Agreed. We (sort of) have them. Vista, OS X, and Linux are all shipping with Application level access control frameworks, by default, these days. The problem is getting it applied and getting a workable UI and workflow.
This doesn't have to be obvious, but when you install an app, the system needs to pop up a box before a single line of code is run giving options that the software is asking for.
I think this is too cumbersome and too complex for the average user. Rather, I think we need to go further. Apps should ship with an ACL that specifies what it should need. Anti-malware companies and organizations should verify these and provide white lists and checksums. That way pre-installed and mainstream software will all run just fine without the user having to do anything. You can ask them about any applications missed by these whitelists, but while giving the user granular controls is great for power users, novice users should be given simpler templates for sandboxing apps and apps should be able to run in a very restricted sandbox without the user being bothered at all, only being asked if it wants to do something, like read/write existing files.
The other thing that would fix a lot of these things--put a bounty on finding & solving new viruii and on hacking into systems.
This may or may not be a good thing. Each OS vendor should have some serious people working on this though. Also, this is the kind of thing that users can help out with. There is no reason users should not be able to report suspicious software to the OS vendor for review/blacklisting.
Really, I think a lot of the problem here is one of motivation. Microsoft doesn't want to put any work in because malware probably nets them more sales than it loses them (people buying new computers with a new copy of Windows to replace their infected machine). Other OS vendors have motivation to keep users happy, but for the most part users don't have a malware problem yet, so haven't done the hard work of developing the GUI and adapting applications to be better behaved and more self contained (which MS could then copy).
Are you sure about that? I would think that this would fall under "fair use".
Fair use is vague, but in the general case, no it would not. Maybe if you were using it for demonstrating how such things are copied in a public school.
Remember that you are also making a copy of music when you play a CD, as the bits are read off of the CD and into the buffer. Also, it seems as though format shifting is considered fair use, though I don't think that this has been tested.
This one at least passes one of the big 4 of fair use, in its effect upon the market. The law so far has been pretty good with precedent here that such "ephemeral" copies were acceptable, although a few judges have weighed in on the other side claiming even those constitute copyright violation.
This would violate the common law tradition of "implied warranty" or "warranty of fitness".
Indeed it does and possibly fall afoul of a number of laws on the books. This has, however, been poorly tested in the courts with them going both ways on it.
But you copied it from Slashdot's servers to your own cache and a bunch of routers in between.
I didn't. The network operators did. They are protected by their (pseudo) common carrier status.
You made at least one copy to your framebuffer.
Again, an ephemeral copy. as per the example above. It goes away in short order (or becomes invisible to the average users anyway).
You shouldn't have read my post if you didn't agree.:) Yes, it's an asinine bit of text - but the argument is very similar to an EULA...
It is similar, but not the same in the fundamental way that you were trying to restrict viewing, instead of copying... and the forms of copying that took place inherently have been pretty well established to be legal or have concretely been established so.
I'm putting arbitrary restrictions on you even though there is no justification for doing so.
Except in the case of the EULA, they do have a legal right, copyright granted by the government. and it is presented before the infringement takes place.
If I didn't want you to read my post I wouldn't have posted it for you to read. If Apple didn't want me to run their software, they wouldn't have sold it to me. Common sense.
Except Apple only wants you to make copies in specific circumstances and the law grants them that right, or possibly does depending upon how the courts end up o the issue of EULAs. The practical take away is, unless you have a lot of money for a legal defense, you'd be an idiot to think you have no chance of being prosecuted if you ignore the EULA and Apple is going to tie their OS and hardware, so if they ever do lose on the EULA issue they'll just change their means of restriction to some less user friendly. Heck, all they have to do is put a waring on the outside of the box, or stop selling disks retail and only sell upgrades as a Web service.
The Mac is just another x86 PC now. It's not even something made distinct by using
a different microprocessor architecture.
I see so all x86 hardware is exactly the same. A computer from HP that has twice the failure rate in the first year as a machine from Lenovo is in no way distinct and we should all ignore the individual specs and reliability ratings of hardware. Do you happen to work for Dell?
The only
difference is that there is a very short list of Apple produced combinations.
Every hardware vendor sells a very short list of combinations. Apple actually sells more variations than several companies with much larger market share than they have (such as Asus).
It's the same guts, the same audio chips, the same northbridge chips and so on.
Some vendors, such as Sony and Lenovo buy only hardware that meets certain standards. To them a 250Gb hard drive from one vendor and another are very different things. To other vendors, such as Dell's desktop division, a 250Gb hard drive is the same as all the others and they'll buy whoever is selling the cheapest one today, regardless of how often they fail or how long they last. They don't test it extensively and often you don't even know what will be in the machine you get (and it may not be the same across all the machines you buy at the same time). This cuts the price, but it also makes for a crappier machine.
My post was pointing out that if you compare Apple to vendors who have similar (even up to 50% worse) failure rates, you'll find very little difference in price as several reputable reviewers have pointed out. Buy a subscription to Consumer Reports already.
Other PC's can and do stand the test of time.
Some do and some don't. The ones that are significantly cheaper than Apple, tend to be the ones that don't.
An IBM 945 is the same whether or not it comes in a machine with an Apple logo on it or a Dell logo.
Yeah it is. But Lenovo machines are actually similar in price to Apple machines. They also have different power supplies hard drives, USB controllers, Webcams, and hundreds of other parts. If you buy a machine with quality parts, you pay for it, whether that is an Apple or a Sony or a Lenovo.
For those of us into free software because of the freedom part, it sounds like Apple is having a hard time even getting to the starting line.
Apple, like most big software producers, creates both free and open software as well as closed software. Their OS itself is not free, nor would it be a good way for them to profit if it was. A lot of the individual components of it (Darwin) are free though and you can install them anywhere you want.
It would have been a very interesting move if Apple had created and released OS X under the GPL. It sure would have been a significant blow to MS's monopoly. That said, developing OS X costs Apple a lot of money and that money has to come from somewhere. I'd like to think they'd still be doing well (maybe even better) with hardware sales and support and that OS X would have brought even more advancement to OS innovation via contributions and improvements from the OSS community as well as new hardware companies who could use it as well. That said, I'm not convinced that would be the case. Apple may well be dead had they tried it and we'd all have one less option and MS would have 97% of the market instead of 90%, giving them just that much more power to break Linux with incompatibilities.
Anyway, arguing Apple is not even near the starting line for free software is very misguided. They are not exclusively a free software company (as we might wish in pipe dreams) but they are a big contributor to free software and the primary supporter of several important projects like WebKit and CUPS.
Just a quick note. You have a lot of assertions, but I bet Apple has a lot of formal studies on what the market wants. While you may want a given machine and while a lot of people on Slashdot may want it to, that doesn't mean it is the most profitable hardware niche for Apple to enter next. They've been doing pretty well so far. Their latest, the MacBook Air is something I don't want and most people on Slashdot think is useless junk. It's also been sold out in many locations for about 6 months now.
As a second note, your assertions about desktops versus laptops is well, not the way the industry is going. For office use and home use, the desktop has been slowly dying for several years now.
Surprisingly, no one seems to have brought up the prime reason why you'll not likely see OS X for generic PCs. Repeat after me: Apple is a hardware company.
Apple used to be a computer hardware company. They branched out and now sell significant amounts of pro software, music players, and smart phones.
They could change their revenue models and sell their OS without tying it to their OS. Mind you it would be economic suicide so long as MS holds a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they could do it. I would argue, in fact, they'd be pretty much forced to do it if the OS market were restored to a free, capitalist market.
Still, right now Apple develops OS X to profit on complete computer systems including hardware and software. If they can't tie them, their OS development is just an expense with no profit involved.
And Apple just counts its cash reserves since they don't compete in most areas that Microsoft tends to. There is happy crossover with, say, Office 2008 for Mac, but generally Apple and Microsoft are different worlds.
Actually, Apple is a threat to MS, chipping away at their desktop OS install base, as well as several other key MS technologies. Apple, on the other hand, is very much affected by what MS makes, since they can use any market they enter to lock out Apple users, thus reducing Apple's sales. That is why Apple entered the portable music player business in the first place. In order to survive they must commit to entering every market MS threatens to monopolize, or find partners who will and who cannot be bought out by MS. It is a very precarious place for Apple and a situation no other company wants to place itself in. Apple would never have willingly entered it, but already had competing products when MS took over and was unwilling to abandon those markets.
Pirating software has a long history of being successfully prosecuted through the courts of most Western countries. Enforcing EULAS does not.
EULAs have some history of prosecution both successful and not. Be careful of which state or country you are in unless you have millions for a legal defense.
Just because Apple says you can't do what you want with the software you have bought doesn't necessarily mean it is not legal to do so.
Ahh, but copyright law does limit what you can do with software you have bought, specifically, if you can make a copy of it on your computer's hard drive (for example). There is a very strong legal case for needing a license of some sort in order to make such a copy and sans agreeing with their EULA, making copies is arguably illegal.
However it most certainly is illegal to install pirated commercial software.
"Pirating" commercial software is simply making a copy without permission from the copyright holder. It is called copyright infringement. Apple selling you a Mac OS X install DVD does not implicitly grant you the right to copy that DVD and more than Adobe selling you a Photoshop install DVD grants you the right to make copies of it and give them to your friends. They are both (arguably) copyright infringement.
When you buy an Apple computer, it comes pre-installed, so there is not any issue of making a copy that could be a violation, but neither does that mean you can install it on other Macs or generic hardware, since those are no different from photocopying a book you bought (something illegal since the 70's sans fair use clauses). Now there are real arguments for personal copies and it is more complex if you buy a retail OS X DVD without a computer given that it may fall afoul other laws for Apple to restrict you in that regard (although this has never been upheld by the courts).
In short, just because you buy copyrighted material, does not mean you can make copies of it and any such action is very questionable legally, unless you have a specific license from the copyright holder.
Personally, I don't recognize EULAs as legitimate contracts. If they want me to enter into a contract, then they need to negotiate it with me PRE-SALE!
Legally I find EULAs to be very questionable. However, if EULAs are ever made illegitimate, all it will do is make it harder for Mac users. Apple will switch to a different, legal method of tying their hardware and software, one that is probably more annoying.
I do, however, recognize their copyright. So I'll buy a copy to respect copyright, and then install it wherever I damn well please.
I'm not sure you are understanding how copyright works. Buying a DVD with OS X on it does not necessarily give you the right to make an additional copy of the OS on your computer's hardware. Only Apple has that right to make a copy and if you want to make use of it, legally, there is a lot of support for you needing some sort of a license from Apple. If they don't give you one, your purchase is pretty useless.
That said, I'm not above copyright infringement either. The RIAA will not see a penny of my money.
I'm the last one to defend the RIAA. I have no problem if you want to go find them, burn down their houses, blow up their cars, and force them to eat their own feet. That said, it hurts the RIAA more to simply not listen to music that they hold copyrights for and instead support independent music. It is harder to find good indy music since it is less widely marketed, but their is plenty of it that is better than most of the tripe the RIAA is peddling.
That ought to hold up in court, eh?
No. I don't need permission to read a post you published. I need permission to make a copy of it... except in the instance of fair use, such as quoting your post in a post of my own, where your copyright is specifically limited by law. In the case of Apple's license, there is a real exchange. The licensee (you) is granted the right to copy the OS onto one Apple branded computer and the licensor(Apple) is given money and the promise that you will not take certain actions.
EULAs are messed up and our copyright needs serious reform, but if you plan to argue against the principals you should probably do a little more research to better understand the real problems.
Interestingly, the hardware control Apple exercises that you say is a good thing is exactly what bothers me with Apple. I know people hate hearing this, but I feel like Apple's operating systems are a cop-out. Sure, everything looks nice and just works...because they spent several months working on a single piece of hardware (which is often no longer on the bleeding edge).
The average user doesn't care why it just works, they just care that it does.
Where's the ability to use brand-new hardware? Where's the ability to make whatever modifications you wish to the computer and then simply download a driver for it (easily, I mean)?
For the most part, this is up to third parties. If third parties write drivers for their new hardware (whatever it is) than it will work, regardless of the OS.
Yes, I know Linux often has trouble supporting new hardware, but that's simply the nature of open-source: things take time.
Actually I disagree. Linux has little market share and that is why they have driver problems. You don't honestly think Microsoft writes all the drivers to make all the hardware in the world work do you? They don't have to. The hardware makers write the Windows drivers because otherwise they don't have a market for their devices. They'll do whatever it takes, including altering the hardware itself to make it run on Windows. It is the state of the OS market that keeps them from doing the same for Linux, not the fact that it is OSS. Apple is somewhere in between. They have more market share and more hardware vendors write drivers for them, and Apple supports a limited amount of hardware themselves (like Linux does).
Given all this, I don't understand why people insist on hacking the Mac for use on PCs. Why not use Linux?
I use Linux and OS X on the desktop daily and so have significant experience with both. The reason a lot of people prefer OS X is because it is simply better at certain tasks than Linux is. Some of this is because of the state of the industry (market share) and some of it is because of real features that work on OS X and don't on Linux. Basically people want to run OS X and don't mind hacking a lot to get it to work. If they wanted the most pleasant experience (as in the least work to do) they'd probably just buy a Mac instead of hacking because of the time and effort required. Some people like hacking things to get them working. Some people already have hardware, but don't want to go back to Linux after having become accustomed to OS X, so they look for a way to make it happen.
Please note, the number of people who hack generic hardware to run OS X is tiny. There will always be a tiny number of people that do something different and impractical.
Perhaps Apple should begin licensing OS X... I believe their hardware could stand on its own merits and the additional revenue and marketshare couldn't hurt.
I agree Apple's hardware can stand on its own merits. Their OS, however, cannot. The desktop OS market is monopolized and as such, entering directly into it is a lost cause. It doesn't matter if OS X is superior to Windows because MS's monopoly can introduce artificial problems with OS X by making it incompatible with 90% of OS's in use. As such, Apple realistic choices are to tie their OS and hardware sales together, or abandon their OS and stop developing it.
Similarly powerful PCs cost 1/2 as much as a Mac does, in almost all areas. I use the term "similarly powerful" on the basis of framerate testing and how fast it can do on CPU heavy projects like folding@home
Allow me to add perspective to your largely correct assertion:
Similarly powerful PCs cost 1/2 as much as a Sony does, in almost all areas. I use the term "similarly powerful" on the basis of framerate testing and how fast it can do on CPU heavy projects like folding@home
You can buy a cheap, low reliability system with the features other than CPU stripped out for less than a machine with lots of features designed for real users who do more than run a folding@home farm in the basement. When you compare machines based upon all their specs, including reliability, Apple is pretty much in line with other premium vendors who come close to the same levels of features and reliability based upon independent testing like Consumer Reports.
In short, Apple offers reasonable prices on their hardware, they just don't have a wide selection of hardware compared to all other hardware vendors combined. As a result, if you're looking for a machine to meet your specific needs (like headless folding@home servers), you will probably be able to find something more exactly suited to your needs elsewhere and may save money by not paying for features that you don't need.
In other words, the interface on the hardware tape deck is consistent with the interface on the software tape deck.
You could say that, but in so doing you have to introduce a second interface with which it is consistent, in order for it to make sense. Since absolutely everything is consistent with thousands of other things, referring to a UI as "consistent" but not naming what it is consistent with, makes no sense. Thus in terms of UI design, "consistent" refers to consistent within the interface, not with some other random interface. Being "consistent" with other user interfaces that people understand and are familiar with is one way of being "intuitive" and is referred to as such to avoid just the type of confusion you're trying to introduce to defend your mistake.
Making a button bright red, while the rest of a UI is a neutral color will work even if the user has never used a user interface that uses such a technique. We're hard wired to respond to it and our blood pressure goes up when we see it. This is intuitive, but need not be consistent with anything. Thus intuitive and consistent are not synonyms in this usage.
Apparently you are discussing Slashdot Microsoft, the borg like all powerful and sinister company that dominates the computer industry and crushes innovation.
I'm discussing Microsoft from the perspective of someone who has to work in the computing industry and has a good generally understanding of the negative affects of monopolies. Why is it that the Web is using outrageously complicated work arounds in order to perform really common functions? Oh yeah, because MS controls the lions share of the Web because of their abusive tying of Windows and IE. As a result the entire Web is stuck using half implemented six to ten year old versions of standards.
I could present a dozen other examples of how innovation has ground to a halt. It has been over a decade since the first OS implemented a spell checker that worked in all the programs instead of making them all implement it separately. What percentage of users have that capability today? What one company has dominated the desktop OS field and felt it unimportant to implement as a innovation?
I was thinking about the Microsoft that my friend worked at a few years ago, where the culture was so entrenched with "eating their own dog food" that few in the company were exposed to anything else that is going on in the computer world.
Please. I've worked with lots of former MS employees, from people who were recruited out of college and had little exposure to other technologies from MS, to people who were senior engineers and know more about UNIX than I ever will.
The vaporware/FUD style of killing competition that Slashdot Microsoft does was generally a result of marketing not understanding engineering, making engineering look bad.
Enough internal communications from MS has been exposed at this point that it is clear monopoly abuse is their business strategy and they don't care if that slows innovation in the industry or results in worse products getting into the hands of consumers, so long as it makes them more money.
But I was also talking about MSFT, the lackluster performing stock that has failed to deliver share holder value in years.
MS's stock has been doing fine. Their growth is slowing because their business model of explosive growth via monopoly abuse now takes longer because they're going after bigger, less connected markets.
The founder whose killer instincts led it to crush the competition leveraging each business has left to go fight diseases in Africa, and his replacement is his college drinking buddy that looks like a big fat baffoon mostly mocked as a chair thrower.
Who cares. They haven't stopped breaking the law. They haven't changed their strategy at all to date.
Your Microsoft conspiracy makes sense... but the incompetence theory makes sense as well. They could have meant well, decided on an open standard, had marketing gum up the process and declare everything a lock down to avoid FUD/anti-trust issues, that surfaced with their exciting new standard that they were stunned that nobody wanted.
Anyone who has gone to law school would be able to tell them their introduction of OOXML after ODF came into use, was likely to cause them legal problems. MS has more lawyers on staff than pretty much anyone. MS has demonstrated again and again that breaking the law, reducing choice, slowing innovation, and hurting consumers are all perfectly acceptable to them, so long as their is a business case for it. There is no way you can claim MS is ignorant of their antitrust abuses at this stage in the game. They've been convicted again and again. They paid half a billion dollars settling out a huge lawsuit about a very similar abuse with MS Office to avoid it being declared a monopoly. There is no way they could be ignorant of the illegality of their actions and their are memos about how they were counting on the affects of said actions to make things harder for
Examples of required, non-deprecated bits of OOXML that are poorly defined? (Hint: "render X like Office 97" aren't required and are deprecated, and their hinting can be ignored without display difficulties.)
If it results in file incompatibility or rendering differences in between documents from MSWord and those opened by other programs, then it doesn't matter if it is listed as "deprecated" or "optional" or "monkey poo." It still is preventing the interoperability truly open standards are designed to remove.
There are more holes in ODF than OOXML. I'm not terribly fond of OOXML, but frankly they got it more right than ODF has.
ODF has a working, open source reference implementation. While the standard as written has a few snags, it's not like developers can't and don't just look to see how OO.org and Workplace did it if there is any question about making sure things are interoperable. OOXML doesn't even have a complete closed source implementation that can be blackbox tested for interoperability. Sorry, OOXML is late to the game and severely lacking in real world ability to seamlessly exchange interoperable documents.
...but we shouldn't deny reality, and that reality is that OOXML is in the direction of more open file formats.
In a vacuum.doc ->.docx is a step towards a more openness of file formats.
In context of the software market, however, MS was obviously not interested in making their format more open, but were afraid of adoption of ODF and so set out to create a competing format that was not as open, but could be marketed as such in the hopes of tricking some people into not moving as far towards openness. The very fact that MS was invited to participate and snubbed the standards body and waited until ODF was version 1.0 and implemented by dozens of other companies before coming out with OOXML, speaks to their intent. They don't want openness, but they are willing to provide a small amount if it can prevent people from moving even further that way. It is also probably criminal abuse of their monopoly against other software companies and projects. While I see your point, I don't see that criminally attacking fair trade with regard to those adopting truly open standards can be seen as move towards openness, regardless of how it might seem ignoring what has been happening in the industry.
Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market.
Or an other Open Source License can do the same.
True. Different licenses are ideal for different uses and companies tend to pick the ones that best fit their needs. Apple did not release their zeroconf implementation under the GPL, because that was too restrictive for other implementors compared to the BSD-like license they used. They could have insured more code would return to them as usable by using the GPL, but they cared more about getting the code out there and in use and promoting the protocol than they did about free dev work from others.
you mentioned LGPL which has less restriction then the GPL to allow better compatibility with BDS license code.
I assume you mean BSD? I guess it doesn't matter. The LGPL is less restricted than the GPL in that it allows linking to/from other code regardless of the license (closed, BSD, etc.).
They can use other licenses to get that same effect.
See my example above. They can't use other licenses to get the same effect unless the license is so similar to the GPL so as to be practically identical. Each license is ideal for a use, and most companies use a variety of them depending upon their needs and desires.
And for companies like Microsoft these other license will not work for them yet.
MS contributing to say, Blender, which is a GPL product will work just as well for MS as it will for Apple or RedHat. MS can use the GPL (and in fact has).
GPL version of Office Professional for free! How many suckers will buy that, very few. and microsoft years of development cost for that version go down the drain.
MS is unlikely to GPL Office anytime soon because it is not a license that will maximize their profit for that product. It is one of their core competencies. The GPL is ideal for making money or saving money by sharing development of items outside your competency/value. Office is one of MS's core competencies. If the market matures and GPL alternatives take over, however, MS could very well open source office as a way to retain market share and insure profits from products to which they have tied it. As for who would use it, plenty of enterprises and OEMs would bundle it and the enterprises would likely even pay MS for support and services.
People keep mentioning the "embrace, extent, extinguish strategy" yet lately microsoft has been mostly unsucessful at this.
Their ongoing extinguishing of Web technologies seems to be going strong and is one of their strongest lock-ins at this point. Their attempt to embrace PDF was stopped by the courts (or threat thereof because Adobe was smart about it). For companies and projects who haven't wised up though, it works just fine.
Microsoft isn't as powerful as it once was.
MS has lost very little market share in their core markets and has dominated several new markets in recent years while putting a huge dent in others. They're close to 50% of the server OS market, which would have been unthinkable 5 years ago. By my count, they're more powerful than ever.
. People are less afraid to say no I don't like your product and Ill use a competitor.
Umm, yeah and who is doing this? What markets are MS losing market share in? Note: this applies to paying markets not ones they use as incentives for other markets.
And when they make a product people will more often now take a wait and see. If this still worked with microsoft Google will be out.
MS has never dominated the online advertising market, but they have been working at it. It generally takes about four to six years to make a real dent by leveraging their other monopolies.
Things are intuitive only if their behavior is consistent. Reinforcement-learning is the basis of intuition.
I don't think so. We're hard wired to respond to certain stimulus we've never before encountered. More importantly, something is intuitive when it is similar to something we've already experienced (preferably a lot). This is different from being similar to other aspects of the same program (consistent).
For example, the tapedeck audio recoding software is intuitive to most users in that it is excessively similar to using one of those old tape recorders. The first time a person uses it, they are likely to be able to intuit how to record something. This has nothing to do with them having used other features of the software and it being consistent with them, because they haven't used any other features yet.
Consistent is having similar controls or workflows for different aspects of the program. Intuitive is being easily learnable, whether because it is similar to things we've learned in other aspects of our lives or other software or for other reasons entirely.
The problem is that, once people start using OO, Firefox, etc., they will eventually realize that they can run that exact same software on a free OS. The shock of changing the OS and the office suite is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.
The thing is, MS is only actively supporting OSS projects they don't have a competitor for. They are actively sabotaging projects they do compete with, including Firefox and OO.org. MS is making the fairly safe bet that people being able to use Blender on Linux and Windows won't allow many people at all to switch to Linux, since most will still need IE or MS Office or will be locked in by other software or services or formats.
With software with a large name such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple... GNU Open source will not be profitible for them because their competitive advantage is having a nitch in a market
Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market. Apple, for example regularly contributes to numerous GPL projects. They are the primary sponsor of (and copyright and trademark holder for) CUPS, for example. They are one of the largest (if not the largest) contributor to Webkit (LGPL). There are lots of other examples of GPL or very GPL-like licensed software from Apple, but those are two of the most widely used on other platforms. Make no mistake. Apple is making money by contributing to these projects because it makes their OS X based Macintosh computers better, while getting free contributions of code from others and being interoperable with them more easily.
They don't want GPL around. But they do see the value of open source however they need to protect their own asse(tt)s.
I disagree. Many large companies see the value of GPL software and are happy it exists as a way to make them money (or save them money). They do not, want to license all their code (especially their core competency) as GPL since they can make more money with other licensing models, but they do certainly recognize the value it provides them.
Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change, If you guys open up a bit and allow Microsoft to embrace open source to some extent then we all gain some more freedoms.
Microsoft embracing will lead to more freedoms eh? I think maybe you missed their embrace, extent, extinguish strategy, which they have successfully applied to kill many projects, thus reducing freedom. I'm not saying there is no place for MS in GPL software, only that it would be idiotic not to be very, very careful with such dealings and recognize that neither antitrust law nor the GPL is sufficient to protect user freedoms in the face of MS's criminal actions.
Over time if they see that being more open doesn't effect their competive edge and their money they will gradually get more open.
The danger is this allows MS to avoid having to compete with OSS, until they decide it is the right time to move, at which point it does not stop them from artificially breaking the GPL products and moving people to their own, closed source ones.
Now you might think this is something that's arguable, but no, not quite. Just like you wouldn't try to argue that a person can outrun a car at full speed, you can't argue that using the 3DsMax interface is faster than using Blender's.
But in some cases a person can outrun a car at full speed. For example, in a muddy pond, full speed might be less than 1 mph for a car. You present one example of one workflow, which is fine by itself; but that just demonstrates that Blender is faster for that one task, not for general use or for the use cases of a given individual. So while Blender might be faster in either of these cases, it is not "proved" by your example. A much more extensive usability test utilizing a larger sample is usually what would be required to be accepted within the scientific community that studies human-machine interfaces.
More intuitive? Maybe, how intuitive something is depends on who you are, what you know, where you've been, from how high you have been dropped on your head as a kid etc... Intuitiveness is so vague and different for each person it's not even worth bothering to argue about it.
The term "intuitive" has a specific meaning in terms of usability testing. It refers to how quickly a user can learn to perform given workflows without outside instruction. It is also sometimes called "learnability" or "learning curve". It is, however, only one aspect of usability and generally not a critically important one for most professional applications. For people who plan to use some software all day, every day, focusing on making tasks faster is usually more important than making them easier to learn.
Actually, the point is: if you learn a small subset of Blender's commands, all the rest is pretty intuitive to deduce, because all share the same concepts.
It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it.
In the user interface design field, the term "intuitive" is usually used to refer to the subset of usability also referred to as "learnability." Basically, the bigger the learning curve, the less intuitive.
Now poor learnability is not always a bad thing. In many interfaces there is a tradeoff between the learnability and speed and power once the user has overcome the learning curve. For home user applications learnability generally needs to be fairly high at the expense of other types of usability. For professional applications, it is usually less important since as an "expert" the user will take the time to learn the interface and it is more important to be fast and powerful once that has been accomplished.
It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".
It might be more efficient, but in terms of usability and UI design it is not more intuitive. But that's okay.
Actually, Microsoft's OSI licenses originally had different names, and OSI requested Microsoft rename them during the OSI approval process. The current names are OSI's doing.
When was the last time you heard an MS representative touting the benefits of the MS-RSL? Microsoft uses the term "shared source" in all their marketing literature and (as far as I know) the OSI had nothing to do with coining that term.
And please, these licenses are very short (much shorter than GPL) and are easy to understand (unlike GPL). If a dev can't tell the the difference between Ms-RL and Ms-LRL (the example used in the summary), even though both are only 3 paragraphs long, it's clear what the difference is, and Microsoft makes it clear which is OSI-approved and which is not, then he's an idiot to begin with. Nobody is going to be confused by these licenses.
You completely misunderstand who this is targeting. Developers may not be confused, but I doubt anyone but MS and a few partners will ever release anything under them. This is about confusing software purchasers. It is about convincing big adopters of some OS or server or application that MS's offerings will bring them the same benefits as code licensed under the GPL. Most purchasing agents and decision makers have only a vague idea of what benefits the GPL brings (security, cost) and even less understanding of how the license brings about those benefits.
Shared source is simply MS business as usual. It is the same as creating a format called 'Office Open XML' to describe a format specifically licensed in such a way as to remove most of the benefits brought about by truly open and free formats. They provide the appearance without the actual substance and try to confuse purchasers into not understanding the difference. It also allows public sector individuals plausible deniability. Sure we went with IIS, but we have a shared source license, so we get just the same security as Apache gets from the Apache license. It sounds plausible enough to the average voter or review board, or plausible enough so you don't get fired and your reelection coffers are now magically full.
That would satisfy most Slashdotters in terms of licensing To be honest, there's always a (very vocal) minority that's not going to be satisfied by anything other than auto-da-fe involving heaps of Windows CDs, and Gates and Ballmer themselves at the stake.
True, but to make this applicable we'd have to make it burning them at the stake and them distributing the video under a create commons license. On an unrelated note, auto-da-fe is a good word. Way to build my vocabulary.
Or expect that from others in combination with perjorative moderation. Believe it or not, someone can understand the issues involved and still disagree with you.
Sure they can disagree with me. But claiming there is some conspiracy to mod down their opinions is a bit lame. Mostly people are modded down when they deserve it for bringing up the same factually incorrect or emotive view that has been discussed over and over again. For the most part people that bring up the moderation system are people either trying to manipulate it by so doing, or who are just upset that most people think they are not only wrong, but willfully so and refusing to bring logic or facts into their posts.
Starting post by making claims about what the GPL "did" to the BSD license in some sort of anthropomorphism in conjunction with highly negative and opinionated descriptive terms (like 'draconian' and 'loudly tell') are very likely to get you modded down as a troll or flamebait. If your interest was not in eliciting a negative emotional response, there is no reason to use those specific terms. As such, the moderations seem fairly reasonable. The fact that you replied only to my brief comment on moderation while completely ignoring my lengthy discussion of the question you were supposedly interested in having answered, implies the same.
Note: that doesn't mean the question is not a useful one to ask or answer, which is why I replied to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. We (sort of) have them. Vista, OS X, and Linux are all shipping with Application level access control frameworks, by default, these days. The problem is getting it applied and getting a workable UI and workflow.
This doesn't have to be obvious, but when you install an app, the system needs to pop up a box before a single line of code is run giving options that the software is asking for.I think this is too cumbersome and too complex for the average user. Rather, I think we need to go further. Apps should ship with an ACL that specifies what it should need. Anti-malware companies and organizations should verify these and provide white lists and checksums. That way pre-installed and mainstream software will all run just fine without the user having to do anything. You can ask them about any applications missed by these whitelists, but while giving the user granular controls is great for power users, novice users should be given simpler templates for sandboxing apps and apps should be able to run in a very restricted sandbox without the user being bothered at all, only being asked if it wants to do something, like read/write existing files.
The other thing that would fix a lot of these things--put a bounty on finding & solving new viruii and on hacking into systems.This may or may not be a good thing. Each OS vendor should have some serious people working on this though. Also, this is the kind of thing that users can help out with. There is no reason users should not be able to report suspicious software to the OS vendor for review/blacklisting.
Really, I think a lot of the problem here is one of motivation. Microsoft doesn't want to put any work in because malware probably nets them more sales than it loses them (people buying new computers with a new copy of Windows to replace their infected machine). Other OS vendors have motivation to keep users happy, but for the most part users don't have a malware problem yet, so haven't done the hard work of developing the GUI and adapting applications to be better behaved and more self contained (which MS could then copy).
Fair use is vague, but in the general case, no it would not. Maybe if you were using it for demonstrating how such things are copied in a public school.
Remember that you are also making a copy of music when you play a CD, as the bits are read off of the CD and into the buffer. Also, it seems as though format shifting is considered fair use, though I don't think that this has been tested.This one at least passes one of the big 4 of fair use, in its effect upon the market. The law so far has been pretty good with precedent here that such "ephemeral" copies were acceptable, although a few judges have weighed in on the other side claiming even those constitute copyright violation.
This would violate the common law tradition of "implied warranty" or "warranty of fitness".Indeed it does and possibly fall afoul of a number of laws on the books. This has, however, been poorly tested in the courts with them going both ways on it.
But you copied it from Slashdot's servers to your own cache and a bunch of routers in between.I didn't. The network operators did. They are protected by their (pseudo) common carrier status.
You made at least one copy to your framebuffer.Again, an ephemeral copy. as per the example above. It goes away in short order (or becomes invisible to the average users anyway).
You shouldn't have read my post if you didn't agree.It is similar, but not the same in the fundamental way that you were trying to restrict viewing, instead of copying... and the forms of copying that took place inherently have been pretty well established to be legal or have concretely been established so.
I'm putting arbitrary restrictions on you even though there is no justification for doing so.Except in the case of the EULA, they do have a legal right, copyright granted by the government. and it is presented before the infringement takes place.
If I didn't want you to read my post I wouldn't have posted it for you to read. If Apple didn't want me to run their software, they wouldn't have sold it to me. Common sense.Except Apple only wants you to make copies in specific circumstances and the law grants them that right, or possibly does depending upon how the courts end up o the issue of EULAs. The practical take away is, unless you have a lot of money for a legal defense, you'd be an idiot to think you have no chance of being prosecuted if you ignore the EULA and Apple is going to tie their OS and hardware, so if they ever do lose on the EULA issue they'll just change their means of restriction to some less user friendly. Heck, all they have to do is put a waring on the outside of the box, or stop selling disks retail and only sell upgrades as a Web service.
I see so all x86 hardware is exactly the same. A computer from HP that has twice the failure rate in the first year as a machine from Lenovo is in no way distinct and we should all ignore the individual specs and reliability ratings of hardware. Do you happen to work for Dell?
The only difference is that there is a very short list of Apple produced combinations.Every hardware vendor sells a very short list of combinations. Apple actually sells more variations than several companies with much larger market share than they have (such as Asus).
It's the same guts, the same audio chips, the same northbridge chips and so on.Some vendors, such as Sony and Lenovo buy only hardware that meets certain standards. To them a 250Gb hard drive from one vendor and another are very different things. To other vendors, such as Dell's desktop division, a 250Gb hard drive is the same as all the others and they'll buy whoever is selling the cheapest one today, regardless of how often they fail or how long they last. They don't test it extensively and often you don't even know what will be in the machine you get (and it may not be the same across all the machines you buy at the same time). This cuts the price, but it also makes for a crappier machine.
My post was pointing out that if you compare Apple to vendors who have similar (even up to 50% worse) failure rates, you'll find very little difference in price as several reputable reviewers have pointed out. Buy a subscription to Consumer Reports already.
Other PC's can and do stand the test of time.Some do and some don't. The ones that are significantly cheaper than Apple, tend to be the ones that don't.
An IBM 945 is the same whether or not it comes in a machine with an Apple logo on it or a Dell logo.Yeah it is. But Lenovo machines are actually similar in price to Apple machines. They also have different power supplies hard drives, USB controllers, Webcams, and hundreds of other parts. If you buy a machine with quality parts, you pay for it, whether that is an Apple or a Sony or a Lenovo.
Apple, like most big software producers, creates both free and open software as well as closed software. Their OS itself is not free, nor would it be a good way for them to profit if it was. A lot of the individual components of it (Darwin) are free though and you can install them anywhere you want.
It would have been a very interesting move if Apple had created and released OS X under the GPL. It sure would have been a significant blow to MS's monopoly. That said, developing OS X costs Apple a lot of money and that money has to come from somewhere. I'd like to think they'd still be doing well (maybe even better) with hardware sales and support and that OS X would have brought even more advancement to OS innovation via contributions and improvements from the OSS community as well as new hardware companies who could use it as well. That said, I'm not convinced that would be the case. Apple may well be dead had they tried it and we'd all have one less option and MS would have 97% of the market instead of 90%, giving them just that much more power to break Linux with incompatibilities.
Anyway, arguing Apple is not even near the starting line for free software is very misguided. They are not exclusively a free software company (as we might wish in pipe dreams) but they are a big contributor to free software and the primary supporter of several important projects like WebKit and CUPS.
Just a quick note. You have a lot of assertions, but I bet Apple has a lot of formal studies on what the market wants. While you may want a given machine and while a lot of people on Slashdot may want it to, that doesn't mean it is the most profitable hardware niche for Apple to enter next. They've been doing pretty well so far. Their latest, the MacBook Air is something I don't want and most people on Slashdot think is useless junk. It's also been sold out in many locations for about 6 months now.
As a second note, your assertions about desktops versus laptops is well, not the way the industry is going. For office use and home use, the desktop has been slowly dying for several years now.
Apple used to be a computer hardware company. They branched out and now sell significant amounts of pro software, music players, and smart phones.
They could change their revenue models and sell their OS without tying it to their OS. Mind you it would be economic suicide so long as MS holds a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they could do it. I would argue, in fact, they'd be pretty much forced to do it if the OS market were restored to a free, capitalist market.
Still, right now Apple develops OS X to profit on complete computer systems including hardware and software. If they can't tie them, their OS development is just an expense with no profit involved.
And Apple just counts its cash reserves since they don't compete in most areas that Microsoft tends to. There is happy crossover with, say, Office 2008 for Mac, but generally Apple and Microsoft are different worlds.Actually, Apple is a threat to MS, chipping away at their desktop OS install base, as well as several other key MS technologies. Apple, on the other hand, is very much affected by what MS makes, since they can use any market they enter to lock out Apple users, thus reducing Apple's sales. That is why Apple entered the portable music player business in the first place. In order to survive they must commit to entering every market MS threatens to monopolize, or find partners who will and who cannot be bought out by MS. It is a very precarious place for Apple and a situation no other company wants to place itself in. Apple would never have willingly entered it, but already had competing products when MS took over and was unwilling to abandon those markets.
EULAs have some history of prosecution both successful and not. Be careful of which state or country you are in unless you have millions for a legal defense.
Just because Apple says you can't do what you want with the software you have bought doesn't necessarily mean it is not legal to do so.Ahh, but copyright law does limit what you can do with software you have bought, specifically, if you can make a copy of it on your computer's hard drive (for example). There is a very strong legal case for needing a license of some sort in order to make such a copy and sans agreeing with their EULA, making copies is arguably illegal.
However it most certainly is illegal to install pirated commercial software."Pirating" commercial software is simply making a copy without permission from the copyright holder. It is called copyright infringement. Apple selling you a Mac OS X install DVD does not implicitly grant you the right to copy that DVD and more than Adobe selling you a Photoshop install DVD grants you the right to make copies of it and give them to your friends. They are both (arguably) copyright infringement.
When you buy an Apple computer, it comes pre-installed, so there is not any issue of making a copy that could be a violation, but neither does that mean you can install it on other Macs or generic hardware, since those are no different from photocopying a book you bought (something illegal since the 70's sans fair use clauses). Now there are real arguments for personal copies and it is more complex if you buy a retail OS X DVD without a computer given that it may fall afoul other laws for Apple to restrict you in that regard (although this has never been upheld by the courts).
In short, just because you buy copyrighted material, does not mean you can make copies of it and any such action is very questionable legally, unless you have a specific license from the copyright holder.
Legally I find EULAs to be very questionable. However, if EULAs are ever made illegitimate, all it will do is make it harder for Mac users. Apple will switch to a different, legal method of tying their hardware and software, one that is probably more annoying.
I do, however, recognize their copyright. So I'll buy a copy to respect copyright, and then install it wherever I damn well please.I'm not sure you are understanding how copyright works. Buying a DVD with OS X on it does not necessarily give you the right to make an additional copy of the OS on your computer's hardware. Only Apple has that right to make a copy and if you want to make use of it, legally, there is a lot of support for you needing some sort of a license from Apple. If they don't give you one, your purchase is pretty useless.
That said, I'm not above copyright infringement either. The RIAA will not see a penny of my money.I'm the last one to defend the RIAA. I have no problem if you want to go find them, burn down their houses, blow up their cars, and force them to eat their own feet. That said, it hurts the RIAA more to simply not listen to music that they hold copyrights for and instead support independent music. It is harder to find good indy music since it is less widely marketed, but their is plenty of it that is better than most of the tripe the RIAA is peddling.
That ought to hold up in court, eh?No. I don't need permission to read a post you published. I need permission to make a copy of it... except in the instance of fair use, such as quoting your post in a post of my own, where your copyright is specifically limited by law. In the case of Apple's license, there is a real exchange. The licensee (you) is granted the right to copy the OS onto one Apple branded computer and the licensor(Apple) is given money and the promise that you will not take certain actions.
EULAs are messed up and our copyright needs serious reform, but if you plan to argue against the principals you should probably do a little more research to better understand the real problems.
The average user doesn't care why it just works, they just care that it does.
Where's the ability to use brand-new hardware? Where's the ability to make whatever modifications you wish to the computer and then simply download a driver for it (easily, I mean)?For the most part, this is up to third parties. If third parties write drivers for their new hardware (whatever it is) than it will work, regardless of the OS.
Yes, I know Linux often has trouble supporting new hardware, but that's simply the nature of open-source: things take time.Actually I disagree. Linux has little market share and that is why they have driver problems. You don't honestly think Microsoft writes all the drivers to make all the hardware in the world work do you? They don't have to. The hardware makers write the Windows drivers because otherwise they don't have a market for their devices. They'll do whatever it takes, including altering the hardware itself to make it run on Windows. It is the state of the OS market that keeps them from doing the same for Linux, not the fact that it is OSS. Apple is somewhere in between. They have more market share and more hardware vendors write drivers for them, and Apple supports a limited amount of hardware themselves (like Linux does).
Given all this, I don't understand why people insist on hacking the Mac for use on PCs. Why not use Linux?I use Linux and OS X on the desktop daily and so have significant experience with both. The reason a lot of people prefer OS X is because it is simply better at certain tasks than Linux is. Some of this is because of the state of the industry (market share) and some of it is because of real features that work on OS X and don't on Linux. Basically people want to run OS X and don't mind hacking a lot to get it to work. If they wanted the most pleasant experience (as in the least work to do) they'd probably just buy a Mac instead of hacking because of the time and effort required. Some people like hacking things to get them working. Some people already have hardware, but don't want to go back to Linux after having become accustomed to OS X, so they look for a way to make it happen.
Please note, the number of people who hack generic hardware to run OS X is tiny. There will always be a tiny number of people that do something different and impractical.
I agree Apple's hardware can stand on its own merits. Their OS, however, cannot. The desktop OS market is monopolized and as such, entering directly into it is a lost cause. It doesn't matter if OS X is superior to Windows because MS's monopoly can introduce artificial problems with OS X by making it incompatible with 90% of OS's in use. As such, Apple realistic choices are to tie their OS and hardware sales together, or abandon their OS and stop developing it.
Allow me to add perspective to your largely correct assertion:
Similarly powerful PCs cost 1/2 as much as a Sony does, in almost all areas. I use the term "similarly powerful" on the basis of framerate testing and how fast it can do on CPU heavy projects like folding@home
You can buy a cheap, low reliability system with the features other than CPU stripped out for less than a machine with lots of features designed for real users who do more than run a folding@home farm in the basement. When you compare machines based upon all their specs, including reliability, Apple is pretty much in line with other premium vendors who come close to the same levels of features and reliability based upon independent testing like Consumer Reports.
In short, Apple offers reasonable prices on their hardware, they just don't have a wide selection of hardware compared to all other hardware vendors combined. As a result, if you're looking for a machine to meet your specific needs (like headless folding@home servers), you will probably be able to find something more exactly suited to your needs elsewhere and may save money by not paying for features that you don't need.
You could say that, but in so doing you have to introduce a second interface with which it is consistent, in order for it to make sense. Since absolutely everything is consistent with thousands of other things, referring to a UI as "consistent" but not naming what it is consistent with, makes no sense. Thus in terms of UI design, "consistent" refers to consistent within the interface, not with some other random interface. Being "consistent" with other user interfaces that people understand and are familiar with is one way of being "intuitive" and is referred to as such to avoid just the type of confusion you're trying to introduce to defend your mistake.
Making a button bright red, while the rest of a UI is a neutral color will work even if the user has never used a user interface that uses such a technique. We're hard wired to respond to it and our blood pressure goes up when we see it. This is intuitive, but need not be consistent with anything. Thus intuitive and consistent are not synonyms in this usage.
Apparently you are discussing Slashdot Microsoft, the borg like all powerful and sinister company that dominates the computer industry and crushes innovation.
I'm discussing Microsoft from the perspective of someone who has to work in the computing industry and has a good generally understanding of the negative affects of monopolies. Why is it that the Web is using outrageously complicated work arounds in order to perform really common functions? Oh yeah, because MS controls the lions share of the Web because of their abusive tying of Windows and IE. As a result the entire Web is stuck using half implemented six to ten year old versions of standards.
I could present a dozen other examples of how innovation has ground to a halt. It has been over a decade since the first OS implemented a spell checker that worked in all the programs instead of making them all implement it separately. What percentage of users have that capability today? What one company has dominated the desktop OS field and felt it unimportant to implement as a innovation?
I was thinking about the Microsoft that my friend worked at a few years ago, where the culture was so entrenched with "eating their own dog food" that few in the company were exposed to anything else that is going on in the computer world.
Please. I've worked with lots of former MS employees, from people who were recruited out of college and had little exposure to other technologies from MS, to people who were senior engineers and know more about UNIX than I ever will.
The vaporware/FUD style of killing competition that Slashdot Microsoft does was generally a result of marketing not understanding engineering, making engineering look bad.
Enough internal communications from MS has been exposed at this point that it is clear monopoly abuse is their business strategy and they don't care if that slows innovation in the industry or results in worse products getting into the hands of consumers, so long as it makes them more money.
But I was also talking about MSFT, the lackluster performing stock that has failed to deliver share holder value in years.
MS's stock has been doing fine. Their growth is slowing because their business model of explosive growth via monopoly abuse now takes longer because they're going after bigger, less connected markets.
The founder whose killer instincts led it to crush the competition leveraging each business has left to go fight diseases in Africa, and his replacement is his college drinking buddy that looks like a big fat baffoon mostly mocked as a chair thrower.
Who cares. They haven't stopped breaking the law. They haven't changed their strategy at all to date.
Your Microsoft conspiracy makes sense... but the incompetence theory makes sense as well. They could have meant well, decided on an open standard, had marketing gum up the process and declare everything a lock down to avoid FUD/anti-trust issues, that surfaced with their exciting new standard that they were stunned that nobody wanted.
Anyone who has gone to law school would be able to tell them their introduction of OOXML after ODF came into use, was likely to cause them legal problems. MS has more lawyers on staff than pretty much anyone. MS has demonstrated again and again that breaking the law, reducing choice, slowing innovation, and hurting consumers are all perfectly acceptable to them, so long as their is a business case for it. There is no way you can claim MS is ignorant of their antitrust abuses at this stage in the game. They've been convicted again and again. They paid half a billion dollars settling out a huge lawsuit about a very similar abuse with MS Office to avoid it being declared a monopoly. There is no way they could be ignorant of the illegality of their actions and their are memos about how they were counting on the affects of said actions to make things harder for
If it results in file incompatibility or rendering differences in between documents from MSWord and those opened by other programs, then it doesn't matter if it is listed as "deprecated" or "optional" or "monkey poo." It still is preventing the interoperability truly open standards are designed to remove.
There are more holes in ODF than OOXML. I'm not terribly fond of OOXML, but frankly they got it more right than ODF has.ODF has a working, open source reference implementation. While the standard as written has a few snags, it's not like developers can't and don't just look to see how OO.org and Workplace did it if there is any question about making sure things are interoperable. OOXML doesn't even have a complete closed source implementation that can be blackbox tested for interoperability. Sorry, OOXML is late to the game and severely lacking in real world ability to seamlessly exchange interoperable documents.
...but we shouldn't deny reality, and that reality is that OOXML is in the direction of more open file formats.In a vacuum .doc -> .docx is a step towards a more openness of file formats.
In context of the software market, however, MS was obviously not interested in making their format more open, but were afraid of adoption of ODF and so set out to create a competing format that was not as open, but could be marketed as such in the hopes of tricking some people into not moving as far towards openness. The very fact that MS was invited to participate and snubbed the standards body and waited until ODF was version 1.0 and implemented by dozens of other companies before coming out with OOXML, speaks to their intent. They don't want openness, but they are willing to provide a small amount if it can prevent people from moving even further that way. It is also probably criminal abuse of their monopoly against other software companies and projects. While I see your point, I don't see that criminally attacking fair trade with regard to those adopting truly open standards can be seen as move towards openness, regardless of how it might seem ignoring what has been happening in the industry.
Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market.
Or an other Open Source License can do the same.
True. Different licenses are ideal for different uses and companies tend to pick the ones that best fit their needs. Apple did not release their zeroconf implementation under the GPL, because that was too restrictive for other implementors compared to the BSD-like license they used. They could have insured more code would return to them as usable by using the GPL, but they cared more about getting the code out there and in use and promoting the protocol than they did about free dev work from others.
you mentioned LGPL which has less restriction then the GPL to allow better compatibility with BDS license code.
I assume you mean BSD? I guess it doesn't matter. The LGPL is less restricted than the GPL in that it allows linking to/from other code regardless of the license (closed, BSD, etc.).
They can use other licenses to get that same effect.
See my example above. They can't use other licenses to get the same effect unless the license is so similar to the GPL so as to be practically identical. Each license is ideal for a use, and most companies use a variety of them depending upon their needs and desires.
And for companies like Microsoft these other license will not work for them yet.
MS contributing to say, Blender, which is a GPL product will work just as well for MS as it will for Apple or RedHat. MS can use the GPL (and in fact has).
GPL version of Office Professional for free! How many suckers will buy that, very few. and microsoft years of development cost for that version go down the drain.
MS is unlikely to GPL Office anytime soon because it is not a license that will maximize their profit for that product. It is one of their core competencies. The GPL is ideal for making money or saving money by sharing development of items outside your competency/value. Office is one of MS's core competencies. If the market matures and GPL alternatives take over, however, MS could very well open source office as a way to retain market share and insure profits from products to which they have tied it. As for who would use it, plenty of enterprises and OEMs would bundle it and the enterprises would likely even pay MS for support and services.
People keep mentioning the "embrace, extent, extinguish strategy" yet lately microsoft has been mostly unsucessful at this.
Their ongoing extinguishing of Web technologies seems to be going strong and is one of their strongest lock-ins at this point. Their attempt to embrace PDF was stopped by the courts (or threat thereof because Adobe was smart about it). For companies and projects who haven't wised up though, it works just fine.
Microsoft isn't as powerful as it once was.
MS has lost very little market share in their core markets and has dominated several new markets in recent years while putting a huge dent in others. They're close to 50% of the server OS market, which would have been unthinkable 5 years ago. By my count, they're more powerful than ever.
. People are less afraid to say no I don't like your product and Ill use a competitor.
Umm, yeah and who is doing this? What markets are MS losing market share in? Note: this applies to paying markets not ones they use as incentives for other markets.
And when they make a product people will more often now take a wait and see. If this still worked with microsoft Google will be out.
MS has never dominated the online advertising market, but they have been working at it. It generally takes about four to six years to make a real dent by leveraging their other monopolies.
As well the
I don't think so. We're hard wired to respond to certain stimulus we've never before encountered. More importantly, something is intuitive when it is similar to something we've already experienced (preferably a lot). This is different from being similar to other aspects of the same program (consistent).
For example, the tapedeck audio recoding software is intuitive to most users in that it is excessively similar to using one of those old tape recorders. The first time a person uses it, they are likely to be able to intuit how to record something. This has nothing to do with them having used other features of the software and it being consistent with them, because they haven't used any other features yet.
Consistent is having similar controls or workflows for different aspects of the program. Intuitive is being easily learnable, whether because it is similar to things we've learned in other aspects of our lives or other software or for other reasons entirely.
The thing is, MS is only actively supporting OSS projects they don't have a competitor for. They are actively sabotaging projects they do compete with, including Firefox and OO.org. MS is making the fairly safe bet that people being able to use Blender on Linux and Windows won't allow many people at all to switch to Linux, since most will still need IE or MS Office or will be locked in by other software or services or formats.
Actually, GNU Open Source can benefit these players by filling holes and reducing costs for developing software that is not their core market. Apple, for example regularly contributes to numerous GPL projects. They are the primary sponsor of (and copyright and trademark holder for) CUPS, for example. They are one of the largest (if not the largest) contributor to Webkit (LGPL). There are lots of other examples of GPL or very GPL-like licensed software from Apple, but those are two of the most widely used on other platforms. Make no mistake. Apple is making money by contributing to these projects because it makes their OS X based Macintosh computers better, while getting free contributions of code from others and being interoperable with them more easily.
They don't want GPL around. But they do see the value of open source however they need to protect their own asse(tt)s.I disagree. Many large companies see the value of GPL software and are happy it exists as a way to make them money (or save them money). They do not, want to license all their code (especially their core competency) as GPL since they can make more money with other licensing models, but they do certainly recognize the value it provides them.
Now if you guys keep taking a hard line on this nothing will change, If you guys open up a bit and allow Microsoft to embrace open source to some extent then we all gain some more freedoms.Microsoft embracing will lead to more freedoms eh? I think maybe you missed their embrace, extent, extinguish strategy, which they have successfully applied to kill many projects, thus reducing freedom. I'm not saying there is no place for MS in GPL software, only that it would be idiotic not to be very, very careful with such dealings and recognize that neither antitrust law nor the GPL is sufficient to protect user freedoms in the face of MS's criminal actions.
Over time if they see that being more open doesn't effect their competive edge and their money they will gradually get more open.The danger is this allows MS to avoid having to compete with OSS, until they decide it is the right time to move, at which point it does not stop them from artificially breaking the GPL products and moving people to their own, closed source ones.
But in some cases a person can outrun a car at full speed. For example, in a muddy pond, full speed might be less than 1 mph for a car. You present one example of one workflow, which is fine by itself; but that just demonstrates that Blender is faster for that one task, not for general use or for the use cases of a given individual. So while Blender might be faster in either of these cases, it is not "proved" by your example. A much more extensive usability test utilizing a larger sample is usually what would be required to be accepted within the scientific community that studies human-machine interfaces.
More intuitive? Maybe, how intuitive something is depends on who you are, what you know, where you've been, from how high you have been dropped on your head as a kid etc... Intuitiveness is so vague and different for each person it's not even worth bothering to argue about it.The term "intuitive" has a specific meaning in terms of usability testing. It refers to how quickly a user can learn to perform given workflows without outside instruction. It is also sometimes called "learnability" or "learning curve". It is, however, only one aspect of usability and generally not a critically important one for most professional applications. For people who plan to use some software all day, every day, focusing on making tasks faster is usually more important than making them easier to learn.
This is called "consistent" not "intuitive".
In the user interface design field, the term "intuitive" is usually used to refer to the subset of usability also referred to as "learnability." Basically, the bigger the learning curve, the less intuitive.
Now poor learnability is not always a bad thing. In many interfaces there is a tradeoff between the learnability and speed and power once the user has overcome the learning curve. For home user applications learnability generally needs to be fairly high at the expense of other types of usability. For professional applications, it is usually less important since as an "expert" the user will take the time to learn the interface and it is more important to be fast and powerful once that has been accomplished.
It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".It might be more efficient, but in terms of usability and UI design it is not more intuitive. But that's okay.
When was the last time you heard an MS representative touting the benefits of the MS-RSL? Microsoft uses the term "shared source" in all their marketing literature and (as far as I know) the OSI had nothing to do with coining that term.
And please, these licenses are very short (much shorter than GPL) and are easy to understand (unlike GPL). If a dev can't tell the the difference between Ms-RL and Ms-LRL (the example used in the summary), even though both are only 3 paragraphs long, it's clear what the difference is, and Microsoft makes it clear which is OSI-approved and which is not, then he's an idiot to begin with. Nobody is going to be confused by these licenses.You completely misunderstand who this is targeting. Developers may not be confused, but I doubt anyone but MS and a few partners will ever release anything under them. This is about confusing software purchasers. It is about convincing big adopters of some OS or server or application that MS's offerings will bring them the same benefits as code licensed under the GPL. Most purchasing agents and decision makers have only a vague idea of what benefits the GPL brings (security, cost) and even less understanding of how the license brings about those benefits.
Shared source is simply MS business as usual. It is the same as creating a format called 'Office Open XML' to describe a format specifically licensed in such a way as to remove most of the benefits brought about by truly open and free formats. They provide the appearance without the actual substance and try to confuse purchasers into not understanding the difference. It also allows public sector individuals plausible deniability. Sure we went with IIS, but we have a shared source license, so we get just the same security as Apache gets from the Apache license. It sounds plausible enough to the average voter or review board, or plausible enough so you don't get fired and your reelection coffers are now magically full.
True, but to make this applicable we'd have to make it burning them at the stake and them distributing the video under a create commons license. On an unrelated note, auto-da-fe is a good word. Way to build my vocabulary.
Sure they can disagree with me. But claiming there is some conspiracy to mod down their opinions is a bit lame. Mostly people are modded down when they deserve it for bringing up the same factually incorrect or emotive view that has been discussed over and over again. For the most part people that bring up the moderation system are people either trying to manipulate it by so doing, or who are just upset that most people think they are not only wrong, but willfully so and refusing to bring logic or facts into their posts.
Starting post by making claims about what the GPL "did" to the BSD license in some sort of anthropomorphism in conjunction with highly negative and opinionated descriptive terms (like 'draconian' and 'loudly tell') are very likely to get you modded down as a troll or flamebait. If your interest was not in eliciting a negative emotional response, there is no reason to use those specific terms. As such, the moderations seem fairly reasonable. The fact that you replied only to my brief comment on moderation while completely ignoring my lengthy discussion of the question you were supposedly interested in having answered, implies the same.
Note: that doesn't mean the question is not a useful one to ask or answer, which is why I replied to it.