I started my career doing programming for management information for a large book wholesaler. Then programming for a government department. Both just the sort of non-software company programming you were talking about. From there I went on to work for various software companies. Big and small.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Sure I'm simplifying. The non-computer company programmers may be doing scripting in Perl or Python too...
True. There's always got to be an enemy. For the USA, once Japan and the Nazis had been defeated, they switched to considering their former allies the USSR as the new enemy. Then once they fell, they switched to various Muslim countries.
For Slashdot, Microsoft was the big evil enemy. Apple hatred didn't come along till much later, and replaced Microsoft hatred over a fairly short time. I think it came about because Apple had a Unix was was being more successful than Linux.
If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not)
Do your own research. Follow it back to the original article and you'll find he was speaking about the "PC industry". But even reading that article, we don't know what the entire sentence that this "quote" came from said.
Thus claiming he was wrong because he didn't limit it to PCs, as you and several others have, is just plain misinformed.
They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto.
Which makes no sense. Apple still manufactures Macs, and the Mac is neither a phone nor a tablet. And some of those Macs are even assembled in the USA.
On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day
AND STILL MANUFACTURE PCS. Neither Radio Shack not TI qualify.
Apple doesn't own fabs. The manufacturing is done by Chinese/Taiwanese assemblers.
Were this true then Apple would be like every pretty much ever other PC and consumer electronics company in America.
But it's not true. Apple has it's own factory in Arizona that manufactures Sapphire for it's lenses and screens. And they have Flextronics in Fort Worth manufacturing the Mac Pro. I believe there are other examples, such as made to order Macs which are assembled in the US.
Ah, the value of looking up the primary source rather than believing a summary of an article, which is commenting on the original article.
From the original article, which includes a little more of what Schiller said: âoeEvery company that made computers when we started the Mac, theyâ(TM)re all gone,â said Philip Schiller, Appleâ(TM)s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Appleâ(TM)s Cupertino campus Thursday. âoeWeâ(TM)re the only one left. Weâ(TM)re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.â
Even if we did live in RMS' world programmers would still get paid because most programmers don't work for software companies.
Right. Yet most of those programmers were using VizBaz back in the bay, and HTML and Javascript now. Management information, and business forms and that sort of thing. Most of them without any qualification in programming.
God help us if that's the only paid programming work available.
The good stuff - the stuff you actually wanted to work on when you chose to study CS at university - that's mostly done at software companies (and universities).
The GPL was a major model for software licensing long before the App Store existed. The burden is on Apply to ensure compatibility, but they clearly don't have any interest in doing so.
Commercial closed source software existed long before the GPL. But the GPL has been worded specifically to be antagonistic to it. It's those deliberate restrictions on freedoms that even make people question whether the GPL and the App Store are compatible.
Apple has no interest in keeping the GPL out, as is demonstrated by the fact that there are many GPL apps on the Apple App Store. The only people who sometime (baselessly) complain about this are GPL fanatics.
Error messages are only slightly better in clang, because GCC has improved since version 4.2, and now even clang developers themselves explain that clang is better in caret positioning and colouring, which I wouldn't call being a generation ahead.
Your links make it clear that 26 year old GCC is playing catch-up with 6 year old Clang. But you only consider the matter of single line errors. Clang error output includes full static analysis, finding many categories of error that GCC will never be able to find, due to it's different approach.
Truly Clang/LLVM is a generation ahead, despite the fact that it's competition is encouraging the GCC developers to make some long needed improvements.
But when we consider less "hip" features, GCC makes faster code (which is usually the foremost interest of a compiler's user).
"Hip" seems to be your biased way to say modern. And no, small differences in executable speed is not the primary concern of most compiler users. It's speed of development, including compile time and quality of diagnostics (Clang's output includes static analysis, which becomes exceptional when paired with a good IDE.)
Clang is written in C++ and modular, and as result of this, it is more embeddable in third party projects and it can target multiple platforms with a single executable. Work is being done in GCC to address this but I'm talking about released code here.
Not so much. This very story is about ESR questioning why GPL GCC deliberately prevents non-GPL software from linking with it. Thus handicapping GCC for developers of IDEs and other tools. And the answer from RMS, that he refuses to compromise, and thus GCCs restrictions remain.
Which is why we just heard Linux running out of funds? [slashdot.org] Oh wait, we didn't.
Right, because GPL projects never put out a request for donations, accompanied by a statement that if they don't get $X they will fold. Of course they do.
For the record, I've nothing against BSD-licensed software, but people seem to be fine with GPL and its derivatives. Linux seems to be the platform of choice for most of smartphones and completely owns supercomputing. The desktop part is missing, insert compulsory joke about "YEAR OF LINUX DESKTOP" here - but generally it seems GPL is not scaring people away.
For "people" (users) there's no difference between GPL and BSD. The distinction only matters to developers. It's there that the tide is turning against GPL. That isn't measured by counting users.
The turn against GPL isn't full flow yet. But there are is certainly more open source people complaining about the restrictions of GPL. Including ESR, who raised the issue that sparked this story, that GCC was likely to be overtaken by Clang/LLVM, not simply because of technical issues, but because of the deliberate way GPL GCC is handicapped so it's use by non-GPL is very limited.
I make a living supporting and extending the software that I write. Big house, three cars in a three car garage. I'm a proud FSF supporter.
No surprise the word support comes first. It's the excuse RMS makes for people not being able to be rewarded for their code. "Hey you can make money through support".
Support is not programming. You can work to support without having written any part of the thing you are supporting. Unlike programming, it's not creative work. At it's best it can be interesting as detective work. At it's worst it is repetitive drudge.
It's like a musician playing for free but making their money from teaching guitar. If they mainly want to be a teacher, fine. But if they want to make their living from playing music, it's nothing but a work around. They are not getting paid for the work they are qualified and enjoy, from their creativity, but from something related to it.
Sure they do. Happily we're not living in RMSs world. The commercial software world is far bigger and better than the free software world.
RMS won't be happy till no programmers are paid for their work. But that just means he won't ever be happy. It's the useful idiots that follow him I feel sorry for.
You mean that project that was fully formed and perfectly usable long before Apple decided to "buy" it.
If by "buy" it, you mean offering the developer a job, with a salary. Rather than his previous situation of working on CUPS for nothing.
The community lost nothing, as the developer was still working on CUPS, and it remained open source, not the property of Apple. But the developer was paid for his work.
It's a demonstration of the twistedness of RMS acolytes that they think this is a bad thing. That are not happy unless computer programmers are in poverty. Working for nothing.
The App Store mechanism does not let you install rebuilt software. Thus, you can not fulfil the requirements of the license, and thus, the license forbids you from releasing through that channel.
Hard to decipher what you mean here. It is of course possible for anyone to become an apple developer, and take any GPLv2 software, modify it, and release it on the Apple App Store.
It will cost them $99 to do so. But there's nothing about the GPL that means no cost.
If there WAS something in the GPL that prevented that, then the restriction would be one of the GPL, not a restriction of the App Store.
App store rules don't include any sort of restriction. Indeed there are many GPL apps on the Apple App Store.
The GPL on the other hand does make restrictions that make it difficult to put GPL software on Apple's app store. And indeed the biggest story on this was VLC, which was NOT removed by Apple, but removed by one of it's developers who believed it to be impossible to put it on the App Store because of it's GPL status. Yet look today and VLC is on the app store again.
RMS is vocally ANTI commercial software. Apple on the other hand actually release a lot of open source software themselves. Some of it even GPL.
It's a complete lie to say that Apple store TOS prohibits releasing software that is GPL. The only hostility here is from RMS and his accolytes. Thay are the ones who want it to be impossible to have GPL on the App Store. Explicitly so.
Slashdot Mirror
I started my career doing programming for management information for a large book wholesaler. Then programming for a government department. Both just the sort of non-software company programming you were talking about. From there I went on to work for various software companies. Big and small.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Sure I'm simplifying. The non-computer company programmers may be doing scripting in Perl or Python too...
I was imprecise, we don't have source code to Xcode
Why should you have it? Have you paid for it? Have you contributed to it? Where is your sense of entitlement coming from?
Indeed. That's why I gave you both an example of manufacturing plant in the US owned by Apple plus one in the US owned by another company.
It was in reply to your false claims:
Apple doesn't own fabs. The manufacturing is done by Chinese/Taiwanese assemblers.
Apple's US plant proves your first claim wrong.
Both Apple and Flextronics US plants prove your second claim wrong.
That doesn't seem to be true even for their base model IBM System x3100 M4. These machines are engineered to be servers.
IBM (1981, now owned by Lenovo)
Interesting. I know I can buy a Lenovo branded PC. But where can a buy a new IBM PC?
Right, but they are intended to SERVE files or data to many users PCs. They are by definition not PERSONAL computers.
Server doesn't mean hi-spec.
True. There's always got to be an enemy. For the USA, once Japan and the Nazis had been defeated, they switched to considering their former allies the USSR as the new enemy. Then once they fell, they switched to various Muslim countries.
For Slashdot, Microsoft was the big evil enemy. Apple hatred didn't come along till much later, and replaced Microsoft hatred over a fairly short time. I think it came about because Apple had a Unix was was being more successful than Linux.
If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not)
Do your own research. Follow it back to the original article and you'll find he was speaking about the "PC industry". But even reading that article, we don't know what the entire sentence that this "quote" came from said.
Thus claiming he was wrong because he didn't limit it to PCs, as you and several others have, is just plain misinformed.
They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto.
Which makes no sense. Apple still manufactures Macs, and the Mac is neither a phone nor a tablet. And some of those Macs are even assembled in the USA.
On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day
AND STILL MANUFACTURE PCS. Neither Radio Shack not TI qualify.
And the very best user satisfaction ratings, year after year.
Apple doesn't own fabs. The manufacturing is done by Chinese/Taiwanese assemblers.
Were this true then Apple would be like every pretty much ever other PC and consumer electronics company in America.
But it's not true. Apple has it's own factory in Arizona that manufactures Sapphire for it's lenses and screens. And they have Flextronics in Fort Worth manufacturing the Mac Pro. I believe there are other examples, such as made to order Macs which are assembled in the US.
Indeed Dell didn't exist till 1988.
Michael Dell did have a company called "PC's Limited", but even that didn't manufacture a PC of it's own till 1985.
They may use descendants of the the IBM PC compatible architecture. But by definition they are not personal computers.
Ah, the value of looking up the primary source rather than believing a summary of an article, which is commenting on the original article.
From the original article, which includes a little more of what Schiller said: âoeEvery company that made computers when we started the Mac, theyâ(TM)re all gone,â said Philip Schiller, Appleâ(TM)s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Appleâ(TM)s Cupertino campus Thursday. âoeWeâ(TM)re the only one left. Weâ(TM)re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.â
It's clear he was talking about PCs.
Wrong. Lenovo bought the name. They put IBMs logo on their own Chinese made computers, rather than continue the actual IBM manufacturing.
They only used it for a few years. These days Lenovo use their own logo on those computers.
IBM PCs are long dead.
Even if we did live in RMS' world programmers would still get paid because most programmers don't work for software companies.
Right. Yet most of those programmers were using VizBaz back in the bay, and HTML and Javascript now. Management information, and business forms and that sort of thing. Most of them without any qualification in programming.
God help us if that's the only paid programming work available.
The good stuff - the stuff you actually wanted to work on when you chose to study CS at university - that's mostly done at software companies (and universities).
RMS's vision is not a utopia, it's a dystopia.
Apple says "thou shalt only do this and that and nothing else",
That's the definition of any license INCLUDING the GPL.
The GPL was a major model for software licensing long before the App Store existed. The burden is on Apply to ensure compatibility, but they clearly don't have any interest in doing so.
Commercial closed source software existed long before the GPL. But the GPL has been worded specifically to be antagonistic to it. It's those deliberate restrictions on freedoms that even make people question whether the GPL and the App Store are compatible.
Apple has no interest in keeping the GPL out, as is demonstrated by the fact that there are many GPL apps on the Apple App Store. The only people who sometime (baselessly) complain about this are GPL fanatics.
Yeah sure, you opt in for the virus
Funny that argument never seems to apply when criticising Apple or Microsoft.
Error messages are only slightly better in clang, because GCC has improved since version 4.2, and now even clang developers themselves explain that clang is better in caret positioning and colouring, which I wouldn't call being a generation ahead.
Your links make it clear that 26 year old GCC is playing catch-up with 6 year old Clang. But you only consider the matter of single line errors. Clang error output includes full static analysis, finding many categories of error that GCC will never be able to find, due to it's different approach.
Truly Clang/LLVM is a generation ahead, despite the fact that it's competition is encouraging the GCC developers to make some long needed improvements.
But when we consider less "hip" features, GCC makes faster code (which is usually the foremost interest of a compiler's user).
"Hip" seems to be your biased way to say modern. And no, small differences in executable speed is not the primary concern of most compiler users. It's speed of development, including compile time and quality of diagnostics (Clang's output includes static analysis, which becomes exceptional when paired with a good IDE.)
Clang is written in C++ and modular, and as result of this, it is more embeddable in third party projects and it can target multiple platforms with a single executable. Work is being done in GCC to address this but I'm talking about released code here.
Not so much. This very story is about ESR questioning why GPL GCC deliberately prevents non-GPL software from linking with it. Thus handicapping GCC for developers of IDEs and other tools. And the answer from RMS, that he refuses to compromise, and thus GCCs restrictions remain.
Which is why we just heard Linux running out of funds? [slashdot.org] Oh wait, we didn't.
Right, because GPL projects never put out a request for donations, accompanied by a statement that if they don't get $X they will fold. Of course they do.
For the record, I've nothing against BSD-licensed software, but people seem to be fine with GPL and its derivatives. Linux seems to be the platform of choice for most of smartphones and completely owns supercomputing. The desktop part is missing, insert compulsory joke about "YEAR OF LINUX DESKTOP" here - but generally it seems GPL is not scaring people away.
For "people" (users) there's no difference between GPL and BSD. The distinction only matters to developers. It's there that the tide is turning against GPL. That isn't measured by counting users.
The turn against GPL isn't full flow yet. But there are is certainly more open source people complaining about the restrictions of GPL. Including ESR, who raised the issue that sparked this story, that GCC was likely to be overtaken by Clang/LLVM, not simply because of technical issues, but because of the deliberate way GPL GCC is handicapped so it's use by non-GPL is very limited.
I make a living supporting and extending the software that I write. Big house, three cars in a three car garage. I'm a proud FSF supporter.
No surprise the word support comes first. It's the excuse RMS makes for people not being able to be rewarded for their code. "Hey you can make money through support".
Support is not programming. You can work to support without having written any part of the thing you are supporting. Unlike programming, it's not creative work. At it's best it can be interesting as detective work. At it's worst it is repetitive drudge.
It's like a musician playing for free but making their money from teaching guitar. If they mainly want to be a teacher, fine. But if they want to make their living from playing music, it's nothing but a work around. They are not getting paid for the work they are qualified and enjoy, from their creativity, but from something related to it.
Sure they do. Happily we're not living in RMSs world. The commercial software world is far bigger and better than the free software world.
RMS won't be happy till no programmers are paid for their work. But that just means he won't ever be happy. It's the useful idiots that follow him I feel sorry for.
You mean that project that was fully formed and perfectly usable long before Apple decided to "buy" it.
If by "buy" it, you mean offering the developer a job, with a salary. Rather than his previous situation of working on CUPS for nothing.
The community lost nothing, as the developer was still working on CUPS, and it remained open source, not the property of Apple. But the developer was paid for his work.
It's a demonstration of the twistedness of RMS acolytes that they think this is a bad thing. That are not happy unless computer programmers are in poverty. Working for nothing.
The App Store mechanism does not let you install rebuilt software. Thus, you can not fulfil the requirements of the license, and thus, the license forbids you from releasing through that channel.
Hard to decipher what you mean here. It is of course possible for anyone to become an apple developer, and take any GPLv2 software, modify it, and release it on the Apple App Store.
It will cost them $99 to do so. But there's nothing about the GPL that means no cost.
If there WAS something in the GPL that prevented that, then the restriction would be one of the GPL, not a restriction of the App Store.
App store rules don't include any sort of restriction. Indeed there are many GPL apps on the Apple App Store.
The GPL on the other hand does make restrictions that make it difficult to put GPL software on Apple's app store. And indeed the biggest story on this was VLC, which was NOT removed by Apple, but removed by one of it's developers who believed it to be impossible to put it on the App Store because of it's GPL status. Yet look today and VLC is on the app store again.
RMS is vocally ANTI commercial software. Apple on the other hand actually release a lot of open source software themselves. Some of it even GPL.
It's a complete lie to say that Apple store TOS prohibits releasing software that is GPL. The only hostility here is from RMS and his accolytes. Thay are the ones who want it to be impossible to have GPL on the App Store. Explicitly so.