>Will this work in freeBSD? (Linux emulation is fine, but there are one or two things that don't run in linux emulation.)
That's pretty standard fare for most things. Better get constant updates to the source. If you wait for any kind of distribution you will invariably get crappy results. Most distributions (even the BSD stuff) dosn't hardly update things except on a bi-yearly date.
They use the SDL library for most (if not all) of their game ports. The freeBSD port is in progress.
Meaning anywhere from 6 months to 5 years.
Once it is finished it should be trivial to port the games under FreeBSD.
Ahhh the kicker here is who will do it? Who will buy them. If we do a simple logic we can see that this will probably not happen anytime soon.
1. The number of linux users is less than that of windows users.
2. the number of BSD users is less than the number of linux users.
3. Loki wants to port games to a platform that has the best chance of succeeding.
4. The mac port has already been done and is marketed well because they outnumber linux.
5. Most likely they will sell the linux version well in certain areas (Silicon Valley) but not in anytown USA or anything so I don't really see this as a possible thing.
Amen to that, brother! My question is, how are action games going to work under a PMT scheduler? Just boost their priority? Or maybe tweek the scheduler to give a guaranteed X% of the processor to a particular class of app (see the Bach book for an explanation of this)? Or all most of the new games multithreaded?
Under most modern operating systems (NT, linux, BeOS, and others) multitasking is possible. In linux you just have to set the priority like you said to a really high level and whatever that is causing the system to bog down at 19 or something. Works really well for things like distributed.net and others.
Just a little question what kind of systems do we actually need to run these games? I have had a *very* difficult time even running fairly trivial ports of various dos games on my linux machine because they do graphics interface work quite poorly. If people don't believe me just look at a dos game (just humor me here) and play it for a while now play a compatable linux game on the same hardware and such. Assuming that the hardware requirements for the game are close enough to the actual hardware that your system has you really see lagging preformance.
If games control the PC market then Linux games will force a new system ever 3 weeks. I'm sorry if I come off sounding like a flammer but it's the truth with most apps the conversion process dosn't go well at all and just sucks mostly.
PS. Are there any good ST games out there for linux I sure would like a good native star trek simulation for linux (no not the BSD games trek).
"The United States loves to see itself..." Isn't that called narcissism?
Actually narcissism is more of that to an unhealthy degree and manner. For example you would rather enjoy looking at yourself than going out on a date, going to work etc.
Ahh I see another misguided fool has been suckered into thinking that M&Ms are really the strongest when we obviously know that from countless hours of clinical trials and research that in fact they are inferior. The greatest hacker of them all Willy wanka needed to beat the vile sorceror who conjured up the candy so he decided to make a team of Everlasting Gobstoppers(tm) and Nerds. Now we all know through so extensive similar nonbiased clinical trials that they will last longer. However some scientists have speculated that rarest candy of them all perhaps may be even tougher yet. George Mayfield of Planfield, Illinois the CEO of the bllion dollar a week Pokemon craze has decided to market Pokemon brand pellets of crack cocaine and sugar printed with smily faces and different pokemon characters through 150 (well actually its 3,000 with such original names as billgatesadrobe who uses his bloatware attack and RMSachu who will sing in a sweet voice about emacs and the one true source so his enemies will drop to their knees). So me and my everlasting gobstoppers and nerds with the full collection of Pokemon rocks will take on your silly M&Ms any day of the week.
/* The raiting of this post 1. -1 too acurate about hidden cultural truthsa 2. -40 because I am using Xemacs to write this post and I made myself look foolist. 3. -1000 Anyone knows that M&Ms are officially backed by Rob and therefore any post that desecrates the sacred candy will elicit a very bad attack of the drain_karma_really fast spell which also takes down 700hps from the character and causes blindness and confusion as well. This must be left up to people who didn't just buy their weight in pokemon rocks.:) */
Just take a look at the difference between say something like perl which is interpreted for the most part and something like assembly. Assembly can do things quite quickly however it is not very easy (not impossibly mind you just takes a lot longer). That is basically what is happening here; because you are not executing snippets of the code you are executing programs that will interact with another kernel. Because of this you could have for instince say have a problem in playing quake or such when you need to do something like write temp data to the hd or something that it would force something else (maybe the keyboard to take a less active role or maybe the mouse) then boom someyone kills you with the BFG10k or something. Yes X does this already but some of that is changing look at the frambuffer in the 2.1 and 2.2 kernels.
From what I have done in research about things like this there is a better chance for fraud at a local store using in person methods of using credit cards than online. If you ever looked at that little "educational" thing called the anarchists cookbook you will notice that they have a fairly detailed scheme that demonostrates how to commit credit card/mail fraud using carbons taken from retail stores in their rubbish bins.
People basically have no choice if I want to get something online: anything at all I need a credit card to process it. This allows for easy and convient transfer of funds and allows for all those nice little savings that people now have. Unfortunately screws anyone that dosn't have a credit card as well.
On a more serious note exactly who is this guy. I could believe that this guy is just working alone without the help of his government the day pigs fly! It's actually a pretty slick thing. Just unofficially get someone to crack a site and then blame him and you can just walk away.
What the arguments basically sum up to is that because you have to communicate with each of those processes and such for even mundane things like the video card or the hd and such that the speed goes down. The nightmare that I envision is that eventually people will not even care the machine is just screwing around with it's time because processor power will just increase.
And why exactly does clock speed not matter compared to the file system? If I have an 8088 processor and have this magical filesystem on a floppy does it mean that suddently I can play quakeII or what? I think in this weary world we have clock speed does matter. I should think quite a great deal. Why then do we have overclocking at all in the first place.
I want a distribution that will install completely on floppies if I so desire. I want a distribution that will use the absolutely newest version of some form of software (even newer than unstable for debian) that will at least be able to test stuff out instead of compiling it for myself (ever tried to really live on a 340Mb hd as a linux user? It can be painful). I have a dream that computer components would be completely 100% backwards compatable and allow me to just take a PIII or something like an Anthalon and just stick it into my 486's motherboard and get it to run. I would like to have a working copy of various GNOME applications that will always work fast and be scable to the processor and memory requirements of a machine. I have a dream that all packages will be allowed for a distribution and that no matter what I install I can upgrade and remove it seamlessly without complaint. I have a dream that all the really interesting developments in computers would not be just for the very elite people in the world and make them more approachable. I have a dream that uncertainty would be removed in the field of technology so that I can be guaranteed at least a decent source of employment. I have a dream that there would be more games that would be scalable and easier to run on crappy machines and not necessitate purtchess of expensive stuff that will be gone shortly. I have a dream that all kinds of access would be possible for the internet and that truely free internet access would actually work work for linux like it does already for windows and the Mac. I dream of all these things without a heed for their lack of possibility and those of the world call me a Quixotean fool for what ammounts to impossibility in terms of actually advancing civilization. We al dream for these things but they never come true. We all search for things that are not there and we try to believe. What is it that we really want? I want a computer that has all of my interests in heart. But the bastard machines have betrayed me at every turn! Ahhh the humanity of it all! What do I actually care if some person dosn't hae the grapes to actually just get a video card that is a little less powerful or a processor that is in fact a little slower than the absolte best? Does it really affect me? Does the universe cease to turn and does the su n then burn out? Do I suddently become fated to have my life eclipsed by the shadow of Zuses's wrath? I propose not really. Linux does a better job of my needs but why the bloat to the total operating system in the array of implimentations of such things as grahics? Why do simple dos games that ran quite well on 286s (Wolfenstein) and such still preform slugglishly on higher end 486 machines? Why the obcession with pretty pictures and the like? Why do we need to observer all that is there without regard to content or use?
Yes we dream of things but will they come true for you or I or any of the people on this spinning blue sphere in any fashion at all? I think not.
Ok here's a little bit of trivia for you. What database does slashdot use for its' engine? Well I guess I kind of let the cat out of the bag in the subject: mysql. Last time I checked it was a little less than full GPL. Dosn this put a little damper on being able to do many of the really interesting things in an free an open manner anyway?
How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply. And as far as a I can tell doing it yourself would be hard as well. Can anyone tell me what would be the cheapest option to creating a site with the existing slash code in a reasonable way.
Don't use web hosting companies that are defective, like CIHost, or Digex. God, Digex sucks. For the past three months we've been dealing with their crap. We have three Solaris boxen at their facility in NoCal; ever since we've had them, they have had connection and bandwidth problems. We get timeouts; we get slow speeds; we get packet loss. Hell, the other day I had to FTP a 146 MB file from one to another. These machines are on a 100BaseT LAN. It never broke 15KB/s. Not to mention uploading the 146 MB file in the first place, which never broke 10KB/s.
Is this company or personal? I would surely hope that your company wouldn't bet its' break and butter stuff to these bozos. As an interesting aside I have noticed that when transmitting large volumes of data that network preformance (with almost any line but usually public ones) goes down in a linear or logarathmic fashion is there some phenomeon that causes this to happen (besides increased network trafic?)
Not to mention that they tend to tell you they'll call you right back, and then don't; they'll tell you something has been fixed, but they haven't tested it (and of course it's not fixed); and so forth. I would avoid Digex at all costs if I were you.
How do these guys avoid getting sued in the first place? Assuming you are loosing data in great quantities and you are experiencing undue levels of incompetence you are able to sue them for this.
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
This actually sounds like a Microsoft solution when something goes wrong. Since usually most items are dependant on preconfigured settings and gui administration most of the really interesting automation usually cannot happen natively. Batch files after all can only do so much and WSH is only so effective at some of the more independent abilities of shell and perl.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
I agree. Most of the settings for various system files that I have seen have been in hiden and system directories that are not usually thought as part of the normal file system (Netware) and such. When people do backups its not totally intuitive for the average person to get something of that nature done easily or properly without the necessary training. An MCSE will not usually cut it because little is done to teach out of contingency management.
I feel that a company is supposed to provide a service that is stable, secure, and efficient. Any time those goals are violated in any way the person has a legitimate legal complaint. Would you be pleased or very impressed at all if for example you had your automobile serviced and then as you were driving out of the service center the engine just dropped out of the vehicle? Hardly.
I'm just curious why this article was posted on Slashdot. There's no angle to BASH Microsoft here. What are the Linux zealots to do?
It has nothing to do with Linux in any way just about people who don't want to use MSN as their ISP or have to stay with them for a period of 3 years. Why should I sign up for MSN when I could say have a DSL or cable or even a T-1 and use a closer, better, faster, more courteous ISP than MSN?
I think Microsoft may just wait until some slightly higher profile person does this and then challenge it in court and make a public example of them. Remember you may not matter but that dosn't mean that they are not paying attention to you.
This poses an interesting question... Will the continued recognition of open source by the corporate community be genuine, or are they simply paying lip service? Will they use a "real" open source license? Will the presence of commercial interests change the open source community? If so, how? Will people be less willing to code "for free" when there are companies willing to pay -- but they pay for what they want, not what you want...
I would think that most of what we have been observing as of late are attempts to make things that are closed source open source if two conditions apply:
1. The product is becomming obsolete or sales are dropping to levels that make its' continued presence in the marketplace not worth the energy they are putting into it.
2. The product has lost market/mindshare and it needs a shot in the arm (Mozilla/Borland).
If I was a corporation I would be looking at these options in great detail if I needed a boost. It makes your company look good and secretly you get more and more money in the process; while placating and convincing people with programming know how that you are a good choice to work with. Do I expect to see Microsoft ever to release any version of windows? No. Do I expect someday to see some crappy program to come down the pike with a restricted opensource liscence? Yes.
Would the release of the Apple source code emable a port to the X86 platform? Sure, we all love linux, but from a GUI standpoint I'd rather use the MacOS over M$FT any day. Also, could it be possible to create an X WM based on the Apple source??
They actually have various themes for gnome, kde, and window maker that change the UI so that it works just like the MacOS or quite close to it. They also have Mac emulators for linux as well.
The very fact the a company that makes very good hardware (compared to some of the things that the PC market has) but has an interface that is a little geek limiting (I really like command lines and such) is now taking the opportunity to make a unix like interface that dosn't need to have totally graphical features and is Open Source! This is quite nice as well because it will also have full hardware support and be free of some of the hoop jumping of other PPC and related OSs.
I for one am an avid slashdot fan. So much so that I in times past tried to get most of the slashdot comments on paper at say oh 4 pt. Even with this method it started to become rather incomvienent to get everything in that manner. I then started to use Xemacs to read text output generated by the various browser programs out there (Netscape, IE, and lynx) Netscape did the best job by properly indenting the text for new comments to the thread in nested mode. However IE deviated even further from this by doing this for a while asnd then further in the thread deciding to just indent the subject of the comment thereby creating a nasty hard-to-figure-out nesting scheme. Lynx will plain to render anything even in nested mode and just prints the data almost like flat or plain mode. Anything that actually helps get this working is good.
It's the Slashdot Reader at http://pike-community.org/sites/slashdot/ To quote http://www.freshmeat.net:
The Slashdot Reader is a program for reading Slashdot headlines and their comments without a using a web browser. It started out as Yet Another Headline Viewer (TM) but has evolved a lot since then. Now you can both read and reply to messages (replies are currently done using a spawned browser). The maintainer is David Hedbor
Slashdot Mirror
>Will this work in freeBSD? (Linux emulation is fine, but there are one or two things that don't run in linux emulation.)
That's pretty standard fare for most things. Better get constant updates to the source. If you wait for any kind of distribution you will invariably get crappy results. Most distributions (even the BSD stuff) dosn't hardly update things except on a bi-yearly date.
They use the SDL library for most (if not all) of their game ports. The freeBSD port is in progress.
Meaning anywhere from 6 months to 5 years.
Once it is finished it should be trivial to port the games under FreeBSD.
Ahhh the kicker here is who will do it? Who will buy them. If we do a simple logic we can see that this will probably not happen anytime soon.
1. The number of linux users is less than that of windows users.
2. the number of BSD users is less than the number of linux users.
3. Loki wants to port games to a platform that has the best chance of succeeding.
4. The mac port has already been done and is marketed well because they outnumber linux.
5. Most likely they will sell the linux version well in certain areas (Silicon Valley) but not in anytown USA or anything so I don't really see this as a possible thing.
Amen to that, brother! My question is, how are action games going to work under a PMT scheduler? Just boost their priority? Or maybe tweek the scheduler to give a guaranteed
X% of the processor to a particular class of app (see the Bach book for an explanation of this)? Or all most of the new games multithreaded?
Under most modern operating systems (NT, linux, BeOS, and others) multitasking is possible. In linux you just have to set the priority like you said to a really high level and whatever that is causing the system to bog down at 19 or something. Works really well for things like distributed.net and others.
Just a little question what kind of systems do we actually need to run these games? I have had a *very* difficult time even running fairly trivial ports of various dos games on my linux machine because they do graphics interface work quite poorly. If people don't believe me just look at a dos game (just humor me here) and play it for a while now play a compatable linux game on the same hardware and such. Assuming that the hardware requirements for the game are close enough to the actual hardware that your system has you really see lagging preformance.
If games control the PC market then Linux games will force a new system ever 3 weeks. I'm sorry if I come off sounding like a flammer but it's the truth with most apps the conversion process dosn't go well at all and just sucks mostly.
PS. Are there any good ST games out there for linux I sure would like a good native star trek simulation for linux (no not the BSD games trek).
"The United States loves to see itself ..." Isn't that called narcissism?
Actually narcissism is more of that to an unhealthy degree and manner. For example you would rather enjoy looking at yourself than going out on a date, going to work etc.
Ahh I see another misguided fool has been suckered into thinking that M&Ms are really the strongest when we obviously know that from countless hours of clinical trials and research that in fact they are inferior.
:) */
The greatest hacker of them all Willy wanka needed to beat the vile sorceror who conjured up the candy so he decided to make a team of Everlasting Gobstoppers(tm) and Nerds. Now we all know through so extensive similar nonbiased clinical trials that they will last longer.
However some scientists have speculated that rarest candy of them all perhaps may be even tougher yet.
George Mayfield of Planfield, Illinois the CEO of the bllion dollar a week Pokemon craze has decided to market Pokemon brand pellets of crack cocaine and sugar printed with smily faces and different pokemon characters through 150 (well actually its 3,000 with such original names as billgatesadrobe who uses his bloatware attack and RMSachu who will sing in a sweet voice about emacs and the one true source so his enemies will drop to their knees).
So me and my everlasting gobstoppers and nerds with the full collection of Pokemon rocks will take on your silly M&Ms any day of the week.
/* The raiting of this post
1. -1 too acurate about hidden cultural truthsa
2. -40 because I am using Xemacs to write this post and I made myself look foolist.
3. -1000 Anyone knows that M&Ms are officially backed by Rob and therefore any post that desecrates the sacred candy will elicit a very bad attack of the drain_karma_really fast spell which also takes down 700hps from the character and causes blindness and confusion as well. This must be left up to people who didn't just buy their weight in pokemon rocks.
Just take a look at the difference between say something like perl which is interpreted for the most part and something like assembly.
Assembly can do things quite quickly however it is not very easy (not impossibly mind you just takes a lot longer).
That is basically what is happening here; because you are not executing snippets of the code you are executing programs that will interact with another kernel. Because of this you could have for instince say have a problem in playing quake or such when you need to do something like write temp data to the hd or something that it would force something else (maybe the keyboard to take a less active role or maybe the mouse) then boom someyone kills you with the BFG10k or something.
Yes X does this already but some of that is changing look at the frambuffer in the 2.1 and 2.2 kernels.
From what I have done in research about things like this there is a better chance for fraud at a local store using in person methods of using credit cards than online.
If you ever looked at that little "educational" thing called the anarchists cookbook you will notice that they have a fairly detailed scheme that demonostrates how to commit credit card/mail fraud using carbons taken from retail stores in their rubbish bins.
People basically have no choice if I want to get something online: anything at all I need a credit card to process it. This allows for easy and convient transfer of funds and allows for all those nice little savings that people now have. Unfortunately screws anyone that dosn't have a credit card as well.
On a more serious note exactly who is this guy. I could believe that this guy is just working alone without the help of his government the day pigs fly!
It's actually a pretty slick thing. Just unofficially get someone to crack a site and then blame him and you can just walk away.
What the arguments basically sum up to is that because you have to communicate with each of those processes and such for even mundane things like the video card or the hd and such that the speed goes down. The nightmare that I envision is that eventually people will not even care the machine is just screwing around with it's time because processor power will just increase.
And why exactly does clock speed not matter compared to the file system? If I have an 8088 processor and have this magical filesystem on a floppy does it mean that suddently I can play quakeII or what?
I think in this weary world we have clock speed does matter. I should think quite a great deal. Why then do we have overclocking at all in the first place.
I want a distribution that will install completely on floppies if I so desire. I want a distribution that will use the absolutely newest version of some form of software (even newer than unstable for debian) that will at least be able to test stuff out instead of compiling it for myself (ever tried to really live on a 340Mb hd as a linux user? It can be painful).
I have a dream that computer components would be completely 100% backwards compatable and allow me to just take a PIII or something like an Anthalon and just stick it into my 486's motherboard and get it to run. I would like to have a working copy of various GNOME applications that will always work fast and be scable to the processor and memory requirements of a machine. I have a dream that all packages will be allowed for a distribution and that no matter what I install I can upgrade and remove it seamlessly without complaint. I have a dream that all the really interesting developments in computers would not be just for the very elite people in the world and make them more approachable. I have a dream that uncertainty would be removed in the field of technology so that I can be guaranteed at least a decent source of employment. I have a dream that there would be more games that would be scalable and easier to run on crappy machines and not necessitate purtchess of expensive stuff that will be gone shortly.
I have a dream that all kinds of access would be possible for the internet and that truely free internet access would actually work work for linux like it does already for windows and the Mac. I dream of all these things without a heed for their lack of possibility and those of the world call me a Quixotean fool for what ammounts to impossibility in terms of actually advancing civilization. We al dream for these things but they never come true. We all search for things that are not there and we try to believe. What is it that we really want? I want a computer that has all of my interests in heart. But the bastard machines have betrayed me at every turn! Ahhh the humanity of it all! What do I actually care if some person dosn't hae the grapes to actually just get a video card that is a little less powerful or a processor that is in fact a little slower than the absolte best? Does it really affect me? Does the universe cease to turn and does the su n then burn out? Do I suddently become fated to have my life
eclipsed by the shadow of Zuses's wrath? I propose not really.
Linux does a better job of my needs but why the bloat to the total operating system in the array of implimentations of such things as grahics? Why do simple dos games that ran quite well on 286s (Wolfenstein) and such still preform slugglishly on higher end 486 machines? Why the obcession with pretty pictures and the like? Why do we need to observer all that is there without regard to content or use?
Yes we dream of things but will they come true for you or I or any of the people on this spinning blue sphere in any fashion at all? I think not.
Ok here's a little bit of trivia for you. What database does slashdot use for its' engine? Well I guess I kind of let the cat out of the bag in the subject: mysql. Last time I checked it was a little less than full GPL. Dosn this put a little damper on being able to do many of the really interesting things in an free an open manner anyway?
How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply. And as far as a I can tell doing it yourself would be hard as well. Can anyone tell me what would be the cheapest option to creating a site with the existing slash code in a reasonable way.
Don't use web hosting companies that are defective, like CIHost, or Digex. God, Digex sucks. For the past three months we've been dealing with their crap. We have three Solaris boxen at their facility in NoCal; ever since we've had them, they have had connection and bandwidth problems. We get timeouts; we get slow speeds; we get packet loss. Hell, the other day I had to FTP a 146 MB file from one to another. These machines are on a 100BaseT LAN. It never broke 15KB/s. Not to mention uploading the 146 MB file in the first place, which never broke 10KB/s.
Is this company or personal? I would surely hope that your company wouldn't bet its' break and butter stuff to these bozos. As an interesting aside I have noticed that when transmitting large volumes of data that network preformance (with almost any line but usually public ones) goes down in a linear or logarathmic fashion is there some phenomeon that causes this to happen (besides increased network trafic?)
Not to mention that they tend to tell you they'll call you right back, and then don't; they'll tell you something has been fixed, but they haven't tested it (and of course it's not fixed); and so forth. I would avoid Digex at all costs if I were you.
How do these guys avoid getting sued in the first place? Assuming you are loosing data in great quantities and you are experiencing undue levels of incompetence you are able to sue them for this.
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
This actually sounds like a Microsoft solution when something goes wrong. Since usually most items are dependant on preconfigured settings and gui administration most of the really interesting automation usually cannot happen natively. Batch files after all can only do so much and WSH is only so effective at some of the more independent abilities of shell and perl.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
I agree. Most of the settings for various system files that I have seen have been in hiden and system directories that are not usually thought as part of the normal file system (Netware) and such. When people do backups its not totally intuitive for the average person to get something of that nature done easily or properly without the necessary training. An MCSE will not usually cut it because little is done to teach out of contingency management.
I feel that a company is supposed to provide a service that is stable, secure, and efficient. Any time those goals are violated in any way the person has a legitimate legal complaint. Would you be pleased or very impressed at all if for example you had your automobile serviced and then as you were driving out of the service center the engine just dropped out of the vehicle? Hardly.
I think CompuServer and Juno are offering similar rebates,it looks lke a great way for Californian's to steal $400.
I thought that Juno was that free e-mail company is their an ISP that has a similar name or has Juno changed it TOS now?
Personally, if I were in California I'd be getting myself a nice new jumbo sized hard drive on Microsoft.
$400 for even a top of the line hd is rather inflated is that what people in California and Oregon have to pay these days?
I'm just curious why this article was posted on Slashdot. There's no angle to BASH Microsoft here. What are the Linux zealots to do?
It has nothing to do with Linux in any way just about people who don't want to use MSN as their ISP or have to stay with them for a period of 3 years. Why should I sign up for MSN when I could say have a DSL or cable or even a T-1 and use a closer, better, faster, more courteous ISP than MSN?
I think Microsoft may just wait until some slightly higher profile person does this and then challenge it in court and make a public example of them. Remember you may not matter but that dosn't mean that they are not paying attention to you.
This poses an interesting question... Will the continued recognition of open source by the corporate community be genuine, or are they simply paying lip service? Will they use a "real" open source license? Will the presence of commercial interests change the open source community? If so, how? Will people be less willing to code "for free" when there are companies willing to pay -- but they pay for what they want, not what you want...
I would think that most of what we have been observing as of late are attempts to make things that are closed source open source if two conditions apply:
1. The product is becomming obsolete or sales are dropping to levels that make its' continued presence in the marketplace not worth the energy they are putting into it.
2. The product has lost market/mindshare and it needs a shot in the arm (Mozilla/Borland).
If I was a corporation I would be looking at these options in great detail if I needed a boost. It makes your company look good and secretly you get more and more money in the process; while placating and convincing people with programming know how that you are a good choice to work with. Do I expect to see Microsoft ever to release any version of windows? No. Do I expect someday to see some crappy program to come down the pike with a restricted opensource liscence? Yes.
Would the release of the Apple source code emable a port to the X86 platform? Sure, we all love linux, but from a GUI standpoint I'd rather use the MacOS over M$FT any day. Also, could it be possible to create an X WM based on the Apple source??
They actually have various themes for gnome, kde, and window maker that change the UI so that it works just like the MacOS or quite close to it. They also have Mac emulators for linux as well.
The very fact the a company that makes very good hardware (compared to some of the things that the PC market has) but has an interface that is a little geek limiting (I really like command lines and such) is now taking the opportunity to make a unix like interface that dosn't need to have totally graphical features and is Open Source! This is quite nice as well because it will also have full hardware support and be free of some of the hoop jumping of other PPC and related OSs.
I for one am an avid slashdot fan. So much so that I in times past tried to get most of the slashdot comments on paper at say oh 4 pt. Even with this method it started to become rather incomvienent to get everything in that manner. I then started to use Xemacs to read text output generated by the various browser programs out there (Netscape, IE, and lynx) Netscape did the best job by properly indenting the text for new comments to the thread in nested mode. However IE deviated even further from this by doing this for a while asnd then further in the thread deciding to just indent the subject of the comment thereby creating a nasty hard-to-figure-out nesting scheme. Lynx will plain to render anything even in nested mode and just prints the data almost like flat or plain mode. Anything that actually helps get this working is good.
It's the Slashdot Reader at http://pike-community.org/sites/slashdot/
To quote http://www.freshmeat.net:
The Slashdot Reader is a program for reading Slashdot headlines and
their comments without a using a web browser. It started out as Yet
Another Headline Viewer (TM) but has evolved a lot since then. Now you
can both read and reply to messages (replies are currently done using
a spawned browser).
The maintainer is David Hedbor