It's not between "closed flash" and "closed implementation of HTML5 with patent-encumbered H.264", but between "closed flash", "closed H.264" and "open Theora". Yes, we know that Theora itself may be encumbered, but if someone has a patent on it, let them speak out and then we shall see.
We've moved far from the days when "hardware support" meant hard-wired format decoders, even in ASIC. Most "hardware" today can be programmed to add new codecs.
Say, an OpenCL implementation of Theora or VP8? I'm sure it's only a matter of time before OpenCL (or a subset thereof) becomes available on mobiles - heck, we already have such an implementation of OpenGL...
Looking for reason in all the wrong places, apparently...
WHEREAS, the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) "Endangerment Finding" and proposed action to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act is based on questionable climate data and would place significant regulatory and financial burdens on all sectors of the nation's economy at a time when the nation's unemployment rate exceeds 10%
And WHEREAS the questionability of the said data has been questioned (and debunked thoroughly) and
WHEREAS, global temperatures have been level and declining in some areas over the past 12 years;
WHEREAS using 12 years of data is a flaw in itself, especially given that 1998 was an El-Nino year, and
WHEREAS the last decade was the hottest on record in any case and
WHEREAS, the "hockey stick" global warming assertion has been discredited and climate alarmists' carbon dioxide-related global warming hypothesis is unable to account for the current downturn in global temperatures;
WHEREAS that old-wives' tale was debunked recently and
WHEREAS, there is a statistically more direct correlation between twentieth century temperature rise and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere than CO2;
WHEREAS that was one study that actually used flawed data and didn't even bother to speculate on the physics of how CFCs could affect temperatures in the first place and
WHEREAS, outlawed and largely phased out by 1978, in the year 2000 CFC's began to decline at approximately the same time as global temperatures began to decline;
WHEREAS said decline in temperatures was addressed above and
WHEREAS, emails and other communications between climate researchers around the globe, referred to as "Climategate," indicate a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome;
WHEREAS a committee appointed for that purpose found no evidence against one researcher, none of the charges against the other researchers was ever proven, and effort involved in faking such a massive amount of data would make it impossible in any case and
WHEREAS, there has been a concerted effort by climate change alarmists to marginalize those in the scientific community who are skeptical of global warming by manipulating or pressuring peer-reviewed publications to keep contrary or competing scientific viewpoints and findings on global warming from being reviewed and published;
WHEREAS the paper under consideration was published by lowering the standards of a peer reviewed journal so that it would get in and several editors resigned from that journal for that reason and
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a blend of government officials and scientists, does no independent climate research but relies on global climate researchers;
WHEREAS this clause only lays down the fact which is unquestioned and was the original purpose of IPCC and
WHEREAS, Earth's climate is constantly changing with recent warming potentially an indication of a return to more normal temperatures following a prolonged cooling period from 1250 to 1860 called the "Little Ice Age";
WHEREAS the rate of change is what matters in the first place, and the existence of a "Little Ice Age" has yet to be proven globally and
WHEREAS, more than $7 billion annually in federal government grants, may have influenced the climate research focus and findings that have produced a "scientific consensus" at research institutions and universities;
WHEREAS that one is simply a strawman argument and
I've dug through the Mozilla source extensively (although that's not saying that much, there's a good deal I haven't looked at), but there's still a mess of old code in there, endless needless layers, and plenty of code that doesn't conform to their current coding standards required for submission of patches.
And I can see the same situation in the proprietary application we're developing at my workplace too! Admittedly, it's not as big as Firefox, but like I said, it doesn't seem to have much to do with the business model.
Running sloccount on my copy of 2.6.30 (gentoo patches applied), it's closer to 7 million lines (7,334,728 to be exact).
As far as the subdirs go, 54% is in drivers (3994570), 19.7% in arch and the rest is generally divided among the others. Looks like this supports the comments saying that most of the code is in drivers...
Being open, the drivers would still be there, only outside the tree, and would be an even worse maintenance nightmare, because everytime something changes, we'd have to change half a million projects...
Drivers live in the kernel tree. They don't necessarily have to be built into the kernel... Take a look at what the M key does in make menuconfig sometime...
It gets done because ultimately somebody says "Fuck this, I can't work on this bloated codebase any longer. We're refactoring, guys!"
Then, if the old lead dev / maintainer / admin doesn't like it, a fork happens...
Projects where this has happened before: The kernel itself, several times (as well as various subsystems, again several times), X (XFree to XOrg), KDE (2-3, 3-4), Amarok (1.x to 2.x), SodiPodi -> Inkscape, Firefox from 2 to 3... These are off the top of my mind, of course - there are lots more.
Of course, there are some cases where this process has failed. I don't think the failure rate is any higher (or lower) than proprietary projects, though...
The incentives are different, but they exist, nevertheless...
You're conveniently forgetting companies like RedHat et al. They charge quite a bit above $0 for their work. The difference between these and say, MS or Apple is that they don't make you agree to an EULA first.
The iPhone model is rather un-free, but I don't see why there should be anything wrong with what he did - the code is out there, and he's not the one who's restricting the binary by signing it - it's apple.
The actual question on hand is that the original developer seems to want the application to be free as in beer, which is not what GPL (either 2 or 3) envisions. Here, the OP would be completely in the clear even with v3...
Of course, the truth is that we're guessing out of our hats there...
What makes you think that there could not be a life-form adapted to living in a planet/moon which gets regularly hit by various bits of artillery bombardment from space? Bacteria have proven that they can live in space. All it takes is a little weird evolution to make lifeforms that can (as a group, at least) survive such a major blow. Possibly a planet-wide organism, or at least, a planet-wide ecosystem?
Come to think of it, we already have one of those - except that the dominant life-form seems hell-bent on destroying it!
Slashdot Mirror
And Mozilla users don't get the option of H.264 on their platform. So, why no outrage at Mozila and Firefox?
I think that should be obvious - Mozilla has literally no way of offering H.264 without illegally implementing patented code.
And yet Firefox supports the proprietary Flash plugins. Outside of certain sites, the web isn't particularly "free."
Not support so much as allow; something that Apple refuses to do on the iPad and iPhone...
A false restriction of choice, then.
It's not between "closed flash" and "closed implementation of HTML5 with patent-encumbered H.264", but between "closed flash", "closed H.264" and "open Theora". Yes, we know that Theora itself may be encumbered, but if someone has a patent on it, let them speak out and then we shall see.
We've moved far from the days when "hardware support" meant hard-wired format decoders, even in ASIC. Most "hardware" today can be programmed to add new codecs.
Say, an OpenCL implementation of Theora or VP8? I'm sure it's only a matter of time before OpenCL (or a subset thereof) becomes available on mobiles - heck, we already have such an implementation of OpenGL...
Sorry, but I just installed Fedora without MS seeing a cent of my money...
This is 2010; install it onto a VM...
You could also use SigC++ or Boost.Bind, or even std::mem_fun in modern C++...
I'd also recommend her Story Of Bottled Water.
And if someone, purely out of random mutation naturally develops that sequence? Sue them for infringement?
Maybe they're trying to create the market?
Take a look at the first device on that search, and you'll find that it takes a 5V power supply.
The key word here is "bridge" - It's not as simple as hooking up the coax to the UTP. They obviously do some conversion before sending it on.
The heatlamp who's fluctuations are in negative correlation with observed warming?
And WHEREAS the questionability of the said data has been questioned (and debunked thoroughly) and
WHEREAS using 12 years of data is a flaw in itself, especially given that 1998 was an El-Nino year, and WHEREAS the last decade was the hottest on record in any case and
WHEREAS that old-wives' tale was debunked recently and
WHEREAS that was one study that actually used flawed data and didn't even bother to speculate on the physics of how CFCs could affect temperatures in the first place and
WHEREAS said decline in temperatures was addressed above and
WHEREAS a committee appointed for that purpose found no evidence against one researcher, none of the charges against the other researchers was ever proven, and effort involved in faking such a massive amount of data would make it impossible in any case and
WHEREAS the paper under consideration was published by lowering the standards of a peer reviewed journal so that it would get in and several editors resigned from that journal for that reason and
WHEREAS this clause only lays down the fact which is unquestioned and was the original purpose of IPCC and
WHEREAS the rate of change is what matters in the first place, and the existence of a "Little Ice Age" has yet to be proven globally and
WHEREAS that one is simply a strawman argument and
Metaphor FAIL!
You do realise that metaphors go only so far, right?
And I can see the same situation in the proprietary application we're developing at my workplace too! Admittedly, it's not as big as Firefox, but like I said, it doesn't seem to have much to do with the business model.
Running sloccount on my copy of 2.6.30 (gentoo patches applied), it's closer to 7 million lines (7,334,728 to be exact).
As far as the subdirs go, 54% is in drivers (3994570), 19.7% in arch and the rest is generally divided among the others. Looks like this supports the comments saying that most of the code is in drivers...
Don't know where the 11 MLOC came from though...
Being open, the drivers would still be there, only outside the tree, and would be an even worse maintenance nightmare, because everytime something changes, we'd have to change half a million projects...
Drivers live in the kernel tree. They don't necessarily have to be built into the kernel... Take a look at what the M key does in make menuconfig sometime...
It gets done because ultimately somebody says "Fuck this, I can't work on this bloated codebase any longer. We're refactoring, guys!"
Then, if the old lead dev / maintainer / admin doesn't like it, a fork happens...
Projects where this has happened before: The kernel itself, several times (as well as various subsystems, again several times), X (XFree to XOrg), KDE (2-3, 3-4), Amarok (1.x to 2.x), SodiPodi -> Inkscape, Firefox from 2 to 3... These are off the top of my mind, of course - there are lots more.
Of course, there are some cases where this process has failed. I don't think the failure rate is any higher (or lower) than proprietary projects, though...
The incentives are different, but they exist, nevertheless...
Debating whether Audi or Ferrari are better in a world without fuel, maybe?
From the moment it was announced, it was Chandrayaan-1... There were always plans for more (including possibly manned missions, IIRC).
You're conveniently forgetting companies like RedHat et al. They charge quite a bit above $0 for their work. The difference between these and say, MS or Apple is that they don't make you agree to an EULA first.
The iPhone model is rather un-free, but I don't see why there should be anything wrong with what he did - the code is out there, and he's not the one who's restricting the binary by signing it - it's apple.
The actual question on hand is that the original developer seems to want the application to be free as in beer, which is not what GPL (either 2 or 3) envisions. Here, the OP would be completely in the clear even with v3...
Even under the PCT, you can't really patent something that's not patentable in that country. China for example, uses this tactic:
The patent is valid everywhere except China in this case. They just rejected it.
Of course, the truth is that we're guessing out of our hats there...
What makes you think that there could not be a life-form adapted to living in a planet/moon which gets regularly hit by various bits of artillery bombardment from space? Bacteria have proven that they can live in space. All it takes is a little weird evolution to make lifeforms that can (as a group, at least) survive such a major blow. Possibly a planet-wide organism, or at least, a planet-wide ecosystem?
Come to think of it, we already have one of those - except that the dominant life-form seems hell-bent on destroying it!
Depends on just how much smarter than us they are...