This is pretty fascinating. If Apple were able to run Win32 executables at some point out of the box it would add a great deal of value to their platform -- especially if it worked well enough to do things like run all of those games that you can't play on OS X so far.
I've seen a lot of Apple laptops over the years and some I liked and some I didn't. I've also seen and worked with a lot of other laptops as a web designer, network administrator, and consultant. I use a DELL Dimension with graphics and hard drive upgrades for work and have always been very happy with it.
My wife is just starting out as an assitant professor and got the laptop they purchased for her last week -- a Macbook Pro.
Leaving the OS totally out of the equation, the laptop itself is very elegant. It's very lightweight. It's very thin. It seems to be very well made. It is probably the nicest laptop I've ever physically had my hands on. The solution that Apple (finally!) came up with to prevent the power connector from snapping off of their motherboards is shear brilliance.
If you haven't seen one, the end of the power cord is magnetic. It pulls itself up against the power contacts on the laptop without anything really slotting into anything. You can knock the power connector loose from the laptop with absolutely no damage to the laptop. There's no traditional "plug in" mechanism holding it together. It's only held against the laptop (rather than inside a piece that's soldered to the mobo) by magnetism.
Contrary to the quote from the article, MS Virtual Server 2005 *is* free. You have to have a license for each concurrently running instance of a Microsoft operating system but you do not have to purchase a license for Virtual Server itself. It's a free download. If you run a non-MS operating system on it, it's completely free. It's been that way since April.
So the real comparison with the new "free" VMWare should be against VS 2005, and not against Virtual PC which is just a desktop emulation app.
Not saying one is better than the other -- just compare the same type of fruit when making your own decisions. The article is badly written or it's writer didn't understand what he was writing about.
Those in order of priority are why I very seldom go to the movies anymore. The writing is really horrible in a lot of films, and too damn many of them are aimed straight at teenagers and little kids. (I've got nothing against teenagers and little kids but...)
It's actually a very close call for me which makes me less likely to go to movies anymore, 'quality' or 'commercials'. The quality issue makes me apathetic about going - "I could go to a movie... but I'd probably enjoy my time more if I did X." The commercials though! Pure spawn of satan, whoever came up with that idea!
The first time I saw a commercial before a movie I was:
a. REALLY offended that I'd paid as much as I had to get in and then been forced to sit through that.
b. Dismayed because I knew that this was not only going to spread to every movie theatre around, but that it would also no doubt grow from just one commercial to... oh, say 30 frickin' minutes of commercials!
And then of course they stopped even being special commercials produced for the theatre. Now we're watching damned TV commercials.
It's sad because I'm not one of those guys who "hates" the whole theatre experience. Get the right movie and the right audience and it can be fun. Unfortunately it's just generally not worth it anymore.
Who are we kidding? This was like throwing raw meat into a lion's den.
Linux fan boys will rally to Gimp, and graphic designers will rally to Photoshop.
Truthfully I haven't tried to use Gimp in a while but the last time I did I was very unimpressed. But that's just my experience.
Just posting this story to Slashdot should get a Troll mod!
I'll admit to being a little surprised that there aren't more people who are concerned that this could be a big step toward the much vaunted "balkanization of the Internet"...
A lot of sort of unrelated things have been happening lately that indicate an instability in the philosophical underpinnings of the Internet. It used to be that the idea of sealing off access to areas of it would be completely anathema, as much as the idea of someone doing something like Verisign's recent Sitefinder profit-play.
We're reaching the point where it's no longer considered completely out of the question to discuss blocking access to non-offenders. It's gone from being okay to block SMTP traffic from "non-static IPs" to being okay to block traffic from "anyone who's not on our exclusive list" within a period of months.
Verisign has done the previously unthinkable by modifying major functions of the DNS system without so much as a "by your leave". And having gotten their hand smacked, rather than admit any wrong doing, they are politicking in the media to lay the ground work for efforts to wrest complete control of the process. What will they decide they have a right to do next? And if they get away with it, what are other (backbone providers/ISPs/you name it) going to try to see how much they in turn can get away with?
And it doesn't look like too many people are thinking ahead to where these trends will go if not arrested. The Internet has functioned as well as it has for as long as it has because by and large the big players have all followed the rules, customs, and generally accepted way of doing things. If they all start to do whatever they please at the moment, will there still be an Internet?
Under $my_distro_of_choice, I know that I can grab one of the $thousands of prepackaged apps out there, install it, and odds are, no crucial shared libraries are going to be 'updated' by an older version, no spyware will be installed, and odds are that I won't have 20 new icons on my desktop, or that everything will be borked in odd and mysterious ways. Under the worst-case linux scenerio, I can purge my hard drive of all the files of a troublesome app. That's the power of package management and quality distributions.
You do realize, I hope that what you just tried to make sound "glaringly simple" would only be simple to a serious geek. Joe Computer-User has neither the time, nor the inclination to develop that level of expertise. He just wants to be able to keep in touch with his aging mother by email.
I like Linux and I take serious issue with blowhard Windows evangelists, but it's incredibly disingenuous to act as if any idiot could use Linux. It's simply not true. I think that was somewhat of the spirit of the Roblimo article.
If you aren't of a relatively high level of technical proficiency yourself, you'd better have a relative or friend who is or Linux is currently not a good idea. It's getting better all the time, but it ain't there yet.
I find your comment about "no crucial shared libraries are going to be 'updated' by an older version" insteresting... I *still* run across problems quite frequently trying to install Linux apps because they require library x-y-z that isn't on my system... or a different version that isn't on my system. And in some cases putting it on my system is going to "bork" something else.
Being a serious geek, I can deal with this, but expecting someone like my wife or my mother to deal with that is just completely unrealistic. Should they just not use a computer? (That's a facetious question but there are some people out there that would say "not if they aren't smart enough to use vi.")
As much as I hate everything that Microsoft stands for, they've managed to come out with an OS that does not crash anymore. Unless you install a bunch of third party crap... but third party crap can screw up a Linux box just as easily as a Windows box. There's just less third party crap out there for Linux so far.
If Linux ever makes it to the grand high holy ground of being the most widely used desktop OS, there's going to be a whole world of "cute" junk that your friends and neighbors can install on their computer that will kludge things up. Count on it.
Well... Thanks for clarifying that you aren't being an elitist, I guess. But believe it or not there are some of us out there who run our own mail servers from behind "NAT" who do so responsibly.
In fact, there are quite a few people who run mail servers from behind "NAT" who aren't using a home ISP but are a commercial interest who are actually using a T1 or whatever just like yourself.
I would have guessed that being one of those folks who knows pays for a T1 you'd know that NAT just means "network address translation". It doesn't imply that it's being run on a home DSL line or home cable modem. I say "home" because there are a lot of businesses running on DSL lines these days. You can purchase a DSL line for a business for increasingly cheap rates these days, especially compared to your T1. T1 lines are frequently not cost effective for a given business. And those DSL lines are business lines that allow servers and include static IPs. And many of those businesses are behind "NAT".
I think there are probably quite a few people who read Slashdot who would be a little offended by your bet that "everyone running a mail server behind NAT is violating the RFC's."
And finally, where did I say that I was complaining about having to use my ISP's SMTP server? I was commenting on your post.
It's certainly not any different - you're quite right. And any ISP is well within it's rights to determine that it's user's cannot run a mail server from home. If you re-read my posts you'll see that I didn't take the position of complaint about that.
The point is that if I'm not the ISP, I don't have a right to say what someone else should have the privilege of doing on their broadband line (barring spammers or hackers). The other poster seemed to pretty clearly believe that the amount he paid for his bandwidth gave him a right to say that someone who paid less should get less privileges.
If someone pays less for bandwidth than you and manages to get more for their money than you did, that's certainly not their fault. And it's not a good reason for you to try to find ways to limit what they can do to what *you* think they paid for.
The other poster seemed to be pretty clearly taking a different position... he paid more money for his bandwidth to get certain privileges. He didn't want someone who paid less than him to get those privileges. Just because he paid more than them, and not because they were abusing those privileges.
Say, I want to pay $800/month for a T-1. I have permission to run a mail server, and everything else.
But, for $40/month DSL, no. As one paying for an expensive t-1 (hypothetically), I don't want you doing the same thing with your bandwidth that I do with mine.
Errr... Well, frankly, I don't care how much you pay for your T1. It's none of your business what anyone else does with their bandwidth. It's only when they start using your bandwidth that it becomes your business.
You paying for a T1 does not make you a more blessed citizen of the Internet - it doesn't give you any extra rights to tell anyone else what they can or cannot do. If you were growling about someone sending you SPAM I'd be right there with you - that materially affects your operations.
You can tell the people using your T1 what to do - that's a given. Somebody else running a mailserver on their bandwidth that they pay for (provided they don't send SPAM) is in no way within your personal realm of rightful control. Their ISP may have take issue with that mail server and tell them to take it down but that's between them and their ISP, don't you think?
If you think otherwise, you're wading into the same realm as the spammers. They think they have a perfect right to do what they want with your bandwidth. I'm sure you don't agree with that so what makes you think you have the right to tell someone else what to do with theirs?
Let's remember who the enemy is... it's the spammers. The Internet didn't get to be what it is by being balkanized between the "haves" and the "have nots". Yes, there are severe irritations (the spammers) but I don't think it's worth throwing out the whole open nature of the Internet in an effort to fix it. The more things get to be based on "who pays the most" the less open it gets.
At some point you have to stop and ask if what you'll have left in the end is what you were trying to save when you started. I guess it depends what your vision of the Internet is.
Most of this just seems to be "reason". The brand of car you drive does not determine which roads you get to drive on or what traffic laws apply to you in the real world. Why shoud the Internet work differently?
This idea that having purchased a much more expensive means of access endows a person with more value is unhealthy.
Where do you get off thinking that you have the same rights online as someone paying 3, 4, 5 or even 6 times as much as you?
Ummm... Did I miss something somewhere, or did one's rights on the Internet become directly linked with how much they pay? The well-heeled are somehow better than the rest of us?
Okay, arguably money grants influence but that's certainly not what you seem to be saying here. And besides that's not a position that too many people would be comfortable defending in the manner that you're coming at this either.
Okay, I really hate taking a chance on sounding like an Apple Evangelista. I admit to owning an old G3 which I haven't used in quite a while. My work place is standardized around Windows. But...
Aren't they just borrowing (I'm sorry "innovating") from Apple's playbook of about two years ago?
For quite a while there you could hardly see someone use a computer without it being a Powerbook or sometimes a Apple PowerMac G4.
Given Microsoft's usual ideas of what's "cool" (everyone looks like a young male or female clone of Bill Gates - remember some of their previous commercials) this could actually turn out to have some serious comic potential.
SCO: "All your toys are belong to SCO. Don't like it? Go cry to your mommy. Now fork over your lunch money."
Some while later...
SCO: "bu... bu... bu... but... why do I have to go to my room without my licensing fees? It really was my code! Mine! Mine! Mine!!!"
So far it looks like the folks defending themselves directly against SCO (see the counter filing that SCO has violated terms of the GPL) are reading from the same playbook as the arguments a lot of folks have been making in discussions here. Those all sound pretty reasonable, and if so SCO can make lots of cash in the market for now because the market are a bunch of clue-free lemmings. Once it gets to court...
Very true. As a fellow Minnesotan I was surprised when he first came out with some public questions about what the RIAA was up to. I think at the teime he also admitted that he had at some point used file sharing software once or twice too, didn't he?
I seem to recall that he tried to soft-peddle it though... "I downloaded some songs but I didn't inhale. Honest!"
Made me (start to) re-evaluate my opinion of the guy too.
Ummm... You need to pay closer attention to the verbiage there, folks.
...they would have the option of allowing users to turn it off.
That is, the PC makers would have that option of giving users the ability to turn the DRM off. The users aren't guaranteed anything. The users only get the ability to turn the DRM off if the individual PC maker decides to allow it. It's the PC makers who get the "option."
That doesn't say that the PC makers either will or won't. Just that the statement the users will have an option to turn off the DRM... is not what the article actually says...
Would the PC makers allow it? Well, maybe... You might say it would be in their best interests, but you might also say that it would be in their best interests to sell "naked" (no OS) PCs if a customer asks for one... but we all know how difficult it is to buy a PC without Windows. Even though the PC makers have the "option" of not installing it on all PCs they sell.
Except if the BIOS being part of Windows is deemed to be a means of securing Windows and/or encrypted, does that not then put it under the wings of the DMCA?
And thus illegal to reverse engineer?
Yeah, it's like IBM all over again... except that this time the law says that no one could reverse engineer a way out of the monopoly lock-in!
This isn't the first time that Verisign has failed "to acknowledge is that the registry is not theirs to do that with."
Verisign announced in another dispute a few years back that the database (the registry) was their "work product" and therefore their property.
If I design a website on contract for somebody, the website is *not* then my work product. That's just completely backwards of how things work. I seem to recall Verisign more or less being allowed to get away with the claim that time. They're still running things aren't they?
This is all par for the course for them. They've long since proven that they aren't trustworthy and should've gotten the boot long ago.
Asking any for-profit organism to function in a neutral capacity while having monopoly control of a major resource is a joke. Give the.com and.net to a non-profit organization to run. It won't be necessarily efficient and it will be political, but... isn't that pretty much what we've got now except that currently it's also a carnivore?
Actually now that the ruling came down in the Sex.com case I think you can sue Netsol (Verisign) for a couple of the things that you just mentioned if true.
Seems like it might be a good time to talk to a lawyer in your case.
You were expecting perhaps that things coming out of Jack Valenti's mouth would have some form of reason to them other than propoganda? That perhaps they would actually make sense?
I think maybe you didn't give the article a full read. What LinkSys has done, if I read the article correctly, is release what they say is the source they are using however it's clear that it isn't the source they are using.
What they've released will not run on their own product. It cannot be compiled.
The article also shows that they made additions to the kernel itself but did not release them.
This isn't about them revealing the internal workings of their silicon, etc. This is about them taking the Linux kernel, modifying it, releasing the modified version as part of their product but not releasing the source code. Which of course violates the GPL. They have since released what they claimed was the source code in three successive versions but none of them is actually the full source code.
What use would it be anyway? Well, if you have the full source code you can then create further development projects. You can try to create enhancements for the hardware purchased from LinkSys. Without the bits that LinkSys left out, it's pretty much useless according to the article.
No one made LinkSys use the GPLed code. They knew what the GPL required if they did use the code. It's looking a bit like they used the efforts of the Linux programmers to save themselves some development time and expenses but now don't want to "pay" the Linux developers in the contractual "coin" -- release of the derivative source code.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever seen Donnie Darko?
This is pretty fascinating. If Apple were able to run Win32 executables at some point out of the box it would add a great deal of value to their platform -- especially if it worked well enough to do things like run all of those games that you can't play on OS X so far.
I've seen a lot of Apple laptops over the years and some I liked and some I didn't. I've also seen and worked with a lot of other laptops as a web designer, network administrator, and consultant. I use a DELL Dimension with graphics and hard drive upgrades for work and have always been very happy with it.
My wife is just starting out as an assitant professor and got the laptop they purchased for her last week -- a Macbook Pro.
Leaving the OS totally out of the equation, the laptop itself is very elegant. It's very lightweight. It's very thin. It seems to be very well made. It is probably the nicest laptop I've ever physically had my hands on. The solution that Apple (finally!) came up with to prevent the power connector from snapping off of their motherboards is shear brilliance.
If you haven't seen one, the end of the power cord is magnetic. It pulls itself up against the power contacts on the laptop without anything really slotting into anything. You can knock the power connector loose from the laptop with absolutely no damage to the laptop. There's no traditional "plug in" mechanism holding it together. It's only held against the laptop (rather than inside a piece that's soldered to the mobo) by magnetism.
(shudder...)
You really need to check your facts. You clearly don't know WTF you're talking about.
So the real comparison with the new "free" VMWare should be against VS 2005, and not against Virtual PC which is just a desktop emulation app.
Not saying one is better than the other -- just compare the same type of fruit when making your own decisions. The article is badly written or it's writer didn't understand what he was writing about.
2. Commercials
3. Cost
Those in order of priority are why I very seldom go to the movies anymore. The writing is really horrible in a lot of films, and too damn many of them are aimed straight at teenagers and little kids. (I've got nothing against teenagers and little kids but...)
It's actually a very close call for me which makes me less likely to go to movies anymore, 'quality' or 'commercials'. The quality issue makes me apathetic about going - "I could go to a movie... but I'd probably enjoy my time more if I did X." The commercials though! Pure spawn of satan, whoever came up with that idea!
The first time I saw a commercial before a movie I was: ... oh, say 30 frickin' minutes of commercials!
a. REALLY offended that I'd paid as much as I had to get in and then been forced to sit through that.
b. Dismayed because I knew that this was not only going to spread to every movie theatre around, but that it would also no doubt grow from just one commercial to
And then of course they stopped even being special commercials produced for the theatre. Now we're watching damned TV commercials.
Hmmm... Offend audience... ticket sales drop... who'da thought?
It's sad because I'm not one of those guys who "hates" the whole theatre experience. Get the right movie and the right audience and it can be fun. Unfortunately it's just generally not worth it anymore.
Who are we kidding? This was like throwing raw meat into a lion's den. Linux fan boys will rally to Gimp, and graphic designers will rally to Photoshop. Truthfully I haven't tried to use Gimp in a while but the last time I did I was very unimpressed. But that's just my experience. Just posting this story to Slashdot should get a Troll mod!
I read the linked email but it didn't seem to clarify that point... Seems important.
A lot of sort of unrelated things have been happening lately that indicate an instability in the philosophical underpinnings of the Internet. It used to be that the idea of sealing off access to areas of it would be completely anathema, as much as the idea of someone doing something like Verisign's recent Sitefinder profit-play.
We're reaching the point where it's no longer considered completely out of the question to discuss blocking access to non-offenders. It's gone from being okay to block SMTP traffic from "non-static IPs" to being okay to block traffic from "anyone who's not on our exclusive list" within a period of months.
Verisign has done the previously unthinkable by modifying major functions of the DNS system without so much as a "by your leave". And having gotten their hand smacked, rather than admit any wrong doing, they are politicking in the media to lay the ground work for efforts to wrest complete control of the process. What will they decide they have a right to do next? And if they get away with it, what are other (backbone providers/ISPs/you name it) going to try to see how much they in turn can get away with?
And it doesn't look like too many people are thinking ahead to where these trends will go if not arrested. The Internet has functioned as well as it has for as long as it has because by and large the big players have all followed the rules, customs, and generally accepted way of doing things. If they all start to do whatever they please at the moment, will there still be an Internet?
Very bluntly put, but unfortunately generally historically accurate.
You do realize, I hope that what you just tried to make sound "glaringly simple" would only be simple to a serious geek. Joe Computer-User has neither the time, nor the inclination to develop that level of expertise. He just wants to be able to keep in touch with his aging mother by email.
I like Linux and I take serious issue with blowhard Windows evangelists, but it's incredibly disingenuous to act as if any idiot could use Linux. It's simply not true. I think that was somewhat of the spirit of the Roblimo article.
If you aren't of a relatively high level of technical proficiency yourself, you'd better have a relative or friend who is or Linux is currently not a good idea. It's getting better all the time, but it ain't there yet.
I find your comment about "no crucial shared libraries are going to be 'updated' by an older version" insteresting... I *still* run across problems quite frequently trying to install Linux apps because they require library x-y-z that isn't on my system... or a different version that isn't on my system. And in some cases putting it on my system is going to "bork" something else.
Being a serious geek, I can deal with this, but expecting someone like my wife or my mother to deal with that is just completely unrealistic. Should they just not use a computer? (That's a facetious question but there are some people out there that would say "not if they aren't smart enough to use vi.")
As much as I hate everything that Microsoft stands for, they've managed to come out with an OS that does not crash anymore. Unless you install a bunch of third party crap... but third party crap can screw up a Linux box just as easily as a Windows box. There's just less third party crap out there for Linux so far.
If Linux ever makes it to the grand high holy ground of being the most widely used desktop OS, there's going to be a whole world of "cute" junk that your friends and neighbors can install on their computer that will kludge things up. Count on it.
In fact, there are quite a few people who run mail servers from behind "NAT" who aren't using a home ISP but are a commercial interest who are actually using a T1 or whatever just like yourself.
I would have guessed that being one of those folks who knows pays for a T1 you'd know that NAT just means "network address translation". It doesn't imply that it's being run on a home DSL line or home cable modem. I say "home" because there are a lot of businesses running on DSL lines these days. You can purchase a DSL line for a business for increasingly cheap rates these days, especially compared to your T1. T1 lines are frequently not cost effective for a given business. And those DSL lines are business lines that allow servers and include static IPs. And many of those businesses are behind "NAT".
I think there are probably quite a few people who read Slashdot who would be a little offended by your bet that "everyone running a mail server behind NAT is violating the RFC's."
And finally, where did I say that I was complaining about having to use my ISP's SMTP server? I was commenting on your post.
It's certainly not any different - you're quite right. And any ISP is well within it's rights to determine that it's user's cannot run a mail server from home. If you re-read my posts you'll see that I didn't take the position of complaint about that.
The point is that if I'm not the ISP, I don't have a right to say what someone else should have the privilege of doing on their broadband line (barring spammers or hackers). The other poster seemed to pretty clearly believe that the amount he paid for his bandwidth gave him a right to say that someone who paid less should get less privileges.
If someone pays less for bandwidth than you and manages to get more for their money than you did, that's certainly not their fault. And it's not a good reason for you to try to find ways to limit what they can do to what *you* think they paid for.
The other poster seemed to be pretty clearly taking a different position... he paid more money for his bandwidth to get certain privileges. He didn't want someone who paid less than him to get those privileges. Just because he paid more than them, and not because they were abusing those privileges.
Say, I want to pay $800/month for a T-1. I have permission to run a mail server, and everything else.
But, for $40/month DSL, no. As one paying for an expensive t-1 (hypothetically), I don't want you doing the same thing with your bandwidth that I do with mine.
Errr... Well, frankly, I don't care how much you pay for your T1. It's none of your business what anyone else does with their bandwidth. It's only when they start using your bandwidth that it becomes your business.
You paying for a T1 does not make you a more blessed citizen of the Internet - it doesn't give you any extra rights to tell anyone else what they can or cannot do. If you were growling about someone sending you SPAM I'd be right there with you - that materially affects your operations.
You can tell the people using your T1 what to do - that's a given. Somebody else running a mailserver on their bandwidth that they pay for (provided they don't send SPAM) is in no way within your personal realm of rightful control. Their ISP may have take issue with that mail server and tell them to take it down but that's between them and their ISP, don't you think?
If you think otherwise, you're wading into the same realm as the spammers. They think they have a perfect right to do what they want with your bandwidth. I'm sure you don't agree with that so what makes you think you have the right to tell someone else what to do with theirs?
Let's remember who the enemy is... it's the spammers. The Internet didn't get to be what it is by being balkanized between the "haves" and the "have nots". Yes, there are severe irritations (the spammers) but I don't think it's worth throwing out the whole open nature of the Internet in an effort to fix it. The more things get to be based on "who pays the most" the less open it gets.
At some point you have to stop and ask if what you'll have left in the end is what you were trying to save when you started. I guess it depends what your vision of the Internet is.
Most of this just seems to be "reason". The brand of car you drive does not determine which roads you get to drive on or what traffic laws apply to you in the real world. Why shoud the Internet work differently?
This idea that having purchased a much more expensive means of access endows a person with more value is unhealthy.
Ummm... Did I miss something somewhere, or did one's rights on the Internet become directly linked with how much they pay? The well-heeled are somehow better than the rest of us?
Okay, arguably money grants influence but that's certainly not what you seem to be saying here. And besides that's not a position that too many people would be comfortable defending in the manner that you're coming at this either.
Aren't they just borrowing (I'm sorry "innovating") from Apple's playbook of about two years ago?
For quite a while there you could hardly see someone use a computer without it being a Powerbook or sometimes a Apple PowerMac G4.
Given Microsoft's usual ideas of what's "cool" (everyone looks like a young male or female clone of Bill Gates - remember some of their previous commercials) this could actually turn out to have some serious comic potential.
Some while later...
SCO: "bu... bu... bu... but... why do I have to go to my room without my licensing fees? It really was my code! Mine! Mine! Mine!!!"
So far it looks like the folks defending themselves directly against SCO (see the counter filing that SCO has violated terms of the GPL) are reading from the same playbook as the arguments a lot of folks have been making in discussions here. Those all sound pretty reasonable, and if so SCO can make lots of cash in the market for now because the market are a bunch of clue-free lemmings. Once it gets to court...
I seem to recall that he tried to soft-peddle it though... "I downloaded some songs but I didn't inhale. Honest!"
Made me (start to) re-evaluate my opinion of the guy too.
That is, the PC makers would have that option of giving users the ability to turn the DRM off. The users aren't guaranteed anything. The users only get the ability to turn the DRM off if the individual PC maker decides to allow it. It's the PC makers who get the "option."
That doesn't say that the PC makers either will or won't. Just that the statement the users will have an option to turn off the DRM... is not what the article actually says...
Would the PC makers allow it? Well, maybe... You might say it would be in their best interests, but you might also say that it would be in their best interests to sell "naked" (no OS) PCs if a customer asks for one... but we all know how difficult it is to buy a PC without Windows. Even though the PC makers have the "option" of not installing it on all PCs they sell.
And thus illegal to reverse engineer?
Yeah, it's like IBM all over again... except that this time the law says that no one could reverse engineer a way out of the monopoly lock-in!
Verisign announced in another dispute a few years back that the database (the registry) was their "work product" and therefore their property.
If I design a website on contract for somebody, the website is *not* then my work product. That's just completely backwards of how things work. I seem to recall Verisign more or less being allowed to get away with the claim that time. They're still running things aren't they?
This is all par for the course for them. They've long since proven that they aren't trustworthy and should've gotten the boot long ago.
Asking any for-profit organism to function in a neutral capacity while having monopoly control of a major resource is a joke. Give the .com and .net to a non-profit organization to run. It won't be necessarily efficient and it will be political, but... isn't that pretty much what we've got now except that currently it's also a carnivore?
At least make it a vegetarian.
Seems like it might be a good time to talk to a lawyer in your case.
pshaw.
(I always wanted a good use for that word.)
What they've released will not run on their own product. It cannot be compiled.
The article also shows that they made additions to the kernel itself but did not release them.
This isn't about them revealing the internal workings of their silicon, etc. This is about them taking the Linux kernel, modifying it, releasing the modified version as part of their product but not releasing the source code. Which of course violates the GPL. They have since released what they claimed was the source code in three successive versions but none of them is actually the full source code.
What use would it be anyway? Well, if you have the full source code you can then create further development projects. You can try to create enhancements for the hardware purchased from LinkSys. Without the bits that LinkSys left out, it's pretty much useless according to the article.
No one made LinkSys use the GPLed code. They knew what the GPL required if they did use the code. It's looking a bit like they used the efforts of the Linux programmers to save themselves some development time and expenses but now don't want to "pay" the Linux developers in the contractual "coin" -- release of the derivative source code.