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User: Ph33r+th3+g(O)at

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Comments · 900

  1. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    I understand the comments perfectly. They're based on the assumption that there are two discrete products here, the OS and the GUI. But that's not the case. OS X is not two pieces--the open-sourced OS and the GUI. Were that so, I'd buy the argument. But it's not--bottom line is Apple derived one product from BSD Unix, and did not open source that entire product. Which, unfortunately, is perfectly legal under that license.

  2. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    That's nice, but are people lining up to pay money for multicast DNS capability? It's mostly a gimmick that would only be useful on tiny networks, anyway. Cool, yes; practical and commercially valuable, no.

  3. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1
    They shouldn't give anything away for Quartz because that is their own property. Do you give all the stuff you work on away for free so other people can copy it?

    No, I don't, but I don't sell an operating system based on open-source code, add a GUI, and charge for it, either. I'm not disputing that what Apple's doing is legal--just saying it's unfortunate that BSD Unix wasn't protected by a GPL-like license that would have forced Apple to contribute the real OS X back, or do their own base OS development.

    And we've seen the state of Apple's in-house OS development before--cooperative multitasking, crash-prone, System 7, et al. (They bought NeXt, so that doesn't really count.)

  4. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1
    People would pay money for Zeroconf? That's news to me. And the implementation they released for Windows, while interesting, is limited to looking for printers. The streaming server is a tactical release--the more people stream QT, the more people are locked into that format, and the more "get pro NOW" players are downloaded. Hardly altruistic.

    Whether I'd like to see them open source Quartz or not doesn't have a lot of bearing on the situation, because they don't have to being that the base of their product is BSD, not GPL, licensed.

  5. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    Then why aren't the OS and GUI sold separately? I'll tell you why--they're inseperable pieces of the same product.

  6. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    So you concede my points then make a remark about putting my foot in my mouth? They both took the BSD licensed software and incorporated it into closed source products. MS gave back nothing, Apple gave back a crippled version of the product for PR purposes. That's the bottom line.

  7. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    They open source what they have to--that software licensed under GPL and similar licenses, or what has no real commercial value (e.g. x86 Darwin). Being a smart corporation, they crow about this as if they were volunteering to do it. (I don't blame them for that.)

  8. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    Why shouldn't they, when a substantial portion of their commercial product was taken from open source? This is the error of the BSD license, in that it allows that sort of thing.

  9. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    The point is, they locked up the product that is substantially just BSD Unix. Had it been licensed under the GPL, they wouldn't have been able to take that code, modify it, and charge for it (without providing the source). I'll concede that Apple has made some contributions to KHTML--but this is a result of Apple's having been required to do so, because of KHTML's license. Otherwise, you can bet it wouldn't have happened.

  10. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    But not to OS X. The source to Darwin is a sop and a palliative, meant to deflect criticism while not contributing back anything of any commercial value.

  11. Re:Four letters on Is Apple The New Microsoft? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Embraces? You mean takes? Both Microsoft and Apple exploit open source software, particularly that (unforunately) under the BSD license. For example, MS took the BSD TCP/IP stack and utilities, made a few changes, and locked them up. Apple did the same thing with BSD Unix, which is the foundation of OS X.

  12. Re:NO "right to know" on Judge Finds For Apple in ThinkSecret Case · · Score: 1

    Once a trade secret is out, it's not a secret anymore, and not so protected.

  13. Re:Good Move Microsoft!!!! on Microsoft to Disable Online Windows Activation · · Score: 1

    When you have a monopoly among those who have to buy software (Linux is cool, but try telling a client who can't read the presentation you sent because OOo's PowerPoint conversion didn't quote do the trick about the virtues of open source), you can piss off your customers and survive.

  14. Re:Use of SSN fundamentally flawed. on 100,000 More Social Security Numbers Exposed · · Score: 1

    And is why SS cards used to say "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION" at the bottom of them until some time in the early 70's or so.

  15. This kind of thing . . . on Microsoft to Disable Online Windows Activation · · Score: 1

    . . . is part of the price you pay when you rent software. And when your ability to use software is controlled by a remote "activation" scheme, that's exactly what you're doing.

  16. Re:Apple's just another... on Apple Backing Away From FireWire · · Score: 1

    -1, dares to tell the truth about Apple.

  17. Re:Wow. Captain obvious to the rescue. [n/t] on How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language · · Score: 1

    I think these references are from back when he was only Lieutenant Obvious, though.

  18. Re:Leave well alone on Artists Against 419 Releases Mugu Marauder · · Score: 1
    it's slow but it's legal, and it works.

    At least the first two, anyway. By giving them enough time for "due process" to be done, there is no net effect on the spammer except the inconvenience of having to move hosts every week or so. And many of the ISPs are quite spam-friendly and don't do anything even in that span of time. Grassroots efforts to exhaust the bandwidth allocation are, in these cases, an effective means of sanction. And the clients' ISPs aren't going to give two shakes, because each one is only loading a few copies of the page--is it good for the network? Probably not. But the customers of the ISPs running the client paid for the right to use that network, so that's just part of the cost of doing business.

  19. Re:eMule? on Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads · · Score: 1

    You could read the source and compile it yourself if you're so inclined.

  20. Re:Athena on U.S. Kids Don't Understand First Amendment · · Score: 1

    That's a great story--I hope someone mods it up; if I had points right now, I would. Good job--it's heartening to see that some students stood up to that.

  21. Re:Yeh... on Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades · · Score: 1

    There's a big-assed difference between support and maintenance ending and deliberate disablement.

  22. Re:I hope the TV people wake up .... on It's Not TV, It's MythTV · · Score: 1
    You never know if the file is what you want or some kind of Mongolian goat bondage porn.

    What's your point?

  23. Re:Irrelevant issue on Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades · · Score: 1

    So once again, the customer is blamed for making a reasonable assumption that's buried in a EULA no one reads.

  24. Re:Irrelevant issue on Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades · · Score: 1

    So you're saying that the customer having been gullible enough to believe Intuit was actually selling what they said the were was the customer's fault? Thanks for clearing that up.

  25. Re:Irrelevant issue on Intuit Disables Features in Quicken To Force Upgrades · · Score: 1

    If they want to charge $25/year, they need to advertise Quicken as a service that costs $25/year. What they have done is a bait-and-switch: they sold a perpetual right to use, then yanked that right by remotely disabling features in a product. I hope Intuit's soon sees the blunt end of a class action lawsuit and that the lawyers rape them like they're raping their customers.