To be specific, if you later decide you want to implement logic while getting and setting, if you made it a public class variable instead, you'd have to recompile everything that links against it.
If I put public type x { get; set; } and later decided that I wanted to make sure x.foo != 0 during the set, I could change it to something like this:
private type myX;
public type x {
get {
return x;
}
set {
if (x.foo == 0)
throw new ArgumentException("foo cannot equal 0");
myX = value;
} }
This requires no recompilation of any other classes, just of the class this logic is in. Granted, it's still a bad idea, as callers wouldn't be expecting an ArgumentException, but it makes sense if my logic was going to divide by that value at a later date... I've just shifted it from a DivideByZeroException to an ArgumentException.
Last I checked APLv2 was compatible with GPLv3, but *NOT* 2, due to the patent protection clauses.
Coincidentally I'm pretty sure the FSF wouldn't think badly of that complaint since the FSF itself recommends v3 over v2 for EXACTLY that reason. And given that Oracle is suing Google over those very patents, I'm pretty sure everyone would feel safer with oracle stating in writing that anyone using the code would not be subject to patent lawsuits. But that may just be me. YMMV and all that.
GPL compatibility is one-way. That is, you can take code from APLv2 and pull it into a GPLv3 project. You can't do it the opposite way around, because that would be a violation of the GPLv3 license, clause 5c.
Getters and setters are bad software engineering in general, so I'd have to consider properties to be a real fast shortcut to bad software engineering.
Getters I could agree with, but setters make sense in that I can stop you from unilaterally changing my objects' variables to values that doesn't make sense/cause crashes/etc...
If you wanted to make this headline more sensational, you could change it to "Apache says GPLv2 license not good enough." which is what OpenJDK7 is licensed under.
Yeah, Apache may be at war with Oracle now, but this has the potential for much more widespread damage. It also puts the Free Software Foundation in an... interesting position, as this technically is the first salvo from Apache in a license war between GPL and Apache License.
The first thing that struck me, both from the summary and the article itself, is that none of these are really open-source specific.
To reiterate, the four they listed in the article are:
Communication technologies, like IRC and mailing lists
How to get, build, and modify open source code
Project organization, including version control, bug trackers, and individual roles within a project
Linux and command line skills
OK, well, you could argue command-line Linux skills are open-source, but that's not guaranteed.
If anything, these are skills that all businesses who have programmers would want them to understand.
Heck, even my current project, an internal project that I swear I could submit things to The Daily WTF every weekday for the next year on, has version control and bug tracking software!
I'm willing to bet it isn't Hulu's choice to do this at all. Their content providers are afraid of people switching to internet tv because their business model doesn't make as much money there. They are afraid of losing more eyeballs from broadcast tv to internet tv, that's all.
Did you forget that Hulu was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, with ABC joining them at some later point? Their owners are their content providers.
Instead of buying that CD you instead download the songs from that CD.
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
According to the RIAA, you now have $50 cash and ~$1,000,000 worth of music for a total of $1,000,050 of value.
Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'
It dilutes (floods) the marketplace and makes it harder to choose between them. So, instead, people... leave Windows/OSX on their machine. Heck, I did!
Monopolies are bad. Oligopolies are bad. However, on the flip side, marketplace dilution is bad.
Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference
Looks like MS learned from Google on that point.
Except that products Microsoft label as betas really are betas*, unlike Google who labels everything as Beta until it starts affecting their business interests (See: Gmail).
*Insert obligatory "Microsoft releases are betas, too, or should be since they're only beta quality."
This is not the result Microsoft would have hoped for, but the writing was on the wall when we heard last week from CEO Steve Ballmer that IE9 was downloaded only 10 million times within 6 weeks after launch.
FTA's other article, that the quote is from:
According to Ballmer, 10 million IE9 Betas have been downloaded in the six weeks after launch, making it the most successful beta browser in Microsoft's history.
See a difference there? If there were 10 million downloads of IE9 after it's launched wouldn't be surprising (it's usually not pushed out on Windows Update then), but that is actually a LOT of betas, even if people were just downloading it to see if the hardware accelerated rendering actually worked.
Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference.
To take just one thing, I don't know if you remember web search before Google - there's a reason that "to Google" is a verb these days... Of course they've taken existing ideas and improved on them - that really is the basis of innovation. You can keep going back further and further to prove that nothing in that little list of yours is really "new" (Android -> Apple -> Palm -> Newton ->... -> PADD from Star Trek ->... -> A pocket notebook ->... -> a bunch of palm leaves or papyrus and so on).
I'd update the GPs list a bit, but getting to the point:
You mentioned innovation, but the problem here is that every product that Google makes that is successful in any way, shape, or form is almost identical to something that someone has already done, but slightly improved.
At least RIM (notice I'm not mentioning Apple here) added applications... to a cellphone! No one had ever done that before! Android has added... spplications... to a cellphone. 12 years after RIM released the BlackBerry.
Web browser? 14 years after Netscape. For a browser that cherry-picked features that the other 4 browsers already had.
Web-based email? 8 years after Hotmail.
There's a certain form of irony that we're talking this in a thread about Google Wave. Wave was, in a way, an innovative product. It faced several major problems that it never surmounted:
People already had email and IM clients.
Closed Betas limit the number of people you can use it with.
Would it? I think it would come down to it being challenged on the constitutional merits of the executive order. If Obama said, "Copyright lasts for 14 years, like it did back in the day", someone would have to challenge that is not promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
It would be interesting to see that argued in court against our current laws. Which one more closely adheres to the constitution?
It'd be unconstitutional; the power to set copyrights doesn't belong to the executive branch.
Windows XP mode on older hardware sucks royally. Windows 7 can run fine in a 1 GB machine, but try running XP Mode on top of that and see what you get. Now try it again on a 512 MB machine (and a lot of companies still have them - we have at least a dozen 2.4 GHz P4's with 512 MB of RAM).
I was under the impression that they would upgrade to Win7 during a hardware refresh.
Unless you are running a premium version of Win7 (not the standard version that ships with most computers), XP mode is disabled.
You are aware that we're not referring to home users here?
Keeping in mind that we're talking about upgrading to Win7, I would think businesses, even small ones, would have Win7 Professional. Larger businesses would have Win7 Enterprise (which is volume-licensed).
If a prepackaged, working solution currently existed to virtualize IE6 and solve all these problems with just the receipt of a licensing fee, this would not be a story.
Even better, virtualize the entire OS it runs on since IE6 is such a security hole.
We could call the feature Windows XP Mode and include it with the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows.
The question comes down to whether this is a Treaty, which would require the advice and consent of 2/3rds of the Senate, or whether it's an Executive Agreement, which ultimately comes down to just an agreement between the executive branches of other agreeing nations and signed by the Executive. Nowadays, Executive Agreements are the norm in foreign policy and not Treaties.
er... yeah:
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
It doesn't matter, Android is Apache 2.0, and the GPL forbids you from relicensing GPLed code unless explicitly exempted (such as the "or later" clause the FSF recommends).
Java's class libraries are split into two sections. The first is the public API, as documented online.
The second part is the native implementation classes. On Sun's JVM, those are the sun.* and com.sun.* packages.
The real question is... which is Oracle referring to in this lawsuit? The former should be considered the interface (to an extent) and not copyrighted under US law. The latter is the implementation and should be covered by US Copyright law.
There's one additional wrinkle in this: If the code was copied from OpenJDK, that means Android would have to be GPL or be in violation of the GPL license. Android is currently licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
i have yet to see any corporation with a major internet presence or market segment come close to following or guaranteeing their privacy policies with complete certitude.
Google's Privacy Policy has nothing to do with this, unless you're implying that Google got everyone in major rural areas to somehow agree to said policy before Google drove out in their Streetview cars.
Slashdot Mirror
That shortcut actually exists for a reason.
To be specific, if you later decide you want to implement logic while getting and setting, if you made it a public class variable instead, you'd have to recompile everything that links against it.
If I put public type x { get; set; } and later decided that I wanted to make sure x.foo != 0 during the set, I could change it to something like this:
private type myX;
public type x {
get {
return x;
}
set {
if (x.foo == 0)
throw new ArgumentException("foo cannot equal 0");
myX = value;
}
}
This requires no recompilation of any other classes, just of the class this logic is in. Granted, it's still a bad idea, as callers wouldn't be expecting an ArgumentException, but it makes sense if my logic was going to divide by that value at a later date... I've just shifted it from a DivideByZeroException to an ArgumentException.
GPL compatibility is one-way. That is, you can take code from APLv2 and pull it into a GPLv3 project. You can't do it the opposite way around, because that would be a violation of the GPLv3 license, clause 5c.
The DSi can play DS games. However, even on a DSi, DS games only support WEP, despite the system supporting WPA/WPA2.
In other words, the WiFi configuration tool is bundled with the game, not the system.
Getters I could agree with, but setters make sense in that I can stop you from unilaterally changing my objects' variables to values that doesn't make sense/cause crashes/etc...
If you wanted to make this headline more sensational, you could change it to "Apache says GPLv2 license not good enough." which is what OpenJDK7 is licensed under.
Yeah, Apache may be at war with Oracle now, but this has the potential for much more widespread damage. It also puts the Free Software Foundation in an... interesting position, as this technically is the first salvo from Apache in a license war between GPL and Apache License.
The first thing that struck me, both from the summary and the article itself, is that none of these are really open-source specific.
To reiterate, the four they listed in the article are:
OK, well, you could argue command-line Linux skills are open-source, but that's not guaranteed.
If anything, these are skills that all businesses who have programmers would want them to understand.
Heck, even my current project, an internal project that I swear I could submit things to The Daily WTF every weekday for the next year on, has version control and bug tracking software!
Did you forget that Hulu was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, with ABC joining them at some later point? Their owners are their content providers.
FTFY
According to the RIAA, you now have $50 cash and ~$1,000,000 worth of music for a total of $1,000,050 of value.
And you didn't even know you were rich!
Normal DVDs are already compressed with MPEG-2.
A full-quality BD is 25GB.
Sure, compression will reduce those sizes, but a single DVD isn't large enough to store a 1080p movie.
/. was below its weekly quota of Apple stories, so the editors just accepted the first story they saw involving Apple.
I admit, I laughed when I read that list. Then I frowned because it's so true.
It dilutes (floods) the marketplace and makes it harder to choose between them. So, instead, people... leave Windows/OSX on their machine. Heck, I did!
Monopolies are bad. Oligopolies are bad. However, on the flip side, marketplace dilution is bad.
Economically, Linux distributions are inferior goods that are imperfect substitutes in monopolistic competition with one another, drawing upon the same resources (namely, people).
You won't upgrade to Windows 7 because there are no "popular Windows software that will not run on Windows XP."
Programmers won't create Windows 7-only programs because there's not users that have Windows 7 to justify ending support for Windows XP.
Chicken... egg.
Except that products Microsoft label as betas really are betas*, unlike Google who labels everything as Beta until it starts affecting their business interests (See: Gmail).
*Insert obligatory "Microsoft releases are betas, too, or should be since they're only beta quality."
FTA:
FTA's other article, that the quote is from:
See a difference there? If there were 10 million downloads of IE9 after it's launched wouldn't be surprising (it's usually not pushed out on Windows Update then), but that is actually a LOT of betas, even if people were just downloading it to see if the hardware accelerated rendering actually worked.
Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference.
I'd update the GPs list a bit, but getting to the point:
You mentioned innovation, but the problem here is that every product that Google makes that is successful in any way, shape, or form is almost identical to something that someone has already done, but slightly improved.
At least RIM (notice I'm not mentioning Apple here) added applications... to a cellphone! No one had ever done that before! Android has added... spplications... to a cellphone. 12 years after RIM released the BlackBerry.
Web browser? 14 years after Netscape. For a browser that cherry-picked features that the other 4 browsers already had.
Web-based email? 8 years after Hotmail.
There's a certain form of irony that we're talking this in a thread about Google Wave. Wave was, in a way, an innovative product. It faced several major problems that it never surmounted:
It'd be unconstitutional; the power to set copyrights doesn't belong to the executive branch.
I was under the impression that they would upgrade to Win7 during a hardware refresh.
You are aware that we're not referring to home users here?
Keeping in mind that we're talking about upgrading to Win7, I would think businesses, even small ones, would have Win7 Professional. Larger businesses would have Win7 Enterprise (which is volume-licensed).
Even better, virtualize the entire OS it runs on since IE6 is such a security hole.
We could call the feature Windows XP Mode and include it with the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows.
Oh wait, Microsoft already did that.
er... yeah:
-- US Constitution, Article I Section 8.
That would prevent an executive order from changing Copyright or Patent laws.
It doesn't matter, Android is Apache 2.0, and the GPL forbids you from relicensing GPLed code unless explicitly exempted (such as the "or later" clause the FSF recommends).
Java's class libraries are split into two sections. The first is the public API, as documented online.
The second part is the native implementation classes. On Sun's JVM, those are the sun.* and com.sun.* packages.
The real question is... which is Oracle referring to in this lawsuit? The former should be considered the interface (to an extent) and not copyrighted under US law. The latter is the implementation and should be covered by US Copyright law.
There's one additional wrinkle in this: If the code was copied from OpenJDK, that means Android would have to be GPL or be in violation of the GPL license. Android is currently licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Google's Privacy Policy has nothing to do with this, unless you're implying that Google got everyone in major rural areas to somehow agree to said policy before Google drove out in their Streetview cars.