This brings the question, what do free software developers do if they discover that their code is being ripped off by some commercial vendor somewhere?
A lot of these free programs are relatively unheard of, but thousands of hours of effort have been put into writing them. As most of these folks tend to be just working on these in their spare time, is legal action viable?
The FSF may help out, but they seem to have enough cases on their hands. Besides, they only go after GPL violaters.
I fear this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem in the future, especially with small time commercial vendors (like this CherryOS guy, or the Gaim ripoff IMBlaze that an earlier poster gave a link to)
Only on/. would a post about a post about a post about a post about nether-monkey-flight and the beauty of recursion be modded to +5, Insightful. That, my friends, is the beauty of Slashdot.
Personally, I think not, or at least not in that way. Google may at best provide lots and lots of usefull tools for your computer, and all web enabled.
And perhaps eventually there were be a complete set of Google desktop tools such that your actual OS (Windows) would be close to irrelevant -- you do most things via the Google tools, and on the web. Reducing Windows to just a buggy set of drivers. Kind of reminds you of the old Netscape vision, doesn't it?
Do not mod a post as +1 Informative automatically if it links to a news site or wikipedia. Try actually clicking the link. The above post was meant to be funny.
There's also a fairly recent hybrid between housecats and another wild cat species, but I can't remember what it's called, a small relative of the leopard I think.
You are probably refering to the "Bengal Cat" which is a cross between the asian leopard cat (a wild cat species with leopard-like markings) and domestic cats. More here:
I think that more interesting would be the intelligence they show when attacking the lions (assuming the stories are true).
Do they plan ahead and work in teams? Do they pass on knowledge to the younger ones? Do they lay traps, ambush and deceive like in guerilla warfare (no pun intended)? Anyway, I don't think that they'll be able to take on a formidable predator like a lion too easily. The stories are probably just stories.
But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I've thought of this before: if Apple ever ports OS X to x86, maybe they'll only provide support for a very limited range of hardware? And maybe they'll give you no support if you're running on non-supported hardware.
That would take away one of the main advantages of PCs - extensibility, but I think many would be willing to make that compromise. And OS X can remain around as stable it is on Mac hardware.
Firefox has a feature disallows sites from blocking right-cliking. Go to Tools->Options (or Edit->Preferences, depending on your platform), click Web Features on the left. Then click on Advanced... next the the "Allow Javascript" checkbox. The option is there.
Sure, standards compliant is important, choice is important, and it's good that non IE browsers are finally getting attention. And it's nice to see Mozilla.org getting so much coverage in the mainstream media after all these years. And yes, do expect more sites to become more standards compliant in the coming months.
However, I feel that most of this talk of the browser wars being back and Firefox gaining market share are pretty irrelevant now.
The original browser wars started when MS realised the threat Netscape posed to its dominance on the desktop. Their fear was that the web browser (Netscape) would bypass the OS. This is precisely what Netscaped planned -- their intention was to reduce windows to "a buggy set of device drivers". This threat prompted MS to massively invest in their web browser (IE), and integrate it with future versions of Windows. IE eventually became the dominant browser on the web, and Netscape became a minor player.
But the web, and web browsing as they stand today are still fairly far from the old vision. Firefox and the other browsers will make the web slightly nicer, and IE's market share may just drop rapidly over the next year or so.
But is MS worried? No. Even if IE's market share falls massively in the near future, it is not Microsoft's concern. The real future lies in the next generation of web browsers. With Longhorn we are likely to see a hugely rewamped browser (probably rewritten from scratch), and built probably for potentially nasty things like XAML. That would be more of a realisation of the old vision.
The OSS world is obviously not blind to this. Mono addresses this possibility, and is trying to make an MS compatible XAML implementaion. Mozilla too has been drawing up plans for the future.
But either way, the browser wars as they are won't be here forever. Eventually (2006-07, perhaps), web access and interactivity would be so fundamental to the operating system shell itself, that the "web browser" as a stand alone app would be irrelevant.
Press release says "SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 comes with latest open source functionality". But it only comes with GNOME 2.6. GNOME 2.8 was out about 3 weeks ago
Anyway, lets hope this release has more than half-hearted GNOME support. The previous version included GNOME, but barely. It's going to be interesting to see how Novell balances KDE and GNOME in the future, given their conflict.
Ditto. Very sad day. Never expected this sort of stuff from slashdot. Also note that the submitter of the article is Randall Burns, the same guy who wrote the article.
The article is from some fascist site (affiliated with this looney one), and the slashdot story was submitted by the author of the article himself. This is not what I visit slashdot.org for. Truly sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Every /. poster should read that page before posting to this story.
That Half-Life movie doesn't seem to be based on the game. Where's Gordon Freeman? And the genre is Drama. They seem unrelated. Thankfully.
Not only is the domain infringing their trademark, he's also using their logo and pretending to be them.
This guy is going to be in deep trouble. Red Hat will take this pretty seriously IMO.
Here's the mirrordot mirror:a 90885a6bb255d38/index.html
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/1175a21b287ffa85
And this too. British soldiers act very differently, and it shows.
No, there's a major difference. This CherryOS guy is claiming credit for someone else's work.
The so called music and movie pirates redistribute data in violation of the license, but do not claim that it is their own work.
In addition, he's actually trying to profit from it, which makes him different from those who share CD-ripped MP3s on Kazaa.
This brings the question, what do free software developers do if they discover that their code is being ripped off by some commercial vendor somewhere?
A lot of these free programs are relatively unheard of, but thousands of hours of effort have been put into writing them. As most of these folks tend to be just working on these in their spare time, is legal action viable?
The FSF may help out, but they seem to have enough cases on their hands. Besides, they only go after GPL violaters.
I fear this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem in the future, especially with small time commercial vendors (like this CherryOS guy, or the Gaim ripoff IMBlaze that an earlier poster gave a link to)
He's busy buying time now. I say he's spending this time trying to remove as many obvious signs of his copying from PearPC as he can.
Only on /. would a post about a post about a post about a post about nether-monkey-flight and the beauty of recursion be modded to +5, Insightful.
That, my friends, is the beauty of Slashdot.
Now mod this insightful, please.
Needless to say, both run only on a GNU/Hurd system.
Small Wikipedia article on him
What's next? The Google operating system?
Personally, I think not, or at least not in that way. Google may at best provide lots and lots of usefull tools for your computer, and all web enabled.
And perhaps eventually there were be a complete set of Google desktop tools such that your actual OS (Windows) would be close to irrelevant -- you do most things via the Google tools, and on the web. Reducing Windows to just a buggy set of drivers. Kind of reminds you of the old Netscape vision, doesn't it?
Firefox 'partially' supported. See this:
n swer=10135&topic=96
http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?a
Anyway, hope they someday release it for an OS other than Windows.
Do not mod a post as +1 Informative automatically if it links to a news site or wikipedia. Try actually clicking the link. The above post was meant to be funny.
There's also a fairly recent hybrid between housecats and another wild cat species, but I can't remember what it's called, a small relative of the leopard I think.
You are probably refering to the "Bengal Cat" which is a cross between the asian leopard cat (a wild cat species with leopard-like markings) and domestic cats. More here:
http://www.bengalcat.co.uk/pet/alc/
http://www.acfacat.com/breeds/bengal.html
Oh, how I pine for the days of vi vs. Emacs.
Errr...no.. it was Emacs vs. vi you know.
I think that more interesting would be the intelligence they show when attacking the lions (assuming the stories are true).
Do they plan ahead and work in teams? Do they pass on knowledge to the younger ones? Do they lay traps, ambush and deceive like in guerilla warfare (no pun intended)? Anyway, I don't think that they'll be able to take on a formidable predator like a lion too easily. The stories are probably just stories.
I for one welcome our new hitherto unknown giant congolese ape overlords
No one has said it yet...
In Soviet Russia, work trains you for gaming!!
But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I've thought of this before: if Apple ever ports OS X to x86, maybe they'll only provide support for a very limited range of hardware? And maybe they'll give you no support if you're running on non-supported hardware.
That would take away one of the main advantages of PCs - extensibility, but I think many would be willing to make that compromise. And OS X can remain around as stable it is on Mac hardware.
Just a thought.
GTK? No.
:)
From what I understand, they use the Chimp Toolkit.
2. right-click on the page at all,
Firefox has a feature disallows sites from blocking right-cliking. Go to Tools->Options (or Edit->Preferences, depending on your platform), click Web Features on the left. Then click on Advanced... next the the "Allow Javascript" checkbox. The option is there.
Sure, standards compliant is important, choice is important, and it's good that non IE browsers are finally getting attention. And it's nice to see Mozilla.org getting so much coverage in the mainstream media after all these years. And yes, do expect more sites to become more standards compliant in the coming months.
However, I feel that most of this talk of the browser wars being back and Firefox gaining market share are pretty irrelevant now.
The original browser wars started when MS realised the threat Netscape posed to its dominance on the desktop. Their fear was that the web browser (Netscape) would bypass the OS. This is precisely what Netscaped planned -- their intention was to reduce windows to "a buggy set of device drivers". This threat prompted MS to massively invest in their web browser (IE), and integrate it with future versions of Windows. IE eventually became the dominant browser on the web, and Netscape became a minor player.
But the web, and web browsing as they stand today are still fairly far from the old vision. Firefox and the other browsers will make the web slightly nicer, and IE's market share may just drop rapidly over the next year or so.
But is MS worried? No. Even if IE's market share falls massively in the near future, it is not Microsoft's concern. The real future lies in the next generation of web browsers. With Longhorn we are likely to see a hugely rewamped browser (probably rewritten from scratch), and built probably for potentially nasty things like XAML. That would be more of a realisation of the old vision.
The OSS world is obviously not blind to this. Mono addresses this possibility, and is trying to make an MS compatible XAML implementaion. Mozilla too has been drawing up plans for the future.
But either way, the browser wars as they are won't be here forever. Eventually (2006-07, perhaps), web access and interactivity would be so fundamental to the operating system shell itself, that the "web browser" as a stand alone app would be irrelevant.
Press release says "SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2 comes with latest open source functionality". But it only comes with GNOME 2.6. GNOME 2.8 was out about 3 weeks ago
Anyway, lets hope this release has more than half-hearted GNOME support. The previous version included GNOME, but barely. It's going to be interesting to see how Novell balances KDE and GNOME in the future, given their conflict.
Ditto. Very sad day. Never expected this sort of stuff from slashdot. Also note that the submitter of the article is Randall Burns, the same guy who wrote the article.
The article is from some fascist site (affiliated with this looney one), and the slashdot story was submitted by the author of the article himself. This is not what I visit slashdot.org for. Truly sad.