually related to it being badly setup. Partly that's our fault, Wine isn't especially easy to setup right, and because it releases every month, distro packages are often out of date (and now redhat doesn't even ship it anymore). After being increasingly frustrated with Wine, I tried CrossOver (a slightly hacked up version of wine designed to be easy to use), and it worked so well I was blown away. Installing IE6 in Wine is a distinctly wierd experience :)
Anyway, I've been using WineHQ wine for quite some time now, but hopefully along with proper setups (DON'T use your pre-existing windows installation etc) Wine will get a much better reputation.
Problem is that although wood burning is a clean, renewable source of energy, it takes too much space, especially for the UK. I think offshore power is what is basically being focussed on at the moment, Blair is annoyed because Holland got ahead of us and now owns the wind farm industry basically.
For sure it is a major feature. I've not heard of LiveObject, sure you don't mean LiveConnect? Unfortunately custom web apps with funky activex controls are waaay too common. Oh, and the NS plugin apis are too limited for some things, the Adobe SVG viewer doesn't work in Mozilla properly for that very reason.
DHTML applications - don't know what you're referring too here. You should be more specific.
Files that end in .hta (hypertext applications) use IE as the runtime host.
Don't know what DirectShow is, so can't comment.
Media pipelining, see below.
You also cite "various proprietary DOM/CSS extensions" and list no examples
document.all, dom.xml, things like that. Maybe Mac IE has them too, I dunno.
To turn the tables somewhat WinIE6 is missing one major thing that MacIE5 does support. Full support for PNG images.
IE can in fact do this, but you need to add some voodoo CSS to the website, to make it use the aforementioned DirectShow filters. Google for it, I've used the technique before and other than being a stupid hack it works great, and is pretty easy to use.
You're living on the moon.
Sorry, but Java is dead for desktop apps, Mozilla and OpenOffice were primarily designed to work well on Windows and have to be gutted through and through to make them even look like they're using native widgets, and Mono will only be capable of running either GTK2 (via X11) apps, or maybe Windows .NET apps if somebody ports Wine to MacOS (huge amount of effort). Regardless they will look and feel like piss poor windows ports.
The rest of your post is a rambling, frothing rant with little coherant argument.
Uhhhh, you haven't seen many IE web apps have you? A few features off the top of my head:
ActiveX/ActiveScript
DHTML applications
DirectShow filtering
Embedding
Various proprietary DOM/CSS extensions
<?import?> binding
There are loads of IE only features, some of which are basically forgotten about today. I've only listed the ones that I know for a fact don't exist in Mac IE, there may well be others (like contentEditable) which don't exist.
And there most certainly IS a Mac version of OpenOffice [openoffice.org].
Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. When a program doesn't actually use the native graphics layer of an OS, is it actually a "Mac version" or is it simply a half-finished port?