(drat, posted anonymously for some reason, i must have clicked the box by accident)....
Apple warned them that their rates were too high. They had to fight tooth and nail to get MPEG-LA to drop its rates to their current level, maybe now they'll listen...
I doubt the MPEG-LA will ever drop licensing entirely. It's possible, but unlikely.
That then raises the question - how is QuickTime open again? Yes yes, I know the container format is documented (although documenting something does not make it open obviously) but whenever people say "Apple should open QuickTime", the Mac apologists always say "QuickTime is open, it's just the codecs, and when everybody uses MPEG4 you won't have anything to complain about".
So, what will Apple do now? It's getting easier to setup MPlayer to use the QuickTime codecs via Wine, but it's still ugly. When will all those trailors be encoded in a format that can be easily played on the platform from which it borrow so much? They say like want digital video for everyone, why don't they fund the Theora team?
Agreed, but I know what my dad would say to that (he works in the UK digital tv industry and is on several digital tv standards boards):
Him: "Son, things like MPEG aren't simple, and take a lot of smart people a lot of time to create. They should be rewarded for their efforts"
Me: "But how can something be an open standard if you have to pay for it?"
Him: "Who says open standards have to be free to implement? It's documented and vendor neutral, that makes it open in my eyes"
Me: "What about GPLd decoders though! Everyone will just end up using Ogg instead."
Him: "What about them? It's easy for people to recreate technologies once the expensive research has been done, Vorbis is based on similar ideas to MP3 for instance. Creating them in the first place takes money though, who's going to do that if all the codecs have to be free of charge?"
At that point I usually shut up, because I don't have a good answer. Looking at the way Ogg is developed I have tremendous respect for those guys, but they are working out their metaphorical basements. See how Tarkin (the research codec) lies abandoned? How would the people who worked on MPEG4 make money without licensing fees? Anybody? I'm sure there must be answers.
Heh, perhaps we can chat about this on irc over the weekend foo:)
...you admit to 2 (and I know I've given you 3) and I'll bet a lot of money you want 1 and 4 as well.
Yes, quite right, 1 is the long term goal obviously. 4 is nice but not necessary.
Of course, if we can't figure out how to make portable binaries then 1 is going to be hard anyway. Since raising the issue on libc-alpha I've talked to a lot of people, but the situation is still deadlocked. There is a problem, symbol versioning is the official answer but has many issues so people don't use it, it's really to do with ancient linking semantics but the maintainers aren't interesting in changing it. No way out.
I dunno what to do now really, except maybe try and persude everyone to use python/.net/java etc which uses different linkers....
You for example, would enjoy the added noteriety. No? Imagine how great you would feel if your project had the noteriety of Apache. Pretty good, eh?
Sure, that'd be good:)
Open source needs somthe e marketing, and it needs it now.
Yep, agree totally. I was talking about advertising individual apps separately though, not open source in general. I'd love to see proper ads for Linux in general on TV, in the cinema etc (well, not yet, we're not prepared for world domination yet), until it had the mindshare.
I've often thought a simple, coordinated campaign that has revolves around a piccy of Tux, with the words: "Linux : Get Ready", "Linux : Power to the People", "Linux : Computers will never be the same again", "Linux : Revolution" or something along those lines underneath in a simple, bold font would be pretty cool. Memorable, mysterious....
The fact is, it's practically impossible to communicate even a tenth of what somebody needs to know in order to make sense of free software in the space you have in a traditional media advert, so the best campaign would be to get people asking "what is linux?" and then people who hopefully know what they're talking about can fill them in. People tend to trust opinions they get via word of mouth more anyway, so that'd be a good way to combine the strengths of both forms.
Now here's one of the things I've never been able to figure out. How can it make sense to build good, solid, complex software that's supposed to be free (beer, speech, whatever) and then say "here it is, it's free. But if you want to figure out how to use it, pay up".
I don't know of any open source projects that do that, do you?
In fact, Nagios provides documentation. What you're talking about is support, ie somebody who will spend however long it takes working with you to get your problem sorted out. Pro level support is very different from writing documentation, and asking people to pay for it isn't unreasonable, it's what Red Hat do for instance.
No, not all open source projects have quality docs. If they don't, then write some! I've done that, took me about 40 minutes, plus a few emails to correct mistakes and get it uploaded. Nothing to it. Every little bit counts you know.
It seems to me most open source/free software is essentially an ego trip for the developer
Oh hardly, most open source software is written to be useful. It's a charitable contribution remember, if it didn't exist you'd still have to pay for commercial equivalents. If you don't find it useful for whatever reason, you can help make it useful, or you can go elsewhere. Complaining about it doesn't write docs though.
That's a good question. However, I can't say much about this, since I really haven't had to deal with it. Nagios is targeted towards sysadmins, so they hear about it by word-of-mouth, Freshmeat, Google, etc. Most OSS project operate with no ($$$) budget, so traditional marketing methods are probably out of the question.
This makes sense, but often open source projects don't need marketing as such. Marketing was originally used in the commercial world to get ahead of the competition - by actively telling people, even people who might not be interested about your product, you could get mindshare. Then everybody started doing it to catch up, and now marketing is regarded as essential.
That's sort of a shame, but there's no reason why 99% of open source projects actually need to market themselves - they don't need to make money, so it makes sense for people to actively search them out, for the users to find them rather than the other way around in effect. Of course there is still word of mouth, which is a bit different, in that people are asked for recommendations and give them.
You might be thinking that's a bit hypocritical coming from me, considering that I've been advertising my project in my sig for a while now. I do that not because I want everyone to use my software (though that'd be nice one day) but because it's a flipping huge task that needs to get solved soon (imho) for desktop Linux to make any progress. So I need developers. The text advert in my sig has helped enormously here, 3 out of the 5 volunteers currently on the project came here via Slashdot, and we get a lot of interest/emails from people who find it this way. We're making great progress now, more than I'd be capable of working on my own, or with one person who found it by accident.
On the other hand, I'd consider this to be a special case. If I was writing a sysadmin utility, or an MP3 player, or a media streaming framework, or pretty much any other piece of software in fact, I'd have deliberately decided not to advertise in such a way. It's slightly obnoxious for starters, advertising is invasive (and i try to make my sig stand out) and often irritating. I'd just post it to freshmeat, and tell my friends about it. If it was good enough, it'd spread by word of mouse. But in this case I decided it was important enough to justify it......
Of course Ethan was talking about advertising to users, which I still maintain isn't really needed for free software, and I don't intend on advertising to users at any point. If they come across.package files and like them, they'll find the project in that way, or via recommendation, or via articles people write about it, or one of the countless ways in which people can discover new things.
DRM or not, any application has to talk to the hardware at some level. Unless microsoft ship binary only sound/video drivers that can't be hacked to write video/audio data out through network or unix domain sockets, or/proc devices, then anyone can access protected content digitally, before it gets to the output device.
They have done. It first appeared in XP, and is called Secure Audio Path. The data passes encrypted into the kernel, where it's decrypted before being passed to the drivers. That kind of thing is hard to work around easily, one solution being to host Windows inside VMware and use that (but how many people can really be bothered? it'd have to be damn compelling content).
It's interesting how so many Linux users complain about how horrible Microsoft products are
Well, the complaints are usually targetted at specific apps, usually Windows. Microsoft make some truly great software, especially in the games dept (though it's arguable whether this is Microsoft producing them or not). I never cared much for Media Player, but a few of my friends prefer it to Winamp.
Wine is a great thing, critical for desktop success even. There are just way too many apps for Windows that don't have any Linux equivalent. I was talking last night to a guy on IRC who needed CATIA, an engineering app. Needs Windows. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on raw WineHQ (it might have worked had he used CrossOver...), but it is a good example.
(and they also like to have Windows-ish desktops, ala GNOME and KDE)
Well, the GNOME configuration I have isn't all that much like Windows, but it does have similarities. Like I said, Microsoft make some good stuff. There are good ideas in the Windows GUI, which KDE and GNOME rightfully nicked.
Nothing good can come of this. I for one don't want to see a Microsoft product on Linux.
I'd be OK with that if they weren't trying to use it to leverage their own proprietary platforms. If Microsoft started releasing games for linux, I might buy them. I might not of course, you could say you shouldn't by any products from MS ever again because of principle. But, I wouldn't have anything against it. The problem is that they only rarely release something that isn't tied to, or doesn't try and tie the users to their own platforms, usually Windows.
Who cares? Safari rocks. A big, bad commercial softwarre developer uses an open-source project and gives back to that community and there are still people who whine. It boggles the mind.
Eh? Who's whining? That's basically the logic they followed, I'd bet. It's not bad logic.
I will whine now though, this sicophantic "and wow! they have given back their changes too!" thing is dumb, even on their website Apple say something like "and because we're good open source citizens, we have even given back our changes!".
Yet KHTML and KJS are under the LGPL, so they had to do that anyway as a legal obligation. Why are people surprised by this?
No - if you're thinking of the LSB then that's not quite the same. RPM is severely deficient as a packaging format, we're trying to make something better. Also of course, due to those deficiencies, it's not anywhere near de facto.
Delphi has long been the standard to which other Windows RAD environments were measured. Unfortunately Borland always focussed very heavily on the database side of things, instead of pushing it as also a very good replacement for VB, ie for more general purpose apps.
Too bad they slaughtered it while porting to Linux. Kylix is nowhere near as good as Delphi is:(
Translation: we realised that we had no chance of building our own layout engine or javascript engine, so we had to choose between Gecko/Spidermonkey and KHTML/KJS. The Mozilla technologies were better, but we could understand the KDE ones. In particular, Mozilla is full of cross platform code that makes it harder to adapt and integrate into our OS, and it relies upon its own portable runtime and rendering layers. When we started this project, Chimera didn't exist.
It seems apple is now pushing it's own X11 implementation
Oh great. Just what the world needs, yet another X server. This will be good if they can keep up with XFree which basically the canonical X server in the world today, but if they can't it'll be worse than useless. Support for XRender is only now filtering down into the commercial X servers for instance, and the new Xr/Xc/R&R/XCursor extensions for instance aren't there yet. Why don't they just use XFree, I don't get this reinventing of the wheel from them. It's not like they're overflowing with resources, and they clearly aren't afraid of leveraging open source code, so why make their own X server?? (if that's indeed what this is).
Hmm, nice rhetoric:) The issue isn't that Apple can choose KHTML, it's more a case of why.
And assuming the world domination thing happens, IE dies off, we would have the same thing, but called Mozilla
Uh.... the same thing being a popular web browser?:)
I think those projects are great, but choice is what the entire Free Software movement is about.
Actually it's about freedom. The fact that choice/duplication of effort is often a side effect of freedom isn't really what it's about, it's just a sometimes pleasant consequence of the way the free software movement works.
Why not let Apple choose KHTML? If we wake up one day and find that only Gecko is out there, IE died and Konqueror is "that other browser" (Like Opera and Mozilla are considered today, in the mainstream, although both are gaining considerable acceptance), where would we have gotten? Except for the fact it's open source, it'll be no different than IE.
Well, uh, yeah, except that it's open source! That's the big difference. Nobody controls Mozilla, yes Netscape/AOL have a big influence on the project but you can always fork it. You can't fork IE. The fact that it's open source IS the big deal. A monopoly of Mozilla wouldn't be bad at all - there's nothing wrong with huge market shares if it happens to be the best product and the makers of said product are not trying to prevent competition.
I think you need to think about that one a bit harder. Choice is fine, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and sometimes restricting it (ie technical standards) is a good thing.
Stop with this! IE is fast because, to put it simply, Microsoft know how to write extremely fast code. That's it.
IE is fast because Microsoft know Windows coding inside and out. When you run iexplore.exe, no, it's not loaded at startup, the executable just loads the relevant COM objects. The UI appears first, then their rendering engine (Trident) is loaded async which is why you see a flat white area when IE is loading for a second or two before it becomes a 3D cutout. Everything is load on demand. That's why it's fast.
Office is fast because the Office coders aren't stupid. They don't pull any OS startup tricks or anything to make that happen. How do I know this? Because I once reinstalled Windows on top of Office - deleted the whole of the windows directory and reinstalled it. Word still started in under 3 seconds, although it gave one or two complaints about missing registry entries it started fine, and boy was it fast.
Maybe IE still pulls this trick, maybe it doesn't, but at the end of the day IE feels fast because they've put a lot of work into optimization. You'll note that Mozilla is catching up now as they also get the optimizations in.
If they sent C&D letters for freakin' themes, I doubt they'll just sit around while their API is emulated.
This project isn't emulating the MacOS APIs, they're getting the basics up and running so they can drop in actual code libraries from OS X. Unlike Wine which is actually recreating all the APIs, this is just a fun hack basically, no danger to Apple as you still need a Mac and a copy of MacOS for it to work.
I seriously doubt we'll see a Mac equivalent of Wine for a very long time, the amount of effort it takes is just too huge given the absence of any must have apps on the Mac (apps with no equivalent on other platforms). Wine is essential because of the huge amount of software that simply doesn't have Linux equivalents (or not very good ones) and probably never will, ie Lightwave, DreamWeaver, Flash and so on, and of course huge numbers of custom business apps. The Mac doesn't really have any such apps, the closest I can think of are the iApps, but there are lots of equivalents for them even on the Mac itself, and I don't know of any custom business apps that are Mac only.
They aren't intending to recreate OS X bear in mind, it's merely a fun hack.
In particular they aren't intending to recreate the widget toolkit it seems, or indeed, many of the libs at all, they just want Mach/Darwin compatability in NetBSD. You'd still need to buy a Mac with an OS X license for it to work.
That makes it fundamentally different to Wine by the way for those who are wondering - wine is a complete reimplementation of the Windows APIs so you can run Windows apps without buying Windows. This is just letting NetBSD use some OS X code, not quite the same thing.
Very cool. I wonder if it could be ported to Linux once they've got working okay on FreeBSD. Then Linux would be able to run Mac OS X apps
You're making a lot of assumptions. Firstly, that such an emulation system could be completed in any reasonable amount of time, and could keep up with Apple. Obviously, that isn't the same kind of issue as it is with Wine as Apple is a lot smaller, and to be frank, Windows has far more APIs and features to the developer than OS X does (at present).
Secondly, you're assuming Apple would let this happen. They can't stop a cleanroom implementation, but they can copyright the artwork which is a big deal to Mac users. Wine has to have its own artwork for instance (but not for the widget toolkit, as the Win98 L&F is so basic it can't really be copyrighted). Not that nice distinctions like code vs art would bother Apple, they have a long history of abusive lawsuits.
Finally you're assuming that such an emulator could emulate PPC opcodes at a reasonable speed, which is a) hard and b) unlikely.
Bear in mind that doesn't say "You can run MacOS apps on NetBSD", far from it, they have some of the basics of Mach IPC working. They haven't even started on graphics support. If there's something we've all learnt from Wine (which has 2 companies working on it as well as hundreds of volunteers), it's that cloning another OS's APIs is a lot of work, and as most of the MacOS APIs are not simply lifts of their UNIX equivalents, they are Apple proprietary (iokit/coreaudio etc), that's no less amount of work.
Cable ships are a large part of the cost of bandwidth, most of the major western top level bandwidth providers maintain fleets of undersea cable maintenance ships. These things are fantastically expensive to build and run, and part of the cost of them filters down to all of us. For instance, part of my £20/month connection costs are helping to pay for the undersea link that connects me to slashdot. Ditto for satellite/microwave links, they all cost a lot to maintain and run.
That's not the only source of expense of course, but it is one major one. Don't forget supply and demand of course - people charge what people are willing to pay.
Actually GTK2.2 has xmove style functionality built in, so any GTK2 apps should be able to do this. I've been unable to figure out how to activate it though. The XFree team are aware of and are working on the colour depth issues, but I don't think there's a solution in the current builds though.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple warned them that their rates were too high. They had to fight tooth and nail to get MPEG-LA to drop its rates to their current level, maybe now they'll listen...
I doubt the MPEG-LA will ever drop licensing entirely. It's possible, but unlikely.
That then raises the question - how is QuickTime open again? Yes yes, I know the container format is documented (although documenting something does not make it open obviously) but whenever people say "Apple should open QuickTime", the Mac apologists always say "QuickTime is open, it's just the codecs, and when everybody uses MPEG4 you won't have anything to complain about".
So, what will Apple do now? It's getting easier to setup MPlayer to use the QuickTime codecs via Wine, but it's still ugly. When will all those trailors be encoded in a format that can be easily played on the platform from which it borrow so much? They say like want digital video for everyone, why don't they fund the Theora team?
Agreed, but I know what my dad would say to that (he works in the UK digital tv industry and is on several digital tv standards boards):
Him: "Son, things like MPEG aren't simple, and take a lot of smart people a lot of time to create. They should be rewarded for their efforts"
Me: "But how can something be an open standard if you have to pay for it?"
Him: "Who says open standards have to be free to implement? It's documented and vendor neutral, that makes it open in my eyes"
Me: "What about GPLd decoders though! Everyone will just end up using Ogg instead."
Him: "What about them? It's easy for people to recreate technologies once the expensive research has been done, Vorbis is based on similar ideas to MP3 for instance. Creating them in the first place takes money though, who's going to do that if all the codecs have to be free of charge?"
At that point I usually shut up, because I don't have a good answer. Looking at the way Ogg is developed I have tremendous respect for those guys, but they are working out their metaphorical basements. See how Tarkin (the research codec) lies abandoned? How would the people who worked on MPEG4 make money without licensing fees? Anybody? I'm sure there must be answers.
Heh, perhaps we can chat about this on irc over the weekend foo :)
Actually, it runs large numbers of ATM machines. Strange but true.
Yes, quite right, 1 is the long term goal obviously. 4 is nice but not necessary.
Of course, if we can't figure out how to make portable binaries then 1 is going to be hard anyway. Since raising the issue on libc-alpha I've talked to a lot of people, but the situation is still deadlocked. There is a problem, symbol versioning is the official answer but has many issues so people don't use it, it's really to do with ancient linking semantics but the maintainers aren't interesting in changing it. No way out.
I dunno what to do now really, except maybe try and persude everyone to use python/.net/java etc which uses different linkers....
Sure, that'd be good :)
Open source needs somthe e marketing, and it needs it now.
Yep, agree totally. I was talking about advertising individual apps separately though, not open source in general. I'd love to see proper ads for Linux in general on TV, in the cinema etc (well, not yet, we're not prepared for world domination yet), until it had the mindshare.
I've often thought a simple, coordinated campaign that has revolves around a piccy of Tux, with the words: "Linux : Get Ready", "Linux : Power to the People", "Linux : Computers will never be the same again", "Linux : Revolution" or something along those lines underneath in a simple, bold font would be pretty cool. Memorable, mysterious....
The fact is, it's practically impossible to communicate even a tenth of what somebody needs to know in order to make sense of free software in the space you have in a traditional media advert, so the best campaign would be to get people asking "what is linux?" and then people who hopefully know what they're talking about can fill them in. People tend to trust opinions they get via word of mouth more anyway, so that'd be a good way to combine the strengths of both forms.
I don't know of any open source projects that do that, do you?
In fact, Nagios provides documentation. What you're talking about is support, ie somebody who will spend however long it takes working with you to get your problem sorted out. Pro level support is very different from writing documentation, and asking people to pay for it isn't unreasonable, it's what Red Hat do for instance.
No, not all open source projects have quality docs. If they don't, then write some! I've done that, took me about 40 minutes, plus a few emails to correct mistakes and get it uploaded. Nothing to it. Every little bit counts you know.
It seems to me most open source/free software is essentially an ego trip for the developer
Oh hardly, most open source software is written to be useful. It's a charitable contribution remember, if it didn't exist you'd still have to pay for commercial equivalents. If you don't find it useful for whatever reason, you can help make it useful, or you can go elsewhere. Complaining about it doesn't write docs though.
This makes sense, but often open source projects don't need marketing as such. Marketing was originally used in the commercial world to get ahead of the competition - by actively telling people, even people who might not be interested about your product, you could get mindshare. Then everybody started doing it to catch up, and now marketing is regarded as essential.
That's sort of a shame, but there's no reason why 99% of open source projects actually need to market themselves - they don't need to make money, so it makes sense for people to actively search them out, for the users to find them rather than the other way around in effect. Of course there is still word of mouth, which is a bit different, in that people are asked for recommendations and give them.
You might be thinking that's a bit hypocritical coming from me, considering that I've been advertising my project in my sig for a while now. I do that not because I want everyone to use my software (though that'd be nice one day) but because it's a flipping huge task that needs to get solved soon (imho) for desktop Linux to make any progress. So I need developers. The text advert in my sig has helped enormously here, 3 out of the 5 volunteers currently on the project came here via Slashdot, and we get a lot of interest/emails from people who find it this way. We're making great progress now, more than I'd be capable of working on my own, or with one person who found it by accident.
On the other hand, I'd consider this to be a special case. If I was writing a sysadmin utility, or an MP3 player, or a media streaming framework, or pretty much any other piece of software in fact, I'd have deliberately decided not to advertise in such a way. It's slightly obnoxious for starters, advertising is invasive (and i try to make my sig stand out) and often irritating. I'd just post it to freshmeat, and tell my friends about it. If it was good enough, it'd spread by word of mouse. But in this case I decided it was important enough to justify it......
Of course Ethan was talking about advertising to users, which I still maintain isn't really needed for free software, and I don't intend on advertising to users at any point. If they come across .package files and like them, they'll find the project in that way, or via recommendation, or via articles people write about it, or one of the countless ways in which people can discover new things.
They have done. It first appeared in XP, and is called Secure Audio Path. The data passes encrypted into the kernel, where it's decrypted before being passed to the drivers. That kind of thing is hard to work around easily, one solution being to host Windows inside VMware and use that (but how many people can really be bothered? it'd have to be damn compelling content).
Well, the complaints are usually targetted at specific apps, usually Windows. Microsoft make some truly great software, especially in the games dept (though it's arguable whether this is Microsoft producing them or not). I never cared much for Media Player, but a few of my friends prefer it to Winamp.
Wine is a great thing, critical for desktop success even. There are just way too many apps for Windows that don't have any Linux equivalent. I was talking last night to a guy on IRC who needed CATIA, an engineering app. Needs Windows. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on raw WineHQ (it might have worked had he used CrossOver...), but it is a good example.
(and they also like to have Windows-ish desktops, ala GNOME and KDE)
Well, the GNOME configuration I have isn't all that much like Windows, but it does have similarities. Like I said, Microsoft make some good stuff. There are good ideas in the Windows GUI, which KDE and GNOME rightfully nicked.
Nothing good can come of this. I for one don't want to see a Microsoft product on Linux.
I'd be OK with that if they weren't trying to use it to leverage their own proprietary platforms. If Microsoft started releasing games for linux, I might buy them. I might not of course, you could say you shouldn't by any products from MS ever again because of principle. But, I wouldn't have anything against it. The problem is that they only rarely release something that isn't tied to, or doesn't try and tie the users to their own platforms, usually Windows.
Eh? Who's whining? That's basically the logic they followed, I'd bet. It's not bad logic.
I will whine now though, this sicophantic "and wow! they have given back their changes too!" thing is dumb, even on their website Apple say something like "and because we're good open source citizens, we have even given back our changes!".
Yet KHTML and KJS are under the LGPL, so they had to do that anyway as a legal obligation. Why are people surprised by this?
No - if you're thinking of the LSB then that's not quite the same. RPM is severely deficient as a packaging format, we're trying to make something better. Also of course, due to those deficiencies, it's not anywhere near de facto.
(plug) Indeed, it's even capable of writing high performance 3D games (end plug).
Delphi has long been the standard to which other Windows RAD environments were measured. Unfortunately Borland always focussed very heavily on the database side of things, instead of pushing it as also a very good replacement for VB, ie for more general purpose apps.
Too bad they slaughtered it while porting to Linux. Kylix is nowhere near as good as Delphi is :(
Where can I get this source then?
And is anybody else seeing extreme slowness on Slashdot since OSDN moved across America?
Translation: we realised that we had no chance of building our own layout engine or javascript engine, so we had to choose between Gecko/Spidermonkey and KHTML/KJS. The Mozilla technologies were better, but we could understand the KDE ones. In particular, Mozilla is full of cross platform code that makes it harder to adapt and integrate into our OS, and it relies upon its own portable runtime and rendering layers. When we started this project, Chimera didn't exist.
Oh great. Just what the world needs, yet another X server. This will be good if they can keep up with XFree which basically the canonical X server in the world today, but if they can't it'll be worse than useless. Support for XRender is only now filtering down into the commercial X servers for instance, and the new Xr/Xc/R&R/XCursor extensions for instance aren't there yet. Why don't they just use XFree, I don't get this reinventing of the wheel from them. It's not like they're overflowing with resources, and they clearly aren't afraid of leveraging open source code, so why make their own X server?? (if that's indeed what this is).
And assuming the world domination thing happens, IE dies off, we would have the same thing, but called Mozilla
Uh.... the same thing being a popular web browser? :)
I think those projects are great, but choice is what the entire Free Software movement is about.
Actually it's about freedom. The fact that choice/duplication of effort is often a side effect of freedom isn't really what it's about, it's just a sometimes pleasant consequence of the way the free software movement works.
Why not let Apple choose KHTML? If we wake up one day and find that only Gecko is out there, IE died and Konqueror is "that other browser" (Like Opera and Mozilla are considered today, in the mainstream, although both are gaining considerable acceptance), where would we have gotten? Except for the fact it's open source, it'll be no different than IE.
Well, uh, yeah, except that it's open source! That's the big difference. Nobody controls Mozilla, yes Netscape/AOL have a big influence on the project but you can always fork it. You can't fork IE. The fact that it's open source IS the big deal. A monopoly of Mozilla wouldn't be bad at all - there's nothing wrong with huge market shares if it happens to be the best product and the makers of said product are not trying to prevent competition.
I think you need to think about that one a bit harder. Choice is fine, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and sometimes restricting it (ie technical standards) is a good thing.
See the section this story is in? You just defined Apple - it wouldn't matter, they'd still be able to sell them to the Apple faithful.
IE is fast because Microsoft know Windows coding inside and out. When you run iexplore.exe, no, it's not loaded at startup, the executable just loads the relevant COM objects. The UI appears first, then their rendering engine (Trident) is loaded async which is why you see a flat white area when IE is loading for a second or two before it becomes a 3D cutout. Everything is load on demand. That's why it's fast.
Office is fast because the Office coders aren't stupid. They don't pull any OS startup tricks or anything to make that happen. How do I know this? Because I once reinstalled Windows on top of Office - deleted the whole of the windows directory and reinstalled it. Word still started in under 3 seconds, although it gave one or two complaints about missing registry entries it started fine, and boy was it fast.
Maybe IE still pulls this trick, maybe it doesn't, but at the end of the day IE feels fast because they've put a lot of work into optimization. You'll note that Mozilla is catching up now as they also get the optimizations in.
This project isn't emulating the MacOS APIs, they're getting the basics up and running so they can drop in actual code libraries from OS X. Unlike Wine which is actually recreating all the APIs, this is just a fun hack basically, no danger to Apple as you still need a Mac and a copy of MacOS for it to work.
I seriously doubt we'll see a Mac equivalent of Wine for a very long time, the amount of effort it takes is just too huge given the absence of any must have apps on the Mac (apps with no equivalent on other platforms). Wine is essential because of the huge amount of software that simply doesn't have Linux equivalents (or not very good ones) and probably never will, ie Lightwave, DreamWeaver, Flash and so on, and of course huge numbers of custom business apps. The Mac doesn't really have any such apps, the closest I can think of are the iApps, but there are lots of equivalents for them even on the Mac itself, and I don't know of any custom business apps that are Mac only.
In particular they aren't intending to recreate the widget toolkit it seems, or indeed, many of the libs at all, they just want Mach/Darwin compatability in NetBSD. You'd still need to buy a Mac with an OS X license for it to work.
That makes it fundamentally different to Wine by the way for those who are wondering - wine is a complete reimplementation of the Windows APIs so you can run Windows apps without buying Windows. This is just letting NetBSD use some OS X code, not quite the same thing.
You're making a lot of assumptions. Firstly, that such an emulation system could be completed in any reasonable amount of time, and could keep up with Apple. Obviously, that isn't the same kind of issue as it is with Wine as Apple is a lot smaller, and to be frank, Windows has far more APIs and features to the developer than OS X does (at present).
Secondly, you're assuming Apple would let this happen. They can't stop a cleanroom implementation, but they can copyright the artwork which is a big deal to Mac users. Wine has to have its own artwork for instance (but not for the widget toolkit, as the Win98 L&F is so basic it can't really be copyrighted). Not that nice distinctions like code vs art would bother Apple, they have a long history of abusive lawsuits.
Finally you're assuming that such an emulator could emulate PPC opcodes at a reasonable speed, which is a) hard and b) unlikely.
Bear in mind that doesn't say "You can run MacOS apps on NetBSD", far from it, they have some of the basics of Mach IPC working. They haven't even started on graphics support. If there's something we've all learnt from Wine (which has 2 companies working on it as well as hundreds of volunteers), it's that cloning another OS's APIs is a lot of work, and as most of the MacOS APIs are not simply lifts of their UNIX equivalents, they are Apple proprietary (iokit/coreaudio etc), that's no less amount of work.
That's not the only source of expense of course, but it is one major one. Don't forget supply and demand of course - people charge what people are willing to pay.
Also of course, the XBox makes a pretty lousy computer. It was never designed for that.
Actually GTK2.2 has xmove style functionality built in, so any GTK2 apps should be able to do this. I've been unable to figure out how to activate it though. The XFree team are aware of and are working on the colour depth issues, but I don't think there's a solution in the current builds though.