Although I don't always agree with their rulings, US courts, and especially the higher courts use a great deal of logic and thought on their decisions.
The school pledge issue, for instance, would have been fine if it were voluntary, but it is a teacher lead activity where your choice is to participate in a (although only barely) religious activity or stand quietly and shut up. It was this factor that lead to the school pledge ban, not a hatred of religion.
In his matter, the court is weighed with the issue of protecting property rights (which is what a trademark is, your property,) with the rights of others to make fair use of it.
Fair use usually precludes making money off of the said product (or name in this case,) but in this case it is awkward and different in many ways, because a name is intangible and readily used in many contexts.
So don't knock the court for being insane or stupid. Criticise judgements with which you disagree, offer up alternatives, and understand that the "wrong" answers to problems like this are usually easy to spot, but coming up with the "right" answers to a problem like this can be quite difficult, or even impossible.
IANAL, but clearly trademarks must be protected. I cannot be allowed to setup a store, call myself Macy's, and begin selling clothing. It is a clear violation of Macy's rights.
But if I were merely trying to associate myself with a well known product, is that the same an act of deception, or an act of comparison. I once ran a live action role playing convention (you know, dorks in costumes with foam swords:) After discovering that few people could find our website without knowing our exact name, and asking them the kinds of things they had searched for, I ended up adding "Dungeons" and "Dragons" to our list of keywords in the metatags. Should TSR/WOTC/Hasboro have sued me for that.
If someone asks you about a band, and you say, "well, they're kindof like the Beatles, with a little bit of Sex Pistols mixed in," are you infringing on the trademarks of the Beatles or the Sex Pistols.
This isn't as apples and oranges of a comparrison as it may seem. Music and Movies use such comparisons often in advertisements, via quotes from critics.
Ultimatly I am concerned about the wording of the ruling. To me it seems overly broad. The line, "clearly holds the marks in question, and defendants used the marks in commerce without (its) permission" could, in theory, apply to an individual who searches for a trademarked name to make a purchase of any search. Granted I don't think anyone would sue you for doing a web search to buy their product, but if, for example, Verisign knew that I did a search on the phrase "Cheaper than Verisign" and purchased from a competitor, would this ruling be used to support their case.
Trademarks are a needed part of commerce, like copyrights and patents, but they must be balanced with free speech, and the ability of the people to make use of the words they need to function in society.
My father is a very moral man, who taught me early on that winning isn't the point in life. In fact, if "winning" is your only goal, you will never win.
He would tell me stories, like the time he quit his high school water polo team after the coach encouraged his team to elbow the opposing team whenever the ref looked away.
My father's tech company was stolen away from him in the same way as in this artical. He and several friends created a start up, and within a few years, all were shut out of the company, and the investors walked away with the prefered stock.
Companies like Microsoft practice an odd form of amorality and defend it as good business practice. It might be sound business practice, but there is nothing good about it.
Admittedly, in any capitalist society there is a dog-eat-dog quality to business, but is there really the need to specifically crush upstart companies, play fast and loose with public standards to kill competition, and other such underhanded techniques that are only good for your company, but bad for everyone else.
In the end, I think most people who were raised with a firm and grounded set of morals appriciate that there is such a thing as good business practices. I try my best to stay abrest of those companies that follow them and only give them my business. It's hard sometimes, but in the end, it might be the only way some businesses can be made to behave.
There are tradeoffs to using the make each program do one thing vs. make each program do everything technique.
I am currently working on a small web content management CGI in C, based on the "small is beautiful / Make each program do one thing," paradigm. It is made of several smaller programs, each does one thing (one part is the CGI, and recieves the request and returns the output, one part is an XSLT transform engine, one part is a cacheing engine that will cache the XSLT output and only rerun the XSL transform if the source file has changed, and so on and so fourth)
I am mostly doing this for self education, but I have noticed that along with the several advantages to my approach (flexibility in application and extensibility,) there are significant drawbacks.
There is processor overhead to loading each program, and while on a server with few hits this will not be an issue, I am positive that my little CMS will pale in comparison to something like MOD_PERL + some random CMS under Apache. Mine is smaller, simpler, more Unix-like, but not nessecarily better.
I think the Unix ideals are good design technique, and should be kept in mind when designing any project, but a systems designer needs to be prepared to drop them if they impede in the performace of the final application.
Think of programs like cars. Formula one race cars are horribly designed taxis. They also absolutly CANNOT handle going off road. Tis doesn't mean they are poorly designed.
This posts meanders a bit, but I eventually get to a point, bare with me...
I read a comment by an American astronaut (or perhaps it was a European astronaut, I forget) who had gone into space with both the European Space Agency and NASA. When asked to compare the two, he said that in Europe, they have a lot of rules, but enforces them loosely. In NASA, they much less rules, but enforced them much more strictly.
I once had a German language teacher who explained to the class that there were social and moral differences between Americans and Europeans that were deeper than mere cultural or language differences. He said that in America, there was a strong sense that if you didn't get caught, you never did anything wrong, and that in Europe, that same logic didn't exist.
While both of these I believe to be strong characterizations, there is a ring of truth to both of them. On the whole, Americans are a regimented and ordered society that believe if someone gives an order then it must be the correct course of action.
One unfortunate side effect of this 'moral logic' is that it favors those who break the rules. If I can break the accepted rules, and get away with it, then not only will I have broken the rules, but now others will find it acceptable and follow me. With each transgression the dam gains another leak.
Europeans tend to lack this 'follow the leaders' mentality not out of moral superiority, but out of the experiencing a thousand years of corrupt leaders. We Americans have only had 200 years, and we have only really been culturally aware of it since Nixon.
Developers tend to not fall into this mental trap. We have a much more single minded approace to knowledge, and approach that is shared with most scholastic professionals, that of a single shared knowledge base, and that knowledge is free. No one objects to Microsoft selling Windows for profit, but developers get a little angry when someone figures out some new API call, and Microsoft get's angry and tells them they can't share that information.
Businessmen, however, do tend follow this pattern. Rockefeller and Hearst (and some might add Gates,) violated many moral ideals to attain market dominance, and became economic (and in many respects, social and political,) gods.
In the long run, the survival of the open source software movement relies not on the GPL, or on Linus Torvalds, but on forstering in the general public the basic idea that regardless of law, court rulings, or public announcements by famous businessmen, sharing of information is a right. Cooperation is a right. Free exchange of ideas is a right. Perhaps not an absolute right (I don't have the right to copy someone elses work verbatim and give it to you, if I haven't been given explicit rights to do so,) but an irrevokable right non-the-less.
In America, the politicians, businessmen, and media are fond of the term capitalism, extoling how it is the foundation of American society. Anything else is communism, and therefore, bad. I won't go about arguing economics here, as it is well outside the scope of my now very overly long point, but I will say that there is now need for a fear of intelectual communism, especially if it is elective. This is what the GPL is, elective intelectual communism. This is what bothers SCO, and Microsoft. This is what bugs the anti-GPL crowds. This is why Europeans look at Americans and wonder, "What's wrong with those people," because they have long since learned that it doesn't matter what the governement says, it's still OK to share with your neighbors.
I'm not surprised that XP won out in all categories
The article states that their subjects were people, "with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP",
Now, unless they got a bunch of Mac people, I'm guessing (from the way that line is worded,) they got people who had "computer experience" from Windows 95/98.
Migrating from 98 to XP would be a bit easier than 98 to KDE. Microsoft has gone out of their way to provide a continually improving, yet consistent, interface for their target audience.
I just happen to not consider myself part of that target audience. I use Ratpoison myself, but KDE is a very good windowing system. Were I to sit here and list out all of the 'Microsoft ui vs. other windowing systems' I would not only be mostly preaching to the choir, but also mostly off-topic, but I just wanted to point out that KDE is designed by people who want usability with some gloss, but not necessarilly at the cost of having the ui try and 'do everything' for the user.
Unfortunatly the 'do everything' is exactly what Microsoft intends for the Windows ui. Prefect for my mother maybe, and obviously for their testers, but not for me
If SCO is right (and they aren't) about SCO IP being in the kernel, the most they could do was collect license fees from infected versions of te kernel. Newer (and SCO IP free versions) of the kernel would be beyond their touch. In effect, they wouldn't be collecting licenses on the GPL'ed kernel, but on the ir IP that was included against their will.
No matter what happens, SCO will not own the Linux name, or the hearts and minds of the linux community.
It seems that while businesses are afraid of the OSS community (just see the wording of of Microsoft's number two enemy comment here
and they all think they can somehow get people to stop OSS development by providing a lot of features and stability (which, although they do fine on the first point, the still significantly lag on the second.) This might be true of end users, but developers, the ones who LIKE to code, don't use linux (or BSD, or whatnot) merely for the stability and cost. They use it because they want to be able to dive into their operating system head first. To fix anything they don't like, to write an app that takes full advantage of new feature that are underdocumented. To write code that makes sense, and have it compile the first time.
Even if (and it won't) SCO some how makes Linux go away, the community of OSS developers will simply find a new baby to nuture. Sure, it would be an enormous hit to the community, but no one would unlearn any of the lessons from Linux, and we might end up with something better. Maybe it would be HURD, or some RTO like TRON. Who knows, but the fact is, SCO and Microsoft are fighting a battle they cannot win. In all fact, they are merely hardening their opposition to their tricks.
The big difference is that Microsoft isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and SCO's days are numbered.
If we all pray really hard, perhaps when the do go out of business, Unix source will become open, or at least released under a very liberal license, that would prevent anything as rediculous as this fiasco from ever happening again.
As has been pointed out in many posts here, many skills and knowledges are dying out because they have outlived thier usefulness and/or have been superceded by modern technology.
This does not mean these skills don't have their place, only that people can get along just fine without them. How many people can't cook anything that doesn't have microwave instructions on the side of the box. Does this mean we don't need chefs?
Handwriting needs to be legible, but beyond that is irrelevant for most people. We will still have professional caligraphers, engravers, and so forth who will keep the art alive.
If Novell is correct, SCO doesn't hold the copyrights. The Open Group owns the Unix trademark. A quick search of the US Patent office (my actual search query is here.)
reveals that SCO doesn't have any Unix related patents before November of 1993 (after Linus had written the kernel)
So really, this whole lawsuit has lept headfirst from a giant joke into something well beyond offensive.
Apparently, the game type is important, as ten hours of the block-rotating game Tetris failed to improve test scores
Tetris only has one important object on the screen at a time, I wonder how much visual object tracking would improve someone made a version of Tetris where you had to control two or more falling bricks at a time.
This reminds me of when I began to study music theory, and started to listen to multiple instruments at the same time. Most people who listen to classical music, or any highly arranged music, can pick out and track multiple melodies, including subtle ones whose only purpose is to enhance the piece. Contrast that to most rock (or any popular music,) where there is one main melody, a bass line that hardly varies from the melody, and no complex vocal harmony.
Most of my friends cannot listen to and enjoy complex music (other than as relaxing background noise.) The human mind adjusts too in environment, and if exposed to complex auditory stimuli, we learn to understand it quicker, and follow it with greater detail. If exposed to complex visual stimuli, we learn to parse it faster. This probably applies to all senses.
The real question is, as games improve in areas such as 3d audio, will other senses besides visual spacial object tracking improve?
Of course the Gates family is well known for their philanthropic gestures, but any time someone is prepared to give away over a BILLION dollars, you have to question their motives
I went about doing half an hour's worth of Googling on unfair trade practices and international product dumping, and came to a conclusion: there is nothing legally wrong with what Microsoft is doing.
Microsoft is merely giving away their product at the same price as the open source people. If I trusted their motives, I would respect the donation, however, I think it is clear to everyone that Microsoft is attempting to attack open source software in one of their most promising markets. Their manner of doing it reaks of unfair trade practices, but for two things:
Nothing is stopping any other distributor from doing the same thing (software is cheap. It costs only pennies to press a cd, and less than a dollar to mail out. It is virtually free to distribute software online. This means Microsoft isn't leveraging their monopoly to out produce their competitors.
Open source software is already do this exact same thing, by releasing all of their products free of charge, they are undercutting proprietory OS's.
So, while I find Microsoft's practices mean spirited and anti-competitive, I think they are perfectly legal.
Well, not to sound overly retortive, but who really cares what the binary license is. A binary only user is restricted to using the product "as is," and can't, practically, modify it to do something else.
With very few exceptions, you may distribute a binary to the same people to whom you may distribute your source. The binary would be under the same split license as the source, it just wouldn't practically mean anything, since a binary can't (practically) be modified.
All of this is assuming we are speaking about a license that is royalty free, or otherwise not a restrictive license. Yes, if a company grants me an exclusive, one time use license for a library, and I link it to my otherwise GPL'ed source code, the result is undistributable, but if the license is royalty free (so that end users may freely redistribute it,) and allowed to be distributed, then a split license with an otherwise GPL'ed source tree (and the resulting binary) would remain open source.
For example: Had Fraunhofer Gesellschaft released their ISO mp3 code under a free (as in beer) but restrictive (as in not free as in speech) license, that said something to the effect of, "this code can only be used to encode files into mp3 format, but not to decode," then instead of the entire mp3 programming movement going underground, perhaps they would have only collected royalties from the mp3 players (which, if it were a very small royalty, might actually work,) but freely encouraged people to make converters to their format (thus, encouraging more people to buy the for (a hopefully reasonable) cost players. A GPL'ed encoder could be written, and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft code could be listed as under a separate license. The player could even be GPL'ed, with the library for the actual codeing being the for cost purchase.
I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that as long as companies do not have restrictive licenses, patent rights can be maintained, and even so profit maid, while still respecting the bulk of the open source community spirit.
The GPL is a wonderful thing, but fear of other licenses, even those with some degree of restriction, alienates traditional model businesses who have a lot to offer the open source community.
The GPL issue is essentially moot, because anyone who wanted to release their code GPL could just bundle the patented code into separate files, and release the whole product under a split license, i.e.:This program is released under GPL, except for the files "protocol-x.c" and "protocol-x.h" which are released under the W3C Royalty Free license.
That would satisfy both licenses, and still fulfill the author's open source intentions.
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Although I don't always agree with their rulings, US courts, and especially the higher courts use a great deal of logic and thought on their decisions.
The school pledge issue, for instance, would have been fine if it were voluntary, but it is a teacher lead activity where your choice is to participate in a (although only barely) religious activity or stand quietly and shut up. It was this factor that lead to the school pledge ban, not a hatred of religion.
In his matter, the court is weighed with the issue of protecting property rights (which is what a trademark is, your property,) with the rights of others to make fair use of it.
Fair use usually precludes making money off of the said product (or name in this case,) but in this case it is awkward and different in many ways, because a name is intangible and readily used in many contexts.
So don't knock the court for being insane or stupid. Criticise judgements with which you disagree, offer up alternatives, and understand that the "wrong" answers to problems like this are usually easy to spot, but coming up with the "right" answers to a problem like this can be quite difficult, or even impossible.
IANAL, but clearly trademarks must be protected. I cannot be allowed to setup a store, call myself Macy's, and begin selling clothing. It is a clear violation of Macy's rights.
But if I were merely trying to associate myself with a well known product, is that the same an act of deception, or an act of comparison. I once ran a live action role playing convention (you know, dorks in costumes with foam swords :) After discovering that few people could find our website without knowing our exact name, and asking them the kinds of things they had searched for, I ended up adding "Dungeons" and "Dragons" to our list of keywords in the metatags. Should TSR/WOTC/Hasboro have sued me for that.
If someone asks you about a band, and you say, "well, they're kindof like the Beatles, with a little bit of Sex Pistols mixed in," are you infringing on the trademarks of the Beatles or the Sex Pistols.
This isn't as apples and oranges of a comparrison as it may seem. Music and Movies use such comparisons often in advertisements, via quotes from critics.
Ultimatly I am concerned about the wording of the ruling. To me it seems overly broad. The line, "clearly holds the marks in question, and defendants used the marks in commerce without (its) permission" could, in theory, apply to an individual who searches for a trademarked name to make a purchase of any search. Granted I don't think anyone would sue you for doing a web search to buy their product, but if, for example, Verisign knew that I did a search on the phrase "Cheaper than Verisign" and purchased from a competitor, would this ruling be used to support their case.
Trademarks are a needed part of commerce, like copyrights and patents, but they must be balanced with free speech, and the ability of the people to make use of the words they need to function in society.
My father is a very moral man, who taught me early on that winning isn't the point in life. In fact, if "winning" is your only goal, you will never win.
He would tell me stories, like the time he quit his high school water polo team after the coach encouraged his team to elbow the opposing team whenever the ref looked away.
My father's tech company was stolen away from him in the same way as in this artical. He and several friends created a start up, and within a few years, all were shut out of the company, and the investors walked away with the prefered stock.
Companies like Microsoft practice an odd form of amorality and defend it as good business practice. It might be sound business practice, but there is nothing good about it.
Admittedly, in any capitalist society there is a dog-eat-dog quality to business, but is there really the need to specifically crush upstart companies, play fast and loose with public standards to kill competition, and other such underhanded techniques that are only good for your company, but bad for everyone else.
In the end, I think most people who were raised with a firm and grounded set of morals appriciate that there is such a thing as good business practices. I try my best to stay abrest of those companies that follow them and only give them my business. It's hard sometimes, but in the end, it might be the only way some businesses can be made to behave.
There are tradeoffs to using the make each program do one thing vs. make each program do everything technique.
I am currently working on a small web content management CGI in C, based on the "small is beautiful / Make each program do one thing," paradigm. It is made of several smaller programs, each does one thing (one part is the CGI, and recieves the request and returns the output, one part is an XSLT transform engine, one part is a cacheing engine that will cache the XSLT output and only rerun the XSL transform if the source file has changed, and so on and so fourth)
I am mostly doing this for self education, but I have noticed that along with the several advantages to my approach (flexibility in application and extensibility,) there are significant drawbacks.
There is processor overhead to loading each program, and while on a server with few hits this will not be an issue, I am positive that my little CMS will pale in comparison to something like MOD_PERL + some random CMS under Apache. Mine is smaller, simpler, more Unix-like, but not nessecarily better.
I think the Unix ideals are good design technique, and should be kept in mind when designing any project, but a systems designer needs to be prepared to drop them if they impede in the performace of the final application.
Think of programs like cars. Formula one race cars are horribly designed taxis. They also absolutly CANNOT handle going off road. Tis doesn't mean they are poorly designed.
This posts meanders a bit, but I eventually get to a point, bare with me...
I read a comment by an American astronaut (or perhaps it was a European astronaut, I forget) who had gone into space with both the European Space Agency and NASA. When asked to compare the two, he said that in Europe, they have a lot of rules, but enforces them loosely. In NASA, they much less rules, but enforced them much more strictly.
I once had a German language teacher who explained to the class that there were social and moral differences between Americans and Europeans that were deeper than mere cultural or language differences. He said that in America, there was a strong sense that if you didn't get caught, you never did anything wrong, and that in Europe, that same logic didn't exist.
While both of these I believe to be strong characterizations, there is a ring of truth to both of them. On the whole, Americans are a regimented and ordered society that believe if someone gives an order then it must be the correct course of action.
One unfortunate side effect of this 'moral logic' is that it favors those who break the rules. If I can break the accepted rules, and get away with it, then not only will I have broken the rules, but now others will find it acceptable and follow me. With each transgression the dam gains another leak.
Europeans tend to lack this 'follow the leaders' mentality not out of moral superiority, but out of the experiencing a thousand years of corrupt leaders. We Americans have only had 200 years, and we have only really been culturally aware of it since Nixon.
Developers tend to not fall into this mental trap. We have a much more single minded approace to knowledge, and approach that is shared with most scholastic professionals, that of a single shared knowledge base, and that knowledge is free. No one objects to Microsoft selling Windows for profit, but developers get a little angry when someone figures out some new API call, and Microsoft get's angry and tells them they can't share that information.
Businessmen, however, do tend follow this pattern. Rockefeller and Hearst (and some might add Gates,) violated many moral ideals to attain market dominance, and became economic (and in many respects, social and political,) gods.
In the long run, the survival of the open source software movement relies not on the GPL, or on Linus Torvalds, but on forstering in the general public the basic idea that regardless of law, court rulings, or public announcements by famous businessmen, sharing of information is a right. Cooperation is a right. Free exchange of ideas is a right. Perhaps not an absolute right (I don't have the right to copy someone elses work verbatim and give it to you, if I haven't been given explicit rights to do so,) but an irrevokable right non-the-less.
In America, the politicians, businessmen, and media are fond of the term capitalism, extoling how it is the foundation of American society. Anything else is communism, and therefore, bad. I won't go about arguing economics here, as it is well outside the scope of my now very overly long point, but I will say that there is now need for a fear of intelectual communism, especially if it is elective. This is what the GPL is, elective intelectual communism. This is what bothers SCO, and Microsoft. This is what bugs the anti-GPL crowds. This is why Europeans look at Americans and wonder, "What's wrong with those people," because they have long since learned that it doesn't matter what the governement says, it's still OK to share with your neighbors.
I'm not surprised that XP won out in all categories
The article states that their subjects were people, "with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP",
Now, unless they got a bunch of Mac people, I'm guessing (from the way that line is worded,) they got people who had "computer experience" from Windows 95/98.
Migrating from 98 to XP would be a bit easier than 98 to KDE. Microsoft has gone out of their way to provide a continually improving, yet consistent, interface for their target audience.
I just happen to not consider myself part of that target audience. I use Ratpoison myself, but KDE is a very good windowing system. Were I to sit here and list out all of the 'Microsoft ui vs. other windowing systems' I would not only be mostly preaching to the choir, but also mostly off-topic, but I just wanted to point out that KDE is designed by people who want usability with some gloss, but not necessarilly at the cost of having the ui try and 'do everything' for the user.
Unfortunatly the 'do everything' is exactly what Microsoft intends for the Windows ui. Prefect for my mother maybe, and obviously for their testers, but not for me
If SCO is right (and they aren't) about SCO IP being in the kernel, the most they could do was collect license fees from infected versions of te kernel. Newer (and SCO IP free versions) of the kernel would be beyond their touch. In effect, they wouldn't be collecting licenses on the GPL'ed kernel, but on the ir IP that was included against their will.
No matter what happens, SCO will not own the Linux name, or the hearts and minds of the linux community.
It seems that while businesses are afraid of the OSS community (just see the wording of of Microsoft's number two enemy comment here and they all think they can somehow get people to stop OSS development by providing a lot of features and stability (which, although they do fine on the first point, the still significantly lag on the second.) This might be true of end users, but developers, the ones who LIKE to code, don't use linux (or BSD, or whatnot) merely for the stability and cost. They use it because they want to be able to dive into their operating system head first. To fix anything they don't like, to write an app that takes full advantage of new feature that are underdocumented. To write code that makes sense, and have it compile the first time.
Even if (and it won't) SCO some how makes Linux go away, the community of OSS developers will simply find a new baby to nuture. Sure, it would be an enormous hit to the community, but no one would unlearn any of the lessons from Linux, and we might end up with something better. Maybe it would be HURD, or some RTO like TRON. Who knows, but the fact is, SCO and Microsoft are fighting a battle they cannot win. In all fact, they are merely hardening their opposition to their tricks.
Maybe if we all start emailing Linus now, we can get him to change the name of Linux to "Battlestar Galactica" for the 2.6 kernel release.
The big difference is that Microsoft isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and SCO's days are numbered. If we all pray really hard, perhaps when the do go out of business, Unix source will become open, or at least released under a very liberal license, that would prevent anything as rediculous as this fiasco from ever happening again.
As has been pointed out in many posts here, many skills and knowledges are dying out because they have outlived thier usefulness and/or have been superceded by modern technology.
This does not mean these skills don't have their place, only that people can get along just fine without them. How many people can't cook anything that doesn't have microwave instructions on the side of the box. Does this mean we don't need chefs?
Handwriting needs to be legible, but beyond that is irrelevant for most people. We will still have professional caligraphers, engravers, and so forth who will keep the art alive.
If Novell is correct, SCO doesn't hold the copyrights. The Open Group owns the Unix trademark. A quick search of the US Patent office (my actual search query is here.) reveals that SCO doesn't have any Unix related patents before November of 1993 (after Linus had written the kernel)
So really, this whole lawsuit has lept headfirst from a giant joke into something well beyond offensive.
Tetris only has one important object on the screen at a time, I wonder how much visual object tracking would improve someone made a version of Tetris where you had to control two or more falling bricks at a time.
This reminds me of when I began to study music theory, and started to listen to multiple instruments at the same time. Most people who listen to classical music, or any highly arranged music, can pick out and track multiple melodies, including subtle ones whose only purpose is to enhance the piece. Contrast that to most rock (or any popular music,) where there is one main melody, a bass line that hardly varies from the melody, and no complex vocal harmony.
Most of my friends cannot listen to and enjoy complex music (other than as relaxing background noise.) The human mind adjusts too in environment, and if exposed to complex auditory stimuli, we learn to understand it quicker, and follow it with greater detail. If exposed to complex visual stimuli, we learn to parse it faster. This probably applies to all senses.
The real question is, as games improve in areas such as 3d audio, will other senses besides visual spacial object tracking improve?
Of course the Gates family is well known for their philanthropic gestures, but any time someone is prepared to give away over a BILLION dollars, you have to question their motives
I went about doing half an hour's worth of Googling on unfair trade practices and international product dumping, and came to a conclusion: there is nothing legally wrong with what Microsoft is doing.
Microsoft is merely giving away their product at the same price as the open source people. If I trusted their motives, I would respect the donation, however, I think it is clear to everyone that Microsoft is attempting to attack open source software in one of their most promising markets. Their manner of doing it reaks of unfair trade practices, but for two things:
So, while I find Microsoft's practices mean spirited and anti-competitive, I think they are perfectly legal.
Well, not to sound overly retortive, but who really cares what the binary license is. A binary only user is restricted to using the product "as is," and can't, practically, modify it to do something else.
With very few exceptions, you may distribute a binary to the same people to whom you may distribute your source. The binary would be under the same split license as the source, it just wouldn't practically mean anything, since a binary can't (practically) be modified.
All of this is assuming we are speaking about a license that is royalty free, or otherwise not a restrictive license. Yes, if a company grants me an exclusive, one time use license for a library, and I link it to my otherwise GPL'ed source code, the result is undistributable, but if the license is royalty free (so that end users may freely redistribute it,) and allowed to be distributed, then a split license with an otherwise GPL'ed source tree (and the resulting binary) would remain open source.
For example: Had Fraunhofer Gesellschaft released their ISO mp3 code under a free (as in beer) but restrictive (as in not free as in speech) license, that said something to the effect of, "this code can only be used to encode files into mp3 format, but not to decode," then instead of the entire mp3 programming movement going underground, perhaps they would have only collected royalties from the mp3 players (which, if it were a very small royalty, might actually work,) but freely encouraged people to make converters to their format (thus, encouraging more people to buy the for (a hopefully reasonable) cost players. A GPL'ed encoder could be written, and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft code could be listed as under a separate license. The player could even be GPL'ed, with the library for the actual codeing being the for cost purchase.
I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that as long as companies do not have restrictive licenses, patent rights can be maintained, and even so profit maid, while still respecting the bulk of the open source community spirit.
The GPL is a wonderful thing, but fear of other licenses, even those with some degree of restriction, alienates traditional model businesses who have a lot to offer the open source community.
The GPL issue is essentially moot, because anyone who wanted to release their code GPL could just bundle the patented code into separate files, and release the whole product under a split license,
i.e.: This program is released under GPL, except for the files "protocol-x.c" and "protocol-x.h" which are released under the W3C Royalty Free license.
That would satisfy both licenses, and still fulfill the author's open source intentions.