"How this will impact the Click-n-Run deal with Ubuntu will be something to look at since I'm sure Microsoft would not want Linspire to just hand out those codecs to just anybody."
I think Click-n-Run can be used to purchase propritary software. So the deal may not effect Click-n-Run at all. Linspire probably pays Microsoft a cut on any Microsoft Codecs etc. that they sell.
"I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option."
I don't think that is their only option. They could release Windows as Open Source and still be in the strongest position to offer software that runs on it.
People are becoming angry that the playing field isn't level and that's one reason there is a migration away from Windows onto a platform where the developer doesn't have to guess about API calls. If Microsoft Offered a version of Windows that was Open Source a community would quickly form, bugs would get fixed, people would start to feel better about Microsoft and they could still keep Office and other application cash cows closed source.
But absolutely they have got to stop rattling the patent saber. It's not helping them it's just pissing a lot of people off.
"Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things."
Schwartz said more than just some nice things. He explained that moving an existing product to the GPL is more difficult than a product that you start and just put under the GPL to begin with. The existing products can have third party code that was licensed. These parties may not want their code put under the GPL.
I can see that you would want to know where every line of code came. This could take time. If you found third party code that was licensed, you have to either remove that code and rewrite it or get the third party to buy off on GPLing their code.
It is true that when people say "Open
Source" they are primarily thinking of GPL'd code. There are other
Open Source licenses
and the BSD license may be what you're looking for if you want to use
other people's code without giving anything back. I wouldn't call
that "helping" however.
If you write code that links to GPL'd
code you must release that code under the GPL but if your code does
not link to GPL'd code you can keep it proprietary if you wish.
Further, if you want to link to something like the KDE libraries
which are released under the GPL you can still purchase a license
from Troll Tech (the copyright owners) that will allow you to keep
the code base closed.
I know people developing code using
Mono which is a
Linux implementation of some of the ECMA/ISO
standards that Microsoft uses in its.NET technologies. Mono allows
them to keep their source closed.
So there are ways to develop programs
that run on Linux without opening your source. If you don't want to
give back code then don't extend GPL'd code.
"The issue is that the OS needs to learn what to load into the Robson memory in order to increase performance," Sony said."
It sounds to me like Microsoft may have implemented it poorly so it's a feature that doesn't really help.
How many people here are old enough to remember the transistor radio? I remember the big thing was to get a five transistor radio. That was a radio with five (5) transistors. And they had five too but if you looked you might see that one of the three leads on two of the transistors were cut.
Unscrupulous companies were putting five transistors into their radios so that they could advertise that feature but they were using two of them as simple diodes not as transistors. What you paid for was a five transistor radio but what you got was a in effect three transistor radio. You couldn't really sue because the unit had all five transistors, just some of them weren't being used as transistors.
"They're eliminating the fear that if their product is used, they, the customer, won't have to worry about the big bad MS coming after them."
No, they're trying to create fear that Linux contains their IP. They want to eliminate all free as in beer versions of Linux. This is just step two of their plan. The SCO litigation was step one.
We are several versions behind also. I don't know why agency's are upgrading to the bleeding edge so quickly. Maybe it's because it's Washington State and Redmond is influential here. We're also being pressured to upgrade from XP to Vista.
Vista would be bad enough but if we get pushed into a quick upgrade to Office 2007 I see visions of our users with torches and pitchforks. I only hope that the door will be thick enough to keep them out!.
I didn't say we purchased Office 2007. We get attachments from other State Departments who have.
I didn't "blame" anyone in my post. I just expressed my frustration at the fact that others send us attachments that we can't use and that fact is putting pressure on us to "upgrade" to a product that gives us nothing. Frankly my time could be better spent than doing a long drawn out conversion that yields no benefits! I'm not even sure what the compelling reason would be for anyone to move to Office 2007 except that older versions of Office will lose Microsoft's support.
Now although I didn't assign blame in my last post, if you want to get into that discussion I am more than willing.
For a large projects with lots of developers who work via the Internet your suggestions just don't make good sense.
If I start a project and twenty people eventually join in and they check out various parts of the project but don't check them back in for long periods of time, following your suggestions would be horrid.
Linus is right. You want distributed repositories not a centralized one.
My department has started getting Office 2007 files and we find it irritating. We are not ready to go there yet. We have many macros that interface to our database that must be rewritten. It will probably be a year or so before our small I.S. department has time to convert to Office 2007.
The amount of money that will be spent to rewrite code that works with Word 2007 will not be insignificant and the real down side is that we get virtually nothing for our effort!
Maybe Microsoft can use this documentation as a road map on how to write docs... God knows Microsoft has been "unable" to provide useful docs to the EU despite being told that they must.
I know, my karma will burn for that one...
Seriously though if they want to share the documentation that they paid to create with Microsoft and not the Open source community that's their right. They must realize, however, that everything they do or don't do impacts the perception that the Open Source community has of them.
Personally I hope that Novell comes back to the community. Right now they're playing with the Devil. Microsoft has a reputation for back stabbing their partners. From talking to Novell representatives I can honestly say that they don't appear to realize the seriousness of the Microsoft/Novell deal. Their hoping it will give them a sales advantage over Redhat. That's too bad too. I think Novell was positioning itself to be the dominant Linux provider but they just blew it with the Microsoft deal.
What they don't seem to get is that one of the things that is so attractive about doing business with Open Source companies is their perceived ethics. They don't try to find reasons to sue you. Well unless their name is SCO and we all see where that pig is headed. This deal seems to send the message "Buy from us or my buddy here will punch you." Not what I would call ethical.
The really important thing to remember is that almost all of our "news" providers are owned by a couple of mega corporations.
There is probably some censorship going on because of this. i.e. They won't air anything that will hurt their bottom line or upset their benefactors. But I think mostly its that as corporations do, they try to do everything on the cheap. It's much cheaper to get a few fluff stories and run them everywhere than it is to do real journalism.
I remember a time before all of the TV stations were owned by a few corporations and each station had news people who would investigate and compete with other stations for the best story. Now it's all just spoon fed to them.
As a society we are poorer because of corporate greed.
"Then there's the fact that most of the free software - gimp and openoffice - while excellent for student work, is woefully inadequate for typical professional work."
Perhaps you could elaborate in what whay Open Office is "woefully inadequate?" Because frankly it sounds like you just crawled out from under a rock! It is in no way inadequate. Just what doesn't it do that is soooooo important?
I have found that most people don't use most of what Microsoft Office does so whatever "features" you're talking about if they don't exists in Openoffice probably would not be missed. Not even by "professionals."
"We know today how to stop increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. If the situation was really as dire as articles like this seem to pretend it is, and if the outcomes were known to the level they would like us to believe, there would be no reason not to turn the switch off."
Knowing how to top increasing levels is very different from actually being able to do it. The long term solution is conceptually easy but practically difficult. All we have to do is stop dumping greenhouse gases into out atmosphere. Easy right? All you would have to do is to convince the entire world to stop driving cars, flying planes, heating there houses will fossil fuels and generating electricity in ways the generate greenhouse gases.
We currently DO NOT have the technology to continue to use fossil fuels without poisoning out planet. Even electric cars require a source of power to recharge them. It is questionable if you gain anything by not burning gas but rather charging your car via a coal burning plant.
Then there is the added difficulty of corporate greed. There is perhaps 100 trillion dollars worth of oil remaining on our planet. Do you believe that Exxon is going to go along with losing its market?? Hell no! They want to sell every drop of oil and transition us into a new source of power that will be as lucrative as possible for them. In short if we leave our future energy needs to the corporations that are raping us today, they'll position themselves to continue to bleed us tomorrow.
It has been argued that the world's temperature has a history of fluctuation. This is true. However, the real problem is not that the Earth temperature fluctuates but that we are causing it to change at a much greater rate than creatures can evolve.
It's one thing for the average temperature to change a few degrees over the course of a million years it's very much more dangerous to our ecosystem to have that same change over a few hundred years.
It amazes me that some people can ignore the huge volume of scientific data concerning global warming. I can't help but wonder what motivates these people. I have found that many have some vested interest or relationship with the oil industry and others have religious beliefs that won't allow them to consider that man could destroy the planet.
I had one guy tell me that the world was made for man and we would never run out of oil because God had created the world to serve man's needs forever.
This guy, however, really is something. I replied to one of his rants where he discounted the ice core science without showing any references of course. I simply said "You're dead wrong on that." and got modded down into oblivion. Probably rightfully so as I should have posted various cites but I didn't feel it would do any good as he was ignoring all other cites that were posted by various people.
He responded in a very rude and obnoxious way. I believe you are correct. There is something not right with this dude. He actually insinuated that believing in global warming could cause irreparable damage. I didn't quite understand how pushing the world to clean up the environment could be dangerous but it made as much sense as the other dribble he was severing.
It would be pointless to direct you to any documentation and data. You obviously are emotionally attached to the issue and would discount any data presented.
You call me a liar? Okay I've got a name your you. Oil Industry Shill. I may or may not be true but it's just as valid as you puffed up statements.
"Don't waste my time by bringing up ice core samples; there is no correlation of ice core samples to global temperature which is accurate to less than ten years, and if you actually bother looking at the ice core record, you'll notice that the correlation that we've seen for more than ten million years is actually holding exactly where we would expect for it to."
Slashdot Mirror
that you're clueless.
Giving in to a bullies demands for protection money is NEVER a good idea. That should be simple enough for even a MS fanboy to understand.
I can see your point with regard to ideas that are truly expensive to implement.
I don't think this applies to software. How much does it cost to put a button on a web page?
where's the uninformed moderation class when you need it?
"How this will impact the Click-n-Run deal with Ubuntu will be something to look at since I'm sure Microsoft would not want Linspire to just hand out those codecs to just anybody."
I think Click-n-Run can be used to purchase propritary software. So the deal may not effect Click-n-Run at all. Linspire probably pays Microsoft a cut on any Microsoft Codecs etc. that they sell.
There are many Open Source products that are very high quality. Your comment is rather ignorant.
"I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option."
I don't think that is their only option. They could release Windows as Open Source and still be in the strongest position to offer software that runs on it.
People are becoming angry that the playing field isn't level and that's one reason there is a migration away from Windows onto a platform where the developer doesn't have to guess about API calls. If Microsoft Offered a version of Windows that was Open Source a community would quickly form, bugs would get fixed, people would start to feel better about Microsoft and they could still keep Office and other application cash cows closed source.
But absolutely they have got to stop rattling the patent saber. It's not helping them it's just pissing a lot of people off.
"Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things."
Schwartz said more than just some nice things. He explained that moving an existing product to the GPL is more difficult than a product that you start and just put under the GPL to begin with. The existing products can have third party code that was licensed. These parties may not want their code put under the GPL.
I can see that you would want to know where every line of code came. This could take time. If you found third party code that was licensed, you have to either remove that code and rewrite it or get the third party to buy off on GPLing their code.
It is true that when people say "Open Source" they are primarily thinking of GPL'd code. There are other Open Source licenses and the BSD license may be what you're looking for if you want to use other people's code without giving anything back. I wouldn't call that "helping" however.
If you write code that links to GPL'd code you must release that code under the GPL but if your code does not link to GPL'd code you can keep it proprietary if you wish. Further, if you want to link to something like the KDE libraries which are released under the GPL you can still purchase a license from Troll Tech (the copyright owners) that will allow you to keep the code base closed.
I know people developing code using Mono which is a Linux implementation of some of the ECMA/ISO standards that Microsoft uses in its .NET technologies. Mono allows
them to keep their source closed.
So there are ways to develop programs that run on Linux without opening your source. If you don't want to give back code then don't extend GPL'd code.
"A company can't put time and money into helping a project when a competitor can then just use those changes..."
Do you understand Open Source at all?? The WHOLE POINT IS TO LET OTHER'S USE YOUR CODE!!
Man, I'm beginning to wonder how many astro-turfers are crawling around slash-dot.
"The issue is that the OS needs to learn what to load into the Robson memory in order to increase performance," Sony said."
It sounds to me like Microsoft may have implemented it poorly so it's a feature that doesn't really help.
How many people here are old enough to remember the transistor radio? I remember the big thing was to get a five transistor radio. That was a radio with five (5) transistors. And they had five too but if you looked you might see that one of the three leads on two of the transistors were cut.
Unscrupulous companies were putting five transistors into their radios so that they could advertise that feature but they were using two of them as simple diodes not as transistors. What you paid for was a five transistor radio but what you got was a in effect three transistor radio. You couldn't really sue because the unit had all five transistors, just some of them weren't being used as transistors.
"They're eliminating the fear that if their product is used, they, the customer, won't have to worry about the big bad MS coming after them."
No, they're trying to create fear that Linux contains their IP. They want to eliminate all free as in beer versions of Linux. This is just step two of their plan. The SCO litigation was step one.
With Ballmer's ability to jump around he'd be harder to shoot in the face...
We are several versions behind also. I don't know why agency's are upgrading to the bleeding edge so quickly. Maybe it's because it's Washington State and Redmond is influential here. We're also being pressured to upgrade from XP to Vista.
Vista would be bad enough but if we get pushed into a quick upgrade to Office 2007 I see visions of our users with torches and pitchforks. I only hope that the door will be thick enough to keep them out!.
I didn't say we purchased Office 2007. We get attachments from other State Departments who have.
I didn't "blame" anyone in my post. I just expressed my frustration at the fact that others send us attachments that we can't use and that fact is putting pressure on us to "upgrade" to a product that gives us nothing. Frankly my time could be better spent than doing a long drawn out conversion that yields no benefits! I'm not even sure what the compelling reason would be for anyone to move to Office 2007 except that older versions of Office will lose Microsoft's support.
Now although I didn't assign blame in my last post, if you want to get into that discussion I am more than willing.
For a large projects with lots of developers who work via the Internet your suggestions just don't make good sense.
If I start a project and twenty people eventually join in and they check out various parts of the project but don't check them back in for long periods of time, following your suggestions would be horrid.
Linus is right. You want distributed repositories not a centralized one.
My department has started getting Office 2007 files and we find it irritating. We are not ready to go there yet. We have many macros that interface to our database that must be rewritten. It will probably be a year or so before our small I.S. department has time to convert to Office 2007.
The amount of money that will be spent to rewrite code that works with Word 2007 will not be insignificant and the real down side is that we get virtually nothing for our effort!
Maybe Microsoft can use this documentation as a road map on how to write docs... God knows Microsoft has been "unable" to provide useful docs to the EU despite being told that they must.
I know, my karma will burn for that one...
Seriously though if they want to share the documentation that they paid to create with Microsoft and not the Open source community that's their right. They must realize, however, that everything they do or don't do impacts the perception that the Open Source community has of them.
Personally I hope that Novell comes back to the community. Right now they're playing with the Devil. Microsoft has a reputation for back stabbing their partners. From talking to Novell representatives I can honestly say that they don't appear to realize the seriousness of the Microsoft/Novell deal. Their hoping it will give them a sales advantage over Redhat. That's too bad too. I think Novell was positioning itself to be the dominant Linux provider but they just blew it with the Microsoft deal.
What they don't seem to get is that one of the things that is so attractive about doing business with Open Source companies is their perceived ethics. They don't try to find reasons to sue you. Well unless their name is SCO and we all see where that pig is headed. This deal seems to send the message "Buy from us or my buddy here will punch you." Not what I would call ethical.
Oh well wait and see I guess.
I think they should call it the yaba-daba-doo museum...
The really important thing to remember is that almost all of our "news" providers are owned by a couple of mega corporations.
There is probably some censorship going on because of this. i.e. They won't air anything that will hurt their bottom line or upset their benefactors. But I think mostly its that as corporations do, they try to do everything on the cheap. It's much cheaper to get a few fluff stories and run them everywhere than it is to do real journalism.
I remember a time before all of the TV stations were owned by a few corporations and each station had news people who would investigate and compete with other stations for the best story. Now it's all just spoon fed to them.
As a society we are poorer because of corporate greed.
"Then there's the fact that most of the free software - gimp and openoffice - while excellent for student work, is woefully inadequate for typical professional work."
Perhaps you could elaborate in what whay Open Office is "woefully inadequate?" Because frankly it sounds like you just crawled out from under a rock! It is in no way inadequate. Just what doesn't it do that is soooooo important?
I have found that most people don't use most of what Microsoft Office does so whatever "features" you're talking about if they don't exists in Openoffice probably would not be missed. Not even by "professionals."
"We know today how to stop increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. If the situation was really as dire as articles like this seem to pretend it is, and if the outcomes were known to the level they would like us to believe, there would be no reason not to turn the switch off."
Knowing how to top increasing levels is very different from actually being able to do it. The long term solution is conceptually easy but practically difficult. All we have to do is stop dumping greenhouse gases into out atmosphere. Easy right? All you would have to do is to convince the entire world to stop driving cars, flying planes, heating there houses will fossil fuels and generating electricity in ways the generate greenhouse gases.
We currently DO NOT have the technology to continue to use fossil fuels without poisoning out planet. Even electric cars require a source of power to recharge them. It is questionable if you gain anything by not burning gas but rather charging your car via a coal burning plant.
Then there is the added difficulty of corporate greed. There is perhaps 100 trillion dollars worth of oil remaining on our planet. Do you believe that Exxon is going to go along with losing its market?? Hell no! They want to sell every drop of oil and transition us into a new source of power that will be as lucrative as possible for them. In short if we leave our future energy needs to the corporations that are raping us today, they'll position themselves to continue to bleed us tomorrow.
It has been argued that the world's temperature has a history of fluctuation. This is true. However, the real problem is not that the Earth temperature fluctuates but that we are causing it to change at a much greater rate than creatures can evolve.
It's one thing for the average temperature to change a few degrees over the course of a million years it's very much more dangerous to our ecosystem to have that same change over a few hundred years.
It amazes me that some people can ignore the huge volume of scientific data concerning global warming. I can't help but wonder what motivates these people. I have found that many have some vested interest or relationship with the oil industry and others have religious beliefs that won't allow them to consider that man could destroy the planet.
I had one guy tell me that the world was made for man and we would never run out of oil because God had created the world to serve man's needs forever.
This guy, however, really is something. I replied to one of his rants where he discounted the ice core science without showing any references of course. I simply said "You're dead wrong on that." and got modded down into oblivion. Probably rightfully so as I should have posted various cites but I didn't feel it would do any good as he was ignoring all other cites that were posted by various people.
He responded in a very rude and obnoxious way. I believe you are correct. There is something not right with this dude. He actually insinuated that believing in global warming could cause irreparable damage. I didn't quite understand how pushing the world to clean up the environment could be dangerous but it made as much sense as the other dribble he was severing.
It would be pointless to direct you to any documentation and data. You obviously are emotionally attached to the issue and would discount any data presented.
You call me a liar? Okay I've got a name your you. Oil Industry Shill. I may or may not be true but it's just as valid as you puffed up statements.
"Don't waste my time by bringing up ice core samples; there is no correlation of ice core samples to global temperature which is accurate to less than ten years, and if you actually bother looking at the ice core record, you'll notice that the correlation that we've seen for more than ten million years is actually holding exactly where we would expect for it to."
Nope. You're dead wrong about that!