In economics (game theory specifically, I suppose), there are a few different models of oligopoly (which pretty accurately describes the gaming card market, being that it only has two major contenders).
One model predicts that if you have 2 firms, you get the same effects as perfect competition (infinite, infinitely small firms, more or less). However, that model makes some relatively unrealistic assumptions (which I forget at the moment, but I could probably find if really necessary; something to do with firms instantaneously setting prices at the same time and consumers unilaterally choosing the lower price).
A somewhat more realistic model predicts that the final price depends on the number of firms in the market. In the one-company limit, it tends toward monopoly pricing, whereas in the infinite limit, it tends toward a perfect competition price.
In other words, 2 firms isn't 'enough' competition to prevent artificially high prices. So count all you want, but 2 firms doesn't necessarily mean, "well, we've got all the competition we need."
Any card can drive a 2048x1536 display if all you're doing is relatively static desktop stuff (check the specs).
But not even a vacuum cleaner video card will play Doom 3 at that resolution today. And as soon as you create a quiet, low-power card that can handle Doom 3 at that resolution, someone will write a game that only runs at 800x600 at 10 fps on that card, and you'll need to buy a newer card.
Which are you asking for? You can get a quiet card that will drive a big-ass display, but don't expect it to play the latest and greatest 3D games on it. Those are designed to run crappily on even the leaf blowers, so that they can take advantage of the yet-to-be-released generation of cards.
Care to be specific? KPDF renders all PDFs I've ever tried fine. If you have some that don't, then perhaps you should post bug reports and let the developers know what isn't working. That way the bugs can get fixed, and you won't have to sit around bitching on Slashdot (which helps exactly no one) anymore.
Are you saying that people who believe in religion don't use it as a basis for a positive outlook on life?
Or are you saying that people who have faith in a religion or something similar should not be called 'faithful'?
Or are you saying that believing that in the future, we will live in an egalitarian society without poverty is somehow fundamentally different than believing that the universe was created/is guided by a benevolent, omnipotent entity?
That is incorrect. There are 100% open source drivers for several 3D video cards. See DRI.
Yes, and for cards that can actually play relatively new games, there are no acceptable open source drivers. That solution is growing increasingly unacceptable. Your closest shot might be a Matrox Parhelia (I believe Matrox has 100% open drivers), but that had trouble shaping up to compete within its own generation of cards, let alone two generations later.
No, my position is that the long-term success of Linux depends on the distribution remaining open source.
Which distribution? Just one of them?
What if all the distributions are 100% open source, and people are able to download and install binary nVidia drivers separately? Does that totally fuck up Linux in every which way?
Or are you arguing that the existence of a binary driver will magically make Linux proprietary; that people will suddenly stop writing open source drivers because some proprietary drivers are available? Why then are people still writing open source drivers for nforce components, then, when nvidia offers binary drivers? Just because some people can be contented with a proprietary driver doesn't mean that others won't be motivated to write open source drivers, whether through idealism or because, wonder of wonders, they enjoy doing it.
Your desire to play 3D video games using $600 video cards is relatively irrelevant.
It's irrelevant to you, but it's not irrelevant to a whole bunch of people out there. In fact, the number of people who care about that dwarfs the number who hold the view that if everything isn't open source, the world is going to end.
Being open source is a big boost to Linux, and it would most likely be a big boost to the nvidia and ati drivers. However, that isn't going to happen today, no matter what you do. In the mean time, it's probably much more important for more people to adopt Linux, as that actually spreads open source to more people, freeing them from proprietary software for the most part. When the culture becomes more ubiquitous, it's more likely that other things, like the ati and nvidia drivers, will become open source themselves. In fact, I'd say it's much more likely to happen that way than it is for a thoroughly insignificant portion of the population to try to force the issue.
You've also as yet failed to explain exactly how the use of a binary driver today will destroy the future of Linux. Repeating it over and over isn't a valid argument.
Incidentally, your view that (paraphrasing) 'if you're not going to use exclusively open source, you shouldn't use Linux,' is flawed, and many kernel developers would probably disagree with you. Linus himself is oft noted as a pragmatist; he merely saw the GPL/open source as being the best way to run his project. People work on Linux for a variety of reasons, and Free Software isn't the end-all and be-all of them
If you're concerned with Free Software above all else, you should be running the HURD, not Linux. That's more the mission statement of the former.
The open source nvidia drivers are only good if you want a $600 video card to perform like a $10 video card. The ati drivers are better than that on old cards, but not much on the new ones.
If you want to play 3D games on Linux today, you need to use binary drivers. Another alternative is to use Windows for gaming, and Linux only for desktop applications. In that case, nvidia still has no incentive to release any specifications or open source drivers for Linux.
A third alternative is to forgo playing any 3D games at all, in which case ATI/nVidia lose perhaps 1% of their sales, and the user has to be unhappy. And ATI/nvidia still have no incentive to release open source drivers/specifications, so these people will be unhappy forever (or at least until way in the future when Linux has a large enough market share that a successful boycott can actually be established).
So, essentially, your position is that you should make significant sacrifices for no conceivable gain, whereas the people you're arguing against are suggesting that people reap the benefits of an almost completely open-source desktop in addition to being able to enjoy their games, by making a concession on a point that they have no hope of winning.
In fact, I cannot remember ever needing their support, so I'm sure I can do without it.
You've never installed any service packs or security updates to Windows 2000?
That's the issue with them cutting support. Not that you can't get tech support, but that any vulnerabilities might go unfixed forever.
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
Good software can be good software even if I can't edit the source code to it.
Yes, it can be good. But in almost any case, it would be better in the long run if it were open source.
Take, for example, PC games. Fallout was a great game. However, it was pretty buggy. Interplay released some patches for it, and it got somewhat less buggy. Now Interplay is gone, so what bugs are there are there for good. Had the game been open sourced, bugs could still be fixed today.
Look at The Temple of Elemental Evil. It also has its fair share of bugs, and in some cases, the patches even make things worse (the consensus in the user community is that installing the third patch is worse than not installing it). However, the user/modder community has gone as far as hex editing parts of the game to fix bugs for itself, and generally produces patches of higher quality than Atari/Troika itself.
Now, it's great that people can hex edit the dll to fix problems in the game, but imagine how much easier it would be to fix problems if these people could hack on the source code instead of sifting through machine code. A much larger segment of the population would be able to contribute as well, and probably would.
It doesn't matter if you or I don't edit the source code. What matters is that there is always a small contingent of the users of a program who can also contribute to it, and at times will, and that will make the program better overall than it would be if it were closed source.
I think people should be able to licence their code however they want. However, if you're a user, choosing a closed source program means choosing a program that will never be as good as it could potentially be. Is that really an upside?
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I don't think tax money should go to "well, couldn't finance this through other means" business models.
Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but isn't that exactly the purpose of tax money, at least in a market economy? The government is supposed to put taxes toward public goods, which, although necessary/beneficial for everyone, aren't fiscally viable for production by private businesses.
Now, you may or may not consider open source software to be in this category (although it fits part of the definition relatively well, in that once produced, it can be consumed by everyone with no marginal cost of production), but if it's beneficial to the people, and can't be financed by private business models (which, arguably, it can be, although most business models revolve around service/support), then it is, almost by definition, something that tax dollars should be used for.
This is true, but it is the end of the Mac; there's simply no point in buying one now.
I'm not totally sure I buy that either. It's entirely likely that Apple will require you to buy their hardware to run OS X (although I can't tell if the numerous people around here saying that have facts supporting them, or whether they're just speculating, and I don't care enough to look it up myself), by requiring proprietary chipsets of some sort. Sure, that will probably be hacked by some people so that you can run OS X on anything, but that's a hassle.
So the point of a Mac will still be that you can buy it and it will "Just Work" with all the pants-creaming, zealot-pleasing goodness that is OS X. You probably won't be able to just go out and get a Dell PC and load up OS X on it without a fair amount of work, and that's a reason in itself for some people.
The spirit of the (L)GPL is the benefit of free software. You can make use of the software freely, but you, in turn, have to help to further the community which you are benefiting from.
Dumping a big, poorly documented tarball complies with the LGPL, certainly, but it was difficult for the KHTML developers to use, so in practice, it was of questionable value. By consequence, Apple was providing questionable actual benefit to the free software community, thus violating the spirit of the (L)GPL.
The section you quoted lists options for complying with (by definition) the letter of the GPL. That doesn't necessarily mean that all of those options are equal, or that they all necessarily comply with the spirit of the license (which isn't necessarily documented within the license).
(As an addendum, merely releasing a tarball isn't necessarily bad. You could, for instance, send a tarball of discrete, well-documented patches, rather than a blob of all the code with minimal documentation that references an internal, inaccessible bug tracking system. That would comply more with the spirit of the LGPL. It's not necessarily the medium of transfer, it's the content.)
I don't see why this was marked as a troll. The fact is, this move isn't going to destroy Apple.
I'm sorry to tell all you chicken littles out there, but Apple will continue on. Yes, they'll be using similar chips to PCs now, but they'll still sell their luxury computers (although, perhaps they'll be able to expand into more market segments now). They're not shifting their fundamental focus, and most people couldn't give two shits about exactly what kind of CPU is in a Mac. They're not going out of business.
Anyone who says otherwise is overreacting, and calling them on it isn't trolling, it's just common sense.
1280x768? 17" LCD monitors have a higher resolution than that, and I can still see the pixels. That would have to be all the way across the room for me to stand it.
Real estate is as much about resolution as it is about size of the actual screen. You could have a 40" monitor at 800x600, and you'd still have no space for anything---you'd just have giant windows---unless you like everything to be blurry.
There's a reason why Apple 30" cinema displays have a native resolution of around 2500x1600: having around 100 PPI is pretty necessary for having something that looks good as a computer monitor (as opposed to something you look at from across the room), although personally, I wish LCDs had much higher than 100 PPI.
That isn't a third type of person. You are are just a single monitor person.
Considering that the original "two types of people" were: "those who have two (or more) monitors, and those who have never tried it," he is indeed a third type of person---someone who tried it, and went back to one monitor.
It's amazing what people can do when sufficiently motivated.
Yeah. When properly motivated, Apple can provide actual assistance to integrating their improvements into KHTML, rather than dumping a blob of poorly documented code on the KHTML developers and saying, "you guys figure it out."
Currently, yes. They could always change that. Its *their* software so they can charge for it.
Yeah, I'm sure it's very likely that they'll start charging everyone for the Flash plugin. God knows that people are dying to pay $25 to see advertisements and hear music on Britney Spears' website.
Flash wouldn't be anywhere near as ubiquitous if people had to pay for the plugin. How many everyday people pay for the pro version of Quicktime (not counting anything bundled with OS X)?
Does Macromedia's development suite run on something other than x86 windows?
Probably not. What difference does that make? There's a big difference in scope between cloning the player and creating a usable, full-fledged development suite. Your argument here is bordering on a "slippery slope," and I haven't seen too many of those that hold up realistically.
Besides, according to your criteria, they could just make their Flash suite work a little differently, and it'd be okie dokie, because it's not an exact clone.
No. It's because they wanted to be *the* standard plugin for supporting Flash on all major desktop operating systems. Their reward for doing this? A bunch of OSS fanatics creating a clone that can run not only on odd operating systems but on systems they Macromedia Flash plugin currently supports. I'm sure they will just say screw it, patent the file format, and stick with Macs and Windows.
Care to explain your logic here?
Oh no, Macromedia won't have the only Flash plugin anymore. That means... What exactly? What's the worst that could happen? The OSS hackers come up with something that works better (for example, doesn't take up 100% CPU when running; doesn't have laggy audio/skip every 5 seconds on Linux) than the official plugin and embarrass Macromedia? That's about the only downside I can think of, other than your "*handwave* they're going to charge for it in the future" argument.
Explain exactly how this is different from Open Office opening/saving MS file formats, other than the fact that people have to reverse engineer them, so it does a mediocre job at it. The interface is a little different? So what? If OO can do everything that MS Office can do, how is that competition, and having two different Flash plugins isn't?
What is the business model of giving away a free plugin that doesn't do any advertising, other than to sell the development suite to create content for said plugin?
Sorry, lack your crystal ball and tarot cards for predicting the future.
I'm not using a crystal ball. I'm looking at the current situation, and asking why you think writing a Free replacement for a free plugin would make a company go totally apeshit.
I take it you didn't try to play doom 3 when it came out! I had just bought a $250 ati AIW 9600 XT 128mb.... its only playable at 800 x 600 resolution on my pc. (dual xeon 2 ghz, 1 gb of ram)
Well, then, exercise a little self control and wait a few months before playing the game. If you believe this chart, a GeForce 6600 GT can play Doom 3 at 1280x1024 at 60 FPS. That's for $150. Plus, by buying Doom 3 now, you get to spend $40 instead of $65.
Besides, exactly how shitty does it look at 800x600? That's still as good or better than the resolution you'll be getting on the TV hooked up to your console.
How much money does Macromedia make on the Flash plugin?
Answer: None. It's free.
Macromedia makes money selling the Flash development suite, and as yet, GPLFlash is not attempting to create one (and I doubt they ever will). If anything, the effect of this project will be that more people will be able to view Flash, since Macromedia only has a player for 32-bit x86 Linux. That makes the development suite more valuable, because you can reach more people.
In addition, people are working on SVG support in open source browsers, which is something of an alternative to Flash.
I'll eat my hat if you can find a standalone 19" or smaller monitor that does better than 1600x1200 (which any good 19" CRT will do). Most do 1280x1024. You obviously haven't looked at all.
Laptop LCDs have very good resolution, but nobody makes standalone LCDs that have that high of a ppi, unless you're talking about the giant ones from Viewsonic or IBM that require 4 DVI cables to run at like 40 Hz. I get 110 ppi on my old 17" CRT, but most LCDs don't even crack 100.
Slashdot Mirror
In economics (game theory specifically, I suppose), there are a few different models of oligopoly (which pretty accurately describes the gaming card market, being that it only has two major contenders).
One model predicts that if you have 2 firms, you get the same effects as perfect competition (infinite, infinitely small firms, more or less). However, that model makes some relatively unrealistic assumptions (which I forget at the moment, but I could probably find if really necessary; something to do with firms instantaneously setting prices at the same time and consumers unilaterally choosing the lower price).
A somewhat more realistic model predicts that the final price depends on the number of firms in the market. In the one-company limit, it tends toward monopoly pricing, whereas in the infinite limit, it tends toward a perfect competition price.
In other words, 2 firms isn't 'enough' competition to prevent artificially high prices. So count all you want, but 2 firms doesn't necessarily mean, "well, we've got all the competition we need."
Any card can drive a 2048x1536 display if all you're doing is relatively static desktop stuff (check the specs).
But not even a vacuum cleaner video card will play Doom 3 at that resolution today. And as soon as you create a quiet, low-power card that can handle Doom 3 at that resolution, someone will write a game that only runs at 800x600 at 10 fps on that card, and you'll need to buy a newer card.
Which are you asking for? You can get a quiet card that will drive a big-ass display, but don't expect it to play the latest and greatest 3D games on it. Those are designed to run crappily on even the leaf blowers, so that they can take advantage of the yet-to-be-released generation of cards.
Care to be specific? KPDF renders all PDFs I've ever tried fine. If you have some that don't, then perhaps you should post bug reports and let the developers know what isn't working. That way the bugs can get fixed, and you won't have to sit around bitching on Slashdot (which helps exactly no one) anymore.
Doki Doki Panic
P.S.: On a side note: I agree, the question was pretty lame. I can't image why it would be front-page material.
What exactly is the problem with what he said?
Are you saying that people who believe in religion don't use it as a basis for a positive outlook on life?
Or are you saying that people who have faith in a religion or something similar should not be called 'faithful'?
Or are you saying that believing that in the future, we will live in an egalitarian society without poverty is somehow fundamentally different than believing that the universe was created/is guided by a benevolent, omnipotent entity?
Or have I missed something? I'm just curious.
That is incorrect. There are 100% open source drivers for several 3D video cards. See DRI.
Yes, and for cards that can actually play relatively new games, there are no acceptable open source drivers. That solution is growing increasingly unacceptable. Your closest shot might be a Matrox Parhelia (I believe Matrox has 100% open drivers), but that had trouble shaping up to compete within its own generation of cards, let alone two generations later.
No, my position is that the long-term success of Linux depends on the distribution remaining open source.
Which distribution? Just one of them?
What if all the distributions are 100% open source, and people are able to download and install binary nVidia drivers separately? Does that totally fuck up Linux in every which way?
Or are you arguing that the existence of a binary driver will magically make Linux proprietary; that people will suddenly stop writing open source drivers because some proprietary drivers are available? Why then are people still writing open source drivers for nforce components, then, when nvidia offers binary drivers? Just because some people can be contented with a proprietary driver doesn't mean that others won't be motivated to write open source drivers, whether through idealism or because, wonder of wonders, they enjoy doing it.
Your desire to play 3D video games using $600 video cards is relatively irrelevant.
It's irrelevant to you, but it's not irrelevant to a whole bunch of people out there. In fact, the number of people who care about that dwarfs the number who hold the view that if everything isn't open source, the world is going to end.
Being open source is a big boost to Linux, and it would most likely be a big boost to the nvidia and ati drivers. However, that isn't going to happen today, no matter what you do. In the mean time, it's probably much more important for more people to adopt Linux, as that actually spreads open source to more people, freeing them from proprietary software for the most part. When the culture becomes more ubiquitous, it's more likely that other things, like the ati and nvidia drivers, will become open source themselves. In fact, I'd say it's much more likely to happen that way than it is for a thoroughly insignificant portion of the population to try to force the issue.
You've also as yet failed to explain exactly how the use of a binary driver today will destroy the future of Linux. Repeating it over and over isn't a valid argument.
Incidentally, your view that (paraphrasing) 'if you're not going to use exclusively open source, you shouldn't use Linux,' is flawed, and many kernel developers would probably disagree with you. Linus himself is oft noted as a pragmatist; he merely saw the GPL/open source as being the best way to run his project. People work on Linux for a variety of reasons, and Free Software isn't the end-all and be-all of them
If you're concerned with Free Software above all else, you should be running the HURD, not Linux. That's more the mission statement of the former.
The open source nvidia drivers are only good if you want a $600 video card to perform like a $10 video card. The ati drivers are better than that on old cards, but not much on the new ones.
If you want to play 3D games on Linux today, you need to use binary drivers. Another alternative is to use Windows for gaming, and Linux only for desktop applications. In that case, nvidia still has no incentive to release any specifications or open source drivers for Linux.
A third alternative is to forgo playing any 3D games at all, in which case ATI/nVidia lose perhaps 1% of their sales, and the user has to be unhappy. And ATI/nvidia still have no incentive to release open source drivers/specifications, so these people will be unhappy forever (or at least until way in the future when Linux has a large enough market share that a successful boycott can actually be established).
So, essentially, your position is that you should make significant sacrifices for no conceivable gain, whereas the people you're arguing against are suggesting that people reap the benefits of an almost completely open-source desktop in addition to being able to enjoy their games, by making a concession on a point that they have no hope of winning.
Does that sum things up pretty well?
If you buy peanut butter, get smooth!
http://www.nakedlongshoremen.com/
In fact, I cannot remember ever needing their support, so I'm sure I can do without it.
You've never installed any service packs or security updates to Windows 2000?
That's the issue with them cutting support. Not that you can't get tech support, but that any vulnerabilities might go unfixed forever.
Good software can be good software even if I can't edit the source code to it.
Yes, it can be good. But in almost any case, it would be better in the long run if it were open source.
Take, for example, PC games. Fallout was a great game. However, it was pretty buggy. Interplay released some patches for it, and it got somewhat less buggy. Now Interplay is gone, so what bugs are there are there for good. Had the game been open sourced, bugs could still be fixed today.
Look at The Temple of Elemental Evil. It also has its fair share of bugs, and in some cases, the patches even make things worse (the consensus in the user community is that installing the third patch is worse than not installing it). However, the user/modder community has gone as far as hex editing parts of the game to fix bugs for itself, and generally produces patches of higher quality than Atari/Troika itself.
Now, it's great that people can hex edit the dll to fix problems in the game, but imagine how much easier it would be to fix problems if these people could hack on the source code instead of sifting through machine code. A much larger segment of the population would be able to contribute as well, and probably would.
It doesn't matter if you or I don't edit the source code. What matters is that there is always a small contingent of the users of a program who can also contribute to it, and at times will, and that will make the program better overall than it would be if it were closed source.
I think people should be able to licence their code however they want. However, if you're a user, choosing a closed source program means choosing a program that will never be as good as it could potentially be. Is that really an upside?
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I don't think tax money should go to "well, couldn't finance this through other means" business models.
Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but isn't that exactly the purpose of tax money, at least in a market economy? The government is supposed to put taxes toward public goods, which, although necessary/beneficial for everyone, aren't fiscally viable for production by private businesses.
Now, you may or may not consider open source software to be in this category (although it fits part of the definition relatively well, in that once produced, it can be consumed by everyone with no marginal cost of production), but if it's beneficial to the people, and can't be financed by private business models (which, arguably, it can be, although most business models revolve around service/support), then it is, almost by definition, something that tax dollars should be used for.
If the developers of KHTML cannot make use of the code released by Apple, then what benefit is it to the users of KHTML?
The important thing about Open Source is the benefit it provides to all people in general.
This is true, but it is the end of the Mac; there's simply no point in buying one now.
I'm not totally sure I buy that either. It's entirely likely that Apple will require you to buy their hardware to run OS X (although I can't tell if the numerous people around here saying that have facts supporting them, or whether they're just speculating, and I don't care enough to look it up myself), by requiring proprietary chipsets of some sort. Sure, that will probably be hacked by some people so that you can run OS X on anything, but that's a hassle.
So the point of a Mac will still be that you can buy it and it will "Just Work" with all the pants-creaming, zealot-pleasing goodness that is OS X. You probably won't be able to just go out and get a Dell PC and load up OS X on it without a fair amount of work, and that's a reason in itself for some people.
The spirit of the (L)GPL is the benefit of free software. You can make use of the software freely, but you, in turn, have to help to further the community which you are benefiting from.
Dumping a big, poorly documented tarball complies with the LGPL, certainly, but it was difficult for the KHTML developers to use, so in practice, it was of questionable value. By consequence, Apple was providing questionable actual benefit to the free software community, thus violating the spirit of the (L)GPL.
The section you quoted lists options for complying with (by definition) the letter of the GPL. That doesn't necessarily mean that all of those options are equal, or that they all necessarily comply with the spirit of the license (which isn't necessarily documented within the license).
(As an addendum, merely releasing a tarball isn't necessarily bad. You could, for instance, send a tarball of discrete, well-documented patches, rather than a blob of all the code with minimal documentation that references an internal, inaccessible bug tracking system. That would comply more with the spirit of the LGPL. It's not necessarily the medium of transfer, it's the content.)
Posthumous, not post humorous.
I don't see why this was marked as a troll. The fact is, this move isn't going to destroy Apple.
I'm sorry to tell all you chicken littles out there, but Apple will continue on. Yes, they'll be using similar chips to PCs now, but they'll still sell their luxury computers (although, perhaps they'll be able to expand into more market segments now). They're not shifting their fundamental focus, and most people couldn't give two shits about exactly what kind of CPU is in a Mac. They're not going out of business.
Anyone who says otherwise is overreacting, and calling them on it isn't trolling, it's just common sense.
1280x768? 17" LCD monitors have a higher resolution than that, and I can still see the pixels. That would have to be all the way across the room for me to stand it.
Real estate is as much about resolution as it is about size of the actual screen. You could have a 40" monitor at 800x600, and you'd still have no space for anything---you'd just have giant windows---unless you like everything to be blurry.
There's a reason why Apple 30" cinema displays have a native resolution of around 2500x1600: having around 100 PPI is pretty necessary for having something that looks good as a computer monitor (as opposed to something you look at from across the room), although personally, I wish LCDs had much higher than 100 PPI.
That isn't a third type of person. You are are just a single monitor person.
Considering that the original "two types of people" were: "those who have two (or more) monitors, and those who have never tried it," he is indeed a third type of person---someone who tried it, and went back to one monitor.
Cheers.
It's amazing what people can do when sufficiently motivated.
Yeah. When properly motivated, Apple can provide actual assistance to integrating their improvements into KHTML, rather than dumping a blob of poorly documented code on the KHTML developers and saying, "you guys figure it out."
Currently, yes. They could always change that. Its *their* software so they can charge for it.
Yeah, I'm sure it's very likely that they'll start charging everyone for the Flash plugin. God knows that people are dying to pay $25 to see advertisements and hear music on Britney Spears' website.
Flash wouldn't be anywhere near as ubiquitous if people had to pay for the plugin. How many everyday people pay for the pro version of Quicktime (not counting anything bundled with OS X)?
Does Macromedia's development suite run on something other than x86 windows?
Probably not. What difference does that make? There's a big difference in scope between cloning the player and creating a usable, full-fledged development suite. Your argument here is bordering on a "slippery slope," and I haven't seen too many of those that hold up realistically.
Besides, according to your criteria, they could just make their Flash suite work a little differently, and it'd be okie dokie, because it's not an exact clone.
No. It's because they wanted to be *the* standard plugin for supporting Flash on all major desktop operating systems. Their reward for doing this? A bunch of OSS fanatics creating a clone that can run not only on odd operating systems but on systems they Macromedia Flash plugin currently supports. I'm sure they will just say screw it, patent the file format, and stick with Macs and Windows.
Care to explain your logic here?
Oh no, Macromedia won't have the only Flash plugin anymore. That means... What exactly? What's the worst that could happen? The OSS hackers come up with something that works better (for example, doesn't take up 100% CPU when running; doesn't have laggy audio/skip every 5 seconds on Linux) than the official plugin and embarrass Macromedia? That's about the only downside I can think of, other than your "*handwave* they're going to charge for it in the future" argument.
Explain exactly how this is different from Open Office opening/saving MS file formats, other than the fact that people have to reverse engineer them, so it does a mediocre job at it. The interface is a little different? So what? If OO can do everything that MS Office can do, how is that competition, and having two different Flash plugins isn't?
What is the business model of giving away a free plugin that doesn't do any advertising, other than to sell the development suite to create content for said plugin?
Sorry, lack your crystal ball and tarot cards for predicting the future.
I'm not using a crystal ball. I'm looking at the current situation, and asking why you think writing a Free replacement for a free plugin would make a company go totally apeshit.
I take it you didn't try to play doom 3 when it came out! I had just bought a $250 ati AIW 9600 XT 128mb.... its only playable at 800 x 600 resolution on my pc. (dual xeon 2 ghz, 1 gb of ram)
Well, then, exercise a little self control and wait a few months before playing the game. If you believe this chart, a GeForce 6600 GT can play Doom 3 at 1280x1024 at 60 FPS. That's for $150. Plus, by buying Doom 3 now, you get to spend $40 instead of $65.
Besides, exactly how shitty does it look at 800x600? That's still as good or better than the resolution you'll be getting on the TV hooked up to your console.
How much money does Macromedia make on the Flash plugin?
Answer: None. It's free.
Macromedia makes money selling the Flash development suite, and as yet, GPLFlash is not attempting to create one (and I doubt they ever will). If anything, the effect of this project will be that more people will be able to view Flash, since Macromedia only has a player for 32-bit x86 Linux. That makes the development suite more valuable, because you can reach more people.
In addition, people are working on SVG support in open source browsers, which is something of an alternative to Flash.
So your entire argument is pretty much unfounded.
I'll eat my hat if you can find a standalone 19" or smaller monitor that does better than 1600x1200 (which any good 19" CRT will do). Most do 1280x1024. You obviously haven't looked at all.
Laptop LCDs have very good resolution, but nobody makes standalone LCDs that have that high of a ppi, unless you're talking about the giant ones from Viewsonic or IBM that require 4 DVI cables to run at like 40 Hz. I get 110 ppi on my old 17" CRT, but most LCDs don't even crack 100.