Rather than just pick up the phone and hold it to your head, you have to take your eyes off the road and screw around with a bluetooth device, because you didn't remember to pair it when you got in.
The unions aren't in any way attempting to secure equal pay for equal work. It's just a ploy to raise some salaries without real reason. If it weren't they'd be willing to "equalize" pay by lowering that of those they seem to feel are overpaid.
Dell, HP, IBM (their PC division is quite healthy as Lenovo) are all going strong.
How many of the old UNIX vendors that tied their implementation to overpriced hardware are still around? Sun is now Oracle's bitch, and SGI has been dead for years. IBM still supports legacy installations of AIX, but they're more about Linux, which is why they're still around.
If you're talking about the old PalmOS. The original Palm company was sold to 3M with the provision that Handspring (composed of the people who originally built and ran Palm) would get a license to continue building products with it. Third parties were never allowed to produce PalmOS devices.
It's not just Microsoft's strategy. All the old UNIX vendors withered under Linux, which could be run on commodity hardware.
There will never be one hardware vendor to rule them all. It just doesn't work that way. If you insist on tying a platform to a single vendor, it will die.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers, so they'll get passed over.
Sure, if Dell (or anyone else) is really avoiding giving out source, have at them. But lets leave the torches and pitchforks in our pants for at least six months.
I have absolutely no problem with writing something polite and informative about the issues. That can only be helpful. I don't much like the whole "you robbed me because I'm a leftie!" sentiment of TFA, though.
I'd rather foster an environment of experimental gaming development than only seeing the most anally polished games that meet each and every possible special interest checkmark. If the game is successful, they can always go back and release a version that addresses the issues at hand.
Indies don't have a lot of spare resources to throw around. If you insist that every game that can be accessible must be, you'll kill a lot of good games.
I'd point out that it's not necessarily the implementation that's expensive, but identifying the issue in the first place. Note that it's not just lefties, but the colourblind, the deaf, dyslexics and I'm sure lots of other things that don't spring immediately to mind.
It's one thing to call out a large developer who can have people familiar with the issues of these groups float between development teams, but it's not reasonable to expect small/indie developers (like the one in the article) to have the same resources.
Oh, and my Samus is black and white and wears a bikini under her power armour, and that's the way I like her.
When the cost to identify and resolve those not so trivial issues exceeds the revenue expected from whatever subset of the ~7% of the population that is left handed that can not or will not adapt to right handed controls it just won't be done. Nor should it.
It may not be an issue for games with a large budget, or games developed by large companies, but consider a small developer with precisely one QA engineer. Should they double the size of the QA department to deal with lefties? Should they have cut out half of Samus' animations so they could have both left and right handed version?
I don't mean to pick on you, but I think you lack perspective. Cognitive and sensory minorities should absolutely be considered in game development (and everything else), but keep in mind that it's not always possible or practical. If we insist that it must, it won't bring those games to the minorities, it will just keep them from being produced at all.
Obviously the were willing to distribute the source, since they have, and obviously there have been no unfulfilled requests.
Again, there is not a time requirement in the GPL. So long as they do, eventually, give you the source they are not in violation. Especially when the do so within the cliche "please allow 6-12 weeks for processing".
If six months down the line they still haven't responded, perhaps a polite but pointed rejoinder is warranted, but pitching a fit now just makes you look like a jackass.
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange
There's no timeframe specified, and the license was written at a time where these things would quite often be done on postal timeframes.
I'm all for holding companies that actually violate the GPL to the fire, but when people pitch a fit about a simple delay it makes us all look like jackasses.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how.
Rather than just pick up the phone and hold it to your head, you have to take your eyes off the road and screw around with a bluetooth device, because you didn't remember to pair it when you got in.
The MIT implementation moved to a non (or at least less) free license, and the community walked away from them.
Not everything can be monetized, I suppose. I'm certainly not blameless; I disabled their kinda creepy google shenanigans.
Hopefully they'll release the plugin source, if they haven't already, so we can continue with our own servers.
Like x.org?
The unions aren't in any way attempting to secure equal pay for equal work. It's just a ploy to raise some salaries without real reason. If it weren't they'd be willing to "equalize" pay by lowering that of those they seem to feel are overpaid.
Dell, HP, IBM (their PC division is quite healthy as Lenovo) are all going strong.
How many of the old UNIX vendors that tied their implementation to overpriced hardware are still around? Sun is now Oracle's bitch, and SGI has been dead for years. IBM still supports legacy installations of AIX, but they're more about Linux, which is why they're still around.
But yeah, Apple will be different. OK.
If you're talking about the old PalmOS. The original Palm company was sold to 3M with the provision that Handspring (composed of the people who originally built and ran Palm) would get a license to continue building products with it. Third parties were never allowed to produce PalmOS devices.
It's not just Microsoft's strategy. All the old UNIX vendors withered under Linux, which could be run on commodity hardware.
There will never be one hardware vendor to rule them all. It just doesn't work that way. If you insist on tying a platform to a single vendor, it will die.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers, so they'll get passed over.
Sure, if Dell (or anyone else) is really avoiding giving out source, have at them. But lets leave the torches and pitchforks in our pants for at least six months.
I have absolutely no problem with writing something polite and informative about the issues. That can only be helpful. I don't much like the whole "you robbed me because I'm a leftie!" sentiment of TFA, though.
I'd rather foster an environment of experimental gaming development than only seeing the most anally polished games that meet each and every possible special interest checkmark. If the game is successful, they can always go back and release a version that addresses the issues at hand.
Indies don't have a lot of spare resources to throw around. If you insist that every game that can be accessible must be, you'll kill a lot of good games.
I don't think we disagree much.
I'd point out that it's not necessarily the implementation that's expensive, but identifying the issue in the first place. Note that it's not just lefties, but the colourblind, the deaf, dyslexics and I'm sure lots of other things that don't spring immediately to mind.
It's one thing to call out a large developer who can have people familiar with the issues of these groups float between development teams, but it's not reasonable to expect small/indie developers (like the one in the article) to have the same resources.
Oh, and my Samus is black and white and wears a bikini under her power armour, and that's the way I like her.
I doubt very much this game sold anywhere near 10 million copies in total.
Oh, and a little googling tells me there have been 3.6 million DSi's sold (which this game requires)
Dell is and was in compliance with the license. They were are and willing to provide the source.
A little googling suggests the first request was something like three weeks ago. Do you really think this justifies all this drama?
When the cost to identify and resolve those not so trivial issues exceeds the revenue expected from whatever subset of the ~7% of the population that is left handed that can not or will not adapt to right handed controls it just won't be done. Nor should it.
It may not be an issue for games with a large budget, or games developed by large companies, but consider a small developer with precisely one QA engineer. Should they double the size of the QA department to deal with lefties? Should they have cut out half of Samus' animations so they could have both left and right handed version?
I don't mean to pick on you, but I think you lack perspective. Cognitive and sensory minorities should absolutely be considered in game development (and everything else), but keep in mind that it's not always possible or practical. If we insist that it must, it won't bring those games to the minorities, it will just keep them from being produced at all.
Obviously the were willing to distribute the source, since they have, and obviously there have been no unfulfilled requests.
Again, there is not a time requirement in the GPL. So long as they do, eventually, give you the source they are not in violation. Especially when the do so within the cliche "please allow 6-12 weeks for processing".
If six months down the line they still haven't responded, perhaps a polite but pointed rejoinder is warranted, but pitching a fit now just makes you look like a jackass.
It says nothing of the kind.
The words "on demand" are not in it.
But it's not what the license actually says:
There's no timeframe specified, and the license was written at a time where these things would quite often be done on postal timeframes.
I'm all for holding companies that actually violate the GPL to the fire, but when people pitch a fit about a simple delay it makes us all look like jackasses.
They weren't violating the GPL - it does not specify a time requirement, and a few months is hardly unreasonable.
And a pony.
Who has a sense of entitlement? What I do on my computer is none of your business.
So that's irrelevant.
No more than I owe them patronage.
Horse armor, or a quest that's obviously supposed to be in the game because you run into someone trying to give it to you, I will not.
If I then have to pirate the whole game just to get around the DLC DRM, I will.
Proper code has comments with exactly that.