The point is they did produce a result, it was published in a first tier crypto journal and the results are acknowledged as correct.
And my point is that your comment is both insulting to MSR and misses the point.
Your comment is insulting to MSR because anybody who knows anything about CS research knows that MSR has top people. They have produced hundreds of first tier journal publications over the years. This is just a minor publication among many good things MSR has done.
It's meaningless because you are missing the main problem that all industrial research labs share: making the connection between research and products. MSR has been as unsuccessful at that as any other of the big industrial computer research labs before. Microsoft's problems is the quality and lack of innovation in their products, not their research labs.
mod parent offtopic.
I suppose when your points are weak, you have to fall back on calling on moderators. Why don't you engage your brain instead of falling back on such underhanded tactics?
Microsoft Research is no different from other industrial research labs: IBM, Bell Labs, etc. They hire the same kinds of people and get the same kinds of inventions out of them. One can't expect any more or less from any big company with a lot of money to spend. However, so far, MSR has not had much positive impact when it comes to driving innovation into the marketplace.
If Penny Black is all there is, it doesn't look like that's going to change. It will probably be decades before we know whether MSR will have had lasting impact. By that time, Microsoft will probably be a benign, lumbering giant, just like its monopolistic predecessors, AT&T and IBM.
Pegoraro's advice for tech-inclined vacation travelers is that less is more.
What is wrong with taking along music, maps, cameras, something to read, and games? Isn't that what people do to relax? Well, it's the 21st century and that sort of thing is done with laptop, handhelds, digital cameras, and all that.
And it's a whole lot better than what we needed to travel with 50 years ago. Cell phones, for example, mean that you aren't at the mercy of hotels and their exorbitant rates. Laptops are a godsent, allowing you to carry plenty of reading materials, letting you write stuff and send it, carry all the maps you might ever need, etc.
With a little bit of planning, you can fit all those gadgets into very little space. Some good power adapters are useful (there are some universal ones that will power your cell phones and laptop).
I think you're missing part of the story here - megahertz for megahertz, the Pentium III outperforms a Pentium 4! The P4's "NetBurst Microarchitecture" or whatever is the ultimate incarnation of the megahertz myth
Apple was claiming there was a "Megahertz myth" long before the P4 came out. They tried to create the impression that a G3 or G4 could best a P3 with twice the clock rate. In reality, the G3 and G4 were way behind Intel/AMD even at the time.
The megahertz myth is alive and well. Trying to sum everything up with a single number is arguably a bad thing, but Joe and Jane Consumer want their single number.
The "Megahertz myth" is a marketing gimmick created by Apple, intended to confuse buyers and hide the fact that the PPC is a less-than-stellar performer. Anybody who really cares knows what the different clock frequencies mean and looks at SPEC marks. And die-hard Apple customers really don't care anyway.
If this was really an issue for Apple, they could adopt AMD's successful strategy of using model designations incorporating P4-equivalent clock rates. But unlike Apple, AMD actually has the numbers to back up their claims: an AMD 3200+ really is comparable to a 3.2GHz P4.
I did not say that Microsoft could release their source code into the public domain and not suffer consequences (they might or they might not be able to, but that's a harder argument to make). I said that they don't depend on secrecy of their source code for their business. There is a big difference between non-secret source code on the one hand, and open source or public domain on the other.
Sun Java, for example, is available in source form to anybody who wants it, but not under an open source license. The SCSL allows you to look at Sun's code, but it contaminates you with Sun intellectual property and does not permit you to release your own version of Sun's JRE without paying them.
People keep trying to portray the question of greenhouse gas emissions as one of finding incontrovertible evidence that global warming has already occurred.
That's completely missing the point. Emitting increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses will inevitably cause climate change in the long run--it's elementary physics. And by the time significant changes to our climate have happened it will be too late to do anything about it because carbon dioxide takes centuries to clear from the atmosphere. The only prudent thing to do is therefore to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we can have definitive proof that increased emissions are safe.
Someone who claims to be an authority on climate change should understand this point. Either Lomborg just doesn't know what he is doing or he is deliberately trying to confuse the issue for political reasons.
As for Lomborg's dismissal, I see no problem with it. Even if Lomborg weren't someone who ignores the facts and who has a political ax to grind, government-appointed committees are intrinsically political. The Bush administrations dismisses scientists whose positions they don't like with regularity. Why should pro-pollution scientists be any more protected than environmentalists from political forces?
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For example, NTFS. Right now we only have NTFS read only, and we can write ntfs by actually using microsofts ntfs.sys file. With the source code there would probably be an NTFS kernel patch inside a week that worked perfectly.
But that would still not matter much because development would still be driven by Microsoft--they could make incompatible changes and put it into the next Windows update and all that open source effort would be useless.
Ultimately, what matters for market control is control of the community and the license on the source code. Whether people can see the source code or not is secondary.
Sun is currently playing this game brilliantly: unlike Microsoft, they do release full sources to the Java platform. But the license under which they release it keeps the implementation and platform proprietary. In fact, their license infects potential open source developers and keeps them from working on open source implementations. As a result, open source efforts to implement the Java 2 platform have met only with limited success and Sun and the JCP retain complete control of the platform.
If MS opens its source people will look at it and fork it and pieces of it. They wont maintain and develop it. They will chop it to bits and turn lead into gold. Thus being the end of Microsoft's monopoly.
Their source code isn't some secret ingredient. It's the only thing seperating them from certain doom.
I didn't say that Microsoft could open source their software and not suffer problems, I said that they don't require secrecy of the source code. Again, look at Sun: Java is not open source, but the source code isn't secret either.
Microsoft could release their source code under something like the Sun Community Source License with probably no ill effects as far as forking is concerned (as I was saying, there is still the embarrassment factor, into which I lump security holes).
In fact, an SCSL-like release of Windows would probably create significant additional hurdles to open source implementations of something like NTFS: right now, it's clear that if you implement NTFS, you did so by reverse engineering. That's legal in many places. If Microsoft released NTFS source code under something like the SCSL, the presumption might well be that if you implement NTFS, you did so from their source and fall under their license. It might be up to you to prove otherwise.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
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You think marketing is the only reason MS doesn't want their sources released ?
You bet, although I'm not sure how conscious they are of it. Microsoft views and presents itself as an advanced technology company. Releasing their source code would be tantamount to an admission that they really don't have any interesting, new technology.
Let me tell you what. Microsoft sales / marketing is getting a BEATING re: the whole Open Source vs Closed Source issue. Open Source for better or worse is a giant buzz and people that have no idea why they do or dont want it are asking about it all the time.
And your point is what? That it would be good for Microsoft to open source Windows because of the current open source buzz? It probably would be in the long run. But I didn't claim that Microsoft marketing is behaving rationally. Microsoft marketing believes that they own the crown jewels and they believe that software should be proprietary. Heck, they probably even genuinely believe that Microsoft is putting out innovative products and that Microsoft is driving the tech revolution. That's how they are presenting the company to the outside. They are not going to turn around and make Windows open source, no matter how rational it might be--it goes against everything they believe in.
In the case, the secretary, who isn't in any sort of community, knows exactly what the software needs to do. There's your QA - the user. If you get _any_ developer - even a contract programmer, the source to word, as long as the secretary gets to review builds before they're approved, you've got what you need to keep the secretary in business. No community, no open source, no nothing.
QA is the least of their worries. A "contract programmer" would be completely overwhelmed with a project the size and complexity of Microsoft Word. Microsoft's version control, project organization, and coding styles only make this even worse compared to open source projects. You'd need a dedicated team just to port it to a new version of Windows, let alone make any significant modifications to it.
source code escrow not very useful
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If the developer goes out of business, getting the source code by itself is almost always useless: almost no single customer will have the resources to maintain and extend it. Source code is only cost effective if there is a community of users and developers, and that requires releasing the code under an open source license ahead of time.
(For the same reason, Microsoft source code isn't their crown jewels, as they always claim: even if people got access to it, they couldn't develop and maintain it anyway. The main reason Microsoft doesn't want their sources released is probably marketing--the "Coca Cola Secret Formula" gimmick--and the probably embarrassing state of it.)
Another problem with source code escrow agreements is that people don't know whether the code deposited with the agent will even compile or be complete. And the agents themselves disappear or misplace code.
On SPEC, the G4 performs comparably to the P3 (yes, P3) MHz for MHz. The Megahertz myth was a fabrication by Apple based on unfair comparisons and unattainable extrapolations.
What about the G5? Unlike previous PPCs, it is competitive, but no more. An Athlon64 or Opteron still gives you more bang for the buck. And comparing a planned PPC for next summer against today's Pentiums, like you did, also makes no sense.
SCO is making copyright claims, so the patent policy is irrelevant. And standards bodies may not even have considered the possibility of copyright claims on something as nebulous as "UNIX principles and methods" to have formulated a policy.
Furthermore, no matter what submitters are required to do, you have to ask the question what happens if they fail to comply with policy. SCO gets barred from submitting more standards? POSIX gets dropped as an official standard? I doubt SCO gives a damn at this point. The standards bodies seem to lack teeth for enforcing IP-related misbehavior even for the requirements they do list.
Finally, Linux implements other UNIX APIs besides those implemented by POSIX, so even if the POSIX argument were bullet-proof (which it is not), SCO could still keep making their claims.
Ultimately, I think SCO's case has no merit. I'm just saying that SCO's claims can't be dismissed in the way Linus and you seem to be trying to dismiss them. SCO's claims ultimately need to be struck down both by demonstrating that no copying took place and that their copyright claims on UNIX principles and methods don't make legal sense.
It's a requirement of the ISO, IEEE and ANSI standards body that participants involved in the development of standards must pre-declare and clearly lable and identify any section of a standard in developent that an implementation would be dependent upon a patent for which royalties must be paid.
Yeah, it's a "requirement". ECMA has similar requirements, yet Microsoft still claims intellectual property even on the ECMA C# standard.
And what's the legal rememdy anyway when companies fail to comply with that requirement? You seem to think it's that the intellectual property falls into the public domain. But the remedy when unexpected intellectual property issues come up is more likely to be that the standard gets dropped by the standards body. See if SCO cares if POSIX gets dropped as an official standard.
Furthermore, even though the submitter and other standards body members disclaim intellectual property rights, any third party can still assert rights. SCO might portray themselves as a third party, not bound by AT&T's original agreements with POSIX.
Linux has met the required standard as a POSIX plaform and today Linux *IS* the defacto industry standard for the common Unix platform.
You are making another logical error here. Linux may or may not have been POSIX-compliant in 1997. But Linux implements a lot of other parts besides POSIX. Even if the POSIX part of Linux is completely free and clear, then SCO can still make claims about the non-POSIX aspects of UNIX that Linux implements.
And lastly to totally blow away your argument
You don't have to "blow away" my argument. I'm merely explaining that just because something complies with a standard, you can't assume it's free or unencumbered. There are many ways in which both parties to the standards process and third parties can still make claims. Your faith in the guarantees resulting from the standards process is naive in my opinion.
Ultimately, I think SCO doesn't have a case. But they certainly can muddy the waters and still cause a lot of trouble.
Well, you don't think they can copyright an interface, but that doesn't keep them from making the claim. And, as the plot example shows, people have successfully established claims on works that "can be expressed in many different ways".
I'm not saying that they have a good claim, I'm merely saying that many of the objections to their claim are based on wrong aasumptions about what it is they are claiming. In particular, Linus's response is missing the point.
Just because a standards body has written a published standard on something does not mean that the thing being standardized is free, or even that you can implement the standard freely. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights might all get in the way.
Granted, the existence of those standards makes SCO's case harder, but it isn't clear by how much.
Standards guarantee openness if all the owners of related IP are members and all the members of the standards body agree, in writing, to permit free and unencumbered use of their IP by anyone for any purpose.
(Note that a license only for compliant implementations isn't good enough because Linux could be argued not to comply.)
SCO keeps talking about the "ABI". It appears that they are not claiming copyright on the headers themselves, but on the general kind of interface those headers specify. Whether Linus looked at BSD or SysV headers is then immaterial.
It's not clear that something that general is copyrightable--they seem to be fishing. But keep in mind that movie plots have been defended using copyright law, so it's possible.
Emacs mail readers have had threaded displays for more than a decade. Mutt has threaded displays as well and lets you read mail and news with the same interface.
I think this kind of ignorance is not Microsoft-specific: user interface researchers frequently seem to "discover" techniques that have been in practical use for years already. And in their arrogance, they'd never look at something like Emacs or UNIX text-oriented untilities bacause they already "know" that the UNIX UI sucks. As the Windows and Mac UIs grow up, this reinvention of UNIX power user features is only going to get worse and more frequent.
Open sourcing the drivers, or at least releasing the specs, would be good insurance against that. In general, open source mitigates the risks of a company out of business, and that's true for both hardware and software.
nVidia and ATI may still keep releasing binary versions of their drivers for old cards, but constant upgrading of binary drivers from vendor sites is such a hassle that they might as well not. I run all my nVidia cards unaccelerated now and I'm not going to buy another one--it's just not worth the hassle.
If you don't like Perens's choice, just don't use or support UserLinux. Perens doesn't like KDE's choice (of toolkit), so that's why he isn't using it in the project he is putting together.
KDE made two bets a few years ago: (1) that making a deal with a commercial company was necessary in order to deliver a high quality toolkit, and (2) that a dual-licensed toolkit wouldn't matter to open source developers or commercial acceptance. Looks like KDE is losing both bets: Gtk+ has more than caught up with Qt technically, and choices by open source entities like the FSF and Perens, and choices by companies like Sun, IBM, and HP (of Gnome) indicate that Qt's license does affect its acceptance.
KDE made its choice and its developers and advocates should accept the consequences.
Having worked for a bunch of companies, I can tell you that's not the way things work.
A lot of corporate development is in-house. The Troll Tech license and license fees mattter a great deal for that. They matter not only because of the short-term cost, but they also matter because of the long-term control Troll Tech gets over commercial applications.
In fact, Troll Tech's control is a problem even for "free software folks", because the design and direction of Qt is ultimately driven by Troll Tech's commercial interests. And you can't weasel your way out of that fact by arguing that if Troll Tech starts going down the wrong path, people can just fork the GPL'ed version of Qt because the very reason for choosing Qt is KDE's assertion that no open source project could deliver a toolkit of comparable quality.
In fact, another strike against KDE and Qt is the fact that KDE already screwed up big time once. Far from being the result of a careful plan, the current dual-licensing scheme for Qt is the result of Troll Tech averting disaster by changing their license after KDE went on for a couple of years merrily developing software under an open source license incompatible with the QPL. The impression one gets as an outside is that KDE doesn't know what the hell they are doing with licenses. And it doesn't help either that Troll Tech is clearly responsible for killing the Harmony Project, an attempt to develop a more liberally licensed Qt-compatible license, because it would cut into their sales. Neither of those is a big recommendation for KDE or Qt.
And, in fact, some of those in-house applications later become open source. But the decision to open source is not something companies make at the start of a project--it takes time to deal with lawyers and business people. With Qt, we'd have had to pay Troll Tech for commercial development licenses just so that we could start developing only to have wasted that money later when we get the corporate OK to open source.
So, why is it that, so far, there are more commercial Qt applications than Gtk+ applications? Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true--where is the data? Secondly, the Qt applications I have seen are usually from companies like Adobe, whose Linux offerings basically suck.
But, in any case, until maybe last year, Gtk+ really was behind Qt (after all, it started later as well), but it has now caught up. But before then, there were already plenty of commercial projects in toolkits like Tcl/Tk and wxWindows, both of which have even more liberal licenses than Gtk+.
In my own experience, Qt's license is deeply harmful to Qt's acceptance for commercial projects: many commercial developers just don't want that sort of dependence on a software vendor, let alone a little company from Norway, even if the money didn't matter. But the money does matter. And Qt's license is also harmful to Qt's use for open source projects.
Muslim headdresses are an attempt at indoctrination?
Yes, as are rosaries, daggers, bibles, and other highly visible religious symbols.
There is a push in France to ban Islamic headdresses in schools.
Good.
They are very anti-muslim, you see.
I fail to see what is "anti-Muslim" about requiring conformance to French norms of dress and behavior. You can practice your religion in private and nobody will prosecute you for it--that's all that religious tolerance means. It doesn't mean that people have to like what you do or that you can use your religion as an excuse for whatever public behavior you want to engage in.
And, in fact, in the case of headdresses, there is really nothing "Islamic" about them anyway, so there isn't even a conflict between French society and Islam. "Islamic" headdresses are supposed to express modesty, but they fail to do so in the context of French culture. In the context of French culture, "Islamic" headdresses express non-conformance. They are also symbolic to many French of the intolerance and human rights violations occurring in modern Islamic nations. The appropriate way of expressing modesty in the context of French culture is through modest Western dress, simple hair styles, and absence of make-up.
You'd be correct if you limit yourself to just text, but copy and paste shouldn't be limited to just text. X can't handle anything that isn't plain text.
X has been able to handle lots of different types for a long time. See here for a list. In addition to the older Atom-based mechanisms, you can now also indicate the type of a selection as a MIME type.
Gnome and kde used to do a different thing with regards to copy and paste. But ever since gnome 2.x and kde 3.x they work identically (for text).
Yes, they now both have lousy support for selections, but at least their support is identically poor. Note that the problem is mostly with application writers, who simply don't understand and don't provide good support for X's selection mechanism. Instead, many Gnome and KDE application writers seem to try their hardest to imitate the feel of Macintosh and Windows applications as closely as possible.
Also, a lot of the graphical effects in gnome and kde are realised through the render extension today. However, the render extension is horribly slow. It's not even anything remotely approaching fast for a software implementation. So, yes, X is to blame for the slow speeds of kde and gnome.
The RENDER extension is a protocol specification. It's neither slow nor fast. And every indication is that RENDER can be implemented very well, both in software and in hardware.
What may be slow is the XFree86 software implementation of RENDER. That can get fixed. XFree86 doesn't define what "X" is, and neither does any other specific implementation.
Furthermore, it was just a bad idea for Gnome and KDE to start relying on a graphics model that X didn't have support for.
No, they are going to have U.S. soldiers doing guard duty at the reactor. Duh. Just like we do guard duty in Serbia, Sinai, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and all kinds of other places, including everywhere we have an embassy.
What's there to guard?
Who would you rather have guarding it? The French? Someone made a joke in another thread about two drunk Germans taking over the reactor...
Since Germany probably is footing the bill for a large fraction of the reactor and since there are probably going to be lots of Germans working at the facility, I don't see what there is to "take over".
Your ideas about European politics seem to be based on Hogan's Heroes. Wake up. It's the 21st century: the French and the Germans are getting along just fine.
now they're moving against free expression of religion in schools (starting young).
Yes, that's one of the things that makes France more democratic than the US, because one person's "free expression of religion" is an attempt at religious indoctrination to others.
At least in the US our courts are making headway in protecting personal liberties again.
If this is what the US is doing, it is no different than what the EU did when it choose the French site over the Spanish site. The EU chose the French site over Spain because Spain supported the Iraq war.
Really? Care to provide any evidence for that? Searching on Google, I found no articles among the top 20 that suggested any linkage between the decision for Spain to drop out and Spain's support of the Iraq war. Several of them said things like:
Spain dropped out of the contest to build the project to strengthen the European position against contenders Canada and Japan, the source added.
In fact, even if Spain's position on Iraq played a role, European diplomats would be less likely to do something as foolish as publicly stating it as a reason.
If you don't like the injection of politics into matters of science, I'm sure you'll rebuke the EU for what they did to Spain.
Here, I'll state it: any nation that determines the location of an unrelated scientific research facility based on whether a war they started was supported by other nations is behaving in a childish manner. Furthermore, if the diplomats and research establishment of that nation publicly give lack of support for the war as the reason for their decision on the location of the research facility, those diplomats are incompetent.
I don't see exactly how the EU could have done what the US did, given that the EU has not started any wars recently, but if they have and if they make such a foolish decision, then, yes, I fully condemn their actions.
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The point is they did produce a result, it was published in a first tier crypto journal and the results are acknowledged as correct.
And my point is that your comment is both insulting to MSR and misses the point.
Your comment is insulting to MSR because anybody who knows anything about CS research knows that MSR has top people. They have produced hundreds of first tier journal publications over the years. This is just a minor publication among many good things MSR has done.
It's meaningless because you are missing the main problem that all industrial research labs share: making the connection between research and products. MSR has been as unsuccessful at that as any other of the big industrial computer research labs before. Microsoft's problems is the quality and lack of innovation in their products, not their research labs.
mod parent offtopic.
I suppose when your points are weak, you have to fall back on calling on moderators. Why don't you engage your brain instead of falling back on such underhanded tactics?
Microsoft Research is no different from other industrial research labs: IBM, Bell Labs, etc. They hire the same kinds of people and get the same kinds of inventions out of them. One can't expect any more or less from any big company with a lot of money to spend. However, so far, MSR has not had much positive impact when it comes to driving innovation into the marketplace.
If Penny Black is all there is, it doesn't look like that's going to change. It will probably be decades before we know whether MSR will have had lasting impact. By that time, Microsoft will probably be a benign, lumbering giant, just like its monopolistic predecessors, AT&T and IBM.
Pegoraro's advice for tech-inclined vacation travelers is that less is more.
What is wrong with taking along music, maps, cameras, something to read, and games? Isn't that what people do to relax? Well, it's the 21st century and that sort of thing is done with laptop, handhelds, digital cameras, and all that.
And it's a whole lot better than what we needed to travel with 50 years ago. Cell phones, for example, mean that you aren't at the mercy of hotels and their exorbitant rates. Laptops are a godsent, allowing you to carry plenty of reading materials, letting you write stuff and send it, carry all the maps you might ever need, etc.
With a little bit of planning, you can fit all those gadgets into very little space. Some good power adapters are useful (there are some universal ones that will power your cell phones and laptop).
I think you're missing part of the story here - megahertz for megahertz, the Pentium III outperforms a Pentium 4! The P4's "NetBurst Microarchitecture" or whatever is the ultimate incarnation of the megahertz myth
Apple was claiming there was a "Megahertz myth" long before the P4 came out. They tried to create the impression that a G3 or G4 could best a P3 with twice the clock rate. In reality, the G3 and G4 were way behind Intel/AMD even at the time.
The megahertz myth is alive and well. Trying to sum everything up with a single number is arguably a bad thing, but Joe and Jane Consumer want their single number.
The "Megahertz myth" is a marketing gimmick created by Apple, intended to confuse buyers and hide the fact that the PPC is a less-than-stellar performer. Anybody who really cares knows what the different clock frequencies mean and looks at SPEC marks. And die-hard Apple customers really don't care anyway.
If this was really an issue for Apple, they could adopt AMD's successful strategy of using model designations incorporating P4-equivalent clock rates. But unlike Apple, AMD actually has the numbers to back up their claims: an AMD 3200+ really is comparable to a 3.2GHz P4.
I did not say that Microsoft could release their source code into the public domain and not suffer consequences (they might or they might not be able to, but that's a harder argument to make). I said that they don't depend on secrecy of their source code for their business. There is a big difference between non-secret source code on the one hand, and open source or public domain on the other.
Sun Java, for example, is available in source form to anybody who wants it, but not under an open source license. The SCSL allows you to look at Sun's code, but it contaminates you with Sun intellectual property and does not permit you to release your own version of Sun's JRE without paying them.
People keep trying to portray the question of greenhouse gas emissions as one of finding incontrovertible evidence that global warming has already occurred.
That's completely missing the point. Emitting increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses will inevitably cause climate change in the long run--it's elementary physics. And by the time significant changes to our climate have happened it will be too late to do anything about it because carbon dioxide takes centuries to clear from the atmosphere. The only prudent thing to do is therefore to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we can have definitive proof that increased emissions are safe.
Someone who claims to be an authority on climate change should understand this point. Either Lomborg just doesn't know what he is doing or he is deliberately trying to confuse the issue for political reasons.
As for Lomborg's dismissal, I see no problem with it. Even if Lomborg weren't someone who ignores the facts and who has a political ax to grind, government-appointed committees are intrinsically political. The Bush administrations dismisses scientists whose positions they don't like with regularity. Why should pro-pollution scientists be any more protected than environmentalists from political forces?
For example, NTFS. Right now we only have NTFS read only, and we can write ntfs by actually using microsofts ntfs.sys file. With the source code there would probably be an NTFS kernel patch inside a week that worked perfectly.
But that would still not matter much because development would still be driven by Microsoft--they could make incompatible changes and put it into the next Windows update and all that open source effort would be useless.
Ultimately, what matters for market control is control of the community and the license on the source code. Whether people can see the source code or not is secondary.
Sun is currently playing this game brilliantly: unlike Microsoft, they do release full sources to the Java platform. But the license under which they release it keeps the implementation and platform proprietary. In fact, their license infects potential open source developers and keeps them from working on open source implementations. As a result, open source efforts to implement the Java 2 platform have met only with limited success and Sun and the JCP retain complete control of the platform.
If MS opens its source people will look at it and fork it and pieces of it. They wont maintain and develop it. They will chop it to bits and turn lead into gold. Thus being the end of Microsoft's monopoly.
Their source code isn't some secret ingredient. It's the only thing seperating them from certain doom.
I didn't say that Microsoft could open source their software and not suffer problems, I said that they don't require secrecy of the source code. Again, look at Sun: Java is not open source, but the source code isn't secret either.
Microsoft could release their source code under something like the Sun Community Source License with probably no ill effects as far as forking is concerned (as I was saying, there is still the embarrassment factor, into which I lump security holes).
In fact, an SCSL-like release of Windows would probably create significant additional hurdles to open source implementations of something like NTFS: right now, it's clear that if you implement NTFS, you did so by reverse engineering. That's legal in many places. If Microsoft released NTFS source code under something like the SCSL, the presumption might well be that if you implement NTFS, you did so from their source and fall under their license. It might be up to you to prove otherwise.
You think marketing is the only reason MS doesn't want their sources released ?
You bet, although I'm not sure how conscious they are of it. Microsoft views and presents itself as an advanced technology company. Releasing their source code would be tantamount to an admission that they really don't have any interesting, new technology.
Let me tell you what. Microsoft sales / marketing is getting a BEATING re: the whole Open Source vs Closed Source issue. Open Source for better or worse is a giant buzz and people that have no idea why they do or dont want it are asking about it all the time.
And your point is what? That it would be good for Microsoft to open source Windows because of the current open source buzz? It probably would be in the long run. But I didn't claim that Microsoft marketing is behaving rationally. Microsoft marketing believes that they own the crown jewels and they believe that software should be proprietary. Heck, they probably even genuinely believe that Microsoft is putting out innovative products and that Microsoft is driving the tech revolution. That's how they are presenting the company to the outside. They are not going to turn around and make Windows open source, no matter how rational it might be--it goes against everything they believe in.
In the case, the secretary, who isn't in any sort of community, knows exactly what the software needs to do. There's your QA - the user. If you get _any_ developer - even a contract programmer, the source to word, as long as the secretary gets to review builds before they're approved, you've got what you need to keep the secretary in business. No community, no open source, no nothing.
QA is the least of their worries. A "contract programmer" would be completely overwhelmed with a project the size and complexity of Microsoft Word. Microsoft's version control, project organization, and coding styles only make this even worse compared to open source projects. You'd need a dedicated team just to port it to a new version of Windows, let alone make any significant modifications to it.
If the developer goes out of business, getting the source code by itself is almost always useless: almost no single customer will have the resources to maintain and extend it. Source code is only cost effective if there is a community of users and developers, and that requires releasing the code under an open source license ahead of time.
(For the same reason, Microsoft source code isn't their crown jewels, as they always claim: even if people got access to it, they couldn't develop and maintain it anyway. The main reason Microsoft doesn't want their sources released is probably marketing--the "Coca Cola Secret Formula" gimmick--and the probably embarrassing state of it.)
Another problem with source code escrow agreements is that people don't know whether the code deposited with the agent will even compile or be complete. And the agents themselves disappear or misplace code.
On SPEC, the G4 performs comparably to the P3 (yes, P3) MHz for MHz. The Megahertz myth was a fabrication by Apple based on unfair comparisons and unattainable extrapolations.
What about the G5? Unlike previous PPCs, it is competitive, but no more. An Athlon64 or Opteron still gives you more bang for the buck. And comparing a planned PPC for next summer against today's Pentiums, like you did, also makes no sense.
SCO is making copyright claims, so the patent policy is irrelevant. And standards bodies may not even have considered the possibility of copyright claims on something as nebulous as "UNIX principles and methods" to have formulated a policy.
Furthermore, no matter what submitters are required to do, you have to ask the question what happens if they fail to comply with policy. SCO gets barred from submitting more standards? POSIX gets dropped as an official standard? I doubt SCO gives a damn at this point. The standards bodies seem to lack teeth for enforcing IP-related misbehavior even for the requirements they do list.
Finally, Linux implements other UNIX APIs besides those implemented by POSIX, so even if the POSIX argument were bullet-proof (which it is not), SCO could still keep making their claims.
Ultimately, I think SCO's case has no merit. I'm just saying that SCO's claims can't be dismissed in the way Linus and you seem to be trying to dismiss them. SCO's claims ultimately need to be struck down both by demonstrating that no copying took place and that their copyright claims on UNIX principles and methods don't make legal sense.
It's a requirement of the ISO, IEEE and ANSI standards body that participants involved in the development of standards must pre-declare and clearly lable and identify any section of a standard in developent that an implementation would be dependent upon a patent for which royalties must be paid.
Yeah, it's a "requirement". ECMA has similar requirements, yet Microsoft still claims intellectual property even on the ECMA C# standard.
And what's the legal rememdy anyway when companies fail to comply with that requirement? You seem to think it's that the intellectual property falls into the public domain. But the remedy when unexpected intellectual property issues come up is more likely to be that the standard gets dropped by the standards body. See if SCO cares if POSIX gets dropped as an official standard.
Furthermore, even though the submitter and other standards body members disclaim intellectual property rights, any third party can still assert rights. SCO might portray themselves as a third party, not bound by AT&T's original agreements with POSIX.
Linux has met the required standard as a POSIX plaform and today Linux *IS* the defacto industry standard for the common Unix platform.
You are making another logical error here. Linux may or may not have been POSIX-compliant in 1997. But Linux implements a lot of other parts besides POSIX. Even if the POSIX part of Linux is completely free and clear, then SCO can still make claims about the non-POSIX aspects of UNIX that Linux implements.
And lastly to totally blow away your argument
You don't have to "blow away" my argument. I'm merely explaining that just because something complies with a standard, you can't assume it's free or unencumbered. There are many ways in which both parties to the standards process and third parties can still make claims. Your faith in the guarantees resulting from the standards process is naive in my opinion.
Ultimately, I think SCO doesn't have a case. But they certainly can muddy the waters and still cause a lot of trouble.
Well, you don't think they can copyright an interface, but that doesn't keep them from making the claim. And, as the plot example shows, people have successfully established claims on works that "can be expressed in many different ways".
I'm not saying that they have a good claim, I'm merely saying that many of the objections to their claim are based on wrong aasumptions about what it is they are claiming. In particular, Linus's response is missing the point.
Just because a standards body has written a published standard on something does not mean that the thing being standardized is free, or even that you can implement the standard freely. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights might all get in the way.
Granted, the existence of those standards makes SCO's case harder, but it isn't clear by how much.
Standards guarantee openness if all the owners of related IP are members and all the members of the standards body agree, in writing, to permit free and unencumbered use of their IP by anyone for any purpose.
(Note that a license only for compliant implementations isn't good enough because Linux could be argued not to comply.)
SCO keeps talking about the "ABI". It appears that they are not claiming copyright on the headers themselves, but on the general kind of interface those headers specify. Whether Linus looked at BSD or SysV headers is then immaterial.
It's not clear that something that general is copyrightable--they seem to be fishing. But keep in mind that movie plots have been defended using copyright law, so it's possible.
Emacs mail readers have had threaded displays for more than a decade. Mutt has threaded displays as well and lets you read mail and news with the same interface.
I think this kind of ignorance is not Microsoft-specific: user interface researchers frequently seem to "discover" techniques that have been in practical use for years already. And in their arrogance, they'd never look at something like Emacs or UNIX text-oriented untilities bacause they already "know" that the UNIX UI sucks. As the Windows and Mac UIs grow up, this reinvention of UNIX power user features is only going to get worse and more frequent.
Open sourcing the drivers, or at least releasing the specs, would be good insurance against that. In general, open source mitigates the risks of a company out of business, and that's true for both hardware and software.
nVidia and ATI may still keep releasing binary versions of their drivers for old cards, but constant upgrading of binary drivers from vendor sites is such a hassle that they might as well not. I run all my nVidia cards unaccelerated now and I'm not going to buy another one--it's just not worth the hassle.
If you don't like Perens's choice, just don't use or support UserLinux. Perens doesn't like KDE's choice (of toolkit), so that's why he isn't using it in the project he is putting together.
KDE made two bets a few years ago: (1) that making a deal with a commercial company was necessary in order to deliver a high quality toolkit, and (2) that a dual-licensed toolkit wouldn't matter to open source developers or commercial acceptance. Looks like KDE is losing both bets: Gtk+ has more than caught up with Qt technically, and choices by open source entities like the FSF and Perens, and choices by companies like Sun, IBM, and HP (of Gnome) indicate that Qt's license does affect its acceptance.
KDE made its choice and its developers and advocates should accept the consequences.
Having worked for a bunch of companies, I can tell you that's not the way things work.
A lot of corporate development is in-house. The Troll Tech license and license fees mattter a great deal for that. They matter not only because of the short-term cost, but they also matter because of the long-term control Troll Tech gets over commercial applications.
In fact, Troll Tech's control is a problem even for "free software folks", because the design and direction of Qt is ultimately driven by Troll Tech's commercial interests. And you can't weasel your way out of that fact by arguing that if Troll Tech starts going down the wrong path, people can just fork the GPL'ed version of Qt because the very reason for choosing Qt is KDE's assertion that no open source project could deliver a toolkit of comparable quality.
In fact, another strike against KDE and Qt is the fact that KDE already screwed up big time once. Far from being the result of a careful plan, the current dual-licensing scheme for Qt is the result of Troll Tech averting disaster by changing their license after KDE went on for a couple of years merrily developing software under an open source license incompatible with the QPL. The impression one gets as an outside is that KDE doesn't know what the hell they are doing with licenses. And it doesn't help either that Troll Tech is clearly responsible for killing the Harmony Project, an attempt to develop a more liberally licensed Qt-compatible license, because it would cut into their sales. Neither of those is a big recommendation for KDE or Qt.
And, in fact, some of those in-house applications later become open source. But the decision to open source is not something companies make at the start of a project--it takes time to deal with lawyers and business people. With Qt, we'd have had to pay Troll Tech for commercial development licenses just so that we could start developing only to have wasted that money later when we get the corporate OK to open source.
So, why is it that, so far, there are more commercial Qt applications than Gtk+ applications? Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true--where is the data? Secondly, the Qt applications I have seen are usually from companies like Adobe, whose Linux offerings basically suck.
But, in any case, until maybe last year, Gtk+ really was behind Qt (after all, it started later as well), but it has now caught up. But before then, there were already plenty of commercial projects in toolkits like Tcl/Tk and wxWindows, both of which have even more liberal licenses than Gtk+.
In my own experience, Qt's license is deeply harmful to Qt's acceptance for commercial projects: many commercial developers just don't want that sort of dependence on a software vendor, let alone a little company from Norway, even if the money didn't matter. But the money does matter. And Qt's license is also harmful to Qt's use for open source projects.
Muslim headdresses are an attempt at indoctrination?
Yes, as are rosaries, daggers, bibles, and other highly visible religious symbols.
There is a push in France to ban Islamic headdresses in schools.
Good.
They are very anti-muslim, you see.
I fail to see what is "anti-Muslim" about requiring conformance to French norms of dress and behavior. You can practice your religion in private and nobody will prosecute you for it--that's all that religious tolerance means. It doesn't mean that people have to like what you do or that you can use your religion as an excuse for whatever public behavior you want to engage in.
And, in fact, in the case of headdresses, there is really nothing "Islamic" about them anyway, so there isn't even a conflict between French society and Islam. "Islamic" headdresses are supposed to express modesty, but they fail to do so in the context of French culture. In the context of French culture, "Islamic" headdresses express non-conformance. They are also symbolic to many French of the intolerance and human rights violations occurring in modern Islamic nations. The appropriate way of expressing modesty in the context of French culture is through modest Western dress, simple hair styles, and absence of make-up.
You'd be correct if you limit yourself to just text, but copy and paste shouldn't be limited to just text. X can't handle anything that isn't plain text.
X has been able to handle lots of different types for a long time. See here for a list. In addition to the older Atom-based mechanisms, you can now also indicate the type of a selection as a MIME type.
Gnome and kde used to do a different thing with regards to copy and paste. But ever since gnome 2.x and kde 3.x they work identically (for text).
Yes, they now both have lousy support for selections, but at least their support is identically poor. Note that the problem is mostly with application writers, who simply don't understand and don't provide good support for X's selection mechanism. Instead, many Gnome and KDE application writers seem to try their hardest to imitate the feel of Macintosh and Windows applications as closely as possible.
Also, a lot of the graphical effects in gnome and kde are realised through the render extension today. However, the render extension is horribly slow. It's not even anything remotely approaching fast for a software implementation. So, yes, X is to blame for the slow speeds of kde and gnome.
The RENDER extension is a protocol specification. It's neither slow nor fast. And every indication is that RENDER can be implemented very well, both in software and in hardware.
What may be slow is the XFree86 software implementation of RENDER. That can get fixed. XFree86 doesn't define what "X" is, and neither does any other specific implementation.
Furthermore, it was just a bad idea for Gnome and KDE to start relying on a graphics model that X didn't have support for.
No, they are going to have U.S. soldiers doing guard duty at the reactor. Duh. Just like we do guard duty in Serbia, Sinai, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and all kinds of other places, including everywhere we have an embassy.
What's there to guard?
Who would you rather have guarding it? The French? Someone made a joke in another thread about two drunk Germans taking over the reactor...
Since Germany probably is footing the bill for a large fraction of the reactor and since there are probably going to be lots of Germans working at the facility, I don't see what there is to "take over".
Your ideas about European politics seem to be based on Hogan's Heroes. Wake up. It's the 21st century: the French and the Germans are getting along just fine.
now they're moving against free expression of religion in schools (starting young).
Yes, that's one of the things that makes France more democratic than the US, because one person's "free expression of religion" is an attempt at religious indoctrination to others.
At least in the US our courts are making headway in protecting personal liberties again.
Oh? Like how?
Really? Care to provide any evidence for that? Searching on Google, I found no articles among the top 20 that suggested any linkage between the decision for Spain to drop out and Spain's support of the Iraq war. Several of them said things like:
In fact, even if Spain's position on Iraq played a role, European diplomats would be less likely to do something as foolish as publicly stating it as a reason.
If you don't like the injection of politics into matters of science, I'm sure you'll rebuke the EU for what they did to Spain.
Here, I'll state it: any nation that determines the location of an unrelated scientific research facility based on whether a war they started was supported by other nations is behaving in a childish manner. Furthermore, if the diplomats and research establishment of that nation publicly give lack of support for the war as the reason for their decision on the location of the research facility, those diplomats are incompetent.
I don't see exactly how the EU could have done what the US did, given that the EU has not started any wars recently, but if they have and if they make such a foolish decision, then, yes, I fully condemn their actions.