Well actually, Microsoft pretty much killed Real's server market by preinstalling their own streaming client that of course does not support Real's protocols - having applications preinstalled isn't just about killing the *client* business, let's face it, most of the clients are free to download anyway. But it's about gaining an advantage over a competitor by having a large installed base - when it then comes to server sales, why would I require my potential customer to download a client first when I can actually give him a solution that works with the preinstalled client?
And no, I'm not a big fan of Real's software, in fact I don't even have it installed. But you used it as an example, so I thought it would be best to continue along that line...
No, the point is, they don't really *make* a choice at all because they don't even understand the reasons for the "crippled" product. But I guess any further discussion is moot anyway, you have just outed yourself as yet another "cheap is good and I don't care what it means to my freedom of choice in the long run", so you obviously don't care if a company with a quasi monopoly is able to eliminate its competition by adding all the "free" stuff into the operating system, as long as you get it cheap.
If you go to the supermarket and have the choice between a gallon of milk and half a gallon of milk, from the same company, for the same price, which one do you choose? Do you care if by taking the full gallon, you actually support someone's anticompetitive behaviour? Would you even *know* that? How is the average consumer supposed to know why there even is a stripped down version of Windows? All they see is that they get less, for the same price, so why should they take that version instead of the "full" one? It's not really about limiting customer choice, it's about disallawing Microsoft to continue its anticompetitive behaviour by simply selling the "sanatizied" version for the same price and thus prompting the consumer to not even consider it as an option.
Yeah, that's the whole point. So the idea of demanding a version of Windows without the software that is threatening to drive competitors out of business is quite right. But since the consumer isn't the one being hurt by having them included, the comsumer shouldn't be the one deciding whether that was the version they wanted - the EU should have mandated that only the N version could legally be sold to EU customers.
The problem is, Microsoft is still allowed to offer its version that includes all the programs that were stripped from the N version in the EU as well. And the EU sanctions are not a reaction to customer demand for a stripped down version, but to complaints by competitors. In that regard, the EU decision seems a bit schizophrenic - they demand a version without all the media player stuff, but then they don't make sure that that's the only version available. And since, I guess, the N version is probably not one cent cheaper to vendors, there's little incentive for them to install it.
Pretty much depends on your definition of "linking in proprietary code". If the devices boots into Linux, but there are no applications to start (because they are proprietary and so you didn't have the source to compile them), so it doesn't do anything, that's not against the GPL - neither letter nor spirit of the GPL. You still get the source for the parts based on the GPL - but you'd have to write your own application software to run on top of it.
Where it gets interesting when it comes to "acquiring" an OSS project is when we think about a hypothetical situation where there is not just one main programmer or a few programmers who are willing to be hired to produce a closed-source version (and yes, I know this is not even the case with JasperReport), but a whole bunch of contributors who have made enhancements to the code in various places over the years. Each one of them owns the rights to hisn modifications, so I would think that once a project had reached a certain popularity not just among users, but also among contributors, it might become too difficult to produce a closed source version without having to rewrite most of the code to avoid problems with former contributors. So I guess we all just need to contribute more to our favourite projects...;)
What were you doing that required you to prove your identity to the police?
I was driving my mom's car and got pulled over because one of the lights had failed, for example.
That's another part of the problem - why doesn't my government trust me?
Maybe it's because you could be anyone, not even a citizen of your country - why *should* they trust you? I don't usually trust random strangers coming to my door, in fact if they do, it's quite possible I ask them to identify themselves or go away and leave me alone. The same thing I would expect from my government. And yes, I do realize that these things can be abused - but so can other things and institutions and nobody objects to having them (well, except for a few people who object to everything;)).
Before you have to take any more guesses: no, I did not say I was an immigrant, I said I lived in the UK for some time (2 years actually), now I'm back at home. And no, home is not the US, it's another European country and the ID cards we have are not drivers licenses, social security cards or anything like that.
Maybe coming from a country where ID cards (and having them with you) have been mandatory since I've been born has made me blid, but what exactly are people's concerns about them? As far as I remember, my privacy has never been threatened by them - I show it to the police to prove who I am, sometimes also to the post office when I collect a parcel. So they believe I'm actually the person who is registered as the owner of the car I'm driving or the recipient of the parcel I'm trying to collect - thank you, I'd expect them to check that. Having lived in the UK for a few years, I couldn't help but get the impression that the point in this discussion is that "I have the right to hide who I am from anyone" - I just don't see that as a legitimate concern. The government and its agencies are not a privately owned supermarket who doesn't need to know who I am to accept me as a customer...
For.de domains, this has been the procedure ever since I've been in the domain business. The way that most registrars have implemented it is that they will send an automatic NACK (not acknowledged) to any incoming transfer request that their customer hasn't specifically asked them to authorize. Many registrars then send a notification to their customer after the transfer has been denied, giving them the opportunity to send a LATEACK, which overrides the previous NACK, but this way the rules are reversed again. If the registrar doesn't offer this LATEACK, it's "allow and try again" if you really want the domain to be transferred. What this does achieve is that if a registrar goes out of business silently, you can still get your domains transferred from them because there won't be anybody or anything sending NACKs anymore...
actually, I doubt that. If you look at what Dell's website says about their Gold technical support program, it only mentions Windows XP and Windows 2000... I suspect that's what Questar bought from them. The service level will still be very high, but probably limited to the hardware only because the customer is using a non-supported OS.
looks like this is a bit misleading - in fact, Dell is shipping them, but they are actually being sold by an Italian company called Questar. So while they are technically Dell machines and even shipped by Dell, this is not a big move by Dell onto the European linux market, it's a smaller company taking the initiative in partnership with Dell...
I think the main advantage over SPF is that this approach doesn't break forwarding as horribly as SPF does. Yes, you can do envelope rewriting for forwarded messages, but Yahoo's approach doesn't require that *all* the servers along the way support it.
Read again: they're talking about the service that they themselves want to offer, not the one that JISC is going to offer as the official service in the future. So basically they're saying: we have lost our official funding, but if we find some money, we can run a smaller-scale service. And JISC is awarding our contract to a new contractor - Lancaster & Kent certainly aren't in a position to make any statements about the service level of that new mirroring service.
The problems that BPL causes are probably more serious than is good for a new technology. The problem of BPL causing a lot of interference with other services using a similar frequency spectrum have caused pretty much all major players who field-tested the technology in Germany to abandon it again.
On the other hand, BPL technology is creeping into the airwaves through the backdoor anyway, as there are now more and more home-networking solutions using powerlines.
There's something at least very similar to that already available as a milter. milter-sender does an email callback to the mx of the domain the email claims to be from and verifies that the address exists. Unlike some of the other solutions available, it doesn't expect the sender to send another mail to verify he's a genuine sender, but accepts the email if the mx doesn't fail to the "RCPT TO" command (exceptions requiring a "full callback" can be configured for mxs that only find out they don't know the recipient after the DATA command has been sent).
More than once I've seen closed source software installing adware/spyware on my Windows box - I've never seen the same thing happening with OSS. Following the author's logic, that's impossible... authors of closed source software are so honest and nice they would never do something like that - must be the OSS people disguising themselves as proprietary software vendors then;)
absolutely right - 90% of all software I install on my box is compiled from source, I hardly ever use the vendor provided binaries. And I guess that a lot of other people do the same. Of course there are limits to what we can notice at a glance, but if things behave strangely, imho the first thing to do is compare the supplied binaries with binaries compiled from the available source...
you are absolutely right. The article examines the issues surrounding the ABI files regardless of whether Linus wrote them or not. Hey, SCO also claim that *they* wrote them... even though they've been caught lying far more often than Linus, it's still worth examining that "what if" question, which is what the article does in a marvellous way.
Well, either Dell are allowed to do it or they are violating their OEM agreement - I bought a couple of Dimension 4600 the other day and they all came with RealPlayer preinstalled on them... there was also some other media player installed as well.
nothing to cool down from...:). I didn't say what you seem to think I said - read my message again. Basically, in your first paragraph you are making the same point I was making. I disagree with your comment about the "market hype", though - at the point when they got to the point of suggesting to the court that M$ should bundle their JRE, the hype had been all but died. Unless of course I live on another planet and I have missed a second Java hype...;)
well, it's true, isn't it? That's exactly what they've tried in the past and what they've failed at. When they couldn't get M$ to release a compliant Java implementation, they tried to get the judge to order them to bundle SUN's own JRE with Windows. Now where exactly did the editor make the mistake when he (or she?) wrote the article? Or is it an editor's duty to keep quiet about facts that are not "nice" to someone?
yeah, for some time they were really annoying, it seems that mainly Richard Morell was driving them that way. If you look at the pages now, you will see that they are actually called " The Smoothwall Open Source Project" - that's a lot different from the "yeah, Smoothwall GPL is our stripped down version of a commercial firewall package" attitude they had a year ago.
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Well actually, Microsoft pretty much killed Real's server market by preinstalling their own streaming client that of course does not support Real's protocols - having applications preinstalled isn't just about killing the *client* business, let's face it, most of the clients are free to download anyway. But it's about gaining an advantage over a competitor by having a large installed base - when it then comes to server sales, why would I require my potential customer to download a client first when I can actually give him a solution that works with the preinstalled client? And no, I'm not a big fan of Real's software, in fact I don't even have it installed. But you used it as an example, so I thought it would be best to continue along that line...
No, the point is, they don't really *make* a choice at all because they don't even understand the reasons for the "crippled" product. But I guess any further discussion is moot anyway, you have just outed yourself as yet another "cheap is good and I don't care what it means to my freedom of choice in the long run", so you obviously don't care if a company with a quasi monopoly is able to eliminate its competition by adding all the "free" stuff into the operating system, as long as you get it cheap.
If you go to the supermarket and have the choice between a gallon of milk and half a gallon of milk, from the same company, for the same price, which one do you choose? Do you care if by taking the full gallon, you actually support someone's anticompetitive behaviour? Would you even *know* that? How is the average consumer supposed to know why there even is a stripped down version of Windows? All they see is that they get less, for the same price, so why should they take that version instead of the "full" one? It's not really about limiting customer choice, it's about disallawing Microsoft to continue its anticompetitive behaviour by simply selling the "sanatizied" version for the same price and thus prompting the consumer to not even consider it as an option.
Yeah, that's the whole point. So the idea of demanding a version of Windows without the software that is threatening to drive competitors out of business is quite right. But since the consumer isn't the one being hurt by having them included, the comsumer shouldn't be the one deciding whether that was the version they wanted - the EU should have mandated that only the N version could legally be sold to EU customers.
The problem is, Microsoft is still allowed to offer its version that includes all the programs that were stripped from the N version in the EU as well. And the EU sanctions are not a reaction to customer demand for a stripped down version, but to complaints by competitors. In that regard, the EU decision seems a bit schizophrenic - they demand a version without all the media player stuff, but then they don't make sure that that's the only version available. And since, I guess, the N version is probably not one cent cheaper to vendors, there's little incentive for them to install it.
Pretty much depends on your definition of "linking in proprietary code". If the devices boots into Linux, but there are no applications to start (because they are proprietary and so you didn't have the source to compile them), so it doesn't do anything, that's not against the GPL - neither letter nor spirit of the GPL. You still get the source for the parts based on the GPL - but you'd have to write your own application software to run on top of it.
Where it gets interesting when it comes to "acquiring" an OSS project is when we think about a hypothetical situation where there is not just one main programmer or a few programmers who are willing to be hired to produce a closed-source version (and yes, I know this is not even the case with JasperReport), but a whole bunch of contributors who have made enhancements to the code in various places over the years. Each one of them owns the rights to hisn modifications, so I would think that once a project had reached a certain popularity not just among users, but also among contributors, it might become too difficult to produce a closed source version without having to rewrite most of the code to avoid problems with former contributors. So I guess we all just need to contribute more to our favourite projects... ;)
What were you doing that required you to prove your identity to the police?
;)).
I was driving my mom's car and got pulled over because one of the lights had failed, for example.
That's another part of the problem - why doesn't my government trust me?
Maybe it's because you could be anyone, not even a citizen of your country - why *should* they trust you? I don't usually trust random strangers coming to my door, in fact if they do, it's quite possible I ask them to identify themselves or go away and leave me alone. The same thing I would expect from my government. And yes, I do realize that these things can be abused - but so can other things and institutions and nobody objects to having them (well, except for a few people who object to everything
Before you have to take any more guesses: no, I did not say I was an immigrant, I said I lived in the UK for some time (2 years actually), now I'm back at home. And no, home is not the US, it's another European country and the ID cards we have are not drivers licenses, social security cards or anything like that.
Maybe coming from a country where ID cards (and having them with you) have been mandatory since I've been born has made me blid, but what exactly are people's concerns about them? As far as I remember, my privacy has never been threatened by them - I show it to the police to prove who I am, sometimes also to the post office when I collect a parcel. So they believe I'm actually the person who is registered as the owner of the car I'm driving or the recipient of the parcel I'm trying to collect - thank you, I'd expect them to check that. Having lived in the UK for a few years, I couldn't help but get the impression that the point in this discussion is that "I have the right to hide who I am from anyone" - I just don't see that as a legitimate concern. The government and its agencies are not a privately owned supermarket who doesn't need to know who I am to accept me as a customer...
For .de domains, this has been the procedure ever since I've been in the domain business. The way that most registrars have implemented it is that they will send an automatic NACK (not acknowledged) to any incoming transfer request that their customer hasn't specifically asked them to authorize. Many registrars then send a notification to their customer after the transfer has been denied, giving them the opportunity to send a LATEACK, which overrides the previous NACK, but this way the rules are reversed again. If the registrar doesn't offer this LATEACK, it's "allow and try again" if you really want the domain to be transferred. What this does achieve is that if a registrar goes out of business silently, you can still get your domains transferred from them because there won't be anybody or anything sending NACKs anymore...
actually, I doubt that. If you look at what Dell's website says about their Gold technical support program, it only mentions Windows XP and Windows 2000... I suspect that's what Questar bought from them. The service level will still be very high, but probably limited to the hardware only because the customer is using a non-supported OS.
looks like this is a bit misleading - in fact, Dell is shipping them, but they are actually being sold by an Italian company called Questar. So while they are technically Dell machines and even shipped by Dell, this is not a big move by Dell onto the European linux market, it's a smaller company taking the initiative in partnership with Dell...
I think the main advantage over SPF is that this approach doesn't break forwarding as horribly as SPF does. Yes, you can do envelope rewriting for forwarded messages, but Yahoo's approach doesn't require that *all* the servers along the way support it.
Read again: they're talking about the service that they themselves want to offer, not the one that JISC is going to offer as the official service in the future. So basically they're saying: we have lost our official funding, but if we find some money, we can run a smaller-scale service. And JISC is awarding our contract to a new contractor - Lancaster & Kent certainly aren't in a position to make any statements about the service level of that new mirroring service.
The problems that BPL causes are probably more serious than is good for a new technology. The problem of BPL causing a lot of interference with other services using a similar frequency spectrum have caused pretty much all major players who field-tested the technology in Germany to abandon it again. On the other hand, BPL technology is creeping into the airwaves through the backdoor anyway, as there are now more and more home-networking solutions using powerlines.
There's something at least very similar to that already available as a milter. milter-sender does an email callback to the mx of the domain the email claims to be from and verifies that the address exists. Unlike some of the other solutions available, it doesn't expect the sender to send another mail to verify he's a genuine sender, but accepts the email if the mx doesn't fail to the "RCPT TO" command (exceptions requiring a "full callback" can be configured for mxs that only find out they don't know the recipient after the DATA command has been sent).
Linux Weekly News also has a great series on driver porting at http://lwn.net/Articles/driver-porting/. It's in the subscription-free area, so go there and have a look at it.
More than once I've seen closed source software installing adware/spyware on my Windows box - I've never seen the same thing happening with OSS. Following the author's logic, that's impossible... authors of closed source software are so honest and nice they would never do something like that - must be the OSS people disguising themselves as proprietary software vendors then ;)
absolutely right - 90% of all software I install on my box is compiled from source, I hardly ever use the vendor provided binaries. And I guess that a lot of other people do the same. Of course there are limits to what we can notice at a glance, but if things behave strangely, imho the first thing to do is compare the supplied binaries with binaries compiled from the available source...
you are absolutely right. The article examines the issues surrounding the ABI files regardless of whether Linus wrote them or not. Hey, SCO also claim that *they* wrote them... even though they've been caught lying far more often than Linus, it's still worth examining that "what if" question, which is what the article does in a marvellous way.
Well, either Dell are allowed to do it or they are violating their OEM agreement - I bought a couple of Dimension 4600 the other day and they all came with RealPlayer preinstalled on them... there was also some other media player installed as well.
nothing to cool down from... :). I didn't say what you seem to think I said - read my message again. Basically, in your first paragraph you are making the same point I was making. I disagree with your comment about the "market hype", though - at the point when they got to the point of suggesting to the court that M$ should bundle their JRE, the hype had been all but died. Unless of course I live on another planet and I have missed a second Java hype... ;)
well, it's true, isn't it? That's exactly what they've tried in the past and what they've failed at. When they couldn't get M$ to release a compliant Java implementation, they tried to get the judge to order them to bundle SUN's own JRE with Windows. Now where exactly did the editor make the mistake when he (or she?) wrote the article? Or is it an editor's duty to keep quiet about facts that are not "nice" to someone?
yeah, for some time they were really annoying, it seems that mainly Richard Morell was driving them that way. If you look at the pages now, you will see that they are actually called " The Smoothwall Open Source Project" - that's a lot different from the "yeah, Smoothwall GPL is our stripped down version of a commercial firewall package" attitude they had a year ago.