"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement.
I used to think so, except that it goes back [wikipedia.org] to at least 1703. Additionally...
That just means it's an old, stupid term for copyright infringement. I value precision in speech and calling one crime by the name of another because the first term is harder to understand or less flashy angers me.
Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license.
It sounds like their argument is that they pay full retail price for each copy and therefore have the full right to use it. I'd be hard pressed to disagree.
The thing is the normal use for a copy they buy requires a license from the copyright holder (to make a copy on the computer). So far the courts have ruled that these licenses can contain additional clauses and limitations and violating those clauses is infringing the copyright just the same as making copies without having purchased a copy and license.
It's hard to prove damages when the defendants have the receipt showing that they paid for it.
Not really since it lessens the chance of Apple selling hardware and may damage their valuable brand by making their product perform in an inferior way. Apple has a very strong case given existing precedent.
At any rate, I was replying to the story's author who made Psystar sound like fraudsters, to the point of being "fly-by-night". That's a judgment of their relative goodness and I don't believe anyone's shown that they've acted unethically, even if they're eventually found liable.
Actually I'd say "fly-by-night" sounds like a good description. They started a business they knew was a huge potential lawsuit and apparently did not bother consulting a lawyer. They started off blatantly violating Apple's trademarks in addition to this copyright issue upon which their entire business is founded. Either they are really, really incompetent (hence fly-by-night) or there is something else going on and they were being deceptive either to try to get publicity to make sales or because they did have ulterior motives.
In fact it's not even a licensed work, just as a book is not licensed. It is simply a commodity good covered by Copyright.
The courts disagree. To use a book for it's normal use you don't have to make an additional copy. To use an OS for its normal purpose you do copy it onto some other computer media and it ships with a license that allows you to do just that. This is a significant difference the courts have so far ruled makes first sale not apply except in the case of selling the original media and license after deleting all other copies, and even there the courts rulings have been mixed.
So long as Pystar ships the PCs with legally-purchased OS X media, I fail to see Apple's complaint as anything other than frivolous.
Too bad the courts don't agree with you. Anyway, in this particular case it is pointless. All it would do is mean Apple would stop shipping retail copies of their OS, but require users to buy a license online first, or move to some other mechanism of licensing that would stop Pystar and any others. Basically, this fight is about whether Apple has to inconvenience their users more, although the precedent being set might be applied more productively in other cases.
The biggest allegation I've heard on Slashdot is of them pirating OS X, but I've seen no proof that they've sold more copies than they've bought.
"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license. In order to copy Apple's copyrighted OS onto the computers they are going to sell, Pystar needs a license. The license that came with the copies they purchased does not cover installation on non-Apple hardware so unless they can get that portion of the license declared illegal for some reason, they break the law every time they ship a machine with OS X installed. Even if they just ship the disks and a blank machine, they're encouraging others to violate Apple's copyright and profiting in the process which makes them guilty of contributory copyright infringement (what Napster was busted for).
I don't get the double standard of why Compaq's cloning of the PC was good while Psystar's cloning of the Mac is bad, other than Steve's reality distortion field.
Good and bad are relative. We're talking about legal and illegal. Compaq legally reverse engineered. Pystar illegally made copies without a license. That's it.
Say all you want, but you have not put forth any evidence for abuse by Apple.
Sigh. I don't think there is any factual evidence in question. Apple has tied the iPod to the iTunes store and software applications and no one who understands those terms questions that. The only real question is if Apple's iPod constitutes having monopoly influence in it's market as the courts define it. This hinges on their evaluation of the market, which the EU has been investigating. To continue with my analogy, no one is arguing about whether or not they pulled the trigger, since they're still doing it in plain sight. The question is if there is someone down range that Apple can see in their sights.
Apple doesn't force you in any way to use the iTMS
And Microsoft doesn't force you to use Windows Server. They just provide incentive for you to do so if you're using windows desktop, incentive they could not offer if they did not control the Windows desktop OS. MS was convicted of antitrust abuse. It isn't a matter of forcing anyone to do anything, just undermining one market using a second, monopolized market.
Apple doesn't force you to buy an iPod either.
MS doesn't force you to buy Windows desktop.
What you arer[sic] advocating is to force Apple to stop offering people what they want from them, thus punishing the customers.
Really? Where did I advocate that? I'm simply telling you what the law says and what antitrust abuse is with regard to Apple. I said nothing about how or if they should be punished, given our current, broken markets.
Nor am I arguing that Apple's effect on the market has not been positive. They entered a market already broken by two different trusts and with a pile of illegal abuse. I'd certainly prefer the laws be enforced and all the abuse was stopped or prevented. Barring that though, to punish Apple after letting both the RIAA and MS get away with it would be insufferably stupid on the part of regulators. That doesn't mean they won't do it though (though I suspect they won't). It also doesn't mean Apple isn't breaking antitrust law (although personally I don't buy that market definition).
C'mon apple, get real! Everyone needs anti-virus software these days!
So far, this just hasn't lined up with the real risks. To date, more Mac users have suffered because of malfunctioning antivirus software than because of intentional malware. I'm not opposed to antivirus and I wish Apple would take ClamAV and run with it as part of the system (as well as other anti-malware technologies) but really the malware risk has been so low they don't have a lot of incentive.
The strength of Mac against viruses lays solely in the use of very stable FOSS solutions for the basics (very close to stable Debian versions) and then building on top of that (Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage etc. don't have any links to sockets). Really, what services CAN lay bare on a Mac to the internet: SSH (OpenSSH), E-mail (Postfix), Webserver (Apache).
I'd say a lot of the strength is in not exposing those services in the default configuration so most machines are not vulnerable to attacks on unneeded services. For those services that are exposed, Apple has done a decent job of sandboxing via their ACL framework (like their zeroconf deamon).
On the program side, you have Safari (Webkit) or Mozilla with Flash (Adobe) or Java (Sun) and those don't come above user level without requiring extreme interaction from the user (passwords).
I'd say those don't really matter much since the user level access is sufficient to be useful to malware authors. There are holes in said programs, but lower market share, less familiarity by malware authors, and implementation details make it less of an issue for OS X, as well as the need to use a trojan, which slows the spread of any malware.
There is no such thing as ~/Library/StartupItems or ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and you need to become root to put stuff in/Library.
Someone else already pointed out there are places a user can put things to make them autorun. Rather, it is Apple doing an okay job with identifying applications and the first time they run that provides some, limited buffer against trojans.
But the bundling was there from the start - and it was what made the iPod successful.
So? I used an analogy in another post about antitrust abuse being like murder. Firing a gun is legal. Firing a gun while it is aimed at another person's head is illegal. If you're on a shooting range and they signal a cease fire while someone goes to change the targets and you are now aiming a gun at a person's head and you fire at it, you've performed the same act, but changed the context such that it does harm and is illegal. The same is true for bundling and monopolies. Bundling does not harm the market or break any laws until you gain monopoly influence, then it does both.
...but blaming or even punishing Apple for that? What is this, Capitalism or the very, very Special Olympics...
Antitrust abuse undermines capitalism, which is why it is illegal. Maybe you haven't studied economics enough to understand how that works or what instances prompted the laws to be written. Why not take a few hours with an economics book and read about it and then get back to me if you're still confused?
Take the so-called iTMS-iPod lock-in. It constantly gets blamed for the fact that people can't buy a non-iPod to replace the old iPod - but nobody I asked ever could name 5 persons (or even one for that matter) who didn't for just that lock-in. Instead you will find dozens of people in every discussion about Apple who will claim they would never again buy an iPod, and some will actually blame that "lock-in" for it.
You have the wrong idea entirely. Antitrust law is not there to ensure people are free to choose other players after having bought an iPod. Rather, they are to ensure that because Apple has done so well in the iPod market, they don't use that to gain in the online music download business, despite not having the best offering. It's about making sure that in order to win different markets, Apple has to have the best and most innovative offering in each market, instead of a great offering in one market and sub-par offerings in other markets that are tied to their great offering in the digital player market. These are the same laws that are supposed to ensure that even though MS has the most popular offering in the desktop OS market they also have to have the best offering in the server OS market to gain share in that market, instead of illegally tying it to their desktop OS in ways that gain them market despite their inferior server offering. Understand?
To "leverage their monopoly" wouldn't Apple have to do something else than what they did to become a monopoly?
Not necessarily. Many actions they have been taking to promote other products using the iPod and to make the "iPod experience" better become questionable. This includes things like bundling iTunes with iPods and tying iPods to both iTunes and the iTunes Store. Should Apple be ruled to have a monopoly, these actions are all potential antitrust abuses... if they have monopoly influence.
As for the DRM, Apple is trying to get rid of DRM in their music.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
Well, you can always buy your non-DRM videos from Amazon. Oh, no, wait... It's amazing how people blame Apple for not doing miracles because they have done what nobody else has managed to do before them so many times.
Apple has certainly been forced to include some DRM because of the content providers and that is simply the reality of the industry made possible by our government's failure to enforce antitrust law against those cartels in the first place. That said, Apple has taken steps as a content distributor has included DRM on their own as well, such as recent additions to Mac firmware. The point being, we need to enforce our antitrust laws against all trusts, including Apple to keep the markets healthy. Enforcing them against Apple, but not MS or the RIAA and MPAA would probably be worse than not enforcing them at all.
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
What "reasonable arguments". Common, lets see them.
"Monopoly influence" is a legal term. It is not the same thing as an absolute monopoly. Apple has 70%+ of the portable digital music player market, which is a rule of thumb for regulators looking for companies that might have undue influence on a market. Apple has been able to sway tertiary markets such as the market for headphones and jukebox software. Mostly the argument (from a legal standpoint) boils down to if cell phones are considered by the average consumer as an alternative to an iPod when making purchasing decisions. Personally, I don't think Apple's iPod business does constitute a monopoly in the legal sense and even if it does, the surrounding markets are already so broken by other monopolies and trusts that and corrections need to be much broader than addressing just Apple. Still, regulators in several countries are looking into the iPod (as they should be) and investigating the issue in more detail.
The reality is that nothing prevents you from listening to the same music on comparable devices with comparable prices to Apple's products
That's not the concern so much as what Apple can do to other markets because of their dominance in portable music players. Apple has done a good job of gaining their huge market share by making the best product and beating competitors. That's perfectly legal and not an issue. The issue is what happens to the markets for online music sales, headphones, jukebox software, etc. that Apple has tied to their iPod product. The purpose of antitrust law is to make sure Apple has to offer the best product in those markets as well, if they want to gain dominance in them. This is to prevent situations like we have now where MS has leveraged their desktop OS monopoly into the Web browser market and the majority of people end up using an inferior product and the whole market has suffered.
You're barking up the wrong tree. It's not Apple that demands DRM, it's the content industries...
Apple is a large content distributor and in that role they have implemented DRM above and beyond what has been demanded by the content providers. Certainly the content providers do drive a lot of the DRM implementations, but both Apple and MS have been complicit where it is in their best financial interests.
Nah, that would just be stuff they both inherited from their common ancestor.
That just isn't so. Next integrated parts of both FreeBSD and OpenBSD into NextStep, which in turn was pulled into OS X, but Apple also pulled in additional parts of the FreeBSD userspace in the creation of OS X. Heck, they still are doing so as the latest release version (Leopard) pulled in some of the ACL architecture from the TrustedBSD project of FreeBSD. OS X is clearly a direct descendent of FreeBSD via multiple paths.
If you mean that OSX is a descendant of FreeBSD then you are mistaken.
OS X uses a Mach Kernel, but OS X and FreeBSD OSs include more than a kernel. Much of the OS X userspace is derived from FreeBSD and as such one can claim OS X a a descendent of NextStep (Mach), FreeBSD, and the original MacOS.
Question: While they're still dominant, would the rapidly decreasing market-share mean that MS will have a better chance of avoiding any monopoly-related issues/charges (or would this only be applicable if their marketshare dropped below XX%)?
Legally speaking, no. It is their share in markets against which their desktop OS is being leveraged that count in court. For example, if they are losing market share in the server OS space, they might be able to use that to argue their tying of desktop and server OS's through secret protocols is not having an adverse effect upon competitors in the server OS space.
Monopoloy[sic] and market share are not connected.
Yes, they are. Monopolies, however, are not illegal. Antitrust abuse is illegal, you just happen to need a monopoly or cartel or other trust in order to have the power to break that law.
Now Apple isn't above this behavior (the iPhones apps show this) however so far OS X has been fairly good at playing nice with others. If Apple gains majority market share and keeps OS X playing nice then they won't be a monopoly.
Actually, if Apple had a monopoly in any one of several markets many of their actions would be illegal. They don't seem to have any such monopoly, however, so their actions did not negatively impact the market or break the law.
A good analogy is shooting a pistol. It's not illegal and two people can both shoot pistols. Apple and MS are those people. A monopoly is aiming a gun at your wife's head and the laws against murder are the laws against antitrust abuse. Apple and MS are both pulling the trigger, but Apple is at the target range and MS is in the living room standing over a family of corpses after having been convicted before and let out on bail.
Why do people keep going on about the 'iTunes lock-in'? It is equivalent to Zune Marketplace, and any other mp3 player + music manager combo (there have been many over the years).
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market. If you don't understand the difference between leveraging a monopoly and bundling two un-monopolized products, then maybe you should do some reading before posting in a thread about monopolies.
As for the DRM, Apple is trying to get rid of DRM in their music.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
What is your logic for going after iTunes as being anything worse then is already out on the market from damn near everyone else?
I already answered this question above.
From what I can see, Apple is trying to be better but is shackled by others (music labels), vs MS who seems to like screwing people and companies over.
Apple isn't trying to be better, they're trying to make money. It just so happens that the best way for them to do that may be to fight against both the RIAA cartel and the MS monopoly abuse that have been so detrimental to consumers thus far. I see Apple as having saved our butts by blocking MS and preventing all music from running through WMP, but I have no illusions about their motives nor do I trust what they do in the future will put users before profits.
Of course the fact that Apple raised their market share from 3% to 9% has to be good news for them. Doesn't that directly imply that they've tripled their income stream? I'd be happy with that!
Apple's income has tripled and a bit more since 2005. A lot of this, however, was due to sales of iPods, iPhones, etc.
. It doesn't matter how great OSX is, or how shitty Windows is. Which this is something most people figured out ages ago... Now if they licensed OSX, and then you have Dell, HP, et.al. selling them, it's another thing. But Jobs will never do this, so talking about it is a moot point.
Apple licensing their OS to other OEMs does nothing to prevent MS's superior install base from being leveraged against them, it just puts them in direct competition with Microsoft so when it is leveraged against them they go out of the OS business and OS X dies. Maybe you haven't noticed but the only alternative OS's still in use are the ones not directly competing with MS. There may come a time when Apple could stop bundling their OS and hardware, but any competent businessman will tell you that the time is after MS's monopoly is broken, not before. Until competitors including Apple get to 40% or so, your idea would be suicide.
Alternately we could enforce our antitrust laws effectively and in a timely manner so that MS can't leverage their market share illegally and then the market will eventually force Apple to unbundle or begin to decline in share.
Just curious, but at what point is Microsoft no longer considered a monopoloy? At what percentage are they legally allowed to start pulling the dirty tricks again?
The summary is misleading in that it refers to "online market share" when what it is really talking about is the number of computers running a particular OS, seen by Web sites. "Market share" refers to the number of OS's sold and is what is considered for monopolies. Unless Apple starts licensing their OS to other PC makers, the number they sell is irrelevant to MS's status as having monopoly influence in the desktop OS market. As for market share numbers, the courts seem to look at about 70% share in markets as a rough guideline, but it is evidence of influence on the market that is the real deciding factor.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned Federal jurisdiction.
Please stop listening to the propaganda of televangelists. Seriously. The 9th circuit court is overturned less often than the average if you base it on the number of cases they hear... they just hear a lot more cases than most courts.
This is one of the many fragmentation problems that makes it difficult for commercial software vendors to offer their products for Linux. No one package format will do the trick across distributions -- not without hassle, anyway.
So obviously what we need is yet another package management system that's different from all the ones that exist now. Developed from scratch, of course.
No, we need a new package format and standard, preferably based on a well supported existing standard like GNUStep, but extended with a mind towards future proofing. Face it, package management on Linux is all geared towards administrators of servers who use OSS software. It is pretty terrible for desktop OS users and software development for those users and with commercial, closed source software. Package management on Linux is ahead of other platforms on bullet points and underlying technology, but inferior for actual end user experience and capabilities.
To that end, there's little or no centralized configuration: everything in the system is controlled through a welter of files, and there's no guarantee that the syntax of any one configuration file will apply to any other.
Obviously the solution is to rewrite every program in the OS to use a standard configuration file format. Instead of, you know, writing a man page that explains how the configuration file works.
Or, you could simply follow in the footsteps of someone who has done this successfully and clone Apple's methodology. That is, define a new standard and have new applications use it and gain additional functionality as a result (it's damn nice to be able to run a program off a USB key and have the right configuration on all three of the machines it is used on for multiple different users, even though the machines have different processors in them).
This is not an all or nothing issue.
Bottom line: the author doesn't like Linux, doesn't bother to understand it, and wishes it were more like a proprietary OS controlled by a single vendor.
Actually, it sounds like the author is a user who would like to use Linux, but is running into real problems in the areas where it is still behind the curve. He doesn't address the areas where Linux is ahead of the curve either because they are not important to the article or because he is unaware of them (they take longer to find than the deficiencies). Some of this is useful feedback and distro developers would do well to pay attention if they're targeting desktop users.
He complains the distribution differences make life hard for people selling software. Well, tough, if they want money maybe they should work for it?
Are you trying to make sure Linux never catches on on the desktop? It is the job of the OS to make things easy for developers to encourage them to support the platform because it makes the OS more useful to the users. Easy to use standards that reach as many users as possible encourages developers to spend money porting and gets more useful applications which, in turn, get more users, which then lead to more useful applications. Ignoring this leads to the OS being ignored by both users and developers.
Configuration files.
There needs to be a consistent -- and whenever possible, self-documenting -- configuration system throughout, from the kernel to userland tools and user applications
I know! Let's recreate the windows registry, but this time better!. Yawn.
This is a solved problem, see OS X. Global, group, and user config files that mean portable and network apps work right all the time and everyone knows where to find them and what format they will be in. Sorry, but Linux is behind the curve on this one.
Unstable Kernel ABI. FUD.
Mostly so, at least compared to the competition.
He wants a versioning filesystem. Like Windows has. (Does it?) I want a poney[sic].
This is just the "we're not as bad as China" defense. Linux should be aiming at being the best OS, not the second worst. See Time Machine. Clone Time Machine, but OSS and without repeating Apple's mistakes.
Audio API. He says there are too many of them.
And you don't agree or something? This is where distributed development is at a disadvantage. It needs a real champion and leader.
Oh, and would someone do some work on documentation?
I wrote documentation for professional software for years, including Linux software. I had numerous colleagues ask me if there was a way they could write docs for OSS projects as a way of contributing and I tried really, really hard to help hook them up with projects... any projects. It was almost always a failure. Developers of OSS don't seem interested in the help and rarely take the time to explain parts of the software the writer can't figure out on their own, even though that explanation would then have made it into the hands of all the users. Good documenters are also user advocates who approach software from the end user perspective and thus tend to come across and point out a lot of usability issues in the course of their job. OSS developers tend to not only ignore such input, but often became rude and abusive when provided with such feedback (which companies usually have to pay big bucks to get). Finally, I've done graphics work professionally and can tell you the same is true for their attempts at contributions. One of the best graphics guys I know, who makes big bucks for his work, was so poorly treated when he tried to submit some free textures to an OSS game he played, he has vowed to never again try to work with "OSS nutcases" as he now calls them.
All that said, if you're developing an OSS project and would like documentation help and you're willing to commit to actually working with a professional documenter, I can probably hook you up with a recent college grad, or a professional looking to do some free work to expand their resume to include OSS.
darwine should get near native performance as opengl -> opengl is very well supported.
I'm a casual gamer. I already have Windows in a VM for random applications, but that's for work when I need it. I only buy a game or two a year and there are plenty of choices for native games so why go through the hassle of configuring WINE and installing and running non-native games?
Uh... what? Half-Life is the top-selling first person shooter of all time. I don't know how it ranks in PC games overall, but the only games I'm aware of that sold more are Starcraft and The Sims.
It's number 6. (Notice anything interesting about both the Sims and Starcraft, like oh say they released a Mac version at the same time as a PC version?)
Yeah, how's Halo 2 treating you?
Late to release, just like the PC version was. Not that I care, I gave up on Bungie after they lost all their good developers and started making crap, halfway through making the original Halo.
Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.
On the PC or Mac there are costs for any practical, commercial venture. You need to pay for hosting the downloads, processing payments, and marketing the product. All of these can be done on the cheap, but you're not going to pull in $250K in a couple of months that way. The iPhone cost a hundred bucks to put an application up, but then it is in front of all the users and the download costs and payment processing is taken care of. It's a decent cost proposition in comparison to shareware on the Web, for example, and easier for many developers than trying to manage all those admin and marketing details.
I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid.
That's capitalism. You don't honestly think most CEOs making a thousand times what their median employee does works that much harder to earn that money do you? The difference here that catches people's attention is the opportunity for the little guy to make it big, something becoming more and more scarce in our current economy.
And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero.
But the development cost is not. Some of us have heard of this newfangled idea called "copyright" that allows people to create novel works without being paid in advance and profit from a (theoretically) limited monopoly on distribution of that work.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement.
I used to think so, except that it goes back [wikipedia.org] to at least 1703. Additionally...
That just means it's an old, stupid term for copyright infringement. I value precision in speech and calling one crime by the name of another because the first term is harder to understand or less flashy angers me.
Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license.
It sounds like their argument is that they pay full retail price for each copy and therefore have the full right to use it. I'd be hard pressed to disagree.
The thing is the normal use for a copy they buy requires a license from the copyright holder (to make a copy on the computer). So far the courts have ruled that these licenses can contain additional clauses and limitations and violating those clauses is infringing the copyright just the same as making copies without having purchased a copy and license.
It's hard to prove damages when the defendants have the receipt showing that they paid for it.
Not really since it lessens the chance of Apple selling hardware and may damage their valuable brand by making their product perform in an inferior way. Apple has a very strong case given existing precedent.
At any rate, I was replying to the story's author who made Psystar sound like fraudsters, to the point of being "fly-by-night". That's a judgment of their relative goodness and I don't believe anyone's shown that they've acted unethically, even if they're eventually found liable.
Actually I'd say "fly-by-night" sounds like a good description. They started a business they knew was a huge potential lawsuit and apparently did not bother consulting a lawyer. They started off blatantly violating Apple's trademarks in addition to this copyright issue upon which their entire business is founded. Either they are really, really incompetent (hence fly-by-night) or there is something else going on and they were being deceptive either to try to get publicity to make sales or because they did have ulterior motives.
In fact it's not even a licensed work, just as a book is not licensed. It is simply a commodity good covered by Copyright.
The courts disagree. To use a book for it's normal use you don't have to make an additional copy. To use an OS for its normal purpose you do copy it onto some other computer media and it ships with a license that allows you to do just that. This is a significant difference the courts have so far ruled makes first sale not apply except in the case of selling the original media and license after deleting all other copies, and even there the courts rulings have been mixed.
So long as Pystar ships the PCs with legally-purchased OS X media, I fail to see Apple's complaint as anything other than frivolous.
Too bad the courts don't agree with you. Anyway, in this particular case it is pointless. All it would do is mean Apple would stop shipping retail copies of their OS, but require users to buy a license online first, or move to some other mechanism of licensing that would stop Pystar and any others. Basically, this fight is about whether Apple has to inconvenience their users more, although the precedent being set might be applied more productively in other cases.
The biggest allegation I've heard on Slashdot is of them pirating OS X, but I've seen no proof that they've sold more copies than they've bought.
"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license. In order to copy Apple's copyrighted OS onto the computers they are going to sell, Pystar needs a license. The license that came with the copies they purchased does not cover installation on non-Apple hardware so unless they can get that portion of the license declared illegal for some reason, they break the law every time they ship a machine with OS X installed. Even if they just ship the disks and a blank machine, they're encouraging others to violate Apple's copyright and profiting in the process which makes them guilty of contributory copyright infringement (what Napster was busted for).
I don't get the double standard of why Compaq's cloning of the PC was good while Psystar's cloning of the Mac is bad, other than Steve's reality distortion field.
Good and bad are relative. We're talking about legal and illegal. Compaq legally reverse engineered. Pystar illegally made copies without a license. That's it.
Say all you want, but you have not put forth any evidence for abuse by Apple.
Sigh. I don't think there is any factual evidence in question. Apple has tied the iPod to the iTunes store and software applications and no one who understands those terms questions that. The only real question is if Apple's iPod constitutes having monopoly influence in it's market as the courts define it. This hinges on their evaluation of the market, which the EU has been investigating. To continue with my analogy, no one is arguing about whether or not they pulled the trigger, since they're still doing it in plain sight. The question is if there is someone down range that Apple can see in their sights.
Apple doesn't force you in any way to use the iTMS
And Microsoft doesn't force you to use Windows Server. They just provide incentive for you to do so if you're using windows desktop, incentive they could not offer if they did not control the Windows desktop OS. MS was convicted of antitrust abuse. It isn't a matter of forcing anyone to do anything, just undermining one market using a second, monopolized market.
Apple doesn't force you to buy an iPod either.
MS doesn't force you to buy Windows desktop.
What you arer[sic] advocating is to force Apple to stop offering people what they want from them, thus punishing the customers.
Really? Where did I advocate that? I'm simply telling you what the law says and what antitrust abuse is with regard to Apple. I said nothing about how or if they should be punished, given our current, broken markets.
Nor am I arguing that Apple's effect on the market has not been positive. They entered a market already broken by two different trusts and with a pile of illegal abuse. I'd certainly prefer the laws be enforced and all the abuse was stopped or prevented. Barring that though, to punish Apple after letting both the RIAA and MS get away with it would be insufferably stupid on the part of regulators. That doesn't mean they won't do it though (though I suspect they won't). It also doesn't mean Apple isn't breaking antitrust law (although personally I don't buy that market definition).
C'mon apple, get real! Everyone needs anti-virus software these days!
So far, this just hasn't lined up with the real risks. To date, more Mac users have suffered because of malfunctioning antivirus software than because of intentional malware. I'm not opposed to antivirus and I wish Apple would take ClamAV and run with it as part of the system (as well as other anti-malware technologies) but really the malware risk has been so low they don't have a lot of incentive.
The strength of Mac against viruses lays solely in the use of very stable FOSS solutions for the basics (very close to stable Debian versions) and then building on top of that (Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage etc. don't have any links to sockets). Really, what services CAN lay bare on a Mac to the internet: SSH (OpenSSH), E-mail (Postfix), Webserver (Apache).
I'd say a lot of the strength is in not exposing those services in the default configuration so most machines are not vulnerable to attacks on unneeded services. For those services that are exposed, Apple has done a decent job of sandboxing via their ACL framework (like their zeroconf deamon).
On the program side, you have Safari (Webkit) or Mozilla with Flash (Adobe) or Java (Sun) and those don't come above user level without requiring extreme interaction from the user (passwords).
I'd say those don't really matter much since the user level access is sufficient to be useful to malware authors. There are holes in said programs, but lower market share, less familiarity by malware authors, and implementation details make it less of an issue for OS X, as well as the need to use a trojan, which slows the spread of any malware.
There is no such thing as ~/Library/StartupItems or ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and you need to become root to put stuff in /Library.
Someone else already pointed out there are places a user can put things to make them autorun. Rather, it is Apple doing an okay job with identifying applications and the first time they run that provides some, limited buffer against trojans.
But the bundling was there from the start - and it was what made the iPod successful.
So? I used an analogy in another post about antitrust abuse being like murder. Firing a gun is legal. Firing a gun while it is aimed at another person's head is illegal. If you're on a shooting range and they signal a cease fire while someone goes to change the targets and you are now aiming a gun at a person's head and you fire at it, you've performed the same act, but changed the context such that it does harm and is illegal. The same is true for bundling and monopolies. Bundling does not harm the market or break any laws until you gain monopoly influence, then it does both.
...but blaming or even punishing Apple for that? What is this, Capitalism or the very, very Special Olympics...
Antitrust abuse undermines capitalism, which is why it is illegal. Maybe you haven't studied economics enough to understand how that works or what instances prompted the laws to be written. Why not take a few hours with an economics book and read about it and then get back to me if you're still confused?
Take the so-called iTMS-iPod lock-in. It constantly gets blamed for the fact that people can't buy a non-iPod to replace the old iPod - but nobody I asked ever could name 5 persons (or even one for that matter) who didn't for just that lock-in. Instead you will find dozens of people in every discussion about Apple who will claim they would never again buy an iPod, and some will actually blame that "lock-in" for it.
You have the wrong idea entirely. Antitrust law is not there to ensure people are free to choose other players after having bought an iPod. Rather, they are to ensure that because Apple has done so well in the iPod market, they don't use that to gain in the online music download business, despite not having the best offering. It's about making sure that in order to win different markets, Apple has to have the best and most innovative offering in each market, instead of a great offering in one market and sub-par offerings in other markets that are tied to their great offering in the digital player market. These are the same laws that are supposed to ensure that even though MS has the most popular offering in the desktop OS market they also have to have the best offering in the server OS market to gain share in that market, instead of illegally tying it to their desktop OS in ways that gain them market despite their inferior server offering. Understand?
To "leverage their monopoly" wouldn't Apple have to do something else than what they did to become a monopoly?
Not necessarily. Many actions they have been taking to promote other products using the iPod and to make the "iPod experience" better become questionable. This includes things like bundling iTunes with iPods and tying iPods to both iTunes and the iTunes Store. Should Apple be ruled to have a monopoly, these actions are all potential antitrust abuses... if they have monopoly influence.
As for the DRM, Apple is trying to get rid of DRM in their music.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
Well, you can always buy your non-DRM videos from Amazon. Oh, no, wait... It's amazing how people blame Apple for not doing miracles because they have done what nobody else has managed to do before them so many times.
Apple has certainly been forced to include some DRM because of the content providers and that is simply the reality of the industry made possible by our government's failure to enforce antitrust law against those cartels in the first place. That said, Apple has taken steps as a content distributor has included DRM on their own as well, such as recent additions to Mac firmware. The point being, we need to enforce our antitrust laws against all trusts, including Apple to keep the markets healthy. Enforcing them against Apple, but not MS or the RIAA and MPAA would probably be worse than not enforcing them at all.
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
What "reasonable arguments". Common, lets see them.
"Monopoly influence" is a legal term. It is not the same thing as an absolute monopoly. Apple has 70%+ of the portable digital music player market, which is a rule of thumb for regulators looking for companies that might have undue influence on a market. Apple has been able to sway tertiary markets such as the market for headphones and jukebox software. Mostly the argument (from a legal standpoint) boils down to if cell phones are considered by the average consumer as an alternative to an iPod when making purchasing decisions. Personally, I don't think Apple's iPod business does constitute a monopoly in the legal sense and even if it does, the surrounding markets are already so broken by other monopolies and trusts that and corrections need to be much broader than addressing just Apple. Still, regulators in several countries are looking into the iPod (as they should be) and investigating the issue in more detail.
The reality is that nothing prevents you from listening to the same music on comparable devices with comparable prices to Apple's products
That's not the concern so much as what Apple can do to other markets because of their dominance in portable music players. Apple has done a good job of gaining their huge market share by making the best product and beating competitors. That's perfectly legal and not an issue. The issue is what happens to the markets for online music sales, headphones, jukebox software, etc. that Apple has tied to their iPod product. The purpose of antitrust law is to make sure Apple has to offer the best product in those markets as well, if they want to gain dominance in them. This is to prevent situations like we have now where MS has leveraged their desktop OS monopoly into the Web browser market and the majority of people end up using an inferior product and the whole market has suffered.
You're barking up the wrong tree. It's not Apple that demands DRM, it's the content industries...
Apple is a large content distributor and in that role they have implemented DRM above and beyond what has been demanded by the content providers. Certainly the content providers do drive a lot of the DRM implementations, but both Apple and MS have been complicit where it is in their best financial interests.
Nah, that would just be stuff they both inherited from their common ancestor.
That just isn't so. Next integrated parts of both FreeBSD and OpenBSD into NextStep, which in turn was pulled into OS X, but Apple also pulled in additional parts of the FreeBSD userspace in the creation of OS X. Heck, they still are doing so as the latest release version (Leopard) pulled in some of the ACL architecture from the TrustedBSD project of FreeBSD. OS X is clearly a direct descendent of FreeBSD via multiple paths.
If you mean that OSX is a descendant of FreeBSD then you are mistaken.
OS X uses a Mach Kernel, but OS X and FreeBSD OSs include more than a kernel. Much of the OS X userspace is derived from FreeBSD and as such one can claim OS X a a descendent of NextStep (Mach), FreeBSD, and the original MacOS.
Question: While they're still dominant, would the rapidly decreasing market-share mean that MS will have a better chance of avoiding any monopoly-related issues/charges (or would this only be applicable if their marketshare dropped below XX%)?
Legally speaking, no. It is their share in markets against which their desktop OS is being leveraged that count in court. For example, if they are losing market share in the server OS space, they might be able to use that to argue their tying of desktop and server OS's through secret protocols is not having an adverse effect upon competitors in the server OS space.
Monopoloy[sic] and market share are not connected.
Yes, they are. Monopolies, however, are not illegal. Antitrust abuse is illegal, you just happen to need a monopoly or cartel or other trust in order to have the power to break that law.
Now Apple isn't above this behavior (the iPhones apps show this) however so far OS X has been fairly good at playing nice with others. If Apple gains majority market share and keeps OS X playing nice then they won't be a monopoly.
Actually, if Apple had a monopoly in any one of several markets many of their actions would be illegal. They don't seem to have any such monopoly, however, so their actions did not negatively impact the market or break the law.
A good analogy is shooting a pistol. It's not illegal and two people can both shoot pistols. Apple and MS are those people. A monopoly is aiming a gun at your wife's head and the laws against murder are the laws against antitrust abuse. Apple and MS are both pulling the trigger, but Apple is at the target range and MS is in the living room standing over a family of corpses after having been convicted before and let out on bail.
Why do people keep going on about the 'iTunes lock-in'? It is equivalent to Zune Marketplace, and any other mp3 player + music manager combo (there have been many over the years).
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market. If you don't understand the difference between leveraging a monopoly and bundling two un-monopolized products, then maybe you should do some reading before posting in a thread about monopolies.
As for the DRM, Apple is trying to get rid of DRM in their music.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
What is your logic for going after iTunes as being anything worse then is already out on the market from damn near everyone else?
I already answered this question above.
From what I can see, Apple is trying to be better but is shackled by others (music labels), vs MS who seems to like screwing people and companies over.
Apple isn't trying to be better, they're trying to make money. It just so happens that the best way for them to do that may be to fight against both the RIAA cartel and the MS monopoly abuse that have been so detrimental to consumers thus far. I see Apple as having saved our butts by blocking MS and preventing all music from running through WMP, but I have no illusions about their motives nor do I trust what they do in the future will put users before profits.
Of course the fact that Apple raised their market share from 3% to 9% has to be good news for them. Doesn't that directly imply that they've tripled their income stream? I'd be happy with that!
Apple's income has tripled and a bit more since 2005. A lot of this, however, was due to sales of iPods, iPhones, etc.
. It doesn't matter how great OSX is, or how shitty Windows is. Which this is something most people figured out ages ago... Now if they licensed OSX, and then you have Dell, HP, et.al. selling them, it's another thing. But Jobs will never do this, so talking about it is a moot point.
Apple licensing their OS to other OEMs does nothing to prevent MS's superior install base from being leveraged against them, it just puts them in direct competition with Microsoft so when it is leveraged against them they go out of the OS business and OS X dies. Maybe you haven't noticed but the only alternative OS's still in use are the ones not directly competing with MS. There may come a time when Apple could stop bundling their OS and hardware, but any competent businessman will tell you that the time is after MS's monopoly is broken, not before. Until competitors including Apple get to 40% or so, your idea would be suicide.
Alternately we could enforce our antitrust laws effectively and in a timely manner so that MS can't leverage their market share illegally and then the market will eventually force Apple to unbundle or begin to decline in share.
Just curious, but at what point is Microsoft no longer considered a monopoloy? At what percentage are they legally allowed to start pulling the dirty tricks again?
The summary is misleading in that it refers to "online market share" when what it is really talking about is the number of computers running a particular OS, seen by Web sites. "Market share" refers to the number of OS's sold and is what is considered for monopolies. Unless Apple starts licensing their OS to other PC makers, the number they sell is irrelevant to MS's status as having monopoly influence in the desktop OS market. As for market share numbers, the courts seem to look at about 70% share in markets as a rough guideline, but it is evidence of influence on the market that is the real deciding factor.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned Federal jurisdiction.
Please stop listening to the propaganda of televangelists. Seriously. The 9th circuit court is overturned less often than the average if you base it on the number of cases they hear... they just hear a lot more cases than most courts.
This is one of the many fragmentation problems that makes it difficult for commercial software vendors to offer their products for Linux. No one package format will do the trick across distributions -- not without hassle, anyway.
So obviously what we need is yet another package management system that's different from all the ones that exist now. Developed from scratch, of course.
No, we need a new package format and standard, preferably based on a well supported existing standard like GNUStep, but extended with a mind towards future proofing. Face it, package management on Linux is all geared towards administrators of servers who use OSS software. It is pretty terrible for desktop OS users and software development for those users and with commercial, closed source software. Package management on Linux is ahead of other platforms on bullet points and underlying technology, but inferior for actual end user experience and capabilities.
To that end, there's little or no centralized configuration: everything in the system is controlled through a welter of files, and there's no guarantee that the syntax of any one configuration file will apply to any other.
Obviously the solution is to rewrite every program in the OS to use a standard configuration file format. Instead of, you know, writing a man page that explains how the configuration file works.
Or, you could simply follow in the footsteps of someone who has done this successfully and clone Apple's methodology. That is, define a new standard and have new applications use it and gain additional functionality as a result (it's damn nice to be able to run a program off a USB key and have the right configuration on all three of the machines it is used on for multiple different users, even though the machines have different processors in them).
This is not an all or nothing issue.
Bottom line: the author doesn't like Linux, doesn't bother to understand it, and wishes it were more like a proprietary OS controlled by a single vendor.
Actually, it sounds like the author is a user who would like to use Linux, but is running into real problems in the areas where it is still behind the curve. He doesn't address the areas where Linux is ahead of the curve either because they are not important to the article or because he is unaware of them (they take longer to find than the deficiencies). Some of this is useful feedback and distro developers would do well to pay attention if they're targeting desktop users.
He complains the distribution differences make life hard for people selling software. Well, tough, if they want money maybe they should work for it?
Are you trying to make sure Linux never catches on on the desktop? It is the job of the OS to make things easy for developers to encourage them to support the platform because it makes the OS more useful to the users. Easy to use standards that reach as many users as possible encourages developers to spend money porting and gets more useful applications which, in turn, get more users, which then lead to more useful applications. Ignoring this leads to the OS being ignored by both users and developers.
Configuration files.
There needs to be a consistent -- and whenever possible, self-documenting -- configuration system throughout, from the kernel to userland tools and user applications
I know! Let's recreate the windows registry, but this time better!. Yawn.
This is a solved problem, see OS X. Global, group, and user config files that mean portable and network apps work right all the time and everyone knows where to find them and what format they will be in. Sorry, but Linux is behind the curve on this one.
Unstable Kernel ABI. FUD.
Mostly so, at least compared to the competition.
He wants a versioning filesystem. Like Windows has. (Does it?) I want a poney[sic].
This is just the "we're not as bad as China" defense. Linux should be aiming at being the best OS, not the second worst. See Time Machine. Clone Time Machine, but OSS and without repeating Apple's mistakes.
Audio API. He says there are too many of them.
And you don't agree or something? This is where distributed development is at a disadvantage. It needs a real champion and leader.
Oh, and would someone do some work on documentation?
I wrote documentation for professional software for years, including Linux software. I had numerous colleagues ask me if there was a way they could write docs for OSS projects as a way of contributing and I tried really, really hard to help hook them up with projects... any projects. It was almost always a failure. Developers of OSS don't seem interested in the help and rarely take the time to explain parts of the software the writer can't figure out on their own, even though that explanation would then have made it into the hands of all the users. Good documenters are also user advocates who approach software from the end user perspective and thus tend to come across and point out a lot of usability issues in the course of their job. OSS developers tend to not only ignore such input, but often became rude and abusive when provided with such feedback (which companies usually have to pay big bucks to get). Finally, I've done graphics work professionally and can tell you the same is true for their attempts at contributions. One of the best graphics guys I know, who makes big bucks for his work, was so poorly treated when he tried to submit some free textures to an OSS game he played, he has vowed to never again try to work with "OSS nutcases" as he now calls them.
All that said, if you're developing an OSS project and would like documentation help and you're willing to commit to actually working with a professional documenter, I can probably hook you up with a recent college grad, or a professional looking to do some free work to expand their resume to include OSS.
darwine should get near native performance as opengl -> opengl is very well supported.
I'm a casual gamer. I already have Windows in a VM for random applications, but that's for work when I need it. I only buy a game or two a year and there are plenty of choices for native games so why go through the hassle of configuring WINE and installing and running non-native games?
Id and Epic haven't made any games quite similar to Half-Life, unless you also think bumper cars are similar to roller coasters.
Doom, Quake, and Unreal series all seem to be FPS games in competition from my perspective.
Uh... what? Half-Life is the top-selling first person shooter of all time. I don't know how it ranks in PC games overall, but the only games I'm aware of that sold more are Starcraft and The Sims.
It's number 6. (Notice anything interesting about both the Sims and Starcraft, like oh say they released a Mac version at the same time as a PC version?)
Yeah, how's Halo 2 treating you?
Late to release, just like the PC version was. Not that I care, I gave up on Bungie after they lost all their good developers and started making crap, halfway through making the original Halo.
Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.
On the PC or Mac there are costs for any practical, commercial venture. You need to pay for hosting the downloads, processing payments, and marketing the product. All of these can be done on the cheap, but you're not going to pull in $250K in a couple of months that way. The iPhone cost a hundred bucks to put an application up, but then it is in front of all the users and the download costs and payment processing is taken care of. It's a decent cost proposition in comparison to shareware on the Web, for example, and easier for many developers than trying to manage all those admin and marketing details.
I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid.
That's capitalism. You don't honestly think most CEOs making a thousand times what their median employee does works that much harder to earn that money do you? The difference here that catches people's attention is the opportunity for the little guy to make it big, something becoming more and more scarce in our current economy.
And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero.
But the development cost is not. Some of us have heard of this newfangled idea called "copyright" that allows people to create novel works without being paid in advance and profit from a (theoretically) limited monopoly on distribution of that work.
That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times.
Umm, interesting math.