Since the judge is holding that the charge of misappropriation on the basis of circumstantial evidence has some basis, then the solution is to re-do the crack without reverse engineering an existing player.
I wonder if knowing the key length (which we all do) would be too prejudicial? The DVDCCA don't seem to regard the number 40 as a trade secret at this point. Was the algorithm known before the crack? If so, then it is just a matter of searching 2^40/40 keys.
The difference is that Linus is protecting the Linux trademark (which he owns) for the use of himself and others for respectable purposes at very little cost.
Cybersquatters by contrast generally do not own or use the trademark (or use it in a desultory way to avoid cybersquatting laws), and only hold the domain name with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder.
So both Linus and cybersqatters hold and sell names.
But they sell for different reasons, to different customers, and for different prices.
Thus it is perfectly consistent to condem one and praise the other.
The UK TV series is I believe BBC2's highest rating show. The latest series is duel based and so closer to the spirit of the original event than earlier series (which involved odd events like sumo and tug'o'war). The web page is at www.robotwars.co.uk.
Some of this years entrants have been really quite impressive, and might acheive parity with the US creations in the 180lb division. We haven't had any really good walkers yet though.
Many western governments have had a de-facto ban on non-Microsoft products for a long time. These come in subtle forms: purchasing agreements with vendors who only supply Windows boxes, mandated file formats and applications for some tasks and so on.
So in one sense I don't see this (alleged) move on behalf of the Chinese government as any worse than what western governments have done.
The question which arises is, how should governments chose their software? We might suggest fitness for the job, but if every office of every department does their own comparative study, they will probably spend more than if they bought MS in the first place.
Governments have two reponsibilities to balence: get the job done and not waste the tax payers money. Linux certainly has advantages in the second task, but there are still application holes where the former is a serious problems in the former. So the issue is not cut-and-dried.
Having lived in the UK and California, my experience is that freeway driving in California is less stressful and feels safer. The main reasons seem to be:
1. The speed limits are enforced, so most people obey them.
2. Traffic may overtake on either side.
This tends to lead to all the lanes on the freeway moving at fairly similar speeds. By contrast, in the UK, there will often be one lane moving at 60mph (50 up hills), one a 75, and one at anything up to 100. Changing lanes becomes a serious business.
This leads to a further problem that all the light traffic concentrates in the centre lane. The traffic density in this lane often exceeds the critical density for the speed, leading to sudden speed changes in the lane.
The US system may seem dangerous to UK drivers, but it leads to much better distribution of traffic between lanes, and much more even speeds.
I think hardare speed limiters are going a bit far, but I would certainly like to see speed limits enforced in the UK.
The really interesting issue here is the way the free software community has impacted business model.
When way the last time you heard of a major corporation apologizing publicly to a group of individuals for having bahaved in an entirely legal manner and without any threat of legal action?
Sun may be wholly behind the ideals of free software, but they certainly seem to be aware that they are part of a community and have certain responsibilities as a result.
It also says something about the power of public opinion on the internet.
I'm afraid that 'Legos' is the common usage in the US, and so universal that I see no chance of it changing.
Strangely, this was the linguistic difference that I found most disturbing whilest living in America, although the crisps/chips/fries and tram/trolley/shopping-cart contortions were more confusing.
Thats a guess, on the basis that the four-foot Alice in Wonderland by the same guy is quoted at $600-800.
I'm wondering if I can figure out the design from the pics. My artistic talents don't run to doing it from scratch. I'm sure I can find some children who wouldn't mind an big box of red and blue bricks for Christmas. (Or can someone build a BSD deamon?)
Of course the true geek approach is to grab the 3-d model from Tux:AQFH and pixelise it.:)
I want to know about png support. After all, we burned all our gifs, didn't we. Didn't we? Oh, if we are slashdot, then we didn't.
(Actually, I'm seeing about 9% failure rate amongst users from a broad cross section of society coming to my site unable to view png's. Most are Win3.1 or Mac+IE users. Upgrade options are Opera or Netscape4.5/Mozilla respectively.)
I agree with the first poster that this is almost certainly to ensure that the downloader is legally responsible to become a party to the license.
This would appear to be against the non-discrimination clause of the DFSG, but on the othr hand, what is the alternative? You can't ask someone to make a legally binding agreement who cannot legally enter a legally binding agreement.
To copy anything under GPL involves acceptance of the license, so my guess is that minors already need parental permission to copy GPL licensed (or any free) software.
I don't see that the 'if any part of this agreement is illegal the rest still applies' clause helps either.
I was thinking of Linux-FT: a defunct UK distribution. Instead of copying packages to the hdd, it used copycache. The hdd essentially became a cache for the CD. All it copies to the hdd during the install is a minimal base system and symlinks to the CD for all the apps. A demon then replaces the links with the files themselves when they are referenced. If the hard disk becomes too full, the oldest files are converted back to links.
This leads to a very quick install of a very comprehensive system, and was useful when hdds were smaller than CDs. Of course, it clogs up your CD drive. And unfortunately, I suspect the distro is now too out of date to handle a modern machine.
Thay have a culture now. It is different from the one they had before the cultural revolution. I'm not suggesting they, or we, or anyone else go back to feudalism.
To some extent politics and culture are inextricably intertwined. I would like to see what China could become under a more liberal government. But I can guess what it will become if all the international corporations are allowed to pour in and create a culture by marketting. Of course, if the Chinese people chose that sort of society, more power to them.
India seems to strike a happy balence, with democracy and yet a distinct culture. Of course, India has its own share of poverty and ethnic factionalism.
The big question all of this revolves around is why the rich first world cultures are culturally less diverse in most respects than the rest of the world. If it is a historical accident, then maybe we will see better societies built from different foundations if we don't straightjacket them with out own ideas.
On the other hand, if all societies in which there is a good deal of freedom and wealth must gravitate towards a particular set of cultral values, then monoculturalism offers relief for poor and opressed people everywhere.
As it may be clear from my first post, I suspect and hope that the former is the case.
Firstly, I rather like living in a culturally diverse world. I don't want to see western north atlantic culture domainte the world. I like the fact that France wants to remain French, China wants to remain Chinese, and Australia wants to strengthen its own self-identity by getting rid of the monarchy (although I'd rather we keep them for now in the UK).
And MS, both through its profit-centric worldview, and through it attempts to create a computational monoculture, does tend to be a vehicle for US culture.
So I approve of China adopting Linux, and Chinese-izing it.
On the other hand, I dont like the fact that China maintains its identity through such oppressive means. So a government (rather than grass roots) endorsement is a bit of an embarassment.
If Linux makes computing and information more accessible to the Chinese people, that would be good. It would be wrong to punish the people for the sins of the government (contrast Iraq, where UN estimates say 250,000 to 500,000 children have died due to medical supplies stopped by sanctions). At the same time, just as some medical supplies can also be used by the military, computing technology can also be used by the government to monitor the people.
So I don't see the issue as black and white as ESR does. I would rather our reactions to China were built up cooperatively from a grass roots level, just as our development has been, rather than being spoken for when I for one haven't yet reached a conclusion on the issue.
Having said that, ESR is spot on when he says that this will be used as ammunition against Linux for those who use 'communist' as an obscenity. The links between open source and anarchism, libertarianism, or scientific-collaboration are all stronger than the parallels with communism. However open source rests uneasy with capitalism, and there are many who believe that everything which is not capitalism is communism.
Is anyone else kicking themselves and thinking 'why didn't I think of this and sell it to a graphics co'?
Its so much simpler that SLI or split screen technology. You could retrofit it to existing cards with a new driver and a very small gizmo to switch between them. (I guess some syncing required too).
The penalty, which is inconsequential, but I guess the reason we all overlooked this, is that the delay (or rather lag) from starting on a frame to getting it on the screen is twice as long (since there is only one engine working on each frame). But this lag will not be noticable, wheras low frame rates are.
Interesting. It will be a box with Microsoft tax but no Intel tax. Not that I think that it will be enough to put AMD in profit....
Anyway, how long do you think it is going to take for someone to port Linux to this thing? I expect WinCE will try and keep user software out of real mode, but there will be a hole somewhere which will allow a loadlin launcher in.
There is Linux advocacy, and there is misinformation. I admire your enthusiasm, but I think it is better if we work with truth and leave the misinformation to the other side.
Point by point...
1. Most scalable? If you mean range (smallest to largest machine), then this is certainly true. Linux doesn't scale as high as Solaris, Irix or Unicos though.
2. Hard to compare, because all the contendors approach the reliability of the hardware. I think Linux behaves less gracefully under swap exhaustion that some unices? And failover and journalling are only just coming on line? Hot swap is still under development?
3. Are you implying x86 is the most scalable, reliable architecture available? Alpha servers are still way ahead on fp power. The IBM power3 is pretty hot too. SGI have outstanding SMP aritechtures. PCs suffer in reliability, partly due to the huge range of components available and partly due to low cost parts. But Linux will run on the other architectures too.
4. Only Digital unix has acheived B2 certification. IIRC without ACLs, Linux can't even match NT3.5's C2.
5. Maybe. It still does not have the track record of BSD, although this may be partly inertia.
My call would be that BSD or Solaris would be good conservative choices, since they are well proven on big servers. Linux is perhaps the more future-proof option given the flood of development.
Wakko is absolutely right when it comes to the relative merits of Linux and Unicos on SMP or parallel machine - Linux wasn't designed for that job and won't do it. Not now, not in the near future. Unicos currently runs machine with up to 2048 processors. Linux hasn't really mastered 16.
However, the proposed machine is bound to be a cluster, not a single machine. Linux will do this just fine. In fact Linux would run on ASCI Red if there were drivers for the networking hardware. (They've booted individual nodes with both Linux and NT).
So there is a possibility of Linux. I guess it might be easier to use Linux on IA64 than port IRIX/Unicos.
My reservation here is that neither the Itanic nor MIPS chips offer cutting edge performance.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
So the fact that QT and get_it are on the same CD does not bring them under the scope of the GPL, since QT is not based on get_it. Neither does copying them to the HDD.
Hmm. Trying to reconcile all those terms for run-time linking is tough. Part of the problem seems to be that the GPL is written more for apps than for OS components.
Oh well, maybe someone cleverer than me can puzzle it out!
Actually, I agree with you on the importance of the GPL, and I no longer regularly use KDE anyway.
But I think that there is still a borderline case that could be made for QT being an "essential system library". If you have a KDE based system with Kdm then your machine will not even boot properly when QT is removed. Furthermore, none of your base applications, with the exception of Netscape, will work.
In the case of Corel and Caldera, I'm not even sure the installer will work without QT.
Now admittedly in the Linux community we recognize the difference between OS and GUI. You can still boot the system in console mode and have a fully functioning operating system.
However, this exactly parallels the situation with Windows: if you remove the widget-set-which-has-no-name, you system won't function normally. You can still boot to DOS mode, but you can't perform normal system management tasks or run base applications. And yet the GPL was written with the intent of allowing GPL'ed apps on top of non-free systems such as Windows (Indeed in the early days of the FSF there were only proprietary unices to run GPL stuff on).
So, while I agree on philosophical grounds with the choice of the GPL whenever possible, I find it hard to see how GPL applications on QT are fundamentally different to GPL applications on Windows.
Even so, the argument is borderline. If QT continues to spread I think it will become hard to refute.
I think the situation has changed since this debate originally arose.
The QT and GPL licenses certainly are potentially in conflict, but whether they are actually in conflict depends on current practice.
IIRC, the GPL contains a clause which allows software to be linked with non-GPL packages if those packages are routinely supplied as part of the OS. Hence you can GPL a Windows application, and you can link applications with Xfree86 which is not GPL.
Now every major Linux distribution is shipping QT and KDE, doesn't QT now fall under this same exception?
France is one of the most fiercly nationalistic (mainly in a good way) countries in Europe, and frequently takes action against dilution of French culture by overseas influences. The expurgation of the language being a notable example.
Open source offers a way to replace one `culturally imperialistic' product with one which can be modified and repackaged in France, and sold to profit French firms.
After Korea, my money was on France to be next. After that though, I'm at a loss. Maybe India.
Is it my imagination, or has it become more and more difficult to turn off image loading in browsers since the advent of banner ads. Does it require the imagination of a conspiracy theorist to suspect that maybe, just maybe, Netscape and Microsoft were influenced in hiding this option?
Think what we will be able to do with the final mozilla code though:
Refuse any cookie not coming from the same IP as the topmost frame. (The current Netscape cookie filter only picks out cookies sent from one site to be read by another IIRC).
Refuse cookies attached to gifs.
Refuse gifs from different IPs from the surrounding page.
Buttons on the toolbar to turn these on and off, so Slashdot can still earn add revenue! Maybe even a db of sites from which we are happy to have ads.
Oh, for more coding time and less projects to work on!
Actually, I think you have drawn attention to an interesting point:
Windows and Mac, the API is tied to the OS, so there is no competition in API design apart from the competition between OS.
Under Linux, there are competing APIs, so you can program using APIs defined in Gnome, KDE, Xlib, Motif, tk etc. And this competition is one of the factors which will determine which environments succeed, since the cleaner APIs will attract more developers.
Slashdot Mirror
You wait all year for a journalling filesystem and then three come at once.
The contraceptive pill. Which has certainly changed the face of society. Of course us nerds might be expected to overlook that one.
Also on the social side, state funded education for all, and state funded healthcare for all are pretty big, at least on this side of the pond.
Of the previous suggestions though, I certainly have to go with plastics and antibiotics.
Since the judge is holding that the charge of misappropriation on the basis of circumstantial evidence has some basis, then the solution is to re-do the crack without reverse engineering an existing player.
I wonder if knowing the key length (which we all do) would be too prejudicial? The DVDCCA don't seem to regard the number 40 as a trade secret at this point. Was the algorithm known before the crack? If so, then it is just a matter of searching 2^40/40 keys.
The difference is that Linus is protecting the Linux trademark (which he owns) for the use of himself and others for respectable purposes at very little cost.
Cybersquatters by contrast generally do not own or use the trademark (or use it in a desultory way to avoid cybersquatting laws), and only hold the domain name with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder.
So both Linus and cybersqatters hold and sell names.
But they sell for different reasons, to different customers, and for different prices.
Thus it is perfectly consistent to condem one and praise the other.
Some of this years entrants have been really quite impressive, and might acheive parity with the US creations in the 180lb division. We haven't had any really good walkers yet though.
I absolutely agree. And somewhat disagree.
Many western governments have had a de-facto ban on non-Microsoft products for a long time. These come in subtle forms: purchasing agreements with vendors who only supply Windows boxes, mandated file formats and applications for some tasks and so on.
So in one sense I don't see this (alleged) move on behalf of the Chinese government as any worse than what western governments have done.
The question which arises is, how should governments chose their software? We might suggest fitness for the job, but if every office of every department does their own comparative study, they will probably spend more than if they bought MS in the first place.
Governments have two reponsibilities to balence: get the job done and not waste the tax payers money. Linux certainly has advantages in the second task, but there are still application holes where the former is a serious problems in the former. So the issue is not cut-and-dried.
Having lived in the UK and California, my experience is that freeway driving in California is less stressful and feels safer. The main reasons seem to be:
1. The speed limits are enforced, so most people obey them.
2. Traffic may overtake on either side.
This tends to lead to all the lanes on the freeway moving at fairly similar speeds. By contrast, in the UK, there will often be one lane moving at 60mph (50 up hills), one a 75, and one at anything up to 100. Changing lanes becomes a serious business.
This leads to a further problem that all the light traffic concentrates in the centre lane. The traffic density in this lane often exceeds the critical density for the speed, leading to sudden speed changes in the lane.
The US system may seem dangerous to UK drivers, but it leads to much better distribution of traffic between lanes, and much more even speeds.
I think hardare speed limiters are going a bit far, but I would certainly like to see speed limits enforced in the UK.
The really interesting issue here is the way the free software community has impacted business model.
When way the last time you heard of a major corporation apologizing publicly to a group of individuals for having bahaved in an entirely legal manner and without any threat of legal action?
Sun may be wholly behind the ideals of free software, but they certainly seem to be aware that they are part of a community and have certain responsibilities as a result.
It also says something about the power of public opinion on the internet.
I'm afraid that 'Legos' is the common usage in the US, and so universal that I see no chance of it changing.
Strangely, this was the linguistic difference that I found most disturbing whilest living in America, although the crisps/chips/fries and tram/trolley/shopping-cart contortions were more confusing.
Thats a guess, on the basis that the four-foot Alice in Wonderland by the same guy is quoted at $600-800.
:)
I'm wondering if I can figure out the design from the pics. My artistic talents don't run to doing it from scratch. I'm sure I can find some children who wouldn't mind an big box of red and blue bricks for Christmas. (Or can someone build a BSD deamon?)
Of course the true geek approach is to grab the 3-d model from Tux:AQFH and pixelise it.
Who cares?
I want to know about png support. After all, we burned all our gifs, didn't we. Didn't we? Oh, if we are slashdot, then we didn't.
(Actually, I'm seeing about 9% failure rate amongst users from a broad cross section of society coming to my site unable to view png's. Most are Win3.1 or Mac+IE users. Upgrade options are Opera or Netscape4.5/Mozilla respectively.)
It was an interesting roundup though.
I agree with the first poster that this is almost certainly to ensure that the downloader is legally responsible to become a party to the license.
This would appear to be against the non-discrimination clause of the DFSG, but on the othr hand, what is the alternative? You can't ask someone to make a legally binding agreement who cannot legally enter a legally binding agreement.
To copy anything under GPL involves acceptance of the license, so my guess is that minors already need parental permission to copy GPL licensed (or any free) software.
I don't see that the 'if any part of this agreement is illegal the rest still applies' clause helps either.
Interesting, but inconvenient.
I was thinking of Linux-FT: a defunct UK distribution. Instead of copying packages to the hdd, it used copycache. The hdd essentially became a cache for the CD. All it copies to the hdd during the install is a minimal base system and symlinks to the CD for all the apps. A demon then replaces the links with the files themselves when they are referenced. If the hard disk becomes too full, the oldest files are converted back to links.
This leads to a very quick install of a very comprehensive system, and was useful when hdds were smaller than CDs. Of course, it clogs up your CD drive. And unfortunately, I suspect the distro is now too out of date to handle a modern machine.
I think you are confusing hstory and culture.
Thay have a culture now. It is different from the one they had before the cultural revolution. I'm not suggesting they, or we, or anyone else go back to feudalism.
To some extent politics and culture are inextricably intertwined. I would like to see what China could become under a more liberal government. But I can guess what it will become if all the international corporations are allowed to pour in and create a culture by marketting. Of course, if the Chinese people chose that sort of society, more power to them.
India seems to strike a happy balence, with democracy and yet a distinct culture. Of course, India has its own share of poverty and ethnic factionalism.
The big question all of this revolves around is why the rich first world cultures are culturally less diverse in most respects than the rest of the world. If it is a historical accident, then maybe we will see better societies built from different foundations if we don't straightjacket them with out own ideas.
On the other hand, if all societies in which there is a good deal of freedom and wealth must gravitate towards a particular set of cultral values, then monoculturalism offers relief for poor and opressed people everywhere.
As it may be clear from my first post, I suspect and hope that the former is the case.
There's a heap of issues here...
Firstly, I rather like living in a culturally diverse world. I don't want to see western north atlantic culture domainte the world. I like the fact that France wants to remain French, China wants to remain Chinese, and Australia wants to strengthen its own self-identity by getting rid of the monarchy (although I'd rather we keep them for now in the UK).
And MS, both through its profit-centric worldview, and through it attempts to create a computational monoculture, does tend to be a vehicle for US culture.
So I approve of China adopting Linux, and Chinese-izing it.
On the other hand, I dont like the fact that China maintains its identity through such oppressive means. So a government (rather than grass roots) endorsement is a bit of an embarassment.
If Linux makes computing and information more accessible to the Chinese people, that would be good. It would be wrong to punish the people for the sins of the government (contrast Iraq, where UN estimates say 250,000 to 500,000 children have died due to medical supplies stopped by sanctions). At the same time, just as some medical supplies can also be used by the military, computing technology can also be used by the government to monitor the people.
So I don't see the issue as black and white as ESR does. I would rather our reactions to China were built up cooperatively from a grass roots level, just as our development has been, rather than being spoken for when I for one haven't yet reached a conclusion on the issue.
Having said that, ESR is spot on when he says that this will be used as ammunition against Linux for those who use 'communist' as an obscenity. The links between open source and anarchism, libertarianism, or scientific-collaboration are all stronger than the parallels with communism.
However open source rests uneasy with capitalism, and there are many who believe that everything which is not capitalism is communism.
Is anyone else kicking themselves and thinking 'why didn't I think of this and sell it to a graphics co'?
Its so much simpler that SLI or split screen technology. You could retrofit it to existing cards with a new driver and a very small gizmo to switch between them. (I guess some syncing required too).
The penalty, which is inconsequential, but I guess the reason we all overlooked this, is that the delay (or rather lag) from starting on a frame to getting it on the screen is twice as long (since there is only one engine working on each frame). But this lag will not be noticable, wheras low frame rates are.
Interesting. It will be a box with Microsoft tax but no Intel tax. Not that I think that it will be enough to put AMD in profit....
Anyway, how long do you think it is going to take for someone to port Linux to this thing? I expect WinCE will try and keep user software out of real mode, but there will be a hole somewhere which will allow a loadlin launcher in.
*choke*
There is Linux advocacy, and there is misinformation. I admire your enthusiasm, but I think it is better if we work with truth and leave the misinformation to the other side.
Point by point...
1. Most scalable? If you mean range (smallest to largest machine), then this is certainly true. Linux doesn't scale as high as Solaris, Irix or Unicos though.
2. Hard to compare, because all the contendors approach the reliability of the hardware. I think Linux behaves less gracefully under swap exhaustion that some unices? And failover and journalling are only just coming on line? Hot swap is still under development?
3. Are you implying x86 is the most scalable, reliable architecture available? Alpha servers are still way ahead on fp power. The IBM power3 is pretty hot too. SGI have outstanding SMP aritechtures. PCs suffer in reliability, partly due to the huge range of components available and partly due to low cost parts. But Linux will run on the other architectures too.
4. Only Digital unix has acheived B2 certification. IIRC without ACLs, Linux can't even match NT3.5's C2.
5. Maybe. It still does not have the track record of BSD, although this may be partly inertia.
My call would be that BSD or Solaris would be good conservative choices, since they are well proven on big servers. Linux is perhaps the more future-proof option given the flood of development.
Wakko is absolutely right when it comes to the relative merits of Linux and Unicos on SMP or parallel machine - Linux wasn't designed for that job and won't do it. Not now, not in the near future. Unicos currently runs machine with up to 2048 processors. Linux hasn't really mastered 16.
However, the proposed machine is bound to be a cluster, not a single machine. Linux will do this just fine. In fact Linux would run on ASCI Red if there were drivers for the networking hardware. (They've booted individual nodes with both Linux and NT).
So there is a possibility of Linux. I guess it might be easier to use Linux on IA64 than port IRIX/Unicos.
My reservation here is that neither the Itanic nor MIPS chips offer cutting edge performance.
But what about this clause from section 2:
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or
with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not
bring the other work under the scope of this License.
So the fact that QT and get_it are on the same CD does not bring them under the scope of the GPL, since QT is not based on get_it. Neither does copying them to the HDD.
Hmm. Trying to reconcile all those terms for run-time linking is tough. Part of the problem seems to be that the GPL is written more for apps than for OS components.
Oh well, maybe someone cleverer than me can puzzle it out!
Actually, I agree with you on the importance of the GPL, and I no longer regularly use KDE anyway.
But I think that there is still a borderline case that could be made for QT being an "essential system library". If you have a KDE based system with Kdm then your machine will not even boot properly when QT is removed. Furthermore, none of your base applications, with the exception of Netscape, will work.
In the case of Corel and Caldera, I'm not even sure the installer will work without QT.
Now admittedly in the Linux community we recognize the difference between OS and GUI. You can still boot the system in console mode and have a fully functioning operating system.
However, this exactly parallels the situation with Windows: if you remove the widget-set-which-has-no-name, you system won't function normally. You can still boot to DOS mode, but you can't perform normal system management tasks or run base applications. And yet the GPL was written with the intent of allowing GPL'ed apps on top of non-free systems such as Windows (Indeed in the early days of the FSF there were only proprietary unices to run GPL stuff on).
So, while I agree on philosophical grounds with the choice of the GPL whenever possible, I find it hard to see how GPL applications on QT are fundamentally different to GPL applications on Windows.
Even so, the argument is borderline. If QT continues to spread I think it will become hard to refute.
I think the situation has changed since this debate originally arose.
The QT and GPL licenses certainly are potentially in conflict, but whether they are actually in conflict depends on current practice.
IIRC, the GPL contains a clause which allows software to be linked with non-GPL packages if those packages are routinely supplied as part of the OS. Hence you can GPL a Windows application, and you can link applications with Xfree86 which is not GPL.
Now every major Linux distribution is shipping QT and KDE, doesn't QT now fall under this same exception?
France is one of the most fiercly nationalistic (mainly in a good way) countries in Europe, and frequently takes action against dilution of French culture by overseas influences. The expurgation of the language being a notable example.
Open source offers a way to replace one `culturally imperialistic' product with one which can be modified and repackaged in France, and sold to profit French firms.
After Korea, my money was on France to be next. After that though, I'm at a loss. Maybe India.
Think what we will be able to do with the final mozilla code though:
Oh, for more coding time and less projects to work on!
Actually, I think you have drawn attention to an interesting point:
Windows and Mac, the API is tied to the OS, so there is no competition in API design apart from the competition between OS.
Under Linux, there are competing APIs, so you can program using APIs defined in Gnome, KDE, Xlib, Motif, tk etc. And this competition is one of the factors which will determine which environments succeed, since the cleaner APIs will attract more developers.