The GPL places severe restirictions on what I can and cannot do with my software
.. and...
I never said that the GPL takes away my freedom.
Hmmm. I'm finding it hard to reconcile those lines.
And this is true. With GNU, I am not free to add value and then charge for that value
Not at all, you can add value in many ways, just not by forking the code. For instance, rather than write a new feature then try and find customers, find customers first who want that feature and persuade them to pay you to do it for them. It means an inversion of the way you're used to doing business, and it's not applicable to all software, but it can be used in a lot of cases.
There are very clear and strong restrictions on what I can do with GPL software, and that is the hippocrisy, that they complain about restrictions on APSL software simple because those restrictions are incompatible with their own restrictions.
Well in a way, yes, but in another way not really - the GPL restrictions are there in order to protect the original author of a work, the APSL restrictions are there in order to protect Apple. It's different enough for it not to be hypocrisy.
Sure, it'd be a tough sell because that's not what they've done before. Ironically, if they made all their money from hardware it'd be much easier: look at Matrox, they have high quality GPLd drivers (not made by them, but they exist) and still make money, because they sell hardware, not software.
I'm hardly a GPL fanboy btw. It has its uses, like any agreement. Protecting technology from commercial exploitation in this instance. The code I've written for wine is dual LGPLd/X11, and my own project is LGPLd because I want people to be able to make commercial software with it.
Also, "we'd find it a tough sell" to the shareholders isn't an excuse. It's harsh, but if they can't make a living while still doing what's best for everyone, then they should go find some other industry to work in. Allowing Jobs to have huge piles of cash from stock options isn't any argument against a GPLd platform.
So why do all QuickTime videos on Apples site (the only place I ever see them anyway) come in Sorensen? It's not so hard to pick another option from the box is it?
I couldn't get to the MacSlash article but I have to question the motivations of these GPL people........ They have been using the BSD license, and they use it a lot!! They both employ prominent members of the BSD community and have given back to the community in code as well...........
I quite frankly hope that the gnu-darwin project falls into oblivion.
So let me get this straight. You haven't read the article, or read the guys justifications for what he's doing, yet you hope his project falls into oblivion because you don't see the point.
Right. A few things you might want to bear in mind. This interview with Jordan Hubbard, a top guy in the BSD community, reveals a lot. To be exact, it reveals that:
Hubbard had to ask to be employed by Apple. They didn't ask him, or suggest it, or even talk to him.
FreeBSD has gained so far from Apple, a few test suites. Brilliant. Oh, and of course he makes a big deal of the positive PR. That's not code though is it?
Hubbard appears to be motivated primarily by wanting to see UNIX on the desktop. In contrast, the GNU/Darwin guy is motivated primarily by wanting to see a free operating system on the desktop.
Now I don't know about you, but I couldn't care less about UNIX. Sure, it's nice, I like the coloured directory listings, but you could conceivable argue that Windows was better engineered for instance. UNIX was great in its day, in 2002 it's merely average. Who gives a monkeys about UNIX, it doesn't matter. What does matter is who's in control of a technology as fundamental as computing. To me at any rate, that's a far bigger deal that what APIs are used to write apps.
I just don't see the point.
I don't see the point of FreeBSD. It's recreating UNIX but has opened itself up to commercial forks such as MacOS. What's the point? If they wanted to make a totally kickass OS, they could do a lot better by dropping UNIX and coming up with something truly original. If they wanted to fix the mess that's been made of the computing industry, letting anybody fork your code and close isn't the way to go about doing it.
Next time, before you comment on another guys project, take the time to understand their perspective on things, otherwise you're no better than they are.
Well guess what? Here we are. And some folks still insist that Apple is on the "bad side" because they don't kill their entire business by adopting the GPL and bringing their revenues down to Redhat levels. Give me a fucking break.
Give us a break too. If Apple didn't have enormously fat profit margins on hardware it'd be dead tomorrow. Say what you want about RedHat, but they are making a profit by selling free software. Whether you agree with them or not, those guys had principles, and they're making money out of them regardless.
In a straight up, software only fight between RedHat and Apple, Apple would be blown out of the water, and I challenge anybody to deny that.
If you don't believe me, go look at the financial statements. It's dry reading, but it is quite clear that the vast percentage of Apples revenues come from sales of Mac hardware, not their software. They've been trying for a long time to become a software company, but they aren't one. Or do you think they'd stick with selling hardware if they could make as much money with an Intel version of OS X?
Apple is standing at that meeting point, taking risks, putting their money where their mouth is, giving to the community, getting something back... They may not get everything right, but jesus, give them a little credit and stop insisting that the militant open source dogma is the only acceptable way.
It depends on your perspective. I hardly think commercial software is evil, I write it for a living, but an OS or platform is a special case. If it's not under the GPL, it can be hijacked and we end up with another Microsoft. The temptation for somebody to try and become the next Gates is far too great to be prevented by anything less than a legal agreement.
So what if they require you to send back your changes?
Originally the GPL had that clause as well, but it was removed in order to preserve peoples sanity. It's a stupid clause. What if you make an experimental change that doesn't work? Do you have to send a useless patch to Apple? What about if you alter the indents to make it look neater in your opinion? They don't really care about that. What about changes that are site specific? The list goes on and on.
The "viral" nature of the GPL is there to stop organisations forking it and then "taking over" the product by adding proprietary modifications that then may become popular, so effectively closing the source. If you never redistribute the code, that can't happen, so there's no need for it.
I see so much FUD about the GPL, really pathetic FUD. Stuff like "the GPL takes away my freedoms". That's BS - it takes away your "freedom" insomuch as laws against murder take away your freedom to kill people. Absolute freedom to do whatever you like simply doesn't exist in reality, why should software licensing be any different.
The GPL places severe restirictions on what I can and cannot do with my software by requiring me to provide source.
No it doesn't. The GPL places some very easily satisfied conditions on you if you modify then redistribute those modifications to somebody elses code. You can use that software for whatever you like, you can modify it in any way you want, but if you want to give other people that software it must be licensed in the same way as it was originally. Big deal.
You know - once you install QuickTime, you don't have to use the player Apple provides.
The key part being - once you install QuickTime.
QuickTime would be okayish (still controlled by Apple) if it always used open codecs, but in practice, it never does. Maybe that'll change now with v6, but their behaviour so far indicates that perhaps not. So you still need to license it from them if you want to build an independant implementation.
Get the win32 codecs pack, the HOWTO is out of date somewhat, and
Configure with the --with-win32libdir=/usr/local/lib/win32 option (if you're installing to/usr/local). I had to set this explicitly, otherwise I got errors about not being able to find codecs.
Oh, and the T3 trailor - probably isn't worth it. I'm trying the XMen2 trailor now:)
Finally big thanks to the MPlayer and Wine teams, who make this possible.
Blame Apple, not Linux. If trailors were released as say actual MPEG4/DivX movies, all of us could play them, with any media player we wanted, for free, with almost no hassle. But they choose not to do that, despite apparently "pushing" for standards.
Right. "MPEG4 is the future" says Apple. I think we'll all take you more seriously when you start releasing all those trailers in an open format. Until then, it's just hot air from their PR department.
This plan has been scrapped for the time being, and Microsoft instead plans to sell software that enables other companies to create their own versions of.NET My Services. (See "New Strategy Devised for.NET My Services" on page 20 of the Apr. 2002 Update.)
Hmm, interesting quote. Perhaps the guy was referring to the corporate version then. I remember MS released a prototype "Hailstorm in a box" for digital ID hosting within a firewall. I never got a chance to play with it, but perhaps it is being rearchitected to support that.
One possiblity is that they try and get it accepted inside corps, then when everybody is used to it at work and want it at home too, start doing personal hosting.
After the 8.0 release I didn't see so many people praising Red Hat as with the 7.3 release. I see Red Hat push for a standardization in the Linux community, but it is more of "their" standards, not what the community wants. This is a double edged sword, good for them and getting Linux more coverage, but possibly bad for the community with a muscle like Red Hat who as we can tell is starting to flex a bit. Please tell me what you think on this.
I think you're exaggurating:)
Actually I think RedHat got lots of praise for 8.0, especially considering it was such a big leap. Desktop unification was a brilliant move, and for distros that ship both desktops you can expect to see more of this in future I am thinking.
Redhat have been sponsoring (through Havoc) the desktop standards effort for some time now. The standards are hardly "theirs", they are developed in conjunction with the community and the only ties to Redhat are the fact that Havoc is the organiser and the mailing lists are hosted on a Redhat box. Redhat have never been about forcing control on people, far from it.
I personally think 8 is great, it looks extremely slick and professional and the admin tools are nicely integrated into gnome2. The fact that they're now in the black tells me it's going to be alright - the hype has passed, but Linux is still here and going strong.
I spoke with some of the top guys at Passport who were obviously heavily involved with Hailstorm at Digital ID World 2002 in Denver. They assured me Hailstorm was very much alive, but it had turned into a far bigger project than they had thought. In particular, I remember one guy saying something to the effect of "Well, my conscious is clean, I told Bill 2 years was unreasonable, but did he listen? Of course not". Words pretty close to that.
It may have been a red herring, but I seriously doubt it. I for one don't think Hailstorm has gone - just forgotten, at least for now.
Yeah, except they have no choice - they cannot open source their drivers as it contains tech patented by other companies. Why did UT2003 require the binary nVidia drivers? Because the game needed this texture compression thingy to get good performance and only the binary drivers had it.
I wish there was a good way out of this mess. Unfortunatley, until somebody figures out how we can all make money out of inventing stuff without IP laws, it won't get any better.
Thanks. My god, no wonder they took so long. They have to provide separate RPMs for every single different optimisation for every CPU type???? I hope the kernel gets some semblance of binary compatability soon, that's nuts.
Actually I read somewhere that's what happened for FreeBSD. They were getting pressure from some big customers to produce decent Linux drivers, so the order came from the top, and then some engineers did the FreeBSD port because it was pretty similar to doing it for Linux and was a fast hack.
I'd much rather they started shipping RPMs for all the stable kernel versions that are out there. Have they finally produced Psyche RPMS yet?
Messing with them just because "you can" just doesn't seem like good diplomacy.
Is that what you think? That's hardly how things are, it's not like Linus sits in his dark tower, steeples his fingers and says "Today, I think I shall once again break binary compatability to screw over nVidia.. bwhahahahaha".
When they break kernel interfaces, it's to make a better kernel. If they didn't, those parts of the kernel would effectively be frozen in time, and the kernel woudln't move forward, it'd get more crufty and less reliable. We'd all suffer, just so binary driver producers don't have to recompile their drivers. Doesn't sound like a good tradeoff to me.
Could somebody sum up the pros/cons of binary modules. I've been trying to understand this issue for some time, but it's nearly impossible to get technical reasons without ideological bias. So far I have:
Pros:
Commercial interests are happy because they keep trade secrets they may need to stay in business
Better drivers (usually)
Patented tech can be used in Linux, like that nVidia texture compression thing (i don't think all patents are stupid).
Cons:
Makes kernel harder to debug
Sticky GPL enforcenment issues
Some kernel developers don't like it
Often come with stupid licensing, ie nVidia - you can't distribute our drivers, only download them (and then no psyche rpms).
Have the kernel devs decided whether they are good or not?
Wow. You must have gone to an old-skool school:) I'm proud to state that the school I went to is in the top 5% of all comprehensives - it's mixed, non selective and state run. We never did latin or greek, that's rather highbrow. We only learnt French because, well, we're right next door to them. Trig at age 12? Man, we didn't do that until we were 15 or 16 (gcses). I dunno how Brit schooling compares to American, but you're experience seems to have been a lot better than normal.
Oh, and for any Yanks wondering - such articles are regularly published in UK media too, and all the parents stress about lack of quality schooling and how India will kick our ass etc. I think it's a western thing, rather than American.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong, Bluetooth is cool, but little use in TVs (unless you want to put your laptop physically on top of the TV to control it). Bear in mind with PVRs you can already program such playlists without needing a laptop though. We used to do it with the Tivo, it worked pretty well.
I don't know why you think he's trolling. He's got an interesting point. What would one do with a Bluetooth enabled TV?
Well firstly, he's a known troll. He posts on trolltalk for instance. It's a game to him. 35 inch TV 8 years ago? Please. He tries to get replies and mods. It's quite amusing to watch, at least, when you catch them:)
Secondly, Bluetooth doesn't have much use in a TV. Note that a PVR doesn't need the TV to be tuned to the actual channel, it contains its own decoding engine.
Thirdly, Bluetooth is very short range, like 10ft at maximum, water in the air blocks it (which is why those frequencies were chosen). Your computer would have to be very near the TV, for little gain.
I'm not aware of anything like this happening down the road, but the BT idea would be interesting. I know I like my laptop talking wirelessly to my phoine.
That's different. That's a) short range, b) low bandwidth and c) a useful way to exchange information. A TV typically doesn't have or need much information exchange. Maybe we'll see bluetooth TVs in the future, but I doubt it.
Don't even think of using BT to transfer video data, it's severely bandwidth limited.
Yes, you'll need a smartcard (for pay tv) and yes, it will be cracked pretty quickly. At least, if the experience in the UK is anything to go by.
Here ONdigital collapsed after pirated cards flooded the markets. The Canal+ card/crypto system was broken. There was later a scandal when it was revealed that the team of hackers who broke it appeared to have significant backing from News Corp who operated the rival Sky TV which used its own crypt system.
This article talks about watermarking which is a tad more advanced than what's used here, but it makes little difference. The cards will be cracked, cloned, whatever. They should see what is going on outside their own borders.
It'd make no difference. A far better use of time would be to stop domain squatting. Far too often I enter a name and come across some random search site with ludicrously high bidding prices for the domain.
Really, if all the domain squatters/speculators were cleared up.org/.com/.net would become far less crowded. The last set of new domain names failed spectacularly - the only one i've ever seen used is.info:.aero anybody? WTF? An entire TLD for a very specific industry?
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I never said that the GPL takes away my freedom.
Hmmm. I'm finding it hard to reconcile those lines.
And this is true. With GNU, I am not free to add value and then charge for that value
Not at all, you can add value in many ways, just not by forking the code. For instance, rather than write a new feature then try and find customers, find customers first who want that feature and persuade them to pay you to do it for them. It means an inversion of the way you're used to doing business, and it's not applicable to all software, but it can be used in a lot of cases.
There are very clear and strong restrictions on what I can do with GPL software, and that is the hippocrisy, that they complain about restrictions on APSL software simple because those restrictions are incompatible with their own restrictions.
Well in a way, yes, but in another way not really - the GPL restrictions are there in order to protect the original author of a work, the APSL restrictions are there in order to protect Apple. It's different enough for it not to be hypocrisy.
I'm hardly a GPL fanboy btw. It has its uses, like any agreement. Protecting technology from commercial exploitation in this instance. The code I've written for wine is dual LGPLd/X11, and my own project is LGPLd because I want people to be able to make commercial software with it.
Also, "we'd find it a tough sell" to the shareholders isn't an excuse. It's harsh, but if they can't make a living while still doing what's best for everyone, then they should go find some other industry to work in. Allowing Jobs to have huge piles of cash from stock options isn't any argument against a GPLd platform.
So why do all QuickTime videos on Apples site (the only place I ever see them anyway) come in Sorensen? It's not so hard to pick another option from the box is it?
So let me get this straight. You haven't read the article, or read the guys justifications for what he's doing, yet you hope his project falls into oblivion because you don't see the point.
Right. A few things you might want to bear in mind. This interview with Jordan Hubbard, a top guy in the BSD community, reveals a lot. To be exact, it reveals that:
Now I don't know about you, but I couldn't care less about UNIX. Sure, it's nice, I like the coloured directory listings, but you could conceivable argue that Windows was better engineered for instance. UNIX was great in its day, in 2002 it's merely average. Who gives a monkeys about UNIX, it doesn't matter. What does matter is who's in control of a technology as fundamental as computing. To me at any rate, that's a far bigger deal that what APIs are used to write apps.
I just don't see the point.
I don't see the point of FreeBSD. It's recreating UNIX but has opened itself up to commercial forks such as MacOS. What's the point? If they wanted to make a totally kickass OS, they could do a lot better by dropping UNIX and coming up with something truly original. If they wanted to fix the mess that's been made of the computing industry, letting anybody fork your code and close isn't the way to go about doing it.
Next time, before you comment on another guys project, take the time to understand their perspective on things, otherwise you're no better than they are.
Give us a break too. If Apple didn't have enormously fat profit margins on hardware it'd be dead tomorrow. Say what you want about RedHat, but they are making a profit by selling free software. Whether you agree with them or not, those guys had principles, and they're making money out of them regardless.
In a straight up, software only fight between RedHat and Apple, Apple would be blown out of the water, and I challenge anybody to deny that.
If you don't believe me, go look at the financial statements. It's dry reading, but it is quite clear that the vast percentage of Apples revenues come from sales of Mac hardware, not their software. They've been trying for a long time to become a software company, but they aren't one. Or do you think they'd stick with selling hardware if they could make as much money with an Intel version of OS X?
Apple is standing at that meeting point, taking risks, putting their money where their mouth is, giving to the community, getting something back... They may not get everything right, but jesus, give them a little credit and stop insisting that the militant open source dogma is the only acceptable way.
It depends on your perspective. I hardly think commercial software is evil, I write it for a living, but an OS or platform is a special case. If it's not under the GPL, it can be hijacked and we end up with another Microsoft. The temptation for somebody to try and become the next Gates is far too great to be prevented by anything less than a legal agreement.
Originally the GPL had that clause as well, but it was removed in order to preserve peoples sanity. It's a stupid clause. What if you make an experimental change that doesn't work? Do you have to send a useless patch to Apple? What about if you alter the indents to make it look neater in your opinion? They don't really care about that. What about changes that are site specific? The list goes on and on.
The "viral" nature of the GPL is there to stop organisations forking it and then "taking over" the product by adding proprietary modifications that then may become popular, so effectively closing the source. If you never redistribute the code, that can't happen, so there's no need for it.
I see so much FUD about the GPL, really pathetic FUD. Stuff like "the GPL takes away my freedoms". That's BS - it takes away your "freedom" insomuch as laws against murder take away your freedom to kill people. Absolute freedom to do whatever you like simply doesn't exist in reality, why should software licensing be any different.
The GPL places severe restirictions on what I can and cannot do with my software by requiring me to provide source.
No it doesn't. The GPL places some very easily satisfied conditions on you if you modify then redistribute those modifications to somebody elses code. You can use that software for whatever you like, you can modify it in any way you want, but if you want to give other people that software it must be licensed in the same way as it was originally. Big deal.
The key part being - once you install QuickTime.
QuickTime would be okayish (still controlled by Apple) if it always used open codecs, but in practice, it never does. Maybe that'll change now with v6, but their behaviour so far indicates that perhaps not. So you still need to license it from them if you want to build an independant implementation.
Get the win32 codecs pack, the HOWTO is out of date somewhat, and
Configure with the --with-win32libdir=/usr/local/lib/win32 option (if you're installing to /usr/local). I had to set this explicitly, otherwise I got errors about not being able to find codecs.
Oh, and the T3 trailor - probably isn't worth it. I'm trying the XMen2 trailor now :)
Finally big thanks to the MPlayer and Wine teams, who make this possible.
Right. "MPEG4 is the future" says Apple. I think we'll all take you more seriously when you start releasing all those trailers in an open format. Until then, it's just hot air from their PR department.
Hmm, interesting quote. Perhaps the guy was referring to the corporate version then. I remember MS released a prototype "Hailstorm in a box" for digital ID hosting within a firewall. I never got a chance to play with it, but perhaps it is being rearchitected to support that.
One possiblity is that they try and get it accepted inside corps, then when everybody is used to it at work and want it at home too, start doing personal hosting.
I think you're exaggurating :)
Actually I think RedHat got lots of praise for 8.0, especially considering it was such a big leap. Desktop unification was a brilliant move, and for distros that ship both desktops you can expect to see more of this in future I am thinking.
Redhat have been sponsoring (through Havoc) the desktop standards effort for some time now. The standards are hardly "theirs", they are developed in conjunction with the community and the only ties to Redhat are the fact that Havoc is the organiser and the mailing lists are hosted on a Redhat box. Redhat have never been about forcing control on people, far from it.
I personally think 8 is great, it looks extremely slick and professional and the admin tools are nicely integrated into gnome2. The fact that they're now in the black tells me it's going to be alright - the hype has passed, but Linux is still here and going strong.
I spoke with some of the top guys at Passport who were obviously heavily involved with Hailstorm at Digital ID World 2002 in Denver. They assured me Hailstorm was very much alive, but it had turned into a far bigger project than they had thought. In particular, I remember one guy saying something to the effect of "Well, my conscious is clean, I told Bill 2 years was unreasonable, but did he listen? Of course not". Words pretty close to that.
It may have been a red herring, but I seriously doubt it. I for one don't think Hailstorm has gone - just forgotten, at least for now.
I wish there was a good way out of this mess. Unfortunatley, until somebody figures out how we can all make money out of inventing stuff without IP laws, it won't get any better.
Thanks. My god, no wonder they took so long. They have to provide separate RPMs for every single different optimisation for every CPU type???? I hope the kernel gets some semblance of binary compatability soon, that's nuts.
I'd much rather they started shipping RPMs for all the stable kernel versions that are out there. Have they finally produced Psyche RPMS yet?
Surely there are better ways of doing it than that. Drivers don't have to resolve every symbol possible do they?
Is that what you think? That's hardly how things are, it's not like Linus sits in his dark tower, steeples his fingers and says "Today, I think I shall once again break binary compatability to screw over nVidia.. bwhahahahaha".
When they break kernel interfaces, it's to make a better kernel. If they didn't, those parts of the kernel would effectively be frozen in time, and the kernel woudln't move forward, it'd get more crufty and less reliable. We'd all suffer, just so binary driver producers don't have to recompile their drivers. Doesn't sound like a good tradeoff to me.
Why does the kernel module interface change so often though? I mean, surely there are only so many ways to write a mouse driver
Pros:
Cons:
Have the kernel devs decided whether they are good or not?
Wow. You must have gone to an old-skool school :) I'm proud to state that the school I went to is in the top 5% of all comprehensives - it's mixed, non selective and state run. We never did latin or greek, that's rather highbrow. We only learnt French because, well, we're right next door to them. Trig at age 12? Man, we didn't do that until we were 15 or 16 (gcses). I dunno how Brit schooling compares to American, but you're experience seems to have been a lot better than normal.
Oh, and for any Yanks wondering - such articles are regularly published in UK media too, and all the parents stress about lack of quality schooling and how India will kick our ass etc. I think it's a western thing, rather than American.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong, Bluetooth is cool, but little use in TVs (unless you want to put your laptop physically on top of the TV to control it). Bear in mind with PVRs you can already program such playlists without needing a laptop though. We used to do it with the Tivo, it worked pretty well.
Well firstly, he's a known troll. He posts on trolltalk for instance. It's a game to him. 35 inch TV 8 years ago? Please. He tries to get replies and mods. It's quite amusing to watch, at least, when you catch them :)
Secondly, Bluetooth doesn't have much use in a TV. Note that a PVR doesn't need the TV to be tuned to the actual channel, it contains its own decoding engine.
Thirdly, Bluetooth is very short range, like 10ft at maximum, water in the air blocks it (which is why those frequencies were chosen). Your computer would have to be very near the TV, for little gain.
I'm not aware of anything like this happening down the road, but the BT idea would be interesting. I know I like my laptop talking wirelessly to my phoine.
That's different. That's a) short range, b) low bandwidth and c) a useful way to exchange information. A TV typically doesn't have or need much information exchange. Maybe we'll see bluetooth TVs in the future, but I doubt it.
Don't even think of using BT to transfer video data, it's severely bandwidth limited.
Nice troll. Could have been a bit smoother. 35" was overkill. Bluetooth - good one.
Here ONdigital collapsed after pirated cards flooded the markets. The Canal+ card/crypto system was broken. There was later a scandal when it was revealed that the team of hackers who broke it appeared to have significant backing from News Corp who operated the rival Sky TV which used its own crypt system.
This article talks about watermarking which is a tad more advanced than what's used here, but it makes little difference. The cards will be cracked, cloned, whatever. They should see what is going on outside their own borders.
Really, if all the domain squatters/speculators were cleared up .org/.com/.net would become far less crowded. The last set of new domain names failed spectacularly - the only one i've ever seen used is .info: .aero anybody? WTF? An entire TLD for a very specific industry?