Don't let the views of 1 speaker worry you. He's not the 'official spokesperson' for FLOSS - nobody is.
FLOSS is very 'big tent'. Everyone is welcome. It brings together the strangest bedfellows, eg. in the US it has lots of freedom and gun lovin' republicans, and lots of socialist gov't lovin' lefties. Not to mention all those who don't care at all about politics. And now they are all working together.
(To be fair, I didn't mean to contrast 'freedom' with 'socialist' - I recognize that democratic socialists love their freedom just as the others.)
Whoa, read some history please. Putting too much faith in any figurehead is very dangerous.
You can like RMS or ESR because of the things they've done, but you should be constantly re-evaluating.
If ESR writes an open message to Sun that happens to contain some really embarassing errors (eg. the stock price thing) then we should re-evaluate down. We shouldn't support him just because he is ESR or just because he is on our side.
Don't get me wrong - it's quite important to me that Sun open Java, because I'm a C++ developer who would like to switch to Java.
Also, I think that the open source community is so diverse that no one can claim to represent it. It is represented by all the individuals who help it along.
I personally really like Torvalds, but I'm always ready to change my mind, and I never accept what he says on faith.
I believe the explanation is that Apple's are only used in a small (and shrinking) number of places, but you happen to be in one of those places.
They are used primarily in the US and in Japan. You won't find a Mac in a developing market.
They are used in education, design, and the consumer market. I think they've given up on most business markets. I don't think they are really fighting their shrinking market share. If you can maintain high margins you can make good money even from a small market. But you better invest some of that money in finding new sources of income (which they are).
But I'm not an expert on Apple or their markets, so maybe somebody else could give us some numbers.
The company I work for writes software for wireless adapters, and Windows was our first platform. The appeal for us of porting our software to another platform would have been much greater if there was some similarity between OSX and Linux, but there is very little. The driver model, the device management, the hardware platform, the GUI, and even the main user mode languages (OC vs. C/C++) are different. I recognize that there is a fair bit of compatibility in the user, non GUI, API's and in the CLI, but I think that was the minimum possible (ie. it couldn't be avoided).
This was Apple's choice when they did the big jump to PPC and OSX: they could have gone with the PC platform, they could have built OSX on the Linux kernel, etc. I think the OSS community would have embraced the slick, polished GUI and software that Apple has if Apple had given them a reason to - it's exactly what Linux needs. But what the OSS community did not need (and still doesn't need) was to reopen the BSD vs. Linux divide (like GTK vs. Qt).
I'm sure they had solid financial and strategic reasons for staying away from any Linux compatibility, but for both Apple and Linux users (and for us developers) it was a bad choice. Perhaps they were concerned that if they did something that really benefited the OSS community then MS would get mad (ie. no more Office).
It's a shame - since Linux is focussed on the low cost, business market, and Apple is focussed on premium, brand conscious, consumers, they could have co-existed and cooperated very nicely.
In the end my company delayed, but has recently decided to port to Linux.
> The decision to bring the case against > Microsoft was political as well.
Good point. But all the judges (incl. the appeal judges) found MS to have a monopoly and to have broken the law. They can't all have been political?
> You can't hardly blame the Bush administration > for choosing a penalty for Microsoft that was > more in line with their own economic beliefs.
Another good point. But I thought that US Republicans were fairly 'law-and-order'. Don't they believe in strong penalties for breaking the law?
I guess I personally hoped for a solution that would dent MS's monopolies (Windows client, and Office). If you look at market share, prices, profit margins, or MS's latest financial statements, you will see that this has not happened.
For example, in a market that was working properly MS Office would cost less than it does, particularly in poorer countries. Though I'm pessimistic about Linux on the desktop, I do believe that Windows would cost even more than it does now if it wasn't for OSS. People don't realize how many $ Linux has saved us all, even if we don't use it.
I agree with you: MS should be reasonably free to do with their OS what they want. Integrating IE didn't seem so far fetched to me.
And I'm not saying that breaking up the company was the best solution. After all, that solution was thrown out on appeal.
I say they were 'let off', because the final remedy was political, not judicial, and there was a general concensus that it was much lighter than expected and did not deal with the judicial issues.
Also, remember, not only did they break the law, but they are also a monopoly selling a 'public good' (in finding of fact, and economic theory).
The normal capitalist, neo-classical, handling of a monopoly is government regulation. No, gov't regulation is not a soviet plot, it is part of American capitalism.
Pure (libertarian, or Randian) capitalists would not accept that solution, but they are just fringe movements so they shouldn't be deciding this.
Yes, I should have read the mono faq before replying, but it doesn't seem to fully answer my question.
> (in that case, what's the problem with your > conscience if you develop for Windows anyway?)
Whereever possible I write cross-platform stuff (eg. STL, wxWindows, Boost, instead of MFC).
The big problem is this. Forms is proprietary and windows oriented, but it is THE gui for C#. If GTK# (or preferably something like SWT# or wxWindows#) were real options than I would support these.
Note that when sharpDevelop (the main OSS IDE for dotNet) decided to switch from Forms to swt# there was a golden opportunity for the OSS community to come together around a single alternative to Forms. But MONO stuck to their guns with GTK#, so eventually #Develop reversed their decision and went back to forms, and now the Mono project is trying to create a gtk# port of #develop.
Others will have a different enterpretation of events (I'm all ears), but to me this was a big opportunity lost. If the only major OSS IDE had used SWT this would have influenced developers. I'm no fan of SWT (I prefer wxWindows) but I would have gone for it for the sake of creating a unified alternative to MS's proprietary forms api.
You can get what you are after on a PC as well. The diversity of the PC market serves just about any customer.
At one end of the spectrum, you can go out and buy all your own specialized components, build your computer, and then download and install debian on it.
At the other end, you can buy a system and support from a high end retailer that comes with WinXP and Office preloaded.
I accept that the Mac OS is now quite good, but the extra money you are paying for your mac is mostly due to the fact that they spend a ton of money on marketing and that they spread their costs over a comparatively small # of users (compared to Windows).
Keeping in mind that the nature of software economics tremendously favours the big guy, I'm actually quite impressed that Apple has been able to maintain both their brand and their quality with such a small market share.
MS wants to keep Apple alive, but Linux might make that impossible!
True, but a free market needs to have laws and the laws must be enforced.
Once someone is caught and convicted you can't (you shouldn't) decide to let them off for the benefit of their customers. Letting the company off will often benefit the customers, but it is bad for the market, and it sends the message that breaking the law is OK as long as you succeed. Is this really how things should work?
Also, there were many remedies proposed in the MS case that would have been 'real', and would have actually helped the customers. Even if the remedy had been so severe as to have eventually broken MS's monopolies, do you really think that would have been bad for the customers? Isn't a monopoly bad for the customers?
In case people have forgotten, the final appeal unanimously upheld the original finding of fact that MS had a monopoly and that they had broken the law. The remedy (and the judge's discretion) was in dispute, but the findings were not.
Mono & dotNet appear to be good technology, but that's already been discussed enough.
So...
With regard to Mono, Novell must either:
(a) have done a complete legal analysis of what will happen when MS doesn't like Mono anymore, or
(b) believe that Mono will always be acceptable to MS.
The fact that they haven't told us about (a) makes me fear that the truth is (b).
Novell, if you are listening, please tell me the answer. I'm a developer and I like the dotNet technology, but I need to know where you are going with this, and I need to now whether it is 'safe' for me (and my conscience) to use Mono and, for example, your windows forms library.
It would appear that you are intentionally misunderstanding the OP.
When he says that this will benefit the whole world, he is referring to the fact that this is open source.
He did not say that OSS is all it would take to make him patriotic. Please re-read his comment.
As well, I should point out that his comments make sense: some of the EU countries are the best in the world for contributing to the world's overall well being. The US is pretty much always dead last. Of course, a statement like that should be backed up, so please read this study by the Washington station of the OECD:
http://www.oecdwash.org/NEWS/LOCAL/oecdwash-apr200 2.pdf
My comments are not meant to reflect on Americans as individuals (many of who are remarkably generous) but on the US as a country.
(BTW, I am not American and not European.)
It is legal.
The technique used by captive has been used by other products, such as the Systems Internals NTFSdos product. MS works with and even promotes this company so they can't now complain when others do the same thing.
OOo has decided that they will be moving away from VCL to a different GUI toolkit/framework (though it now appears that this will not happen until after 2.0).
So, any patching done to the VCL now is just temporary, and will have to be thrown out after 2.0.
Here's a much better plan. Decide what framework you think they should switch to and improve it with features that might be useful to OO. That way your work lives a lot longer, and even more importantly, it is available to everyone who uses that framework, not just OO.
I personally agree with their decision. Having OO uses it own, very inaccessible, GUI framework is very bad for the open source community (and for OO). Their are many excellent GUI toolkits/frameworks out there, such as wxWindows, the Qt framework, SWT, etc. Any of these could easily be used via (and could benefit from) OO's component technology. So let's shoot for that rather than taking such a short term approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't let the views of 1 speaker worry you. He's not the 'official spokesperson' for FLOSS - nobody is.
FLOSS is very 'big tent'. Everyone is welcome. It brings together the strangest bedfellows, eg. in the US it has lots of freedom and gun lovin' republicans, and lots of socialist gov't lovin' lefties. Not to mention all those who don't care at all about politics. And now they are all working together.
(To be fair, I didn't mean to contrast 'freedom' with 'socialist' - I recognize that democratic socialists love their freedom just as the others.)
Whoa, read some history please. Putting too much faith in any figurehead is very dangerous.
You can like RMS or ESR because of the things they've done, but you should be constantly re-evaluating.
If ESR writes an open message to Sun that happens to contain some really embarassing errors (eg. the stock price thing) then we should re-evaluate down. We shouldn't support him just because he is ESR or just because he is on our side.
Don't get me wrong - it's quite important to me that Sun open Java, because I'm a C++ developer who would like to switch to Java.
Also, I think that the open source community is so diverse that no one can claim to represent it. It is represented by all the individuals who help it along.
I personally really like Torvalds, but I'm always ready to change my mind, and I never accept what he says on faith.
I believe the explanation is that Apple's are only used in a small (and shrinking) number of places, but you happen to be in one of those places.
They are used primarily in the US and in Japan. You won't find a Mac in a developing market.
They are used in education, design, and the consumer market. I think they've given up on most business markets. I don't think they are really fighting their shrinking market share. If you can maintain high margins you can make good money even from a small market. But you better invest some of that money in finding new sources of income (which they are).
But I'm not an expert on Apple or their markets, so maybe somebody else could give us some numbers.
The company I work for writes software for wireless adapters, and Windows was our first platform. The appeal for us of porting our software to another platform would have been much greater if there was some similarity between OSX and Linux, but there is very little. The driver model, the device management, the hardware platform, the GUI, and even the main user mode languages (OC vs. C/C++) are different. I recognize that there is a fair bit of compatibility in the user, non GUI, API's and in the CLI, but I think that was the minimum possible (ie. it couldn't be avoided).
This was Apple's choice when they did the big jump to PPC and OSX: they could have gone with the PC platform, they could have built OSX on the Linux kernel, etc. I think the OSS community would have embraced the slick, polished GUI and software that Apple has if Apple had given them a reason to - it's exactly what Linux needs. But what the OSS community did not need (and still doesn't need) was to reopen the BSD vs. Linux divide (like GTK vs. Qt).
I'm sure they had solid financial and strategic reasons for staying away from any Linux compatibility, but for both Apple and Linux users (and for us developers) it was a bad choice. Perhaps they were concerned that if they did something that really benefited the OSS community then MS would get mad (ie. no more Office).
It's a shame - since Linux is focussed on the low cost, business market, and Apple is focussed on premium, brand conscious, consumers, they could have co-existed and cooperated very nicely.
In the end my company delayed, but has recently decided to port to Linux.
> The decision to bring the case against
> Microsoft was political as well.
Good point.
But all the judges (incl. the appeal judges) found MS to have a monopoly and to have broken the law. They can't all have been political?
> You can't hardly blame the Bush administration
> for choosing a penalty for Microsoft that was
> more in line with their own economic beliefs.
Another good point.
But I thought that US Republicans were fairly 'law-and-order'. Don't they believe in strong penalties for breaking the law?
I guess I personally hoped for a solution that would dent MS's monopolies (Windows client, and Office). If you look at market share, prices, profit margins, or MS's latest financial statements, you will see that this has not happened.
For example, in a market that was working properly MS Office would cost less than it does, particularly in poorer countries. Though I'm pessimistic about Linux on the desktop, I do believe that Windows would cost even more than it does now if it wasn't for OSS. People don't realize how many $ Linux has saved us all, even if we don't use it.
I agree with you: MS should be reasonably free to do with their OS what they want. Integrating IE didn't seem so far fetched to me.
And I'm not saying that breaking up the company was the best solution. After all, that solution was thrown out on appeal.
I say they were 'let off', because the final remedy was political, not judicial, and there was a general concensus that it was much lighter than expected and did not deal with the judicial issues.
Also, remember, not only did they break the law, but they are also a monopoly selling a 'public good' (in finding of fact, and economic theory).
The normal capitalist, neo-classical, handling of a monopoly is government regulation. No, gov't regulation is not a soviet plot, it is part of American capitalism.
Pure (libertarian, or Randian) capitalists would not accept that solution, but they are just fringe movements so they shouldn't be deciding this.
If I buy a Mac then I'm paying for the OS and the brand. Is there another, cheaper, source for the hardware?
So now you believe that convicted companies should be spared any punishment because it might hurt the shareholders?
So you really believe that no company should be punished for anything? Or do you just mean successful companies?
What if it was a company from another country, who's activities were harming the companies or consumers of your country?
> Why don't you just read the Mono FAQ?
Yes, I should have read the mono faq before replying, but it doesn't seem to fully answer my question.
> (in that case, what's the problem with your
> conscience if you develop for Windows anyway?)
Whereever possible I write cross-platform stuff (eg. STL, wxWindows, Boost, instead of MFC).
The big problem is this. Forms is proprietary and windows oriented, but it is THE gui for C#. If GTK# (or preferably something like SWT# or wxWindows#) were real options than I would support these.
Note that when sharpDevelop (the main OSS IDE for dotNet) decided to switch from Forms to swt# there was a golden opportunity for the OSS community to come together around a single alternative to Forms. But MONO stuck to their guns with GTK#, so eventually #Develop reversed their decision and went back to forms, and now the Mono project is trying to create a gtk# port of #develop.
Others will have a different enterpretation of events (I'm all ears), but to me this was a big opportunity lost. If the only major OSS IDE had used SWT this would have influenced developers. I'm no fan of SWT (I prefer wxWindows) but I would have gone for it for the sake of creating a unified alternative to MS's proprietary forms api.
You can get what you are after on a PC as well. The diversity of the PC market serves just about any customer.
At one end of the spectrum, you can go out and buy all your own specialized components, build your computer, and then download and install debian on it.
At the other end, you can buy a system and support from a high end retailer that comes with WinXP and Office preloaded.
I accept that the Mac OS is now quite good, but the extra money you are paying for your mac is mostly due to the fact that they spend a ton of money on marketing and that they spread their costs over a comparatively small # of users (compared to Windows).
Keeping in mind that the nature of software economics tremendously favours the big guy, I'm actually quite impressed that Apple has been able to maintain both their brand and their quality with such a small market share.
MS wants to keep Apple alive, but Linux might make that impossible!
True, but a free market needs to have laws and the laws must be enforced.
Once someone is caught and convicted you can't (you shouldn't) decide to let them off for the benefit of their customers. Letting the company off will often benefit the customers, but it is bad for the market, and it sends the message that breaking the law is OK as long as you succeed. Is this really how things should work?
Also, there were many remedies proposed in the MS case that would have been 'real', and would have actually helped the customers. Even if the remedy had been so severe as to have eventually broken MS's monopolies, do you really think that would have been bad for the customers? Isn't a monopoly bad for the customers?
In case people have forgotten, the final appeal unanimously upheld the original finding of fact that MS had a monopoly and that they had broken the law. The remedy (and the judge's discretion) was in dispute, but the findings were not.
Mono & dotNet appear to be good technology, but that's already been discussed enough.
So...
With regard to Mono, Novell must either:
(a) have done a complete legal analysis of what will happen when MS doesn't like Mono anymore, or
(b) believe that Mono will always be acceptable to MS.
The fact that they haven't told us about (a) makes me fear that the truth is (b).
Novell, if you are listening, please tell me the answer. I'm a developer and I like the dotNet technology, but I need to know where you are going with this, and I need to now whether it is 'safe' for me (and my conscience) to use Mono and, for example, your windows forms library.
It would appear that you are intentionally misunderstanding the OP. When he says that this will benefit the whole world, he is referring to the fact that this is open source. He did not say that OSS is all it would take to make him patriotic. Please re-read his comment. As well, I should point out that his comments make sense: some of the EU countries are the best in the world for contributing to the world's overall well being. The US is pretty much always dead last. Of course, a statement like that should be backed up, so please read this study by the Washington station of the OECD: http://www.oecdwash.org/NEWS/LOCAL/oecdwash-apr200 2.pdf
My comments are not meant to reflect on Americans as individuals (many of who are remarkably generous) but on the US as a country.
(BTW, I am not American and not European.)
It is legal. The technique used by captive has been used by other products, such as the Systems Internals NTFSdos product. MS works with and even promotes this company so they can't now complain when others do the same thing.
OOo has decided that they will be moving away from VCL to a different GUI toolkit/framework (though it now appears that this will not happen until after 2.0).
So, any patching done to the VCL now is just temporary, and will have to be thrown out after 2.0.
Here's a much better plan. Decide what framework you think they should switch to and improve it with features that might be useful to OO. That way your work lives a lot longer, and even more importantly, it is available to everyone who uses that framework, not just OO.
I personally agree with their decision. Having OO uses it own, very inaccessible, GUI framework is very bad for the open source community (and for OO). Their are many excellent GUI toolkits/frameworks out there, such as wxWindows, the Qt framework, SWT, etc. Any of these could easily be used via (and could benefit from) OO's component technology. So let's shoot for that rather than taking such a short term approach.