CmdrTaco has a half-dozen replicants locked up in a basement in front of monitors doing meta-meta-moderation, 24-7. They don't eat or sleep, helluva investment.
Now if he could just teach those guys how to program, and then cut them loose on slashcode...
a kind of licence for QT that contains something dramatically labelled a "poison clause",
Its not a clause of the software license's legalese, they just made the 'KDE Free Qt Foundation' a co-author, in effect, giving that organization the right to relicense Qt if TT ever disappeared, or got taken over by someone hostile to FOSS.
There was, I believe, a separate document, a kind of legal 'memorandum of understanding' or whatever the lawyers call them, separately between those 2 entities that spelled out under what conditions the later could do the relicensing, but it was separate from Qt's software licenses.
And this entire, long story is really moot now, since Nokia has subsequently dual-licensed Qt under the LGPL as well.
This made embracing the advantages of open source the only viable business decision
You make it sound as if they were forced into something, but they would have not bought Trolltech if they didn't like the Qt license arrangement. This wasn't a shotgun marriage, neither one was brought kicking and screaming to the altar.:)
They did not have to invest all their own time and money that they are doing in leading the now more open & collaborative development of Qt. I'm not an insider, but they seem to be putting *more* resources into its development than TT could have.
A very open & Free Qt is part of their *plan* for their future smartphones, a foundation stone of their (also very open) Maemo OS. Being open & collaborative with Qt will (they hope) help convince devs to support their platform. They're thinking more 'open' right now than Google is with Android, never mind Apple.
The question is, where is all this hypothetical value? If so, why is Sun struggling bad enough to be bought out by Oracle?
Sun's problems had nothing to do with the FOSS that they supported. This is the other big problem with TFA summary: Sun was never 'focused almost entirely on open source'. They were a hardware company.
They should have left Sun/MySQL out of the summary. Invalid examples.
It doesn't matter whether something emits radioactive elements but rather how much is emitted.
Understood, the only reason this gets brought up all the time is because that many of the anti-nuclear folks who get obsessed about a nuclear plant's emissions don't fully realize what their current non-nuclear power plants are emitting.
A quick google finds a study indicating that each year 100,000 times more radon is emitted directly by the soil than from coal
Which ought to tell us that most nuclear radiation fears are vastly overrated, if not irrational (its a common natural phenomena), but hey, its got that word 'nuclear' in it, so most rationality usually gets tossed within the first 5 minutes of a discussion.
but until then the radiation argument against coal is bunk
Not exactly. Its only part of the argument against coal. The CO2 and CH4 parts constitute the main part of the anti-coal argument. When you add them all up...
Of course, nuclear has its own issues too. There are no silver bullets for this problem.
In various forms, it is currently under development by MIT, the South African company PBMR, General Atomics (U.S.), the Dutch company Romawa B.V., Adams Atomic Engines [1], Idaho National Laboratory, and the Chinese company Huaneng
I count 5 references there to US companies and universities involved Pebble Bed reactor design.
Not sure what you mean by 'accelerated' thorium but on the list of thorium reactors from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle, the US has been involved in that as well. The only country still actively running thorium reactors is India, and thats because, understandably, they have a *lot* of thorium and very little uranium available in their own country.
I use Westinghouse as an example becuase they will happily sell you a Chenobyl era reactor painted green and pretend it's new.
Name one commercial Westinghouse nuclear reactor that was built without a containment building. Just one.
Please, comparing any commercial nuclear reactor built in the West to the Soviet RBMK-1000 is a crime against logic.
Their current design, AP1000, is Gen3+, Chernobyl is considered 'early' Gen2, and that is probably an insult to all the other reactor types that fall under the Gen2 classification - its design was that bad and its implementation was, unbelievably, even worse. Hell, it was nothing more than a spiffed-up copy of an older Soviet military reactor that was designed solely for plutonium production.
even if that means buying something from outside the USA.
Ahh, so this is an anti-US rant? Well, you're in luck, Westinghouse is A-OK-Joe, since they're now owned by Toshiba, as well as having several (separate, originally independent) European subsidiaries involved in nuclear power. Nuclear power is big, but also expensive, business, thus the players went international a long time ago.
Oh wait, do you have something against the Japanese and Europeans too?
only because it has the most headroom to grow into, considering that its *still* dead-last behind everyone else.
That later part (still dead-last) is the interesting thing, given that Silverlight's master is also the master of Windows: why hasn't Silverlight jumped to a usage percentage similar to Window's own market share?
Given the Windows monopoly, I'm astonished that Silverlight hasn't even reached 50% penetration yet. Heck, until I saw your link, I thought it *was* more wide-spread.
Wow, MS caves on SVG, and now I discover Silverlight isn't even over 50% of the market after 3 years of being pimped hard by MS. Dunno if I can handle this much good news from a Microsoft-related thread simultaneously, its certainly not what I'm used too...
silverlight runs on mac, windows (also on firefox), and linux (via moonlight).
[cut-n-paste of a response I made above here]
Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.
Both Adobe and Microsoft have made great leaps in the recent years to make these extension models (which is really what they are) of the browsers more powerful.
There is one crucial difference though: DRMed Flash works on my OS, Silverlight does not. All other technical details are irrelevant.
It also works on Mac and Linux (through Moonlight).
Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.
if boycotts by the technologically conscious were by any means effective, Internet Explorer would...
Boycotts against monopolies almost never work by definition (IE), but for your response to the GP to be relevant we would have to consider Netflix as a monopoly... I don't think so.
Until now, I didn't even know how Netflix delivered its movies, and now that I do know, I'll not ever waste my time going there.
I do think there is enough evidence out there that a longer term view eventually yeilds better returns.
With a publicly traded company, the only thing that matters is what the stockholders think.
We should try and break the 18mo CEO cycle.
If its the shareholders demanding 'progress' on an annual, or even quarterly, basis, then who the CEO happens to be, won't make a damn bit of difference. A company's officers answer to the stockholders, and *only* the stockholders. This is the root problem: shareholders only interested in the short-term.
P&G is merely an exception to the rule; they aren't the only one, but its difficult to buck the normal stockholder's expectation of regular, near-term profits.
Insightful? I know there isn't a sarcasm mod, but wouldn't funny do?
Ah, but what do you do when the sarcasm is *both* funny and insightful? Such a dilemma!:)
Well, since funny doesn't add to your karma, but insightful does, when I'm faced with this kind of dilemma, I go with insightful too, as the mods did in your case.
I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.
At some point Firefox was in the exact same position, yet it eventually managed to take marketshare away from IE, and without the advantage of Google's ad budget.
I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users
At this point it probably doesn't even matter. We don't even know yet how much of this rapid adoption is permanent or not. Its a lot harder to guess who are the 'winners' and 'losers', especially long-term, with so many players now in the game.
Choice is good, and nothing beats a little friendly competition at getting a complacent player off their duff and back in the game (yes, I'm looking at you Firefox: at some point you lost your 'lean-n-mean' under an avalanche of XUL chrome and plugin hell - you need to work on getting that back).
This would be more believable if it wasn't a totally new UID.
And your comment would be even more believable if you had any UID at all. At least the GP has one.
you gotta have heard about/. before.
'hearing about' != 'registering as a user'
I lurked here (read-only) for at least a year or so before bothering to sign up. Maybe the GP, when he was at Google, was just too busy doing Real Work(TM) to bother?
Besides, its not like Slashdot is the center of the IT universe. What reason would anyone have to expect that every current and former Google employee is a/. member?
/. may be the center of *our* universe, but its not everyone else's Prime Attractor.:)
For instance, Linux was used in a Linksys router, which forced them to release some code (though mostly blobs) related to the Broadcom drivers.
It was a binary driver, they were not forced to release the source code to it, only the source to the rest of the FOSS software they were using.
The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret
Which you can do with Linux.
private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
They are very relevant, because they are a "loophole" in the GPL
Not being applicable to internal usage was a deliberate intent of the GPL, it is only concerned with distribution to the larger public.
But if you insist, consider nVidia. They seem to have found a loophole which lets them insert their own code into the kernel.
??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...
The only difference here is that they are given a choice between the risks (and rewards) of contributing, and the risks (and rewards) of maintaining a separate branch.
Thats obvious. My only point is that for some companies the risk/reward of a GPLed OS makes better sense for them.
Basically, what you're claiming, hypothetically, is that something completely different -- not Linux, not HURD, and not BSD -- would've been invented,
Not completely different in the technical sense, only in its licensing.
and would've surpassed BSD, which would clearly dominate, at least for a short time.
Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually. Just as those for whom the BSD works better already have been, or will be in the future, switching to the BSD over time.
And that is where we differ, because I really don't see that happening.
Fair enough. That part of my post was a 'hypothetical of a hypothetical' for which I have no evidence.
for example, the reason projects like Postfix are successful is because
You keep going back to non-OS examples, when my point was all about licensing issues related to operating systems...
And you keep ignoring my point that neither the GPL nor the BSD work for everyone, so obviously there will be plenty of examples for each side...
KHTML probably never would've made it anywhere close to Gecko
Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.
So you're right, this is where we do differ -- because BSD does work better for other companies,
Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone? All I said was the corollary of your above point is also true. Thats why the GPL and BSD will always both be around.. because neither one works best for everyone.
What I'm arguing is that there are plenty of people who choose Linux today, even though it's not the license they'd prefer,
If there are enough of those people to form a large enough dev community for the BSDed OSes, then the BSDs will eventually catch up to Linux, and those people will switch.
My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...
I realize you're claiming it wouldn't get that far.
Not at all, you keep making the mistake of assuming I'm one of those 'GNU zealots' who hates the BSD and wants to see it die.
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
Is your point, then, that the GPL is crucial to the success of an operating system?
Only that an OS and an app have different characteristics when it comes to the license issue. First, OSes are far more complex. Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see). For those 2 reasons the enforced collaboration/sharing that the GPL requires makes more sense for some companies/people.
Of course they can. Google maintains a proprietary fork of Linux
My previous/current comments were/are referring to code that is distributed, thus my examples involving companies using an embedded OS on consumer products.
Besides, private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
The nature of the open source development model is what encourages companies to contribute back,
Encourages, but doesn't require, unless the GPL is used. Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards). Thus a level playing field.
as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
Right -- agnostic, practical -- if you mean what I think you mean, they aren't choosing it for the license, they're choosing it because it's stable, mature, and does what they want.
No, they're choosing a GPLed OS rather then a BSDed OS precisely because of the license, but not for the usual 'religious' reasons. Again, as above, its a level playing field.
I don't see how you can look at the history and conclude that.
We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.
And for other people, and other markets, the GPL makes less sense,
I never claimed the GPL works for everyone, only that it works better for some.
Then let me clarify: The reason Linux is so widespread is not because of zealotry.
Thank you. The whole 'GNU zealots' thing is getting real old, especially since real 'GNU zealots' are as rare as hen's teeth around here.
It's because by the time anyone else (who wasn't BSD) had figured out that this might be a good idea, Linux had already snowballed into the default choice.
This is where we (still) disagree. I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.
So as soon as our hypothetical GPLed OS did become available, those companies/people for whom the GPL works better would migrate to it because it *does* work better for them, no matter how long the prior BSDed OSes had been around.
If one license is universally better than the other one, in all circumstances, then we'll inevitably see a movement to that one 'superior' license. The fact that that doesn't appear to be happening tells me that the licensing does matter, and that the different licenses are useful to different people (or the same folks but in different circumstances).
While I can see the attractiveness of the GPL for a (very) young project, it seems like it's more about wanting to put _some_ license on it so you can get back to the part that counts -- actual code.
One point I've made, though, is that we have this idea of "taken"... on the other hand, we see people who dislike copyright, who pirate and feel it should be legal
Thing is, you're the only one who keeps bringing this point up, it was never part of the original issue, and the post you initially responded to said nothing about this.
Now here's the problem you have: there are plenty of people who agree with your point above... but also use the GPL. To them, you're starting off on a GPL rant, and ending up on piracy/MPAA/whatever, is merely going off-topic, not making a point.
I'd suggest that you actually verify your implicit assumption that everyone who advocates the use of the GPL also advocates piracy, and once you discover this assumption is false, save the second half of your rant just for those to whom it actually applies.
there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots
You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them. Meanwhile, they all get the advantage from the code contributions of others. Its a more level playing field for many commercial entities, and they don't have the hassle of maintaining their own private fork.
It all depends on the nature of the market. For normal apps, the license issue is not that significant (except to the zealots - on whichever side), but, as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
The point I'm trying to make here is that the license issue is actually important (in both directions) to a *lot* of people/companies, not just the 'zealots' (of either side).
But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
No, but then again, if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well: it would have become popular despite the pre-existence of the BSDs, because for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.
You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry, but I don't see that, there just aren't that many GPL zealots out there (they're obviously badly outnumbered here on/.). RMS's army of smelly, bearded holy warriors isn't *that* big.:)
There really is more going on here than just zealotry...
But OpenOffice still would take at least 6 hours to compile.
Ok, I'll admit that I've never tried to compile OO.o (when I did try it I just used the prebuilt *-bin version, but ended up just using KOffice since my needs in that area are really minimal), so its still probably the best example of an extremely long compile time for a single package/app. However, its now on a very short list.
A big +Funny repeat joke is "Ubuntu: An African word meaning 'Can't configure Debian'."
Except Debian, and especially Ubuntu, have enough fans around here to usually mod those jokes below my threshold.
Jokes about the Debian OpenSSL cockup are rampant
Jokes about specific problems are routine, but tend to fade eventually, once the original problem has long gone away. The Gentoo jokes have been around since the beginning though, and are still with us, even though some of them are no longer applicable.
So grow some thicker skin for when people make a prod at your favorite OS or distro, it isn't the end of the world.
Oh I know, the Gentoo jokes meme is the longest running one here, so I'm used to it.
I think it was mainly your comment tacked on at the end that got me to respond in the first place. After all, you were, in effect, demanding that I ignore a 'joke' that simply no longer matches the reality that a typical Gentoo user sees now.
Sure, we still have long compiles for some things, or when upgrading a lot at the same time, but the computer-is-useless-while-updating part of the meme *really* doesn't make any sense anymore, at least not on modern hardware.
But I'll try to thicken my skin some more anyway, as it looks like this meme is just too popular for it to go away anytime soon...:)
Europa quite possibly has the best odds of actually having something worth the funding of mission
A mission to Europa is being planned too (see the post upstream of us about how they plan to test the Europa probe here on Earth by using an Antarctic under-the-ice lake).
The only difference is that this one to Titan is actually easier/cheaper to do, which is why it may happen first, but eventually Europa will be seeing a probe from us as well (pending approval from 'Dave', of course).
I pointed out that this would be inconsistent with the definition of "derived work" as argued for and promoted by FSF
But since the LGPL explicitly allows dynamic linking, and ffmpeg is LGPLed, the FSF's definition of a "derived work" is *still* irrelevant to the current subject.
either dynamically linking to ffmpeg is good enough to work around patent issues, but then GPL is not any more restrictive than LGPL
Logical fallacy. The part of this sentence before the comma has no connection *whatsoever* with the rest.
Using dynamic linking to avoid patent issues is possible simply because it means you don't have to *distribute* the patent-encumbered code *yourself*. At no time does the "derived work" issue come into play, because thats not what any party here is either claiming or worrying about.
To show you where you've gone wrong here, please note that the FSF's interpretation of "derived work" has nothing to do with distribution! (Which is ironic, given that the language of the GPL itself is mostly focused on distribution.) Anyway, according to them you are violating the GPL whether *you* distribute that GPLed library or not, because in their view its merely the act of *linking* that causes this particular violation of the GPL, distribution has nothing to do with it. Whereas with the patent problem, avoiding the distribution of the patent-encumbered code entirely solves the problem... and it just so happens that dynamic linking allows you to do exactly that.
So, in a hypothetical situation where you used a GPLed library with patent-encumbered code, by distributing only your app and not the library (requiring your users to get the lib themselves), you'd avoid the patent issue entirely, but *still* be violating the GPL according to the FSF. Note that this asymmetry also applies if the situation were reversed: if you complied with the GPL by GPLing your app, and then distributed the lib with your app, you'd be fine as far as the GPL was concerned but *still* be violating someone's patent. Thus these 2 issues are not connected in the way you think.
Now again, since the ffmpeg is not GPLed, none of this is relevant to the current subject, my point here is that you're mixing up 2 completely unrelated issues: distribution versus linking.
Note that I'm also *not* interested in defending or arguing about the FSF's interpretation of "derived work", partly because I'm not sure I entirely agree with it myself, but mainly because only the SCOTUS can decide whether they are right or wrong, everyone else is just pontificating pointlessly. In any case, it has no relevance here.
However, the framework is good for much more than watching videos online.
So? MS's goal for Silverlight is to kill Flash, so 'watching video online' is the only thing that matters as far as Silverlight adoption goes, and if Moonlight will never have the DRM and all the proprietary codecs that Silverlight has, it means Moonlight is utterly worthless, which was what the GP was alluding to.
It will likely be the best solution for bringing native-application-like functionality to web browsers in the next year or two.
Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.
At the very least, one could hope that it will displace Flash.
Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.
Well, GPL says (or at least Stallman says that it says) that dynamic linking...
Boy, you just couldn't resist the chance to do a little GPL/RMS bashing could you?
FYI: ffmpeg is mostly under the LGPL (and its optional GPLed parts can be left out using a compile option resulting in a binary thats only covered by the LGPL), thus dynamic linking is explicitly supported/allowed. Your rant is thus irrelevant here.
For the commercial distros, as the posters above us allude to, the issue with ffmpeg is the patent-encumbered codecs that it implements, not its software license. If they included it, they'd soon have, at the very least, MPEG-LA's lawyers knocking on their door...
Slashdot Mirror
But who watches the meta mods?
CmdrTaco has a half-dozen replicants locked up in a basement in front of monitors doing meta-meta-moderation, 24-7. They don't eat or sleep, helluva investment.
Now if he could just teach those guys how to program, and then cut them loose on slashcode...
a kind of licence for QT that contains something dramatically labelled a "poison clause",
Its not a clause of the software license's legalese, they just made the 'KDE Free Qt Foundation' a co-author, in effect, giving that organization the right to relicense Qt if TT ever disappeared, or got taken over by someone hostile to FOSS.
There was, I believe, a separate document, a kind of legal 'memorandum of understanding' or whatever the lawyers call them, separately between those 2 entities that spelled out under what conditions the later could do the relicensing, but it was separate from Qt's software licenses.
And this entire, long story is really moot now, since Nokia has subsequently dual-licensed Qt under the LGPL as well.
This made embracing the advantages of open source the only viable business decision
You make it sound as if they were forced into something, but they would have not bought Trolltech if they didn't like the Qt license arrangement. This wasn't a shotgun marriage, neither one was brought kicking and screaming to the altar. :)
They did not have to invest all their own time and money that they are doing in leading the now more open & collaborative development of Qt. I'm not an insider, but they seem to be putting *more* resources into its development than TT could have.
A very open & Free Qt is part of their *plan* for their future smartphones, a foundation stone of their (also very open) Maemo OS. Being open & collaborative with Qt will (they hope) help convince devs to support their platform. They're thinking more 'open' right now than Google is with Android, never mind Apple.
They *wanted* to do this.
The question is, where is all this hypothetical value? If so, why is Sun struggling bad enough to be bought out by Oracle?
Sun's problems had nothing to do with the FOSS that they supported. This is the other big problem with TFA summary: Sun was never 'focused almost entirely on open source'. They were a hardware company.
They should have left Sun/MySQL out of the summary. Invalid examples.
It doesn't matter whether something emits radioactive elements but rather how much is emitted.
Understood, the only reason this gets brought up all the time is because that many of the anti-nuclear folks who get obsessed about a nuclear plant's emissions don't fully realize what their current non-nuclear power plants are emitting.
A quick google finds a study indicating that each year 100,000 times more radon is emitted directly by the soil than from coal
Which ought to tell us that most nuclear radiation fears are vastly overrated, if not irrational (its a common natural phenomena), but hey, its got that word 'nuclear' in it, so most rationality usually gets tossed within the first 5 minutes of a discussion.
but until then the radiation argument against coal is bunk
Not exactly. Its only part of the argument against coal. The CO2 and CH4 parts constitute the main part of the anti-coal argument. When you add them all up...
Of course, nuclear has its own issues too. There are no silver bullets for this problem.
Examples are non US solutions like pebble bed, accelerated thorium and startups like Hyperion
That is just bizarre.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
In various forms, it is currently under development by MIT, the South African company PBMR, General Atomics (U.S.), the Dutch company Romawa B.V., Adams Atomic Engines [1], Idaho National Laboratory, and the Chinese company Huaneng
I count 5 references there to US companies and universities involved Pebble Bed reactor design.
Not sure what you mean by 'accelerated' thorium but on the list of thorium reactors from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle, the US has been involved in that as well. The only country still actively running thorium reactors is India, and thats because, understandably, they have a *lot* of thorium and very little uranium available in their own country.
As for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation
You do realize that Hyperion is a US-based company don't you?
I use Westinghouse as an example becuase they will happily sell you a Chenobyl era reactor painted green and pretend it's new.
Name one commercial Westinghouse nuclear reactor that was built without a containment building. Just one.
Please, comparing any commercial nuclear reactor built in the West to the Soviet RBMK-1000 is a crime against logic.
Their current design, AP1000, is Gen3+, Chernobyl is considered 'early' Gen2, and that is probably an insult to all the other reactor types that fall under the Gen2 classification - its design was that bad and its implementation was, unbelievably, even worse. Hell, it was nothing more than a spiffed-up copy of an older Soviet military reactor that was designed solely for plutonium production.
even if that means buying something from outside the USA.
Ahh, so this is an anti-US rant? Well, you're in luck, Westinghouse is A-OK-Joe, since they're now owned by Toshiba, as well as having several (separate, originally independent) European subsidiaries involved in nuclear power. Nuclear power is big, but also expensive, business, thus the players went international a long time ago.
Oh wait, do you have something against the Japanese and Europeans too?
Silverlight is the fastest growing plugin...
only because it has the most headroom to grow into, considering that its *still* dead-last behind everyone else.
That later part (still dead-last) is the interesting thing, given that Silverlight's master is also the master of Windows: why hasn't Silverlight jumped to a usage percentage similar to Window's own market share?
Given the Windows monopoly, I'm astonished that Silverlight hasn't even reached 50% penetration yet. Heck, until I saw your link, I thought it *was* more wide-spread.
Wow, MS caves on SVG, and now I discover Silverlight isn't even over 50% of the market after 3 years of being pimped hard by MS. Dunno if I can handle this much good news from a Microsoft-related thread simultaneously, its certainly not what I'm used too...
silverlight runs on mac, windows (also on firefox), and linux (via moonlight).
[cut-n-paste of a response I made above here]
Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.
Both Adobe and Microsoft have made great leaps in the recent years to make these extension models (which is really what they are) of the browsers more powerful.
There is one crucial difference though: DRMed Flash works on my OS, Silverlight does not. All other technical details are irrelevant.
It also works on Mac and Linux (through Moonlight).
Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.
if boycotts by the technologically conscious were by any means effective, Internet Explorer would...
Boycotts against monopolies almost never work by definition (IE), but for your response to the GP to be relevant we would have to consider Netflix as a monopoly... I don't think so.
Until now, I didn't even know how Netflix delivered its movies, and now that I do know, I'll not ever waste my time going there.
NetFlix.com != IE (when it was a monopoly)
I do think there is enough evidence out there that a longer term view eventually yeilds better returns.
With a publicly traded company, the only thing that matters is what the stockholders think.
We should try and break the 18mo CEO cycle.
If its the shareholders demanding 'progress' on an annual, or even quarterly, basis, then who the CEO happens to be, won't make a damn bit of difference. A company's officers answer to the stockholders, and *only* the stockholders. This is the root problem: shareholders only interested in the short-term.
P&G is merely an exception to the rule; they aren't the only one, but its difficult to buck the normal stockholder's expectation of regular, near-term profits.
Insightful? I know there isn't a sarcasm mod, but wouldn't funny do?
Ah, but what do you do when the sarcasm is *both* funny and insightful? Such a dilemma! :)
Well, since funny doesn't add to your karma, but insightful does, when I'm faced with this kind of dilemma, I go with insightful too, as the mods did in your case.
I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.
At some point Firefox was in the exact same position, yet it eventually managed to take marketshare away from IE, and without the advantage of Google's ad budget.
I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users
At this point it probably doesn't even matter. We don't even know yet how much of this rapid adoption is permanent or not. Its a lot harder to guess who are the 'winners' and 'losers', especially long-term, with so many players now in the game.
Choice is good, and nothing beats a little friendly competition at getting a complacent player off their duff and back in the game (yes, I'm looking at you Firefox: at some point you lost your 'lean-n-mean' under an avalanche of XUL chrome and plugin hell - you need to work on getting that back).
This would be more believable if it wasn't a totally new UID.
And your comment would be even more believable if you had any UID at all. At least the GP has one.
you gotta have heard about /. before.
'hearing about' != 'registering as a user'
I lurked here (read-only) for at least a year or so before bothering to sign up. Maybe the GP, when he was at Google, was just too busy doing Real Work(TM) to bother?
Besides, its not like Slashdot is the center of the IT universe. What reason would anyone have to expect that every current and former Google employee is a /. member?
For instance, Linux was used in a Linksys router, which forced them to release some code (though mostly blobs) related to the Broadcom drivers.
It was a binary driver, they were not forced to release the source code to it, only the source to the rest of the FOSS software they were using.
The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret
Which you can do with Linux.
private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
They are very relevant, because they are a "loophole" in the GPL
Not being applicable to internal usage was a deliberate intent of the GPL, it is only concerned with distribution to the larger public.
But if you insist, consider nVidia. They seem to have found a loophole which lets them insert their own code into the kernel.
??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...
The only difference here is that they are given a choice between the risks (and rewards) of contributing, and the risks (and rewards) of maintaining a separate branch.
Thats obvious. My only point is that for some companies the risk/reward of a GPLed OS makes better sense for them.
Basically, what you're claiming, hypothetically, is that something completely different -- not Linux, not HURD, and not BSD -- would've been invented,
Not completely different in the technical sense, only in its licensing.
and would've surpassed BSD, which would clearly dominate, at least for a short time.
Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually. Just as those for whom the BSD works better already have been, or will be in the future, switching to the BSD over time.
And that is where we differ, because I really don't see that happening.
Fair enough. That part of my post was a 'hypothetical of a hypothetical' for which I have no evidence.
for example, the reason projects like Postfix are successful is because
You keep going back to non-OS examples, when my point was all about licensing issues related to operating systems...
And you keep ignoring my point that neither the GPL nor the BSD work for everyone, so obviously there will be plenty of examples for each side...
KHTML probably never would've made it anywhere close to Gecko
Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.
So you're right, this is where we do differ -- because BSD does work better for other companies,
Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone? All I said was the corollary of your above point is also true. Thats why the GPL and BSD will always both be around.. because neither one works best for everyone.
What I'm arguing is that there are plenty of people who choose Linux today, even though it's not the license they'd prefer,
If there are enough of those people to form a large enough dev community for the BSDed OSes, then the BSDs will eventually catch up to Linux, and those people will switch.
My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...
I realize you're claiming it wouldn't get that far.
Not at all, you keep making the mistake of assuming I'm one of those 'GNU zealots' who hates the BSD and wants to see it die.
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
Is your point, then, that the GPL is crucial to the success of an operating system?
Only that an OS and an app have different characteristics when it comes to the license issue. First, OSes are far more complex. Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see). For those 2 reasons the enforced collaboration/sharing that the GPL requires makes more sense for some companies/people.
Of course they can. Google maintains a proprietary fork of Linux
My previous/current comments were/are referring to code that is distributed, thus my examples involving companies using an embedded OS on consumer products.
Besides, private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
The nature of the open source development model is what encourages companies to contribute back,
Encourages, but doesn't require, unless the GPL is used. Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards). Thus a level playing field.
as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
Right -- agnostic, practical -- if you mean what I think you mean, they aren't choosing it for the license, they're choosing it because it's stable, mature, and does what they want.
No, they're choosing a GPLed OS rather then a BSDed OS precisely because of the license, but not for the usual 'religious' reasons. Again, as above, its a level playing field.
I don't see how you can look at the history and conclude that.
We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.
And for other people, and other markets, the GPL makes less sense,
I never claimed the GPL works for everyone, only that it works better for some.
Then let me clarify:
The reason Linux is so widespread is not because of zealotry.
Thank you. The whole 'GNU zealots' thing is getting real old, especially since real 'GNU zealots' are as rare as hen's teeth around here.
It's because by the time anyone else (who wasn't BSD) had figured out that this might be a good idea, Linux had already snowballed into the default choice.
This is where we (still) disagree. I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.
So as soon as our hypothetical GPLed OS did become available, those companies/people for whom the GPL works better would migrate to it because it *does* work better for them, no matter how long the prior BSDed OSes had been around.
If one license is universally better than the other one, in all circumstances, then we'll inevitably see a movement to that one 'superior' license. The fact that that doesn't appear to be happening tells me that the licensing does matter, and that the different licenses are useful to different people (or the same folks but in different circumstances).
While I can see the attractiveness of the GPL for a (very) young project, it seems like it's more about wanting to put _some_ license on it so you can get back to the part that counts -- actual code.
One point I've made, though, is that we have this idea of "taken" ... on the other hand, we see people who dislike copyright, who pirate and feel it should be legal
Thing is, you're the only one who keeps bringing this point up, it was never part of the original issue, and the post you initially responded to said nothing about this.
Now here's the problem you have: there are plenty of people who agree with your point above... but also use the GPL. To them, you're starting off on a GPL rant, and ending up on piracy/MPAA/whatever, is merely going off-topic, not making a point.
I'd suggest that you actually verify your implicit assumption that everyone who advocates the use of the GPL also advocates piracy, and once you discover this assumption is false, save the second half of your rant just for those to whom it actually applies.
there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots
You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them. Meanwhile, they all get the advantage from the code contributions of others. Its a more level playing field for many commercial entities, and they don't have the hassle of maintaining their own private fork.
It all depends on the nature of the market. For normal apps, the license issue is not that significant (except to the zealots - on whichever side), but, as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
The point I'm trying to make here is that the license issue is actually important (in both directions) to a *lot* of people/companies, not just the 'zealots' (of either side).
But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
No, but then again, if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well: it would have become popular despite the pre-existence of the BSDs, because for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.
You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry, but I don't see that, there just aren't that many GPL zealots out there (they're obviously badly outnumbered here on /.). RMS's army of smelly, bearded holy warriors isn't *that* big. :)
There really is more going on here than just zealotry...
But OpenOffice still would take at least 6 hours to compile.
Ok, I'll admit that I've never tried to compile OO.o (when I did try it I just used the prebuilt *-bin version, but ended up just using KOffice since my needs in that area are really minimal), so its still probably the best example of an extremely long compile time for a single package/app. However, its now on a very short list.
A big +Funny repeat joke is "Ubuntu: An African word meaning 'Can't configure Debian'."
Except Debian, and especially Ubuntu, have enough fans around here to usually mod those jokes below my threshold.
Jokes about the Debian OpenSSL cockup are rampant
Jokes about specific problems are routine, but tend to fade eventually, once the original problem has long gone away. The Gentoo jokes have been around since the beginning though, and are still with us, even though some of them are no longer applicable.
So grow some thicker skin for when people make a prod at your favorite OS or distro, it isn't the end of the world.
Oh I know, the Gentoo jokes meme is the longest running one here, so I'm used to it.
I think it was mainly your comment tacked on at the end that got me to respond in the first place. After all, you were, in effect, demanding that I ignore a 'joke' that simply no longer matches the reality that a typical Gentoo user sees now.
Sure, we still have long compiles for some things, or when upgrading a lot at the same time, but the computer-is-useless-while-updating part of the meme *really* doesn't make any sense anymore, at least not on modern hardware.
But I'll try to thicken my skin some more anyway, as it looks like this meme is just too popular for it to go away anytime soon... :)
My hope was that Obama would recognize this, but so far he doesn't seem to be able to see much beyond science as some kind of economic stimulus.
To be fair, Obama did have big, ambitious plans for NASA, but that was before the economy tanked...
Europa quite possibly has the best odds of actually having something worth the funding of mission
A mission to Europa is being planned too (see the post upstream of us about how they plan to test the Europa probe here on Earth by using an Antarctic under-the-ice lake).
The only difference is that this one to Titan is actually easier/cheaper to do, which is why it may happen first, but eventually Europa will be seeing a probe from us as well (pending approval from 'Dave', of course).
I pointed out that this would be inconsistent with the definition of "derived work" as argued for and promoted by FSF
But since the LGPL explicitly allows dynamic linking, and ffmpeg is LGPLed, the FSF's definition of a "derived work" is *still* irrelevant to the current subject.
either dynamically linking to ffmpeg is good enough to work around patent issues, but then GPL is not any more restrictive than LGPL
Logical fallacy. The part of this sentence before the comma has no connection *whatsoever* with the rest.
Using dynamic linking to avoid patent issues is possible simply because it means you don't have to *distribute* the patent-encumbered code *yourself*. At no time does the "derived work" issue come into play, because thats not what any party here is either claiming or worrying about.
To show you where you've gone wrong here, please note that the FSF's interpretation of "derived work" has nothing to do with distribution! (Which is ironic, given that the language of the GPL itself is mostly focused on distribution.) Anyway, according to them you are violating the GPL whether *you* distribute that GPLed library or not, because in their view its merely the act of *linking* that causes this particular violation of the GPL, distribution has nothing to do with it. Whereas with the patent problem, avoiding the distribution of the patent-encumbered code entirely solves the problem... and it just so happens that dynamic linking allows you to do exactly that.
So, in a hypothetical situation where you used a GPLed library with patent-encumbered code, by distributing only your app and not the library (requiring your users to get the lib themselves), you'd avoid the patent issue entirely, but *still* be violating the GPL according to the FSF. Note that this asymmetry also applies if the situation were reversed: if you complied with the GPL by GPLing your app, and then distributed the lib with your app, you'd be fine as far as the GPL was concerned but *still* be violating someone's patent. Thus these 2 issues are not connected in the way you think.
Now again, since the ffmpeg is not GPLed, none of this is relevant to the current subject, my point here is that you're mixing up 2 completely unrelated issues: distribution versus linking.
Note that I'm also *not* interested in defending or arguing about the FSF's interpretation of "derived work", partly because I'm not sure I entirely agree with it myself, but mainly because only the SCOTUS can decide whether they are right or wrong, everyone else is just pontificating pointlessly. In any case, it has no relevance here.
However, the framework is good for much more than watching videos online.
So? MS's goal for Silverlight is to kill Flash, so 'watching video online' is the only thing that matters as far as Silverlight adoption goes, and if Moonlight will never have the DRM and all the proprietary codecs that Silverlight has, it means Moonlight is utterly worthless, which was what the GP was alluding to.
It will likely be the best solution for bringing native-application-like functionality to web browsers in the next year or two.
Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.
At the very least, one could hope that it will displace Flash.
Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.
Well, GPL says (or at least Stallman says that it says) that dynamic linking ...
Boy, you just couldn't resist the chance to do a little GPL/RMS bashing could you?
FYI: ffmpeg is mostly under the LGPL (and its optional GPLed parts can be left out using a compile option resulting in a binary thats only covered by the LGPL), thus dynamic linking is explicitly supported/allowed. Your rant is thus irrelevant here.
For the commercial distros, as the posters above us allude to, the issue with ffmpeg is the patent-encumbered codecs that it implements, not its software license. If they included it, they'd soon have, at the very least, MPEG-LA's lawyers knocking on their door...