> "Whoa! That's the best wine I've ever had in my > life! Where did you get it? How much did it cost? > Pour me some more! Is the bottle empty already? > Wanh wanh wanh!!!"
> If Microsoft software is so bad, > why doesn't someone create some that is close?
First there is a lot of software out there that is a lot better than anything Microsoft has ever written. Did Microsoft write the software that controls the Space Shuttle? I don't think so. This software has been audited bytecode by bytecode and simply *works*. Did Microsoft write the software that controls nuclear power plants? same story.
If you mean desktop kind of software, what about OS/X? Try it for a while, it is a 100 times better than Windows, hands down.
Myself I think Mozilla is much much better than IE. You should try it some time.
Second because Microsoft won't let you. Seriously.
Look at the Go story today. If any company looks like someone is writing a piece of software in which Microsoft is interested in, they will pull every stop to kill it, and they have (netscape, etc). At the moment Microsoft is trying very hard to kill open-source software, you'd be blind not to notice it, between all the memos, all the shady SCO stuff, all the bad press Microsoft is trying to give OSS at every turn.
Third because Microsoft has billions in the bank and can bring resources to bear that no one else can, when they really want it they can take an existing piece of software by company Z, clone it, improve on it a bit on the edges (easy when you know there is a market and a blueprint) and bundle it. Case closed.
You can't erase thousands of years of feuds at a stroke. Even right now Americans are still very very close the British (same language, same origin for the majority), and look how well they get along with the French (Both the Americans and the British). In all objectivity, are the French so bad? I don't think so. Neither are the German, the Dutch, the
I the US there might be 50 states but they are all pretty much the same. Maybe a Californian will make fun of an Oregonian, but who cares? At the basic level they understand each other and an Oregonian might well become a Californian someday. It is a hell of a lot harder for a German to go to work in Spain, let me tell you. New language, new customs, hardly anything in common.
For an American to say "oh, grow up, can't you realize you should get along?" to some Europeans and at the same time both rename their chips "freedom fries" and goes away and bomb somebody for political purposes is simply the height of irony.
That the Europeans are starting to get along is a bloody miracle.
That's only a few of the more obvious ones. I'm pretty sure they'd knew what to do with a few hundred million dollars each.
And yes, the EU could decide to fund various universities with that money for various open-source projects, or set up their own foundation to best spend the cash on worthy F/OSS developers.
> Time and money trump anything the EU has on their > side.
Like the law? It didn't work for Carnegie in the US, we'll see.
If this is their line in the sand, why is it that they have kept so much cash in hand rather than spend it? Wouldn't it be because they were anticipating troubles like these?
Do you usually quote things out of context like that? The man was imprisoned 12 years although innocent. He won E1 million in compensation, however the jugdge tried to substract E50,000 of that same amount for bed and board. That's not exactly the same thing as what you wrote. The way you wrote things it sounds as if the guy was imprisoned, then later found innocent and then charged for time in jail without any kind of compensation, which is not at all what happened.
Moreover the judge's decision was reversed (that decision is being appealed),.
Also don't worry (or rather do worry), surveillance systems are alive and well in the US as well.
In the meantime Microsoft is not happy to pay. It will create a precedent, and they are fighting it tooth and nail.
Believe me if it turns out they do eventually pay, there will be some long faces at Microsoft, and the stock will take a beating, and the shareholder will start asking questions, because it might be (and *might* is enough) the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
It won't take 10 of these fines to bring Microsoft down completely.
Scenario: Company A start making new, innovative product (e.g: Real, Netscape). Microsoft waits a bit, decides A is on a winner, either buys A outright or makes competing product. Microsoft bundles product, makes it cooler, better than A's product using its vast resources, etc.
Users move to using Microsoft's product. A dies. Microsoft has continued to assert their dominance, while not innovating one bit. Shortly Microsoft loses interest in the product A used to make because there is no competition anymore.
Case in point: Internet Explorer. How long have we had IE6? When is IE going to support web standards?
This is not healthy. The famed market is not rewarding the innovators, it's rewarding the wealthy. If you want to have continued innovation and competition in the marketplace you need to change this. Microsoft has in its sight the game console makers, Google, and a host of other minor stuff you never hear about, but when you do, you might think "oh yes, these guys used to make good software".
Microsoft is happy to have a large number of small development house who do little pieces of software that a minority of people use and as long as it runs on its own system. As soon as any of these companies comes up with something that more than about a million people would use, they apply the above tactics. It's trouble-free, guaranteed to work and they are not afraid to use it.
You decide in which world you want to live. If you think the above is fine and you will trust Microsoft for the remainder of your days to provide the best IT environement anybody can dream of, I don't have an argument with you. However this is not my opinion.
Microsoft tactics make my blood boil, I think they make horrible software and have only their own interest as heart. We need the competition. Bring on the fines, Europe!
I just want to remind you that at that point in time (1939-40, when Poland was invaded and Hitler consolidated), neither the UK or the USA for that matter did anything to stop Hitler. Yes France should have invaded (easy to say with 20/20 hindsight) but so should have the UK, at least.
The USA were the biggest cowards as well at the time. `It was not their problem'. 75% of the opinion in the US wanted no part of what was happening in Europe (who cares? they were saying). The US only got involved when they got attacked in one of their remote bases, and only through FDR's careful manipulation of the opinion.
And the USA did not get involved in Europe out of the goodness of their heart. Had they not, Europe would now be either 100% German and fascist or 100% Russian and still communist. In spite of the current minor diplomatic difficulties we have now, the USA thought at the time it would be far, far easier to continue to deal with Western-style, enfeebled democracies rather than another antagonistic superblock with even more resources than their own, and they were right.
Finally it's a lot easier for old men in power in remote countries with a lot of young population that was never severely affected to send them to battle with good materiel, as was the case in the US, than it is for old men in power who have seen the effect of war themselves to send a severly affected by a recent war, not so young, not so well equipped army into slaughter as was the case in Europe.
If John Kerry gets elected, I suspect (and I hope) he will be less eager to send young Americans to die overseas for dubious reasons than the current president, who himself was never involved in battle.
Like I said, it's in the eye of the beholder. Myself I like the C++ ISO style.
One thing that confuses me with Qt is the allocation business. You are now allowed to free what you allocate, the toolkit takes care of that, except for a few things... I think this confuses newbies too.
Regarding signal/slot, you should take a look at the callback infrastructure of FLTK (www.fltk.org), very simple, no extension.
IBM's research centers do very well. They earn in excess of $1B a year in licencing fee alone. Also how much do you think the 50,000 patents portfolio is worth? Don't you think it will come into play shortly with the SCO disaster?
Bell Labs were explicitely forbidden to market Unix or the C language or C++ for profit due to regulation. Arguably this is a contributing cause to their success, making these technologies open and publicly available to a great extent.
Management, like politics, is most often short term focussed. Pure research drives what society will use 20-50 years down the track and it can be profitable for companies, as IBM is showing. It just requires long-term management. Maybe they should take a leaf out of some companies that have long-term views, like some wineries (look up Robert Mondavies: he wants to make his premium wine, Opus One, the best wine on the planet, period, within a time frame of 100 years. Right now it is in the top ten).
Today's broadband ISPs are a bit more sophisticated than the shabby dialup operations of yesteryear. Now they offer as standard spam & viruses filtering, NAT, real routers as opposed to modems, and more.
Also more and more mere users have come to understand the importance of patching, disabling services, not trusting attachments etc and even Microsoft is supposed to be shipping some kind of firewall software as standard now.
I'm sorry, you are the flamer, I would have said nothing if you had remained polite and objective.
All I have to say is that CVS is still tremendously useful, and you have no right to call it a POS. It's not remotely polite. I'm not a CVS developer but I've been using it for many years, and I've also used others SCS over time like SCCS, RCS, Perforce and now Subversion.
I've never used CSCVS, I'm sure it's tremendously useful, I mean no disrespect.
In defence of CVS all I'm saying is that it has limitations, but that these limitations are well known and well documented, and that CVS is as bug-free as any piece of software can be. When Arch has 1% of the usage that CVS has had I'll certainly consider using it.
I know very well that CVS doesn't do moves and renames nicely, but you can still do them, and you can still do branching. The point is that for the truly vast majority of software projects out there CVS is enough, and if not Subversion certainly is. Only a few projects really need Arch's features and very few of them should be ready at this stage to trust Arch's implementation.
I'd love to see the proportion of software projects, free or otherwise, that use 10,000 files. Most start with something like 10 and die before they reach 1000. The main problems I face with people who use any version of source control systems is not branching or atomic operations, it's developers who can't be bothered double-checking their changes and only submit a subset of what is needed for the others to compile the tree again. Now if there was a SCS that could force users to do this double checking that would be a real advance.
Moreover Arch might be very nice but it is maintain by a single lone guy who says on his home page that he doesn't have the time or resources to maintain it as he would like to. Would you trust your whole source tree with a piece of software that might go totally unmaintained tomorrow?
AFAIK sourceforge does not support Arch or Subversion. You have to use CVS, full stop. Maybe that means something?
Finally I really can't see why you think a particular project is not worthwhile because it doesn't use Arch as its SCS.
I wouldn't say that Palm is quite dead yet, or that it is the PocketPC that are killing it. Unless you are someone who 100% absolutely needs to have a PC in your pocket the Palms (and their licensees like the Sonys) are still more useable.
Palm faces competition from two segments: their own old hardware (I don't plan to change my Palm III until it dies. I love the autonomy: one month! and I don't need colour or more memory) and cell phones with calendars. Most people don't care about playing videos on tiny screens.
If I were a CVS developer I'd be really pissed off right now:
> a POS excuse for a revision control system like CVS
Sorry? what happened to good manner? CVS is still the work horse of pretty damn near 100% of all free software projects and God now how many non-free ones. It may have a few issues but it works as advertised and it is still very very useful, pretty much bug free and has been for many years. The CVS issues that Arch is designed to fix don't come up very often in real-world projects with a couple, or even a dozen of developers, and at the moment maybe Arch is stable, maybe it isn't, and it certainly hasn't seen the kind of usage that CVS has, so people may have very good reason not to choose it over CVS.
When you have contributed something of the order of magnitude of usefulness as CVS, maybe you will have a leg to stand on.
In the meantime people have work to do. Good day to you.
There are lots of comments that are saying: look, Windows Media Player is the best, why should Microsoft forced to unbundle it? Why is the European parliament worried about that?
Some time ago Microsoft did not care too much about the video media. Windows had a player that basically used Intel codecs. Then came along Real and Apple with much better video compression and rendering, and all sort of things sprung up on the web like movie trailers, etc, that people actually wanted to watch.
Now Microsoft became interested, developed their own codecs and now wants to own that market lock, stock and barrel. It can be easily argued that they have been using their monopoly on the desktop to ensure their dominance in this area, and that shortly Real will be history and probably Apple too, except on their own hardware.
This is not a very healthy situation. Microsoft is so huge and powerful that they can wait for smaller companies to come up with new, innovative business models and product, let them do the hard slog of being the prime mover in a new area, and then when it is proven to work and be profitable, either buy them outright or quickly write a competing product that they can force people to use just by bundling it `for free' with their O/S.
Quickly content developers start using the Microsoft format, whether it is better or worse than the competition does not matter because it is soon to become `the standard' by virtue of Microsoft saying so.
This is not healthy because it discourages innovation on the desktop, it does not reward the true innovators, only the same people over and over, and once the market domination has been put in place, end-users face a total absense of choice and competition, which can't be good.
Just remember the Netscape situation, and look at the state of Internet Explorer on Windows right now. Sure IE was better at some stage than Netscape was, but Netscape was completely wiped out by virtue of the bundling of IE, and now IE is not standard compliant, full of bugs, lacks a lot of features that other browsers have had for years (tabs, better popup controls, spam control, etc) but Microsoft has lost interest. It owns the market now, and can't be bothered maintaining IE, they have other fish to fry.
If nothing is done over the video codecs and players, this is exactly what will happen to users a few years down the track.
The idea of the injunction is not to forbid Microsoft from providing a Media Player, it is to forbid them from bundling it. Users can still download it for free or whatever, or they can get it on a CD, whatever. The idea is to level the playing field by forcing the users to make a choice based on quality and availability, not a Microsoft fiat.
So maybe there is a tiny bit of inconvenience to users right now, but the benefit is continued competition for years to come, based on quality, not the leverage of a monopoly.
Apparently you can sue the government and even win if you prove some law has do you harm somehow. This is the essence of Mabo, but you have to be in there for the long haul, I think it took Mabo more than 10 years to have "Terra Nullius" revoked, and he was dead before he learned of his victory.
In the case of the FTA there should be reviews at regular intervals, I think the Democrats are heading down that path.
Eventually when we vote for the Republic again we must *insist* on a Bill of Rights.
RedHat hasn't dropped their desktop, it's called Fedora now. Look closely at the URL, they are still supporting it.
Moreover AFAIK their entire line of product is open-source, even the branded, server line. They make their money the way the FSF says they should: by providing the support and distribution for pay and the source for free. You are still welcome to grab and compile RHEL for yourself and maintain it yourself using the released source patches.
So far this is 100% in the FOSS model, and yes RedHat is making profits.
I'm not sure how you would do your accounting regarding open-source projects like Darwin. Obviously you are not going to get hard cash for Darwin itself, but there are lots of unpaid programmers who help maintain it, and it makes its way eventually in MacOS/X, which certainly isn't free and that people don't seem to mind paying for.
Regarding OSS on the desktop, your last comment, you need to realize that the world is up against a massive monopoly who shall remain nameless, and who has a track record of not playing fair. So what do you do? Complaining that OSS is not making money right now in this space is silly. I would wager that this big monopoly is not making a lot of money on the desktop O/S either given the price they charge OEMs.
This in itself does not mean the FOSS model of making money is flawed given the playing field is not level, you simply cannot draw that conclusion. On the contrary, the evidence in server space where there is a lot more competition is that it works really quite well.
I can only tell you that when that happened, as a French citizen I was totally aghast at:
1- the complete stupidity, incompetence, callousness and viciousness of the French secret service. 2- How the governement could get away with this. Eventually the defence minister was fired, but clearly at least the prime minister and probably the president (Francois Mitterand) knew about all that and should have resigned on the spot, if not faced an international court of justice.
The whole story that was relayed in the French media seem to have been fair to the NZ side of the story. Eventually the prime minister got so damaged with this story (and another one on contaminated blood) that he was fired. However Mitterand lingered on and was even re-elected against Jacques Chirac (another great guy that the New Zealander love).
Please don't confuse the French people and their representative or their secret service, no more than you should confuse the average American with GWB or the CIA.
I'd like to think that if that happened again, such a state-sponsored act of terrorist would see those responsible face the tribunal at The Hague.
You are right that the FTA (not Free as in speech or as in beer, that's for sure) is a huge worry.
I'm actually worried by the lack of ways for the common person in Australia to challenge the power that be in some kind of court. If the FTA gets signed on, and people in the US realize how detrimental the DMCA is after a while, we could be faced with an implementation of the DMCA in Australia that wouldn't exist in the US anymore but that we could not get rid of over here.
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> "Whoa! That's the best wine I've ever had in my
> life! Where did you get it? How much did it cost?
> Pour me some more! Is the bottle empty already?
> Wanh wanh wanh!!!"
Yes, I know what you mean exactly. All the best.
If you run RedHat chances are you're not running the stock kernel. This is still the most popular distribution.
I think most large distro have customized kernels.
In fact I think most Linux users who do not compile their own kernels do not use Linus'
> If Microsoft software is so bad,
> why doesn't someone create some that is close?
First there is a lot of software out there that is a lot better than anything Microsoft has ever written. Did Microsoft write the software that controls the Space Shuttle? I don't think so. This software has been audited bytecode by bytecode and simply *works*. Did Microsoft write the software that controls nuclear power plants? same story.
If you mean desktop kind of software, what about OS/X? Try it for a while, it is a 100 times better than Windows, hands down.
Myself I think Mozilla is much much better than IE. You should try it some time.
Second because Microsoft won't let you. Seriously.
Look at the Go story today. If any company looks like someone is writing a piece of software in which Microsoft is interested in, they will pull every stop to kill it, and they have (netscape, etc). At the moment Microsoft is trying very hard to kill open-source software, you'd be blind not to notice it, between all the memos, all the shady SCO stuff, all the bad press Microsoft is trying to give OSS at every turn.
Third because Microsoft has billions in the bank and can bring resources to bear that no one else can, when they really want it they can take an existing piece of software by company Z, clone it, improve on it a bit on the edges (easy when you know there is a market and a blueprint) and bundle it. Case closed.
You can't erase thousands of years of feuds at a stroke. Even right now Americans are still very very close the British (same language, same origin for the majority), and look how well they get along with the French (Both the Americans and the British). In all objectivity, are the French so bad? I don't think so. Neither are the German, the Dutch, the
I the US there might be 50 states but they are all pretty much the same. Maybe a Californian will make fun of an Oregonian, but who cares? At the basic level they understand each other and an Oregonian might well become a Californian someday. It is a hell of a lot harder for a German to go to work in Spain, let me tell you. New language, new customs, hardly anything in common.
For an American to say "oh, grow up, can't you realize you should get along?" to some Europeans and at the same time both rename their chips "freedom fries" and goes away and bomb somebody for political purposes is simply the height of irony.
That the Europeans are starting to get along is a bloody miracle.
Let's see:
1- The Free Software Foundation
2- The Open Source Initiative
3- The Open Source Development Labs (They employ Linus Thorvalds)
4- The Source forge
That's only a few of the more obvious ones. I'm pretty sure they'd knew what to do with a few hundred million dollars each.
And yes, the EU could decide to fund various universities with that money for various open-source projects, or set up their own foundation to best spend the cash on worthy F/OSS developers.
> Time and money trump anything the EU has on their
> side.
Like the law? It didn't work for Carnegie in the US, we'll see.
If this is their line in the sand, why is it that they have kept so much cash in hand rather than spend it? Wouldn't it be because they were anticipating troubles like these?
Do you usually quote things out of context like that? The man was imprisoned 12 years although innocent. He won E1 million in compensation, however the jugdge tried to substract E50,000 of that same amount for bed and board. That's not exactly the same thing as what you wrote. The way you wrote things it sounds as if the guy was imprisoned, then later found innocent and then charged for time in jail without any kind of compensation, which is not at all what happened.
Moreover the judge's decision was reversed (that decision is being appealed),.
Also don't worry (or rather do worry), surveillance systems are alive and well in the US as well.
In the meantime Microsoft is not happy to pay. It will create a precedent, and they are fighting it tooth and nail.
Believe me if it turns out they do eventually pay, there will be some long faces at Microsoft, and the stock will take a beating, and the shareholder will start asking questions, because it might be (and *might* is enough) the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
It won't take 10 of these fines to bring Microsoft down completely.
Axiom: Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop.
Scenario:
Company A start making new, innovative product (e.g: Real, Netscape). Microsoft waits a bit, decides A is on a winner, either buys A outright or makes competing product. Microsoft bundles product, makes it cooler, better than A's product using its vast resources, etc.
Users move to using Microsoft's product. A dies. Microsoft has continued to assert their dominance, while not innovating one bit. Shortly Microsoft loses interest in the product A used to make because there is no competition anymore.
Case in point: Internet Explorer. How long have we had IE6? When is IE going to support web standards?
This is not healthy. The famed market is not rewarding the innovators, it's rewarding the wealthy. If you want to have continued innovation and competition in the marketplace you need to change this. Microsoft has in its sight the game console makers, Google, and a host of other minor stuff you never hear about, but when you do, you might think "oh yes, these guys used to make good software".
Microsoft is happy to have a large number of small development house who do little pieces of software that a minority of people use and as long as it runs on its own system. As soon as any of these companies comes up with something that more than about a million people would use, they apply the above tactics. It's trouble-free, guaranteed to work and they are not afraid to use it.
You decide in which world you want to live. If you think the above is fine and you will trust Microsoft for the remainder of your days to provide the best IT environement anybody can dream of, I don't have an argument with you. However this is not my opinion.
Microsoft tactics make my blood boil, I think they make horrible software and have only their own interest as heart. We need the competition. Bring on the fines, Europe!
I just want to remind you that at that point in time (1939-40, when Poland was invaded and Hitler consolidated), neither the UK or the USA for that matter did anything to stop Hitler. Yes France should have invaded (easy to say with 20/20 hindsight) but so should have the UK, at least.
The USA were the biggest cowards as well at the time. `It was not their problem'. 75% of the opinion in the US wanted no part of what was happening in Europe (who cares? they were saying). The US only got involved when they got attacked in one of their remote bases, and only through FDR's careful manipulation of the opinion.
And the USA did not get involved in Europe out of the goodness of their heart. Had they not, Europe would now be either 100% German and fascist or 100% Russian and still communist. In spite of the current minor diplomatic difficulties we have now, the USA thought at the time it would be far, far easier to continue to deal with Western-style, enfeebled democracies rather than another antagonistic superblock with even more resources than their own, and they were right.
Finally it's a lot easier for old men in power in remote countries with a lot of young population that was never severely affected to send them to battle with good materiel, as was the case in the US, than it is for old men in power who have seen the effect of war themselves to send a severly affected by a recent war, not so young, not so well equipped army into slaughter as was the case in Europe.
If John Kerry gets elected, I suspect (and I hope) he will be less eager to send young Americans to die overseas for dubious reasons than the current president, who himself was never involved in battle.
To me eonophilia is like audiophilia. I like wine and music but I have better things to do with the little money I have to pursue these things.
Like I said, it's in the eye of the beholder. Myself I like the C++ ISO style.
One thing that confuses me with Qt is the allocation business. You are now allowed to free what you allocate, the toolkit takes care of that, except for a few things... I think this confuses newbies too.
Regarding signal/slot, you should take a look at the callback infrastructure of FLTK (www.fltk.org), very simple, no extension.
Well it's pretty unusual for researcher to pay for conference registration fees out of their own salaries.
Out of the budget for their lab, yes, but there is a big difference there.
IBM's research centers do very well. They earn in excess of $1B a year in licencing fee alone. Also how much do you think the 50,000 patents portfolio is worth? Don't you think it will come into play shortly with the SCO disaster?
Bell Labs were explicitely forbidden to market Unix or the C language or C++ for profit due to regulation. Arguably this is a contributing cause to their success, making these technologies open and publicly available to a great extent.
Management, like politics, is most often short term focussed. Pure research drives what society will use 20-50 years down the track and it can be profitable for companies, as IBM is showing. It just requires long-term management. Maybe they should take a leaf out of some companies that have long-term views, like some wineries (look up Robert Mondavies: he wants to make his premium wine, Opus One, the best wine on the planet, period, within a time frame of 100 years. Right now it is in the top ten).
Ah yes, no template (no STL), no exception, home-grown String class and the weird non-standard signal/slot extension. C++ from ca 1990.
Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.
What they mean like that is that you are not allowed to develop closed source apps, free (as in beer) or otherwise, with the GPL version of QT.
If you want to develop closed-source applications with QT you need to purchase the commercial version of QT, you can't use the GPL version.
This way of doing things is compatible with the GPL.
Today's broadband ISPs are a bit more sophisticated than the shabby dialup operations of yesteryear. Now they offer as standard spam & viruses filtering, NAT, real routers as opposed to modems, and more.
Also more and more mere users have come to understand the importance of patching, disabling services, not trusting attachments etc and even Microsoft is supposed to be shipping some kind of firewall software as standard now.
Things are not as one-sided as it looks.
I'm sorry, you are the flamer, I would have said nothing if you had remained polite and objective.
All I have to say is that CVS is still tremendously useful, and you have no right to call it a POS. It's not remotely polite. I'm not a CVS developer but I've been using it for many years, and I've also used others SCS over time like SCCS, RCS, Perforce and now Subversion.
I've never used CSCVS, I'm sure it's tremendously useful, I mean no disrespect.
In defence of CVS all I'm saying is that it has limitations, but that these limitations are well known and well documented, and that CVS is as bug-free as any piece of software can be. When Arch has 1% of the usage that CVS has had I'll certainly consider using it.
I know very well that CVS doesn't do moves and renames nicely, but you can still do them, and you can still do branching. The point is that for the truly vast majority of software projects out there CVS is enough, and if not Subversion certainly is. Only a few projects really need Arch's features and very few of them should be ready at this stage to trust Arch's implementation.
I'd love to see the proportion of software projects, free or otherwise, that use 10,000 files. Most start with something like 10 and die before they reach 1000. The main problems I face with people who use any version of source control systems is not branching or atomic operations, it's developers who can't be bothered double-checking their changes and only submit a subset of what is needed for the others to compile the tree again. Now if there was a SCS that could force users to do this double checking that would be a real advance.
Moreover Arch might be very nice but it is maintain by a single lone guy who says on his home page that he doesn't have the time or resources to maintain it as he would like to. Would you trust your whole source tree with a piece of software that might go totally unmaintained tomorrow?
AFAIK sourceforge does not support Arch or Subversion. You have to use CVS, full stop. Maybe that means something?
Finally I really can't see why you think a particular project is not worthwhile because it doesn't use Arch as its SCS.
I wouldn't say that Palm is quite dead yet, or that it is the PocketPC that are killing it. Unless you are someone who 100% absolutely needs to have a PC in your pocket the Palms (and their licensees like the Sonys) are still more useable.
Palm faces competition from two segments: their own old hardware (I don't plan to change my Palm III until it dies. I love the autonomy: one month! and I don't need colour or more memory) and cell phones with calendars. Most people don't care about playing videos on tiny screens.
If I were a CVS developer I'd be really pissed off right now:
> a POS excuse for a revision control system like CVS
Sorry? what happened to good manner? CVS is still the work horse of pretty damn near 100% of all free software projects and God now how many non-free ones. It may have a few issues but it works as advertised and it is still very very useful, pretty much bug free and has been for many years. The CVS issues that Arch is designed to fix don't come up very often in real-world projects with a couple, or even a dozen of developers, and at the moment maybe Arch is stable, maybe it isn't, and it certainly hasn't seen the kind of usage that CVS has, so people may have very good reason not to choose it over CVS.
When you have contributed something of the order of magnitude of usefulness as CVS, maybe you will have a leg to stand on.
In the meantime people have work to do. Good day to you.
There are lots of comments that are saying: look, Windows Media Player is the best, why should Microsoft forced to unbundle it? Why is the European parliament worried about that?
Some time ago Microsoft did not care too much about the video media. Windows had a player that basically used Intel codecs. Then came along Real and Apple with much better video compression and rendering, and all sort of things sprung up on the web like movie trailers, etc, that people actually wanted to watch.
Now Microsoft became interested, developed their own codecs and now wants to own that market lock, stock and barrel. It can be easily argued that they have been using their monopoly on the desktop to ensure their dominance in this area, and that shortly Real will be history and probably Apple too, except on their own hardware.
This is not a very healthy situation. Microsoft is so huge and powerful that they can wait for smaller companies to come up with new, innovative business models and product, let them do the hard slog of being the prime mover in a new area, and then when it is proven to work and be profitable, either buy them outright or quickly write a competing product that they can force people to use just by bundling it `for free' with their O/S.
Quickly content developers start using the Microsoft format, whether it is better or worse than the competition does not matter because it is soon to become `the standard' by virtue of Microsoft saying so.
This is not healthy because it discourages innovation on the desktop, it does not reward the true innovators, only the same people over and over, and once the market domination has been put in place, end-users face a total absense of choice and competition, which can't be good.
Just remember the Netscape situation, and look at the state of Internet Explorer on Windows right now. Sure IE was better at some stage than Netscape was, but Netscape was completely wiped out by virtue of the bundling of IE, and now IE is not standard compliant, full of bugs, lacks a lot of features that other browsers have had for years (tabs, better popup controls, spam control, etc) but Microsoft has lost interest. It owns the market now, and can't be bothered maintaining IE, they have other fish to fry.
If nothing is done over the video codecs and players, this is exactly what will happen to users a few years down the track.
The idea of the injunction is not to forbid Microsoft from providing a Media Player, it is to forbid them from bundling it. Users can still download it for free or whatever, or they can get it on a CD, whatever. The idea is to level the playing field by forcing the users to make a choice based on quality and availability, not a Microsoft fiat.
So maybe there is a tiny bit of inconvenience to users right now, but the benefit is continued competition for years to come, based on quality, not the leverage of a monopoly.
Ultimately this is better for users.
Apparently you can sue the government and even win if you prove some law has do you harm somehow. This is the essence of Mabo, but you have to be in there for the long haul, I think it took Mabo more than 10 years to have "Terra Nullius" revoked, and he was dead before he learned of his victory.
In the case of the FTA there should be reviews at regular intervals, I think the Democrats are heading down that path.
Eventually when we vote for the Republic again we must *insist* on a Bill of Rights.
You are making some points that are simply false:
RedHat hasn't dropped their desktop, it's called Fedora now. Look closely at the URL, they are still supporting it.
Moreover AFAIK their entire line of product is open-source, even the branded, server line. They make their money the way the FSF says they should: by providing the support and distribution for pay and the source for free. You are still welcome to grab and compile RHEL for yourself and maintain it yourself using the released source patches.
So far this is 100% in the FOSS model, and yes RedHat is making profits.
I'm not sure how you would do your accounting regarding open-source projects like Darwin. Obviously you are not going to get hard cash for Darwin itself, but there are lots of unpaid programmers who help maintain it, and it makes its way eventually in MacOS/X, which certainly isn't free and that people don't seem to mind paying for.
Regarding OSS on the desktop, your last comment, you need to realize that the world is up against a massive monopoly who shall remain nameless, and who has a track record of not playing fair. So what do you do? Complaining that OSS is not making money right now in this space is silly. I would wager that this big monopoly is not making a lot of money on the desktop O/S either given the price they charge OEMs.
This in itself does not mean the FOSS model of making money is flawed given the playing field is not level, you simply cannot draw that conclusion. On the contrary, the evidence in server space where there is a lot more competition is that it works really quite well.
I can only tell you that when that happened, as a French citizen I was totally aghast at:
1- the complete stupidity, incompetence, callousness and viciousness of the French secret service.
2- How the governement could get away with this. Eventually the defence minister was fired, but clearly at least the prime minister and probably the president (Francois Mitterand) knew about all that and should have resigned on the spot, if not faced an international court of justice.
The whole story that was relayed in the French media seem to have been fair to the NZ side of the story. Eventually the prime minister got so damaged with this story (and another one on contaminated blood) that he was fired. However Mitterand lingered on and was even re-elected against Jacques Chirac (another great guy that the New Zealander love).
Please don't confuse the French people and their representative or their secret service, no more than you should confuse the average American with GWB or the CIA.
I'd like to think that if that happened again, such a state-sponsored act of terrorist would see those responsible face the tribunal at The Hague.
You are right that the FTA (not Free as in speech or as in beer, that's for sure) is a huge worry.
I'm actually worried by the lack of ways for the common person in Australia to challenge the power that be in some kind of court. If the FTA gets signed on, and people in the US realize how detrimental the DMCA is after a while, we could be faced with an implementation of the DMCA in Australia that wouldn't exist in the US anymore but that we could not get rid of over here.