The Zaurus is really nifty hardware, but it has been held back by QPE: the Qt/Embedded based desktop made it very hard to port GUI apps to the Zaurus and it was slow and memory hungry compared to X11. It also really didn't have a very good GUI in my opinion.
I don't know whether the X11-based GUI will be any more usable as a PDA, but I do know that with a full X11 environment, the Zaurus can carve out a niche for itself for "vertical apps" (applications specific to particular industry sectors) that previously required far too much effort to port to Qt.
Furthermore, with a 640x480 screen and a 200-400MHz processor, the argument that the handheld should run anything other than desktop software becomes really weak anyway.
That's not the way the law works. You pay your own legal fees in a lawsuit unless the judge determines that the lawsuit was frivolous. Yes, it sucks, but it's not clear that the alternatives are any better.
If it worries you, you can take out insurance to cover such unexpected legal costs. Many Europeans do.
Standards compliance is always a good thing. But dont for a moment think that it means crossbrowser/platform compatibility.
Standards compliance clearly does not mean cross-browser or cross-platform compatibility: almost all standards define certain behaviors as "implementation dependent" or "undefined", and they often leave many issues completely unmentioned (and hence undefined).
In order to write something that works cross-platform, it doesn't just have to be standards-compliant, it also has to avoid all implementation dependent or undefined effects in the standard. Depending on the standard, that can be easier (Scheme), moderately difficult (Java), or very hard (C, C++).
Separating content and presentation would be a good thing. But the currently supported web standards (HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, DOM, CSS) don't let you do it by themselves. To achieve that kind of separation, you need to use some kind of server-side technology and you need to generate preference-specific HTML anyway.
But even if you manage to do that, it's not clear that it's a good thing: regular folks don't feel all that comfortable authoring abstract markup. They want to write their web pages in something WYSIWYG and they will (trust me) manage to encode lots of assumptions about how the content is ultimately presented.
So, you have to pick some kind of middle ground: not too much user customization but some (maybe light/heavy). Not too much server side separation of content and presentation, but some. Not too much JavaScript and CSS, but a little may help you out quite a bit. Etc.
Look at NEC or Fujitsu's pen-based computers; they predate TabletPC and they have offered displays that can be used in direct sunlight for years. They probably have updated them to TabletPC software by now.
Many PDAs are also usable in direct sunlight, so if your software is portable, you could run it on something like the Sharp Zaurus.
I don't know what you mean by "take into account". It doesn't matter when you got your US patent, it just won't be valid in Europe. Unless you have actually applied for a European patent around the same time you applied for your US patent, you simply have no enforceable patent rights in Europe. And you can't make up for that by applying years later in Europe: once the invention has been published, it's published, even if the publication is a US patent. At best, you can use your US patent to try to invalidate a European patent, claiming that the US patent is published prior art. But that only means that the European patent holder can't enforce his patent in Europe, it doesn't give you any ability to enforce your patent in Europe.
However, I do wish I could find a similar forum for us to talk about our chosen operating system, applications, viruses, and other issues.
It's called MSDN and microsoft.com. You can also hire consultants, subscribe to commercial newsletters, and go to commercial training courses. You picked a commercial platform, your support is going to be commercial and you get astroturf for a community. I mean, what do you expect?
Linux and open source isn't as much about the software, it's about the community. If you want an open source-like community, you have to use software that comes out of that community, even if you would prefer something else in terms of software.
Occasionally, you will find a commercial platform with a vibrant and enthusiastic user community. But such situations usually only arise when the commercial platform is a technological breakthrough, and they usually don't last more than a few years. Eventually, people ask themselves: why should I work for free, only so that the company that's making the product can cut back on support and increase their profits?
US patents aren't automatically valid in the rest of the world. The US would like it to be so, but it hasn't happened yet. Right now, bogus US patents are just hurting US consumers (or subsidizing US industries, whichever way you want to look at it).
Well, just within a few minutes, I found dynacc, which offered similar functionality in July 1999.
But more importantly, the patent should be invalid simply because it's an obvious engineering solution. I'm sure we can find previous commercial or free implementations that go back to the early 1990's.
As for why it took four years to get the patent--who knows. Maybe it was poorly written or maybe it was iffy to begin with. I also don't see what difference it would make even if this were a proper patent.
Everything boils down to machine code. Teach someone how things work in assembly, teach them basic programming language concepts, and from then on out, you only need to teach them how a particular language translates things to machine code and what the syntax is for those concepts. That last step doesn't take nearly as long as the first two.
That belief is rooted in a very limited exposure to programming languages: just because the only languages you (apparently) have seen are like C++ and Python, whose execution models are both fairly close to the machine, you assume that everything has to be that way. It isn't. There are plenty of languages where an understanding of machine language is of little help and whose execution model is completely different from machine language.
It's also bogus because the real world doesn't work that way. An airplane mechanic knows how an airplane is built, but he may not be able to fly it. A physicist knows how a violin functions, but he may not be able to play it. A violinist knows how to play one stringed instrument and knows music, but that doesn't mean he can play the guitar. Knowledge of how a thing operates or familiarity with a similar thing doesn't mean that you can perform well on the actual thing.
Some knowledge transfers between some languages, but your general claim is untenable and, if anything, just demonstrates very limited experience on your part.
The notion of a "defensive patent" in the sense you are using it is utter nonsense. Patenting something gives you no more protection against someone else patenting the same thing as a proper disclosure, and the disclosure is a whole lot cheaper.
"Defensive" patents only make sense if you use the patents as weapons: "we'll sue you over this if you sue us over that". And that is what IBM has been doing traditionally.
I wear pants when expected by our dippy culture, but I never understood what the hell they are supposed to mean.
They hide parts of your body that most people would like to go through life not seeing. They also protect parts of your body from coming in contact with things you don't want them to come in contact with. And they prevent shrinkage and other ill effects of loss of body heat. Does that clear it up? If you still can't figure it out, try going without for a day.
A lot of computer science departments realize that the language that is in style changes, so they teach a good amount of theory, rather than specific languages. What this means is that their students can basically pick up a new language by grabbing and book and be useful in a day or two
You won't be "useful in a day or two" in C or C++ if you have never dealt with pointers or manual memory management before. But even if you have, C and C++ have enough pitfalls and obscure corners that you really have to spend years learning them.
And the same is true about many other languages. And, in addition to the languages themselves, you have to know their APIs in order to be productive.
A CS degree gives you CS skills. CS skills are not the same as commercial programming skills, much as you may not want to believe that.
His strategy seems to be: rant like a lunatic and behave like a jerk. Then, only people with low self-esteem will apply and management will become really easy. Great idea.
Of course, lots of big organizations had figured that one out long ago, having a long tradition of degrading application and hiring procedures of their own.
VAST areas should considered totally uninhabitable only because few parasite-ridden mosquitos also happen to share them with humans?
Yes, why not? Vast areas of the world should be uninhabited. What's the alternative? Strip malls all around the globe with a few parks thrown in? If you are concerned with long-term survival of humans, your vision is simply not workable.
Humans have been afflicted by malaria for at least 8000 years, are you claiming there was significant overpopulation back then?
"Overpopulation" depends on both technology and popluation densities. Since there was less technology back then, much smaller population densities constituted overpopulation.
In any case, nobody knows whether malaria was widespread back then in human populations or just an occasional occurrence. If overpopulation (or other social pressures) didn't force people to move into malaria-infested areas back then, it was certainly as easy to avoid at that time as it is today.
That being said, the money that Gates has contributed to research for a malaria vaccine - probably the world's most pressing health problem, and one that is shamefully underfunded by our government
Malaria is not a pressing health problem, it's a symptom of overpopulation pushing people to live in areas that should be considered uninhabitable. You can't fix that problem with a malaria vaccine.
And the money he's donated to charter schools across the country (including the one at which my brother teaches) is offering real educational opportunity to many poor kids who otherwise would be stuck in shitty public schools.
As a means of funding education, the "Windows Tax" is one of the least efficient imaginable. Tax people like Gates properly and put the money into the public school system and we'll all be better off.
2) Standardizing the way GUI applications work so that ordinary folks can get productivity out of them instead of endless tweaking and fumbling. (of course, sometimes it crashes and those @#$%^*!! words start flowing)
That's utter B.S. The standardization that you see in the Windows UI came from IBM; Microsoft merely implemented it and then bastardized it. Today, the Windows UI is one of the least consistent UIs around; you just have to observe some newbie users struggle with it to know.
3) Bill is a philanthropist and a marvellous example compared to many other rich folks.
Really? He only donates a tiny fraction of his wealth and he would be left with more money than most small nations even if he donated a big fraction of his wealth. How is that an example of philanthropy, even if he had earned the money legitimately?
What I'm saying is that copyleft is successful, no matter how you slice it, at thwarting traditional copyright in software.
The fact that I release copylefted software for free doesn't "thwart" your use of copyright for your software. You can exercise your copyright as much as you could before.
What pisses me off is free-market droids co-opting what is, essentially, a socialist attempt to stem the rising tide of so-called "intellectual property rights" by claiming that the license's true purpose is to make more efficient markets, or some other bullshit.
The licenses effect is to make more efficient markets. Its purpose depends on who you ask. To Stallman, it has one purpose, to me another, and to IBM yet another.
Yes, that's probably why it has succeeded in spreading copyleft software to millions across the globe. Its real success, however, is that it makes traditional copyright seem less and less justified each and every day.
The fact that there is a copylefted Linux kernel tells you nothing about whether copyrights on books or Disney movies are still needed. Furthermore, you can't attack copyright based on its success or the success of copyleft. Drugs are enormously successful in the market, but that doesn't make them good.
What I'm saying is that the creators of copyleft sat down one day and said: We'd like to create a copyright license that will thwart to as great a degree as possible proprietary copyrights. We want millions of people to use software so licensed, each day, and not notice the difference.
You completely fail to understand the argument that Stallman was making. Stallman's creation of copyleft wasn't about the abolition of copyright, it was about making source code (yes, specifically, source code--not movies, or books, or anything else) available, modifiable, and redistributable.
If you just abolished copyright tomorrow, you'd be further away from Stallman's original vision than we are now--all the GPL'ed software would fall into the public domain, and companies would start relying more on trusted hardware, dongles, and obfuscation, and they would include any free software they like. That would be far worse than today's situation.
But completely separately from copyleft, Stallman (and others, including myself) worry about the social effects of copyrights in other areas. But those concerns were not the original driving force behind copyleft, and the success or failure of copyleft doesn't affect those concerns. The Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Law and the DMCA would be bad ideas in my (and I guess Stallman's) opinion even if there were no copylefted software anywhere.
PalmOS 6 is the answer, at least, the answer most PalmOS users and licensees are looking at. Hopefully it'll be a good answer, but I have some reservations.
I agree with those technical issues. But I see a more fundamental problem: Palm's history and attitude. They started off as ex-Macintosh hackers and basically just repeated technically what they did before: lots of low-level hacking, nice apps, and no understanding of the longer-range issues. In fact, arguably, they repeated what they did with Macintosh: they got the basic ideas from Xerox (the PARCTab).
Worse, Palm views their fortune in "owning the platform", which means they will do anything they can do in order to make the platform as incompatible with the rest of the world as they can get away with. That's why Palm still doesn't have widespread Java or XML support. That's also why it doesn't run in protected mode, have a modern window system, or have a usable file system (if it did, you could port other software to it too easily). I think POS6 (what an ironic acronym) won't solve the problems POS4 and POS5 have because it is not in Palm's financial interest to make POS6 a modern operating system. The more baroque POS remains, the more of a lock they have on the market. Sound familiar?
With Linux, there is too much of a temptation for the company using it to just approach it like they're getting a deal, saving $15 per unit for the WinCE.NET 4.2 licensing fee. Linux could be very worthwhile if some company(ies) was willing to put a lot of time and money into Linux on the PDA, advancing the state of the art in a lot of areas. Sharp sure as hell isn't doing it.
I fully agree with that. Linux is a great kernel, even for PDAs, but it is far from enough. What people need to worry about with Linux-on-PDAs is the applications. Qtopia has wasted years rewriting the low-level graphics stuff but doing no better than Palm or PPC on apps.
The right thing to do would be to develop an updated Newton-like environment (dynamic language, persistent database, XML data interchange, etc.) and not waste time with reinventing the low-level infrastructure--Linux and X11 are fine for modern handhelds--they need decent, modern apps. And that's a real opportunity, because both Microsoft and Palm are sitting on their hands.
I don't know for you, but my IM client on my Tungsten T2 stays online when I go in the address book.
PalmOS 5 is not a multi-tasking, protected mode operating system, and it shows. It causes problems for the UI (e.g., when you switch between applications, views change capriciously) and for robustness (applications that crash often take down the whole handheld).
The fact that a few applications manage to "stay online" doesn't make the OS multitasking. DOS had TSR programs and various other hacks, and that didn't make it multitasking either. Sorry, but it's you who doesn't know what you are talking about.
Newton had something that might be called a "real PDA OS". The Sharp Zaurus has a "real OS that works well for a PDA". But Zodiac and Palm have neither. The reason that they work so well is simply the enormous efforts that application writers put into the platform. Zodiac's OS is a Frankenstein monster, a combination of the outdated PalmOS 5 platform with some gaming features thrown in.
and that's why Zodiac will live: If it will suck as a gaming machine it will still be a quite powerfull PDA.
Zodiac's business plan is probably that they get acquired by Palm or someone else. Given their dependency on PalmOS licenses, they are at Palm's mercy anyway.
What Zodiac should have done is put a real kernel and OS on the Zodiac and run PalmOS as a guest operating system under that.
No, no, no. You're missing the point entirely: copyleft was designed to thwart traditional copyrights. The fact that it is enforced using copyright law is called poetic justice. It certainly doesn't validate copyright nor nullify the political point behind creating "copyleft" in the first place.
No, YOU are missing the point. No matter what its creators intended, copyleft is something that has taken on a life of its own. Copyleft is a valid, useful license that many people rely on.
That you fail to make the distinction for whatever reason doesn't mean that the distinction is nonexistant or unimportant.
I do make the distinction: copyleft is a particular license, copyright is a legal right. That's the only distinction there is.
That copyleft exists to thwart the perpetuation of copyright is a fundamental and inseperable quality of it,
The reasons out of which copyleft was created are very much separable from its actual significance today: millions of people use copylefted software who don't care about any abolition of copyright or other changes to intellectual property law.
Institutions and laws take on different meanings and purposes over time: the US was founded as a nation where women couldn't vote, where discrimination and corruption were rampant, and where slavery was practiced. Yet, many of its laws and institutions are still in use today--we didn't throw them out just because they were tainted by a century of government that today we would find absolutely intolerable. Those institutions and laws have taken on a new meaning in a new context, even though they are still the same institutions and laws that existed two centuries ago.
your flawed views on the matter notwithstanding.
Actually, people like you try to put copyleft in a bad light because you see what a threat it is to your business. You keep screaming at the top of your lungs that copyleft is some communist lunacy because you already know that copyleft is wildly successful and competitive in the market with your flawed and inefficient business models.
Copyleft has succeeded because it is a useful business tool and part of an efficient market. The motivation for its creation is irrelevant.
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The Zaurus is really nifty hardware, but it has been held back by QPE: the Qt/Embedded based desktop made it very hard to port GUI apps to the Zaurus and it was slow and memory hungry compared to X11. It also really didn't have a very good GUI in my opinion.
I don't know whether the X11-based GUI will be any more usable as a PDA, but I do know that with a full X11 environment, the Zaurus can carve out a niche for itself for "vertical apps" (applications specific to particular industry sectors) that previously required far too much effort to port to Qt.
Furthermore, with a 640x480 screen and a 200-400MHz processor, the argument that the handheld should run anything other than desktop software becomes really weak anyway.
That's not the way the law works. You pay your own legal fees in a lawsuit unless the judge determines that the lawsuit was frivolous. Yes, it sucks, but it's not clear that the alternatives are any better.
If it worries you, you can take out insurance to cover such unexpected legal costs. Many Europeans do.
Standards compliance is always a good thing. But dont for a moment think that it means crossbrowser/platform compatibility.
Standards compliance clearly does not mean cross-browser or cross-platform compatibility: almost all standards define certain behaviors as "implementation dependent" or "undefined", and they often leave many issues completely unmentioned (and hence undefined).
In order to write something that works cross-platform, it doesn't just have to be standards-compliant, it also has to avoid all implementation dependent or undefined effects in the standard. Depending on the standard, that can be easier (Scheme), moderately difficult (Java), or very hard (C, C++).
Separating content and presentation would be a good thing. But the currently supported web standards (HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, DOM, CSS) don't let you do it by themselves. To achieve that kind of separation, you need to use some kind of server-side technology and you need to generate preference-specific HTML anyway.
But even if you manage to do that, it's not clear that it's a good thing: regular folks don't feel all that comfortable authoring abstract markup. They want to write their web pages in something WYSIWYG and they will (trust me) manage to encode lots of assumptions about how the content is ultimately presented.
So, you have to pick some kind of middle ground: not too much user customization but some (maybe light/heavy). Not too much server side separation of content and presentation, but some. Not too much JavaScript and CSS, but a little may help you out quite a bit. Etc.
Look at NEC or Fujitsu's pen-based computers; they predate TabletPC and they have offered displays that can be used in direct sunlight for years. They probably have updated them to TabletPC software by now.
Many PDAs are also usable in direct sunlight, so if your software is portable, you could run it on something like the Sharp Zaurus.
I don't know what you mean by "take into account". It doesn't matter when you got your US patent, it just won't be valid in Europe. Unless you have actually applied for a European patent around the same time you applied for your US patent, you simply have no enforceable patent rights in Europe. And you can't make up for that by applying years later in Europe: once the invention has been published, it's published, even if the publication is a US patent. At best, you can use your US patent to try to invalidate a European patent, claiming that the US patent is published prior art. But that only means that the European patent holder can't enforce his patent in Europe, it doesn't give you any ability to enforce your patent in Europe.
However, I do wish I could find a similar forum for us to talk about our chosen operating system, applications, viruses, and other issues.
It's called MSDN and microsoft.com. You can also hire consultants, subscribe to commercial newsletters, and go to commercial training courses. You picked a commercial platform, your support is going to be commercial and you get astroturf for a community. I mean, what do you expect?
Linux and open source isn't as much about the software, it's about the community. If you want an open source-like community, you have to use software that comes out of that community, even if you would prefer something else in terms of software.
Occasionally, you will find a commercial platform with a vibrant and enthusiastic user community. But such situations usually only arise when the commercial platform is a technological breakthrough, and they usually don't last more than a few years. Eventually, people ask themselves: why should I work for free, only so that the company that's making the product can cut back on support and increase their profits?
US patents aren't automatically valid in the rest of the world. The US would like it to be so, but it hasn't happened yet. Right now, bogus US patents are just hurting US consumers (or subsidizing US industries, whichever way you want to look at it).
Well, just within a few minutes, I found dynacc, which offered similar functionality in July 1999.
But more importantly, the patent should be invalid simply because it's an obvious engineering solution. I'm sure we can find previous commercial or free implementations that go back to the early 1990's.
As for why it took four years to get the patent--who knows. Maybe it was poorly written or maybe it was iffy to begin with. I also don't see what difference it would make even if this were a proper patent.
Everything boils down to machine code. Teach someone how things work in assembly, teach them basic programming language concepts, and from then on out, you only need to teach them how a particular language translates things to machine code and what the syntax is for those concepts. That last step doesn't take nearly as long as the first two.
That belief is rooted in a very limited exposure to programming languages: just because the only languages you (apparently) have seen are like C++ and Python, whose execution models are both fairly close to the machine, you assume that everything has to be that way. It isn't. There are plenty of languages where an understanding of machine language is of little help and whose execution model is completely different from machine language.
It's also bogus because the real world doesn't work that way. An airplane mechanic knows how an airplane is built, but he may not be able to fly it. A physicist knows how a violin functions, but he may not be able to play it. A violinist knows how to play one stringed instrument and knows music, but that doesn't mean he can play the guitar. Knowledge of how a thing operates or familiarity with a similar thing doesn't mean that you can perform well on the actual thing.
Some knowledge transfers between some languages, but your general claim is untenable and, if anything, just demonstrates very limited experience on your part.
I realized that many companies get patents because they half to - to keep someone else from getting one and screwing them over
That may be so, but when companies try to enforce such patents against others without provocation, it is hostile and needs to be condemned.
The notion of a "defensive patent" in the sense you are using it is utter nonsense. Patenting something gives you no more protection against someone else patenting the same thing as a proper disclosure, and the disclosure is a whole lot cheaper.
"Defensive" patents only make sense if you use the patents as weapons: "we'll sue you over this if you sue us over that". And that is what IBM has been doing traditionally.
I wear pants when expected by our dippy culture, but I never understood what the hell they are supposed to mean.
They hide parts of your body that most people would like to go through life not seeing. They also protect parts of your body from coming in contact with things you don't want them to come in contact with. And they prevent shrinkage and other ill effects of loss of body heat. Does that clear it up? If you still can't figure it out, try going without for a day.
A lot of computer science departments realize that the language that is in style changes, so they teach a good amount of theory, rather than specific languages. What this means is that their students can basically pick up a new language by grabbing and book and be useful in a day or two
You won't be "useful in a day or two" in C or C++ if you have never dealt with pointers or manual memory management before. But even if you have, C and C++ have enough pitfalls and obscure corners that you really have to spend years learning them.
And the same is true about many other languages. And, in addition to the languages themselves, you have to know their APIs in order to be productive.
A CS degree gives you CS skills. CS skills are not the same as commercial programming skills, much as you may not want to believe that.
Joel on Software painless software management
His strategy seems to be: rant like a lunatic and behave like a jerk. Then, only people with low self-esteem will apply and management will become really easy. Great idea.
Of course, lots of big organizations had figured that one out long ago, having a long tradition of degrading application and hiring procedures of their own.
VAST areas should considered totally uninhabitable only because few parasite-ridden mosquitos also happen to share them with humans?
Yes, why not? Vast areas of the world should be uninhabited. What's the alternative? Strip malls all around the globe with a few parks thrown in? If you are concerned with long-term survival of humans, your vision is simply not workable.
Humans have been afflicted by malaria for at least 8000 years, are you claiming there was significant overpopulation back then?
"Overpopulation" depends on both technology and popluation densities. Since there was less technology back then, much smaller population densities constituted overpopulation.
In any case, nobody knows whether malaria was widespread back then in human populations or just an occasional occurrence. If overpopulation (or other social pressures) didn't force people to move into malaria-infested areas back then, it was certainly as easy to avoid at that time as it is today.
That being said, the money that Gates has contributed to research for a malaria vaccine - probably the world's most pressing health problem, and one that is shamefully underfunded by our government
Malaria is not a pressing health problem, it's a symptom of overpopulation pushing people to live in areas that should be considered uninhabitable. You can't fix that problem with a malaria vaccine.
And the money he's donated to charter schools across the country (including the one at which my brother teaches) is offering real educational opportunity to many poor kids who otherwise would be stuck in shitty public schools.
As a means of funding education, the "Windows Tax" is one of the least efficient imaginable. Tax people like Gates properly and put the money into the public school system and we'll all be better off.
2) Standardizing the way GUI applications work so that ordinary folks can get productivity out of them instead of endless tweaking and fumbling. (of course, sometimes it crashes and those @#$%^*!! words start flowing)
That's utter B.S. The standardization that you see in the Windows UI came from IBM; Microsoft merely implemented it and then bastardized it. Today, the Windows UI is one of the least consistent UIs around; you just have to observe some newbie users struggle with it to know.
3) Bill is a philanthropist and a marvellous example compared to many other rich folks.
Really? He only donates a tiny fraction of his wealth and he would be left with more money than most small nations even if he donated a big fraction of his wealth. How is that an example of philanthropy, even if he had earned the money legitimately?
Sounds like the company of those who refused is a lot better than those who accepted...
Maybe the old girl is planning on striking a little harder than usual this time--you know, "for services rendered".
What I'm saying is that copyleft is successful, no matter how you slice it, at thwarting traditional copyright in software.
The fact that I release copylefted software for free doesn't "thwart" your use of copyright for your software. You can exercise your copyright as much as you could before.
What pisses me off is free-market droids co-opting what is, essentially, a socialist attempt to stem the rising tide of so-called "intellectual property rights" by claiming that the license's true purpose is to make more efficient markets, or some other bullshit.
The licenses effect is to make more efficient markets. Its purpose depends on who you ask. To Stallman, it has one purpose, to me another, and to IBM yet another.
Yes, that's probably why it has succeeded in spreading copyleft software to millions across the globe. Its real success, however, is that it makes traditional copyright seem less and less justified each and every day.
The fact that there is a copylefted Linux kernel tells you nothing about whether copyrights on books or Disney movies are still needed. Furthermore, you can't attack copyright based on its success or the success of copyleft. Drugs are enormously successful in the market, but that doesn't make them good.
What I'm saying is that the creators of copyleft sat down one day and said: We'd like to create a copyright license that will thwart to as great a degree as possible proprietary copyrights. We want millions of people to use software so licensed, each day, and not notice the difference.
You completely fail to understand the argument that Stallman was making. Stallman's creation of copyleft wasn't about the abolition of copyright, it was about making source code (yes, specifically, source code--not movies, or books, or anything else) available, modifiable, and redistributable.
If you just abolished copyright tomorrow, you'd be further away from Stallman's original vision than we are now--all the GPL'ed software would fall into the public domain, and companies would start relying more on trusted hardware, dongles, and obfuscation, and they would include any free software they like. That would be far worse than today's situation.
But completely separately from copyleft, Stallman (and others, including myself) worry about the social effects of copyrights in other areas. But those concerns were not the original driving force behind copyleft, and the success or failure of copyleft doesn't affect those concerns. The Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Law and the DMCA would be bad ideas in my (and I guess Stallman's) opinion even if there were no copylefted software anywhere.
PalmOS 6 is the answer, at least, the answer most PalmOS users and licensees are looking at. Hopefully it'll be a good answer, but I have some reservations.
I agree with those technical issues. But I see a more fundamental problem: Palm's history and attitude. They started off as ex-Macintosh hackers and basically just repeated technically what they did before: lots of low-level hacking, nice apps, and no understanding of the longer-range issues. In fact, arguably, they repeated what they did with Macintosh: they got the basic ideas from Xerox (the PARCTab).
Worse, Palm views their fortune in "owning the platform", which means they will do anything they can do in order to make the platform as incompatible with the rest of the world as they can get away with. That's why Palm still doesn't have widespread Java or XML support. That's also why it doesn't run in protected mode, have a modern window system, or have a usable file system (if it did, you could port other software to it too easily). I think POS6 (what an ironic acronym) won't solve the problems POS4 and POS5 have because it is not in Palm's financial interest to make POS6 a modern operating system. The more baroque POS remains, the more of a lock they have on the market. Sound familiar?
With Linux, there is too much of a temptation for the company using it to just approach it like they're getting a deal, saving $15 per unit for the WinCE.NET 4.2 licensing fee. Linux could be very worthwhile if some company(ies) was willing to put a lot of time and money into Linux on the PDA, advancing the state of the art in a lot of areas. Sharp sure as hell isn't doing it.
I fully agree with that. Linux is a great kernel, even for PDAs, but it is far from enough. What people need to worry about with Linux-on-PDAs is the applications. Qtopia has wasted years rewriting the low-level graphics stuff but doing no better than Palm or PPC on apps.
The right thing to do would be to develop an updated Newton-like environment (dynamic language, persistent database, XML data interchange, etc.) and not waste time with reinventing the low-level infrastructure--Linux and X11 are fine for modern handhelds--they need decent, modern apps. And that's a real opportunity, because both Microsoft and Palm are sitting on their hands.
I don't know for you, but my IM client on my Tungsten T2 stays online when I go in the address book.
PalmOS 5 is not a multi-tasking, protected mode operating system, and it shows. It causes problems for the UI (e.g., when you switch between applications, views change capriciously) and for robustness (applications that crash often take down the whole handheld).
The fact that a few applications manage to "stay online" doesn't make the OS multitasking. DOS had TSR programs and various other hacks, and that didn't make it multitasking either. Sorry, but it's you who doesn't know what you are talking about.
It's a PDA, a REAL pda! Not a PDA-like OS
Newton had something that might be called a "real PDA OS". The Sharp Zaurus has a "real OS that works well for a PDA". But Zodiac and Palm have neither. The reason that they work so well is simply the enormous efforts that application writers put into the platform. Zodiac's OS is a Frankenstein monster, a combination of the outdated PalmOS 5 platform with some gaming features thrown in.
and that's why Zodiac will live: If it will suck as a gaming machine it will still be a quite powerfull PDA.
Zodiac's business plan is probably that they get acquired by Palm or someone else. Given their dependency on PalmOS licenses, they are at Palm's mercy anyway.
What Zodiac should have done is put a real kernel and OS on the Zodiac and run PalmOS as a guest operating system under that.
No, no, no. You're missing the point entirely: copyleft was designed to thwart traditional copyrights. The fact that it is enforced using copyright law is called poetic justice. It certainly doesn't validate copyright nor nullify the political point behind creating "copyleft" in the first place.
No, YOU are missing the point. No matter what its creators intended, copyleft is something that has taken on a life of its own. Copyleft is a valid, useful license that many people rely on.
That you fail to make the distinction for whatever reason
doesn't mean that the distinction is nonexistant or unimportant.
I do make the distinction: copyleft is a particular license, copyright is a legal right. That's the only distinction there is.
That copyleft exists to thwart the perpetuation of copyright is a fundamental and inseperable quality of it,
The reasons out of which copyleft was created are very much separable from its actual significance today: millions of people use copylefted software who don't care about any abolition of copyright or other changes to intellectual property law.
Institutions and laws take on different meanings and purposes over time: the US was founded as a nation where women couldn't vote, where discrimination and corruption were rampant, and where slavery was practiced. Yet, many of its laws and institutions are still in use today--we didn't throw them out just because they were tainted by a century of government that today we would find absolutely intolerable. Those institutions and laws have taken on a new meaning in a new context, even though they are still the same institutions and laws that existed two centuries ago.
your flawed views on the matter notwithstanding.
Actually, people like you try to put copyleft in a bad light because you see what a threat it is to your business. You keep screaming at the top of your lungs that copyleft is some communist lunacy because you already know that copyleft is wildly successful and competitive in the market with your flawed and inefficient business models.
Copyleft has succeeded because it is a useful business tool and part of an efficient market. The motivation for its creation is irrelevant.