Intervideo's lindvd product, that is a linux post of windvd that's bundled with every second dvd drive, was the first commercial dvd player for linux, and its so old i'm suprised no one mentioned it earlier- its been in the market for at least 3 years as far as i remember. Here's a url : http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/LinDVD.jsp . I hope i typed it in correctly- i'm posting from a cellular phone and cant really check;-)
You are aware that this law effectivly forbids selling/advertising/installing/providing support/etc' to any OS that contains firewalling and NAT components ? (i.e. Linux/*BSD/Windows >= 2k)
Well - you're contradicting yourself.
Companies, organizations and governments are looking into open source and free software as a way to slash costs. as a results of that less money will go to the software industry, hence less money for less developers.
Thaking the RMS idea of software development (as I understand it) to the extreme, means exactly what the former poster said : developers will not get payed for developing their software. at most developers will be payed to support software, which usually means that most if not all people who work on software will do so on their own free time (what's left of it) while doing something else (hopefully computer related but probably not) to pay the rent. which means less "quality" programming time spent on the project.
Most of the successful open source project you mentioned (and all of the big ones) were developed (not entirely of course) by people who got payed to work on them full time - Mozilla was mostly the brain child of netscape. many distributions are employing people to work full time on the Linux kernel, KDE and GNOME. OpenOffice is being developed activly by Sun and IBM, while Wine is being contributed to by companies who base their products on it.
IMO - the utopia will not be programmers who contribute their free time to open source projects, but instead commercial software projects being released as open source while large open source projects will be developed jointly by several companies and instituions. Software engineers will be employed full time by these commercial and non-commercial entities - they will be payed to because of their ability to create good software.
The software industry will still exist, not in the way it currently does, but with much greater cooperation and effiency.
Although it matured in to a very nice browser, with very good standard compliance, there are still many anoying bugs - the ones which I find most anoying, and especially anoying as I don't think they get the attention they require, are the BiDi bugs. for a standard compliance aiming browser, the Mozilla developers have sure neglected to pay attention to an important part of an important standard - Unicode.
Now, I'm not saying that Mozilla does not do BiDi - it's just that the bugs in the BiDi implementation are so severe as to make Mozilla completly unsuable to anyone who reads and writes a complex script language. most notable are the "text selction" bugs which makes copying and pasting from pages that contain complex scripts impossible, and worse - the BiDi text input bug which causes Mozilla to spontaneusly crash when entering text in (for example) the text area boxes of weblogs.
The most infuriating thing about this, is that the serious BiDi bugs resolution dates have been postponed to later and later milestones, and now, as those are marked nsBeta1 (meaning - fixes to be submitted before 1.0 released), the source tree still has no fixes in sight, and I'm starting to doubt if we will see Mozilla as a competing browser to IE on the 'end user's' desktop - even after 1.0.
It is interesting to note the hype generated about this "cutting edge technology", when countries other then the US (namely the former soviets and the Israeli) have had similar (if not much more advanced, in the case of the Israeli) tech for over 10 years now.
Also, not that the Helmet Mounted Sight in question is Israeli developed technology - Elbit, which is supplying the technology for the helmet, is one of the two biggest defence contractors in Israel, and also helped with the develpoment of the 15 years old Python 4 AAM which will still out perform, out range and out shoot the "futuristic" AIM-9X which will only be fully delpoyed by 2004 by the best estimates. (for a nice view of the Python 4's capability, check out this video. take a close look at the first sequence showing an actual missile shot, and the path the missile travels).
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Intervideo's lindvd product, that is a linux post of windvd that's bundled with every second dvd drive, was the first commercial dvd player for linux, and its so old i'm suprised no one mentioned it earlier- its been in the market for at least 3 years as far as i remember. Here's a url : http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/LinDVD.jsp . I hope i typed it in correctly- i'm posting from a cellular phone and cant really check ;-)
Its quite understandable that SCO's helpdesk is located in Santa Cruz - as SCO stands for "the Santa Cruz Operation"
You are aware that this law effectivly forbids selling/advertising/installing/providing support/etc' to any OS that contains firewalling and NAT components ? (i.e. Linux/*BSD/Windows >= 2k)
Well - you're contradicting yourself. Companies, organizations and governments are looking into open source and free software as a way to slash costs. as a results of that less money will go to the software industry, hence less money for less developers. Thaking the RMS idea of software development (as I understand it) to the extreme, means exactly what the former poster said : developers will not get payed for developing their software. at most developers will be payed to support software, which usually means that most if not all people who work on software will do so on their own free time (what's left of it) while doing something else (hopefully computer related but probably not) to pay the rent. which means less "quality" programming time spent on the project. Most of the successful open source project you mentioned (and all of the big ones) were developed (not entirely of course) by people who got payed to work on them full time - Mozilla was mostly the brain child of netscape. many distributions are employing people to work full time on the Linux kernel, KDE and GNOME. OpenOffice is being developed activly by Sun and IBM, while Wine is being contributed to by companies who base their products on it. IMO - the utopia will not be programmers who contribute their free time to open source projects, but instead commercial software projects being released as open source while large open source projects will be developed jointly by several companies and instituions. Software engineers will be employed full time by these commercial and non-commercial entities - they will be payed to because of their ability to create good software. The software industry will still exist, not in the way it currently does, but with much greater cooperation and effiency.
Give up konqueror, after all the support they got from Apple ? They would be really dumb to do that.
Now, I'm not saying that Mozilla does not do BiDi - it's just that the bugs in the BiDi implementation are so severe as to make Mozilla completly unsuable to anyone who reads and writes a complex script language. most notable are the "text selction" bugs which makes copying and pasting from pages that contain complex scripts impossible, and worse - the BiDi text input bug which causes Mozilla to spontaneusly crash when entering text in (for example) the text area boxes of weblogs.
The most infuriating thing about this, is that the serious BiDi bugs resolution dates have been postponed to later and later milestones, and now, as those are marked nsBeta1 (meaning - fixes to be submitted before 1.0 released), the source tree still has no fixes in sight, and I'm starting to doubt if we will see Mozilla as a competing browser to IE on the 'end user's' desktop - even after 1.0.
see bugs :
95228
82352
125546
112101
75011
Also, not that the Helmet Mounted Sight in question is Israeli developed technology - Elbit, which is supplying the technology for the helmet, is one of the two biggest defence contractors in Israel, and also helped with the develpoment of the 15 years old Python 4 AAM which will still out perform, out range and out shoot the "futuristic" AIM-9X which will only be fully delpoyed by 2004 by the best estimates. (for a nice view of the Python 4's capability, check out this video. take a close look at the first sequence showing an actual missile shot, and the path the missile travels).