You do what film gimp and Jahshaka are investigating. You contact potential users in a market dominated by absurd licensing fees and restrictive EULA's and see if they would be interested in donating to a technology with potential to free them from that burden. E.G. Film Companies and Special effects studios. A lot of them already pay programmers to write custom stuff. All it takes is a few studios with vision.
After reading all the comments and being a linux user for over 10 years now. I'd have to say the problem with Unix (on the linux side) is the perspective of the application developers. For instance all the complaints about filesystem hierarchy and installation standards come because of one very simple reason. The developers leave package managment up to the distributor. Developers of an application by and large don't bother to come up with an cross platform installation for their app. Consequently the distro's come up with their own. If KDE and Gnome had a downloadable install that worked on every system and worked the same way then you would have standardization across distro's. The same thing goes for upgrading. Applications would be able to upgrade across platforms. Ditto for uninstalls. when Each distro does it a different way it becomes unmanageable. It should really be the developers responsiblity to handle installing the application not the distributors. Until developers take responsibility for managing their installs the problem will be difficult to fix. They are the only ones in a real position to set a standard for their app.
Accepting the premise of your argument it should be possible to take a group of chihuahas and breed a wolf. Something any dog breeder will tell you is not possible.
Another example is the many dog breeds that experience health problems. This is called inbreeding. We discourage the practice of sister and brother marrying and having kids. Why is that? The reason is that the kids have a habit of being malformed and unhealthy. The generally accepted reason for this is the close similarity of their parents genetic makeup. They quite simply don't have enough genetic material between them to have a fully viable and healthy child. They may have the same number of Genes but the amount of useable DNA has decreased. I suppose I should amend my previous statement to state that the chaos of the system has increased. The amount of useable information has decreased in the DNA. Think of it as Thermodynamics applied to Genetic systems.
How about all those people insisting evolution be taught in school, as it also "is not a scientific theory". It while having predictive power has no practical predictions you can make, Offers no true explanation for existence, nor can it be tested. Therefore I hereby nominate Evolution to be put in the philosophy religion and/or sociology class.
* note: I speak here about Macro not Micro evolution, which is a fundamentally different process. Macro evolution in the biological sense requires introducing new information and complexity into the system. Micro evolution involves losing information or complexity in the system. eg. wolves, german shephards and chihuaha's are an example of micro evolution. They all exist because certain "traits" or genetic information were bred out of them. A LOSS of information. Macro evolution is going from single cell single strand of DNA to multicellular multistrand dna forms. The Addition of information. Micro is provable Macro is not.
Actually if you read the whole article He is working on a mirrorless version too. it just aims the fiber directly at your eye. Of course resolutions is still dependent on the accuracy of your steering. Also I believe he does not steer the mirror itself just the laser which would accomplish the same result.
My absolute favourite MMO game "Shattered Galaxy" Followed this approach. An open beta while the game was being polished. They got an huge playerbase doing that and most of them went pay after release. People don't expect perfect games in beta and you can build a playerbase. Shattered Galaxy is hands down the best MMO rpg/rts you can play. In no small part because of the community and the smooth gameplay. They took their time and polished the game all the while using the beta to build a base of players.
It's UI is completely done in opengl and the library (Ghost) hasn't been mentioned. The blender developers wrote it when Glut didn't quite fit the bill for them.
CFCs? Ok, guess you never heard of those. CFCs only managed to destroy the ozone layer. True, the "hole" is over Antarctica, but ozone has thinned *everywhere*
some facts please? that is an unsupported statement. I'm not saying that it is necessarily wrong but if your going to say stuff like that then you better support it eith actual data.
And on the subject of it being a cyclical phenomenon. This has as much validity as CFC's causing the shrinkage. the fact of the matter is we simply haven't observed the hole for a long enough time to know what is normal behavior and not. A few decades of observing atmospheric phenomena is no where near enough data for accurate models. Heck we can't even predict tornado behavior with any kind of precision. Gloom and doom predictions on such little data is little more than scare tactics.
Granted taking steps to prevent possible future damage is good responsible behavior even before we know for sure. But I resent folks speaking of this stuff as if it was "fact" when it's really still speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
You do what film gimp and Jahshaka are investigating. You contact potential users in a market dominated by absurd licensing fees and restrictive EULA's and see if they would be interested in donating to a technology with potential to free them from that burden. E.G. Film Companies and Special effects studios. A lot of them already pay programmers to write custom stuff. All it takes is a few studios with vision.
After reading all the comments and being a linux user for over 10 years now. I'd have to say the problem with Unix (on the linux side) is the perspective of the application developers. For instance all the complaints about filesystem hierarchy and installation standards come because of one very simple reason. The developers leave package managment up to the distributor. Developers of an application by and large don't bother to come up with an cross platform installation for their app. Consequently the distro's come up with their own. If KDE and Gnome had a downloadable install that worked on every system and worked the same way then you would have standardization across distro's. The same thing goes for upgrading. Applications would be able to upgrade across platforms. Ditto for uninstalls. when Each distro does it a different way it becomes unmanageable. It should really be the developers responsiblity to handle installing the application not the distributors. Until developers take responsibility for managing their installs the problem will be difficult to fix. They are the only ones in a real position to set a standard for their app.
Accepting the premise of your argument it should be possible to take a group of chihuahas and breed a wolf. Something any dog breeder will tell you is not possible. Another example is the many dog breeds that experience health problems. This is called inbreeding. We discourage the practice of sister and brother marrying and having kids. Why is that? The reason is that the kids have a habit of being malformed and unhealthy. The generally accepted reason for this is the close similarity of their parents genetic makeup. They quite simply don't have enough genetic material between them to have a fully viable and healthy child. They may have the same number of Genes but the amount of useable DNA has decreased. I suppose I should amend my previous statement to state that the chaos of the system has increased. The amount of useable information has decreased in the DNA. Think of it as Thermodynamics applied to Genetic systems.
How about all those people insisting evolution be taught in school, as it also "is not a scientific theory". It while having predictive power has no practical predictions you can make, Offers no true explanation for existence, nor can it be tested. Therefore I hereby nominate Evolution to be put in the philosophy religion and/or sociology class. * note: I speak here about Macro not Micro evolution, which is a fundamentally different process. Macro evolution in the biological sense requires introducing new information and complexity into the system. Micro evolution involves losing information or complexity in the system. eg. wolves, german shephards and chihuaha's are an example of micro evolution. They all exist because certain "traits" or genetic information were bred out of them. A LOSS of information. Macro evolution is going from single cell single strand of DNA to multicellular multistrand dna forms. The Addition of information. Micro is provable Macro is not.
Actually if you read the whole article He is working on a mirrorless version too. it just aims the fiber directly at your eye. Of course resolutions is still dependent on the accuracy of your steering. Also I believe he does not steer the mirror itself just the laser which would accomplish the same result.
My absolute favourite MMO game "Shattered Galaxy" Followed this approach. An open beta while the game was being polished. They got an huge playerbase doing that and most of them went pay after release. People don't expect perfect games in beta and you can build a playerbase. Shattered Galaxy is hands down the best MMO rpg/rts you can play. In no small part because of the community and the smooth gameplay. They took their time and polished the game all the while using the beta to build a base of players.
It's UI is completely done in opengl and the library (Ghost) hasn't been mentioned. The blender developers wrote it when Glut didn't quite fit the bill for them.
Blender