If you made a black to white gradient on a 24-bit (or 32-bit since the result is the same) display... it is just possible for some people to see the contrast between say, Gray 117 and Gray 118. They wouldn't be able to uniquely IDENTIFY those two colors (you can only distinguish a few dozen greys), but they can see the contrast.
Question though: Would you pay for say, 50% more RAM in your video card so that a few people couldn't strain their eyes looking for constrasting greys in long black to white gradients? It's not noticeable in any normal use, and you REALLY have to stare pretty hard to see it. X supports 48-bit color information, but nobody at all uses it.
The Film industry needs 36 bits because they LOSE bits during image editing processes, that has nothing what-so-ever to do with the display depth. Your DVDs will look just fine in 24-bit RGB
This is exactly what Red Hat have set out to do since they first discovered that you could actually SELL Linux for more than cost. Rather than try to grow a small independent vendor into the big OS pond, they've set out to shrink the market until they're the biggest player left. This is an unusual tactic, but one that works especially well against a company like Microsoft which MUST grow to survive. It might seem from the figures that this will hurt proprietary Unix more, but in reality those vendors charge sky-high fees for their OS for exactly the same reason they charge sky-high fees for a new mouse, or a 17in monitor -- they can. Sun have shown how little Server OS revenue impacts their bottom line this year.
Next year, expect to see Microsoft bundle Windows and Office for the first time, in a package aimed at businesses. They will need to re-establish their "unique value" and that's the only way I can see to do it. Also you can expect Windows 2000 to take up to 40% of the market, and more than half of the remaining Server market going to Linux. Desktop domination? Not yet, but the excuses for having Windows will get sillier this year e.g. "I can't switch yet because Linux doesn't have an Access Clone" or "Linux is doomed on the desktop by the lack of 3D pinball". I won't even blink if Linux client sales exceed all MacOS sales for 2000.
I'm pretty extreme (No Windows here) but I make an exception for proprietary games because it's not obvious that we could support similar Free products NOW or possibly even in the future. This just isn't true for application classes like the Office Suite or IDE where high quality Free equivalents are already in progress, and I don't expect that to change.
Also, Games just aren't going to stand in the way of World Domination, there's no way that Bill Gates could have steered a Games company to the point where it makes headline news every time he sneezes. So I spend $65 importing Q3A for Linux and Myth II but I don't expect that to make me any less Free.
Finally, I can see money spent on ID games, at least, as a future investment in Free Software, they've released Doom and now Quake as GPL software, and there's no reason to think this policy will stop for as long as they're profitable.
GTK+ Drag-and-drop is interoperable with your old Motif DnD, but has an easy to use API (I don't know if Motif did, but I suspect not) KDE/Qt 1.x do not support a standard DnD mechanism, they will work with other Qt apps, but not anything else. Worth ignoring because Qt 2.x is, guess what - compatible with GTK+ and Motif.
Two great examples to work with are URLs (Netscape 4.x, the GNOME panel and various GTK+ apps can drag these about) and GDK Colors, which can be dragged between any two GTK+ color choosers from any applications. Wicked!
To give an idea of how easy this, I added DnD file open to a notepad app one day in FIVE minutes. That's from "I wonder if I can..." to "It works!"
Either this comment went through a worm-hole or you need to stop repeating old gossip on/.
Civ:CTP has been available on Linux for so long that my local games store (in the UK no less) has it discounted already. I don't even remember which month it was when the first copies of Civ:CTP for Linux showed up at work. Loki have moved on to releasing games for other companies (Q3A) and stuff like Heroes III. I think their most serious problem is getting good games to port, the porting seems to work out fine.
Yeah, good Tori Amos single, but on the album I like Concertina at the moment. Yes, this is off-topic. Moderating it down is silly, because it says "Off Topic" at the top, so save your points guys.:)
Anyway, I said something useful further up, and this "news" is just hype generated to sell a product as others have said. Look deeper/. users
Well, you don't HAVE to be root, but in a default setup you would be hard pressed to do it any other way...
The answer is (and you may not like it) install only trusted packages. You should not install untrustworthy software for the same reason you shouldn't run it (especially as root), avoid even LOOKING at potentially hostile binaries.
If you want FULL PARANOIA ON, use OpenBSD instead and don't change any of its security settings (e.g. no/proc, no unnecessary binaries, few if any setuid binaries) and you'll have a fine server, though not exactly a fun desktop machine.
Assuming that you're determined to run Linux, or you're not *really* that paranoid, you should be insisting on GnuPG signed RPMs. Use a trusted source of GnuPG source or binaries, get the Red Hat et al. vendor signatures confirmed over the telephone. Then your trust extends only to a few known vendors.
BTW You should do all this FIRST, starting today is too late if your kernel already has a cloaked virus module in it, especially if it has infiltrated the boot disks and backup media you are using. We are in a better position to defend against threats than most proprietary OS users, but that is NO REASON to be caught unawares.
"To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, and, something that had never been done before in the industry -- Portability to other processor families -- NT represented a technological leap beyond any of its competitors in the Unix world."
These "innovations" were previously found everywhere except Billy's empire. Am I innovating the first time I try skiing or mountain climbing? If all my friends have already been, but I pretented I didn't want to, can I claim later that I was a market leader by following them?
In the Unix world multi-tasking, virtual memory, working shared libraries, CPU portability (talk to Sun or Digital as was) were all quite normal. The people who got excited about it came from Windows 3.x backgrounds, or in a few cases the awful Apple Mac. Even OS/2 users had seen it all before. This is not rocket science!
Portability to other processor families is boring and routine, so much so that Linux, which was deliberately designed from the outset as an x86 OS kernel is now ported to more hardware than almost any other OS (the notable exception being that king of the frontier, NetBSD).
NB Windows 2000, the latest "portable" NT kernel, is available on how many different CPU architectures? Answer: One. Microsoft abandoned the support for other processors as soon as their claims had won them market share, features mean nothing in the face of all those nodding IA32 admins who got an MCSE out of their cereal box.
* Once we invested time, effort and money to write this software, how can we avoid having someone larger than us profit from our labors at our expense?
You can't prevent other people from making a profit out of what you do. When you sell something to another company, they're making a profit out of your work, when you buy something from another company, they're making a profit too. So obviously that can't be what you REALLY wanted to ask (and if you were a smart businessman I'm sure you wouldn't make that kind of mistake).
What you really want is to make sure that YOU PROFIT from your investment. It doesn't really matter if someone else is making money, so long as you get yours. The way to ensure this is by using a license like the GNU GPL which prevents other companies from making a proprietary derivative of your product.
* What is the economic model that allows me to profit from my knowledge and skills, since you insist I am to give away the fruits of my labor for free?
Do not give things away for free! It's obvious to me that you're starting to troll at this point, practically every post to this thread has pointed out that libre != gratis. If you're a profit-making company you need to get a return on your investment, so don't give anything away free.
Someone wants your software? Well, they sure COULD try to find someone else with it and take a copy, but YOU will sell them a nice box, a professionally produced manual (with the most up-to-date documentation) and a full year's support contract for only a trifle more than you charged last year. Now it has source included for that added peace of mind. Who could resist?
Of course, they COULD go to your competitor, but why buy from him when he doesn't know anything about the product? You employ the experts, you have the best people for the job, and from here on you go straight into the usual marketting BS which every customer gets.
If you're BETTER than your competitors then Free Software levels the playing field, and you should find that your markets INCREASES. If you're not better, then frankly I don't care if your company sinks into the marshes, sooner or later your competitors will figure out that Open Source benefits them.
* Who would write this highly-specialized software if we didn't, and why would we do it if there was no incentive for us to do so?
If no-one else would write the software, go find someone who wants it, and tell them you want to write it, FOR A PRICE. You can do them a great deal, because they will get the source code -- not in escrow (which is probably what you do now if you're in that sort of business) but up front, in exchange for the final check for the development work. There's your incentive, cold hard currency.
If no-one else wants it then I don't either. Go peddle your worthless software to someone who cares, and ask yourself why anyone, least of all Free Software advocates should think of incentives for you to write useless software.
(FWIW I don't intend to remain unpaid forever either, but for now I have enough money and work not to want a Free Software job)
"It's just impossible to enforce these licenses because if the source is closed you just don't have any way of knowing what they are using"
Where do all these clueless posts come from? If you've ever worked with RE (reverse engineering) or look at the really GOOD disassembly/ debugger tools which are available for the true hacker who doesn't have source you would know that it's not really that hard to detect the "fingerprint" of a particular coder or group of coders.
Sure, you can steal 10, 100, maybe even 1000 lines of code from a GPL application and not get caught, but that's probably not too distant from the fair use defense anyway. When it comes to stealing whole libraries or modules of code it's not very hard to spot when someone has been taking without asking.
The secret is that software is always flawed, and that two pieces of software with the same design, but different programming teams will result in different bugs. If you see the same pattern of bugs in a competitors product you know that they're "borrowing" your code. Some bugs in particular are such howlers that you KNOW when you see them again that it isn't coincidence.
In a court of law this won't win me a case, but with a good legal team it will get a judge to agree that independent experts should examine the contested program, and if I'm right THAT will quickly lead to me winning the case.
As to how you'd find out that the infringing program exists at all, I can tell you that many Free Software developers actively spend time playing with products that have similar functionality from proprietary vendors. This is especially true when the proprietary product is superior (and if it's not, why would anyone buy the stolen source version instead of your free one?).
The Gimp development team receives occasional reports of apps that look more similar than they really should. Sometimes they turn out to be infringing (and on really old versions of Gimp too, what a waste) and I'm sure if you ask someone nicely they'll tell you what happened to the infringers. Sometimes there are legitimate or apparently legitimate explanations for the resemblance.
Personally I think my second action if I felt that someone was seriously infringing on some of my GPL code would be to sign all my code over to the FSF (my first action of course would be to ask them to stop, this works far better than you would expect). I think the FSF have been hoping to actually fight a case like this for ages, and would leap at the chance.
It's a/the major UK paper, considered the official text record of events for some purposes but of course that doesn't mean this story went to a tech guy. I'm sure The Times employees at least a couple of journalists who can tell the difference between Java and Javascript, say, but are they working on a Sunday? I don't think so.
What you've got here is probably a local (ie UK) police release or statement from VISA rehashed for the live edition. The printed version will presumably have a competent tech. journalist (anyone know if this was in The Sunday Times?)
Nope, it has pretty mediocre PNG support, it's just that you've gotten so used to totally abysmal PNG support in most browsers that you think IE is doing a good job.
If you're lucky, and have the right version of IE (not the latest) then most PNGs will render to the baseline standard, which is a long way short of good, but better than nothing. You certainly won't see 32-bit RGBA images as you would hope, and you won't see proper support for OBJECT embedding a la HTML 4.0
If you're NOT lucky, for example if you have QuickTime, then your browser will render every PNG OBJECT with its own private scrollable frame (Huh???) and will insist on describing standalone PNGs as "unknown or unsupported image format," and refuse to view them.
The IE development team have shown no interest in fixing their implementation of HTML 4.0 to have more than a passing resemblance to the specification, and like most proprietary software vendors they've chosen to go it alone in implementing PNG, rather than using the excellent and freely available example source.
If this is the best Microsoft have to offer (and personally I think the NT kernel would fit that mark better) then it's a tribute to consumer stupidity that they're top dog in the marketplace.
It might make small-scale commercial piracy more difficult. I don't think anyone's asked... All the people I know who do small-scale commercial piracy record to tape, so they don't know either.
It was DEFINITELY possible to make near-as-damnit 2nd generation copies of DVDs prior to CSS. They used an evil hack with stealing images live from the frame buffer. Once the 2nd generation copies are unprotected (which they were), all future copies are similarly good quality. I would DEFINITELY have bought DVDs of that quality, even if they're not 100% as good as the originals.
However, personally I don't use illegally duplicated software, so what do I know?
This legal attack is not motivated by a desire to shut down commercial piracy, that's clear as daylight.
Yes, but the REAL purpose of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" is to take away first sale rights, legitimate fair use rights, default UCC consumer protection and all the other things which might stand in the way of Disney taking every last cent in your pocket.
Because most of these rights derive from the constitution, and would be difficult to actually take away, they've chosen a back door method with bans whole classes of technology based on their potential for "defeating a technological copy protection mechanism".
So, Disney can't prevent you from selling your digitally pristine copy of "The Lion King", but they can create a mechanism that means it won't work for anyone but you, so that selling it is worthless. If you make a device to defeat their technology, and thus get back your constitutional rights, the DMCA puts you in line for a bad fall.
Similarly, NBC can't prevent you from time shifting a TV program, but they can use a feeble encryption technique and then outlaw devices other than TVs (such as VCRs) which decrypt the signal, so that you have to watch all their output live or risk getting shafted under the DMCA. This means you'll PAY to watch repeats, because you couldn't time shift the original programme:(
Finally, the DMCA lets media companies rest easy about software. In the past it looked as though these old fashioned companies might get eaten alive by software companies. Now, with the DMCA they can license out proprietary technology like CSS to control their "property", and any software that won't play ball can't work with their media -- just like Linux today. If you RE their stupid protection, as software companies would have in the past, you get DMCA litigation.
In summary, this "Digital Millennium" is presumably due to end in less than twelve months, and hopefully it will either by seriously weakened in application or it will get mauled and thrown out altogether. Right now the balance is too strongly in favour of giant international IPOs (and I don't mean stock offerings).
I'd like to put in the obligatory plug for AbiWord, and Gnumeric, which are the most polished parts of the GNOME Office replacement. Remember, unlike their KDE counterparts, the GNOME tools compile, build and work with the GNOME libraries you already have for your everyday GNOME desktop.
Wow, I said a GNOME a lot didn't I?
Well, the other nice thing is that Gnumeric loads Excel spreadsheets, and AbiWord loads Word documents. So all that work you did in the OTHER office suite you were using is not wasted.
Of course, they're not perfect, but I think you'll find that they're both functional for everyday business documents, and my life is easier now that I can download an XLS file from a web site rather than having to paste data from the on-line HTML tables.
Well I certainly am, not least because I'm hoping to celebrate the start of the new Millenium in style:) You can't just arbitrarily stop a Millenium 999 years in, because "it looks like a round number", or "there's this great Prince song". I don't see people celebrating St. Valentine's on February 13th, or April Fool's day on the 2nd, so why celebrate the "wrong" Millenium?
Sure, so give the content and distribution companies five more years. Come back in five more years, and they're still sat on their arses mumbling to themselves...
Both types of company haven't been customer focused in the true sense for years, and finally blowing up NTSC (about 25 years too late IMHO) will at least make them stop snoring and take a look around.
Because a significant fraction of the investment in UK broadcasting comes from the public purse, we got working digital TV systems last year. However, I would swap all the steps forward we have compared with the US for a telecoms provider that wasn't dragging its feet on ADSL and call charges.
It's nice to see that in all these cases the Government (in the form of the FCC and OFTEL) get to be good guys for a change.
You can apply this argument to every other industry too. (Some of) Wall Street is stupid enough to pay $$$ for things which are patently worthless today, to avoid the possibility of missing out on a potential gold mine tomorrow.
Some people who get burnt by this will blame Red Hat, or Linux, or even Linus Torvalds, but you can bet they won't be doing it anywhere high profile. Why? Because no-one likes to admit that they can't tell the difference between The Real Thing and a cheap copy. It's embarassing.
The Linux trademark could potentially be used to prevent this sort of thing, but I think it's already too diluted to be effective, and in many ways that's for the best -- who would decide which companies are "too shady" to trade under the Linux name?
I may be a software developer, but I am first and foremost a computer USER Therefore, however nice it might be to get paid in Ferraris (like John C) I will license code under the GPL (or occasionally X style licenses) because that's what I want to receive AS A USER. If I can get a roof over my head some day from writing Free Software, that'd be great, but meanwhile I'm happy to contribute to the cooking pot under GNU's fair sharing rules in my "spare time".
As a USER, it's no good to me that the 1991 shoddy version of FooX was BSD licensed, I can't use that now (bit rot), and the user community is supporting MS proprietary FooX which was forked in 1992. Therefore as a USER, I support GPL projects, for all the obvious reasons. Of course, as a USER, there are many projects not under a Copyleft which are of benefit, but I am concious that they could be snuffed out tomorrow by a proprietary fork, and that worries me.
Those supporting BSD, Artistic etc. licenses should ask themselves AS USERS, whether they like the idea of the software they use being the victim of a proprietary fork... I think the GPL has been the best license for defending against this. It has also resisted "license forks" (BSD may be short, but a few hundred variants make the reading much LONGER than the GPL) and has a built-in upgrade system for future "bug fixes" in the event that global laws change.
Why do you give special rights to the Regents of Berkeley? (who have since said that they don't want them) Or do you mean "I use yet another incompatible variant of the BSD license that causes even more headaches, but might one day get me a line of 8pt text at the bottom of a half-page advert in an obscure magazine"?
If you use a non-obnoxious BSD variant, like the X license, why not say that -- the stupid BSD license should have died long ago.
What do you write anyway? And what makes you think anyone will need to make a proprietary fork and then return some of the changes to you later?
No, they're not using Photoshop "because its better", they're using it because "it's the industry standard", it even wins awards from PC Magazine and the like on this basis, as if it were a basis for comparison at all... This cycle is very difficult to break, some say you must have an order of magnitude better product to take the top spot from one that is so entrenched. Gimp is not (yet) an order of magnitude better for profressional design work.
The thing that users of Free Software like Gimp can't get used to in proprietary software is the total lack of power. How many thousands of people around the world were annoyed with lack of multiple levels of undo in PS4? Who knows -- the only reason it got fixed was because Adobe decided to release a new improved version, and those on platforms which didn't get the new version, didn't get the new feature.
Meanwhile on Gimp, the ONLY reason you can't work with CMYK (which is the main complaint we get from designers, they seem pretty happy with every other aspect I can think of) is because no-one will (a) pay to have CMYK added or (b) do it themselves. I wish Adobe were so accomadating -- I'm sure someone would have donated a working PNG built-in for PS 5.x by now, because their expensively developed in-house one still SUCKS after all these years.
"Historically, free software lags far behind in terms of feature[s]"
Nah, historically free software wins for reliability, functionality (that would be your features) and of course portability. Your vendor-specific CC may have two features that aren't in GCC, but you can bet there are 20 other features GCC has over their CC, and it targets way more architectures.
I don't have a URL to hand (someone else?) but Free Software won a shoot-out run by academics interested in the relative merits of vendor supplied and Free software many years ago (that count as historic enough?) and it wasn't on reliability and cost alone I can tell you.
More recently the case is even stronger. Apache isn't the FASTEST web server you can buy from your vendor, but it is probably the most fully-featured, extensible and standards-compliant one you'll find, and the performance is still not to be sneezed at.
Actually, I'm having a tough time to imagine what Unix vendors would do without Free Software groups of one kind or another. They certainly can't all afford to hire enough people to maintain this breadth and depth of functionality in house, especially vendors who are focused on hardware. SGI's ultra-fast SMB benchmarks came from their use of Samba, for example.
Oh, I agree. Windows NT 5 is the best and most fully featured PC operating system to be launched in 1997, but unfortunately all the features which were "ground breaking" when all Bill had to do was _talk_ about them, are now well-understood, commonly implemented, and pretty much expected.
When an OS arrives over two years late it had better have every single damn feature specified, and all of them had better work very well. The FACT that W2K is still losing "out of box" features at this late stage (witness the removal of OGL and D3D drivers from the shipping target) is not an indication of improved quality but of endless deadline slips.
Of course, if Microsoft had specified their PC OS for the Millenium, instead of for 1997, they would have included 64-bit support, and maybe done a good job of 3D, low latency multimedia, IPv6, and everything else which will now have to be retro-fitted to W2K, but if I'd asked for that then, they'd still be working on it in 2005:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's given away on one of the fan sites, I didn't get it until I read there (didn't try hard though)
"Even on a monitor this can be noticeable"
If you made a black to white gradient on a 24-bit (or 32-bit since the result is the same) display...
it is just possible for some people to see the contrast between say, Gray 117 and Gray 118.
They wouldn't be able to uniquely IDENTIFY those two colors (you can only distinguish a few dozen greys), but they can see the contrast.
Question though: Would you pay for say, 50% more RAM in your video card so that a few people couldn't strain their eyes looking for constrasting greys in long black to white gradients?
It's not noticeable in any normal use, and you REALLY have to stare pretty hard to see it. X supports 48-bit color information, but nobody at all uses it.
The Film industry needs 36 bits because they LOSE bits during image editing processes, that has nothing what-so-ever to do with the display depth. Your DVDs will look just fine in 24-bit RGB
This is exactly what Red Hat have set out to do since they first discovered that you could actually SELL Linux for more than cost. Rather than try to grow a small independent vendor into the big OS pond, they've set out to shrink the market until they're the biggest player left. This is an unusual tactic, but one that works especially well against a company like Microsoft which MUST grow to survive. It might seem from the figures that this will hurt proprietary Unix more, but in reality those vendors charge sky-high fees for their OS for exactly the same reason they charge sky-high fees for a new mouse, or a 17in monitor -- they can. Sun have shown how little Server OS revenue impacts their bottom line this year.
Next year, expect to see Microsoft bundle Windows and Office for the first time, in a package aimed at businesses. They will need to re-establish their "unique value" and that's the only way I can see to do it. Also you can expect Windows 2000 to take up to 40% of the market, and more than half of the remaining Server market going to Linux. Desktop domination? Not yet, but the excuses for having Windows will get sillier this year e.g. "I can't switch yet because Linux doesn't have an Access Clone" or "Linux is doomed on the desktop by the lack of 3D pinball". I won't even blink if Linux client sales exceed all MacOS sales for 2000.
The next millenium should be really exciting.
I'm pretty extreme (No Windows here) but I make an exception for proprietary games because it's not obvious that we could support similar Free products NOW or possibly even in the future. This just isn't true for application classes like the Office Suite or IDE where high quality Free equivalents are already in progress, and I don't expect that to change.
Also, Games just aren't going to stand in the way of World Domination, there's no way that Bill Gates could have steered a Games company to the point where it makes headline news every time he sneezes. So I spend $65 importing Q3A for Linux and Myth II but I don't expect that to make me any less Free.
Finally, I can see money spent on ID games, at least, as a future investment in Free Software, they've released Doom and now Quake as GPL software, and there's no reason to think this policy will stop for as long as they're profitable.
Nick.
GTK+ Drag-and-drop is interoperable with your old Motif DnD, but has an easy to use API (I don't know if Motif did, but I suspect not)
KDE/Qt 1.x do not support a standard DnD mechanism, they will work with other Qt apps, but not anything else. Worth ignoring because Qt 2.x is, guess what - compatible with GTK+ and Motif.
Two great examples to work with are URLs (Netscape 4.x, the GNOME panel and various GTK+ apps can drag these about) and GDK Colors, which can be dragged between any two GTK+ color choosers from any applications. Wicked!
To give an idea of how easy this, I added DnD file open to a notepad app one day in FIVE minutes. That's from "I wonder if I can..." to "It works!"
Either this comment went through a worm-hole or you need to stop repeating old gossip on /.
Civ:CTP has been available on Linux for so long that my local games store (in the UK no less) has it discounted already. I don't even remember which month it was when the first copies of Civ:CTP for Linux showed up at work.
Loki have moved on to releasing games for other companies (Q3A) and stuff like Heroes III. I think their most serious problem is getting good games to port, the porting seems to work out fine.
Yeah, good Tori Amos single, but on the album I like Concertina at the moment. :)
/. users
Yes, this is off-topic. Moderating it down is silly, because it says "Off Topic" at the top, so save your points guys.
Anyway, I said something useful further up, and this "news" is just hype generated to sell a product as others have said. Look deeper
Well, you don't HAVE to be root, but in a default setup you would be hard pressed to do it any other way...
/proc, no unnecessary binaries, few if any setuid binaries) and you'll have a fine server, though not exactly a fun desktop machine.
The answer is (and you may not like it) install only trusted packages. You should not install untrustworthy software for the same reason you shouldn't run it (especially as root), avoid even LOOKING at potentially hostile binaries.
If you want FULL PARANOIA ON, use OpenBSD instead and don't change any of its security settings (e.g. no
Assuming that you're determined to run Linux, or you're not *really* that paranoid, you should be insisting on GnuPG signed RPMs. Use a trusted source of GnuPG source or binaries, get the Red Hat et al. vendor signatures confirmed over the telephone. Then your trust extends only to a few known vendors.
BTW You should do all this FIRST, starting today is too late if your kernel already has a cloaked virus module in it, especially if it has infiltrated the boot disks and backup media you are using. We are in a better position to defend against threats than most proprietary OS users, but that is NO REASON to be caught unawares.
Nick.
"To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, and, something that had never been done before in the industry -- Portability to other processor families -- NT represented a technological leap beyond any of its competitors in the Unix world."
These "innovations" were previously found everywhere except Billy's empire. Am I innovating the first time I try skiing or mountain climbing? If all my friends have already been, but I pretented I didn't want to, can I claim later that I was a market leader by following them?
In the Unix world multi-tasking, virtual memory, working shared libraries, CPU portability (talk to Sun or Digital as was) were all quite normal. The people who got excited about it came from Windows 3.x backgrounds, or in a few cases the awful Apple Mac. Even OS/2 users had seen it all before. This is not rocket science!
Portability to other processor families is boring and routine, so much so that Linux, which was deliberately designed from the outset as an x86 OS kernel is now ported to more hardware than almost any other OS (the notable exception being that king of the frontier, NetBSD).
NB Windows 2000, the latest "portable" NT kernel, is available on how many different CPU architectures? Answer: One. Microsoft abandoned the support for other processors as soon as their claims had won them market share, features mean nothing in the face of all those nodding IA32 admins who got an MCSE out of their cereal box.
Nick.
Linus was partly responsible for one of the Quake (that's Quake 1) ports to Linux IIRC
* Once we invested time, effort and money to write this software,
how can we avoid having someone larger than us profit from our
labors at our expense?
You can't prevent other people from making a profit out of what you do. When you sell something to another company, they're making a profit out of your work, when you buy something from another company, they're making a profit too. So obviously that can't be what you REALLY wanted to ask (and if you were a smart businessman I'm sure you wouldn't make that kind of mistake).
What you really want is to make sure that YOU PROFIT from your investment. It doesn't really matter if someone else is making money, so long as you get yours. The way to ensure this is by using a license like the GNU GPL which prevents other companies from making a proprietary derivative of your product.
* What is the economic model that allows me to profit from my
knowledge and skills, since you insist I am to give away the
fruits of my labor for free?
Do not give things away for free! It's obvious to me that you're starting to troll at this point, practically every post to this thread has pointed out that libre != gratis. If you're a profit-making company you need to get a return on your investment, so don't give anything away free.
Someone wants your software? Well, they sure COULD try to find someone else with it and take a copy, but YOU will sell them a nice box, a professionally produced manual (with the most up-to-date documentation) and a full year's support contract for only a trifle more than you charged last year. Now it has source included for that added peace of mind. Who could resist?
Of course, they COULD go to your competitor, but why buy from him when he doesn't know anything about the product? You employ the experts, you have the best people for the job, and from here on you go straight into the usual marketting BS which every customer gets.
If you're BETTER than your competitors then Free Software levels the playing field, and you should find that your markets INCREASES. If you're not better, then frankly I don't care if your company sinks into the marshes, sooner or later your competitors will figure out that Open Source benefits them.
* Who would write this highly-specialized software if we didn't, and
why would we do it if there was no incentive for us to do so?
If no-one else would write the software, go find someone who wants it, and tell them you want to write it, FOR A PRICE. You can do them a great deal, because they will get the source code -- not in escrow (which is probably what you do now if you're in that sort of business) but up front, in exchange for the final check for the development work. There's your incentive, cold hard currency.
If no-one else wants it then I don't either. Go peddle your worthless software to someone who cares, and ask yourself why anyone, least of all Free Software advocates should think of incentives for you to write useless software.
(FWIW I don't intend to remain unpaid forever either, but for now I have
enough money and work not to want a Free Software job)
Nick.
"It's just impossible to enforce these licenses because if the source is closed you just don't have any way of knowing what they are using"
Where do all these clueless posts come from?
If you've ever worked with RE (reverse engineering) or look at the really GOOD disassembly/ debugger tools which are available for the true hacker who doesn't have source you would know that it's not really that hard to detect the "fingerprint" of a particular coder or group of coders.
Sure, you can steal 10, 100, maybe even 1000 lines of code from a GPL application and not get caught, but that's probably not too distant from the fair use defense anyway. When it comes to stealing whole libraries or modules of code it's not very hard to spot when someone has been taking without asking.
The secret is that software is always flawed, and that two pieces of software with the same design, but different programming teams will result in different bugs. If you see the same pattern of bugs in a competitors product you know that they're "borrowing" your code. Some bugs in particular are such howlers that you KNOW when you see them again that it isn't coincidence.
In a court of law this won't win me a case, but with a good legal team it will get a judge to agree that independent experts should examine the contested program, and if I'm right THAT will quickly lead to me winning the case.
As to how you'd find out that the infringing program exists at all, I can tell you that many Free Software developers actively spend time playing with products that have similar functionality from proprietary vendors. This is especially true when the proprietary product is superior (and if it's not, why would anyone buy the stolen source version instead of your free one?).
The Gimp development team receives occasional reports of apps that look more similar than they really should. Sometimes they turn out to be infringing (and on really old versions of Gimp too, what a waste) and I'm sure if you ask someone nicely they'll tell you what happened to the infringers. Sometimes there are legitimate or apparently legitimate explanations for the resemblance.
Personally I think my second action if I felt that someone was seriously infringing on some of my GPL code would be to sign all my code over to the FSF (my first action of course would be to ask them to stop, this works far better than you would expect). I think the FSF have been hoping to actually fight a case like this for ages, and would leap at the chance.
Nick.
It's a/the major UK paper, considered the official text record of events for some purposes but of course that doesn't mean this story went to a tech guy.
I'm sure The Times employees at least a couple of journalists who can tell the difference between Java and Javascript, say, but are they working on a Sunday? I don't think so.
What you've got here is probably a local (ie UK) police release or statement from VISA rehashed for the live edition. The printed version will presumably have a competent tech. journalist (anyone know if this was in The Sunday Times?)
"... and has full PNG support"
Nope, it has pretty mediocre PNG support, it's just that you've gotten so used to totally abysmal PNG support in most browsers that you think IE is doing a good job.
If you're lucky, and have the right version of IE (not the latest) then most PNGs will render to the baseline standard, which is a long way short of good, but better than nothing. You certainly won't see 32-bit RGBA images as you would hope, and you won't see proper support for OBJECT embedding a la HTML 4.0
If you're NOT lucky, for example if you have QuickTime, then your browser will render every PNG OBJECT with its own private scrollable frame (Huh???) and will insist on describing standalone PNGs as "unknown or unsupported image format," and refuse to view them.
The IE development team have shown no interest in fixing their implementation of HTML 4.0 to have more than a passing resemblance to the specification, and like most proprietary software vendors they've chosen to go it alone in implementing PNG, rather than using the excellent and freely available example source.
If this is the best Microsoft have to offer (and personally I think the NT kernel would fit that mark better) then it's a tribute to consumer stupidity that they're top dog in the marketplace.
Nick.
It might make small-scale commercial piracy more difficult. I don't think anyone's asked...
All the people I know who do small-scale commercial piracy record to tape, so they don't know either.
It was DEFINITELY possible to make near-as-damnit 2nd generation copies of DVDs prior to CSS. They used an evil hack with stealing images live from the frame buffer.
Once the 2nd generation copies are unprotected (which they were), all future copies are similarly good quality. I would DEFINITELY have bought DVDs of that quality, even if they're not 100% as good as the originals.
However, personally I don't use illegally duplicated software, so what do I know?
This legal attack is not motivated by a desire to shut down commercial piracy, that's clear as daylight.
Yes, but the REAL purpose of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" is to take away first sale rights, legitimate fair use rights, default UCC consumer protection and all the other things which might stand in the way of Disney taking every last cent in your pocket.
Because most of these rights derive from the constitution, and would be difficult to actually take away, they've chosen a back door method with bans whole classes of technology based on their potential for "defeating a technological copy protection mechanism".
So, Disney can't prevent you from selling your digitally pristine copy of "The Lion King", but they can create a mechanism that means it won't work for anyone but you, so that selling it is worthless. If you make a device to defeat their technology, and thus get back your constitutional rights, the DMCA puts you in line for a bad fall.
Similarly, NBC can't prevent you from time shifting a TV program, but they can use a feeble encryption technique and then outlaw devices other than TVs (such as VCRs) which decrypt the signal, so that you have to watch all their output live or risk getting shafted under the DMCA. This means you'll PAY to watch repeats, because you couldn't time shift the original programme
Finally, the DMCA lets media companies rest easy about software. In the past it looked as though these old fashioned companies might get eaten alive by software companies. Now, with the DMCA they can license out proprietary technology like CSS to control their "property", and any software that won't play ball can't work with their media -- just like Linux today. If you RE their stupid protection, as software companies would have in the past, you get DMCA litigation.
In summary, this "Digital Millennium" is presumably due to end in less than twelve months, and hopefully it will either by seriously weakened in application or it will get mauled and thrown out altogether. Right now the balance is too strongly in favour of giant international IPOs (and I don't mean stock offerings).
Go EFF, Go!
Nick.
I'd like to put in the obligatory plug for AbiWord, and Gnumeric, which are the most polished parts of the GNOME Office replacement. Remember, unlike their KDE counterparts, the GNOME tools compile, build and work with the GNOME libraries you already have for your everyday GNOME desktop.
Wow, I said a GNOME a lot didn't I?
Well, the other nice thing is that Gnumeric loads Excel spreadsheets, and AbiWord loads Word documents. So all that work you did in the OTHER office suite you were using is not wasted.
Of course, they're not perfect, but I think you'll find that they're both functional for everyday business documents, and my life is easier now that I can download an XLS file from a web site rather than having to paste data from the on-line HTML tables.
Nick.
Well I certainly am, not least because I'm hoping to celebrate the start of the new Millenium in style :)
You can't just arbitrarily stop a Millenium 999 years in, because "it looks like a round number", or "there's this great Prince song". I don't see people celebrating St. Valentine's on February 13th, or April Fool's day on the 2nd, so why celebrate the "wrong" Millenium?
Sure, so give the content and distribution companies five more years.
Come back in five more years, and they're still sat on their arses mumbling to themselves...
Both types of company haven't been customer focused in the true sense for years, and finally blowing up NTSC (about 25 years too late IMHO) will at least make them stop snoring and take a look around.
Because a significant fraction of the investment in UK broadcasting comes from the public purse, we got working digital TV systems last year. However, I would swap all the steps forward we have compared with the US for a telecoms provider that wasn't dragging its feet on ADSL and call charges.
It's nice to see that in all these cases the Government (in the form of the
FCC and OFTEL) get to be good guys for a change.
Nick.
You can apply this argument to every other industry too.
(Some of) Wall Street is stupid enough to pay $$$ for things which are patently worthless today, to avoid the possibility of missing out on a potential gold mine tomorrow.
Some people who get burnt by this will blame Red Hat, or Linux, or even Linus Torvalds, but you can bet they won't be doing it anywhere high profile.
Why? Because no-one likes to admit that they can't tell the difference between The Real Thing and a cheap copy. It's embarassing.
The Linux trademark could potentially be used to prevent this sort of thing, but I think it's already too diluted to be effective, and in many ways that's for the best -- who would decide which companies are "too shady" to trade under the Linux name?
Amen.
I may be a software developer, but I am first and foremost a computer USER Therefore, however nice it might be to get paid in Ferraris (like John C) I will license code under the GPL (or occasionally X style licenses) because that's what I want to receive AS A USER. If I can get a roof over my head some day from writing Free Software, that'd be great, but meanwhile I'm happy to contribute to the cooking pot under GNU's fair sharing rules in my "spare time".
As a USER, it's no good to me that the 1991 shoddy version of FooX was BSD licensed, I can't use that now (bit rot), and the user community is supporting MS proprietary FooX which was forked in 1992. Therefore as a USER, I support GPL projects, for all the obvious reasons. Of course, as a USER, there are many projects not under a Copyleft which are of benefit, but I am concious that they could be snuffed out tomorrow by a proprietary fork, and that worries me.
Those supporting BSD, Artistic etc. licenses should ask themselves AS USERS, whether they like the idea of the software they use being the victim of a proprietary fork... I think the GPL has been the best license for defending against this. It has also resisted "license forks" (BSD may be short, but a few hundred variants make the reading much LONGER than the GPL) and has a built-in upgrade system for future "bug fixes" in the event that global laws change.
Nick.
You are a weirdo!
Why do you give special rights to the Regents of Berkeley? (who have since said that they don't want them)
Or do you mean "I use yet another incompatible variant of the BSD license that causes even more headaches, but might one day get me a line of 8pt text at the bottom of a half-page advert in an obscure magazine"?
If you use a non-obnoxious BSD variant, like the X license, why not say that -- the stupid BSD license should have died long ago.
What do you write anyway? And what makes you think anyone will need to make a proprietary fork and then return some of the changes to you later?
No, they're not using Photoshop "because its better", they're using it because "it's the industry standard", it even wins awards from PC Magazine and the like on this basis, as if it were a basis for comparison at all... This cycle is very difficult to break, some say you must have an order of magnitude better product to take the top spot from one that is so entrenched. Gimp is not (yet) an order of magnitude better for profressional design work.
The thing that users of Free Software like Gimp can't get used to in proprietary software is the total lack of power. How many thousands of people around the world were annoyed with lack of multiple levels of undo in PS4? Who knows -- the only reason it got fixed was because Adobe decided to release a new improved version, and those on platforms which didn't get the new version, didn't get the new feature.
Meanwhile on Gimp, the ONLY reason you can't work with CMYK (which is the main complaint we get from designers, they seem pretty happy with every other aspect I can think of) is because no-one will (a) pay to have CMYK added or (b) do it themselves. I wish Adobe were so accomadating -- I'm sure someone would have donated a working PNG built-in for PS 5.x by now, because their expensively developed in-house one still SUCKS after all these years.
Nick.
"Historically, free software lags far behind in terms of feature[s]"
Nah, historically free software wins for reliability, functionality (that would be your features) and of course portability. Your vendor-specific CC may have two features that aren't in GCC, but you can bet there are 20 other features GCC has over their CC, and it targets way more architectures.
I don't have a URL to hand (someone else?) but Free Software won a shoot-out run by academics interested in the relative merits of vendor supplied and Free software many years ago (that count as historic enough?) and it wasn't on reliability and cost alone I can tell you.
More recently the case is even stronger. Apache isn't the FASTEST web server you can buy from your vendor, but it is probably the most fully-featured, extensible and standards-compliant one you'll find, and the performance is still not to be sneezed at.
Actually, I'm having a tough time to imagine what Unix vendors would do without Free Software groups of one kind or another. They certainly can't all afford to hire enough people to maintain this breadth and depth of functionality in house, especially vendors who are focused on hardware. SGI's ultra-fast SMB benchmarks came from their use of Samba, for example.
Nick.
Oh, I agree. Windows NT 5 is the best and most fully featured PC operating
:)
system to be launched in 1997, but unfortunately all the features which
were "ground breaking" when all Bill had to do was _talk_ about them, are
now well-understood, commonly implemented, and pretty much expected.
When an OS arrives over two years late it had better have every single
damn feature specified, and all of them had better work very well. The
FACT that W2K is still losing "out of box" features at this late stage
(witness the removal of OGL and D3D drivers from the shipping target)
is not an indication of improved quality but of endless deadline slips.
Of course, if Microsoft had specified their PC OS for the Millenium,
instead of for 1997, they would have included 64-bit support, and maybe
done a good job of 3D, low latency multimedia, IPv6, and everything
else which will now have to be retro-fitted to W2K, but if I'd asked
for that then, they'd still be working on it in 2005
Nick.