Maybe buying StarOffice was cheap. However, many Sun engineers have been maintaining and improving OpenOffice for the last 6 years. There are still a lot of things that could be better with OpenOffice, but the progress from 1.0 to 2.0 was amazing, and Sun must have payed for most of it. I am really curios whether doing all this development in the open was overall beneficial for Sun (it surely was beneficial for the community). I remember they had their hard times, for example everybody was flaming Sun when they started using Java for some OpenOffice components. They were also flamed for the (bloated) architecture of OpenOffice, which I think was inherited from StarOffice anyway.
PNG wouldn't solve anything here, it works better for simple images with lines and large areas of color (vector rasterization, GUI screenshots, etc). Using it on things like pictures just results in a large filesize with a quality no better than JPEG. Their choice of JPEGs with temporarily available BMPs was a good decision.
You are wrong. Twice.
First, "PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a bitmap image format that employs lossless data compression", so a PNG is always as good as the original. Absolutely no information loss, just like zipping the BMP only (usually) at a (slightly) better compression rate. On the other hand JPEG provides lossy compression, so quality inevitably decreases with JPEG (whether you observe it or not).
Second, you imply that with this kind of images no compression can be achieved. So I just downloaded the BMP and compressed it using different lossless methods. Here are the file sizes:
Original BMP: 145,410,358
GZIP Archive: 118,947,446
TIFF (with LZW): 107,235,924
PNG Image: 89,314,365
BZIP2 Archive: 85,572,062
Sure, the file sizes are still an order of magnitude larger than the JPEG and this is unavoidable with loosless compression in this setting. However, they they easily reduce the size of the originals to around 60%. That means that they could store them for 50 days instead of 30 using the same space. This also means I could have waited only 3.5 minutes instead of 6 minutes for it to download.
There is a good Comparison of ODF v MOOX which goes into the details.
The Groklaw article is written by Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D'Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship, and it is naturally biased. If you want to see arguments coming from both sides I would recommend the Wikipedia article on the issue.
You are missing an important point. OpenDocument is not Microsoft Office "Open" XML. OpenDocument is the document format used by office suits like OpenOffice.org and KOffice, and is not supported by Microsoft. Actually, I think Microsoft would have preferred OpenDocument to never happen, so that they can keep all their users well locked in their proprietary binary formats. Now that it happened, Microsoft responded by having their own proprietary XML format for the (very recently released) Office 2007. So, as usual Microsoft is playing catch up because they need to, not because they want to.
So even though for the usage scenarios you are describing, it makes little difference whether it's OpenDocument or the Microsoft "Open" XML, this does not make them the same. They are not.
He is a Romanian citizen and it's very unlikely that he will be extradited. Romania does have a extradition convention with the US from 1924, which become valid by the Constitution change in 2003 (before that no Romanian citizen could have been extradited by the Constitution). However, the list of crimes that this convention covers does not include breaking into computer systems (it was signed in 1924 so it's quite normal). And this would not be the first time when these kind of things happen, there were other cases when the US authorities needed to give up. -- Link to an article about this in Romanian
If he is found guilty in Romania he risks several years in jail. Romanian laws are quite mild, in particular against this types of violations (compared to the absurd ones in the US). He didn't kill anybody, so 54 years in jail would be more than the maximum you can get in Romania for murder (25 years).
Arad, where the guy is from is a historical hungarian town which now belongs to Romania.
Well, if everybody was to judge like this then the whole Pannonia is a historical Romanian province, which now belongs to Hungary (map from 82BC). Just be more careful with affirmations like this.
There is a good possibility that this guy has hungarian origins
Just by looking at his name (Faur) you can tell this guy is Romanian.
Finally, he is a Romanian citizen and it's very unlikely that he will be extradited. Yes, Romania does have a extradition convention with the US from 1924, which become valid by the Constitution change in 2003. However, the list of crimes that this convention covers does not include breaking into computer systems (it was signed in 1924 so quite normal).
Still Xbox is not the first but the second try. And its relative success has a lot to do with Sony and Nintendo not being able to deliver fast enough. Now they did, so let's see whether the Xbox 360 can keep up with the PS3 and the Wii.
Don't know whether parent has some data to support his claims. From where I stand the balance seems to be quite evenly distributed between KDE and Gnome. What I know is that KDE is great for what I do, and I use Slackware which no longer even ships with Gnome.
a) Sure, many contributions can be tracked. The question is: can the origin of every single line of code be tracked? And even if the best effort is made, will there ever be any guarantee that the code is not tainted by one line which is under GPL v2.
b) You assume that all contributors will also want the change, which is not the case now. Linus has pronounced himself clearly and repeatedly against it. Also there are contributors from companies which will dislike v3 (Novel?), so it's quite unlikely it is going to be easy (if possible at all) to convince all important Linux contributors to make the switch.
c) Maybe I'm wrong, but if things are like I presented them above the change to GPL v3 would be a huge effort (if possible at all) and would necessitate a lot if things to be rewritten in the clean room. This is why looking for alternatives which won't have this license problem is so important.
Fortunately, we do have 2 alternatives, should we need them: GNU/BSD (or GNU/Darwin) and GNU/HURD. I hope it doesn't come to that, though!
I think we will need these options, and this is not because Linus and the Linux kernel developers don't want to move to GPL v3. It's because even if they wanted they cannot. Linux was released right from the start under GPL v2 only, and I personally don't think it would be possible now to track all persons who ever contributed and ask for their legal permission to change the license.
So the switch to an alternative kernel is not just a theoretical possibility, it's something most of us are going to have to go through after FSF moves GNU to GPL v3. However, the kernel alternatives seem mature enough. And if Sun (re)releases Solaris under under the GPL v3 (which I think will happen right after v3 is released, since Sun would be total idiots not to do this), then there will be a third major alternative: GNU/Solaris.
Will this hurt Linux (the kernel)? Sure it will. However, for the FSF people this would be great news, since this will make them right all these years when saying: "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels".
Will this fragment the community? Not more than it's already fragmented.
More important, will this hurt the users? Maybe I'm wrong, but having more kernels to chose from will benefit the GNU/Linux users, to the extent one considers having more choice as being something good. Sure, the process of choosing will be a little harder, but every distribution will have its preferred kernel so it will still be just a matter of choosing a distribution. Also, at the same time I expect such a move to benefit Mac, BSD or Solaris users since there will be more developers interested in working on their kernels.
What I'm curious about, is not whether this switch will occur (I'm pretty confident it will), but which will be the kernel officially endorsed by the FSF (if there will be such a thing), and which kernel will be the one that will gather the largest user community.
Software Patents are currently ignored by almost everyone. But to the extent they are enforced, they will categorically end the American software industry, and software will continue to be a business in Europe, Asia, and... well basically every other civilized nation, who have soundly rejected this silly game and are by the way laughing their asses off at us.
While I do agree with the parent, I have to mention that Europe is not yet safe from software patents. Sure, we won some fights against them, but the influence US companies can have on the bureaucratic decision structures of the European Union is not to be underestimated. And there might come a day when corrupt politicians and bureaucrats will make the terrible mistake US companies are lobbying them into. The opinion of Europeans might just not matter in the corruptible decision process of the EU, and this happens too often here.
(Unlike with windows) there is not only one distribution of Linux, so different distributions have different mindsets. With distributions like Ubuntu nobody has to recompile anything himself/herself.
However my point still holds: having the source available is much better than any sort of bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility. Whether you compile it yourself (like the Gentoo or even Slackware users love to), or the distribution provides precompiled binaries for everything is just a matter of choice. A matter of freedom. And this is something Windows will never offer.
As long as you can recompile your software, Linux provides excelent backward compatibility, but that is a non-option for many situations.
Tell that to a Gentoo user!
The only problem is that in the Windows world almost everything is closed, proprietary, binary only. And I'm extremely glad that Microsoft has to spend huge amount of resources trying to prevent things from going crazy. They created this sick ecosystem!
I posted about this elsewhere in this discussion, but what if OpenSolaris goes GPL3? Along with GCC, libc, GDB, Emacs, etc. etc.? Linux is very likely *not* going GPLv3. Which kernel do you think would fare better as the free software kernel of choice to be distributed with GNU?
It depends on the name they will give it. If it were named GNU/Solaris then things would be surely settled;)
It would be foolish to commit your future to a language/platform that has only commercial vendors at the helm.
Unless it comes from Microsoft right? Because if it comes from there nobody cares how non-free it is, they all bet their future on it. But yes, I agree, it is stupid even then. Just that we have a lot of retards around. For example the ones that coded everything in Visual Basic which one day (probably soon enough) will just be discontinued.
This move completes it. It's also roughly equivalent to Microsoft releasing the Windows source code, as well as C#,.NET (including ASP.NET), and Visual Studio.NET. Hell, it's roughly equivalent to Microsoft funding Wine development.
Seriously, i hope Microsoft introduces a multi-platform dev tool that is meant to produce pure java code.
You can hope whatever you want, but when was the last time Microsoft produced a multi-platform application ? And by multi-platform I don't mean something that runs both on windows 98 and XP.
Slashdot Mirror
First, "PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a bitmap image format that employs lossless data compression", so a PNG is always as good as the original. Absolutely no information loss, just like zipping the BMP only (usually) at a (slightly) better compression rate. On the other hand JPEG provides lossy compression, so quality inevitably decreases with JPEG (whether you observe it or not).
Second, you imply that with this kind of images no compression can be achieved. So I just downloaded the BMP and compressed it using different lossless methods. Here are the file sizes:
- Original BMP: 145,410,358
- GZIP Archive: 118,947,446
- TIFF (with LZW): 107,235,924
- PNG Image: 89,314,365
- BZIP2 Archive: 85,572,062
Sure, the file sizes are still an order of magnitude larger than the JPEG and this is unavoidable with loosless compression in this setting. However, they they easily reduce the size of the originals to around 60%. That means that they could store them for 50 days instead of 30 using the same space. This also means I could have waited only 3.5 minutes instead of 6 minutes for it to download.Nice thoughts. However, I fail to understand why Javascript comes in this picture (Javascript is not directly related to Java or Sun).
Should we tell them?
You are missing an important point. OpenDocument is not Microsoft Office "Open" XML. OpenDocument is the document format used by office suits like OpenOffice.org and KOffice, and is not supported by Microsoft. Actually, I think Microsoft would have preferred OpenDocument to never happen, so that they can keep all their users well locked in their proprietary binary formats. Now that it happened, Microsoft responded by having their own proprietary XML format for the (very recently released) Office 2007. So, as usual Microsoft is playing catch up because they need to, not because they want to.
So even though for the usage scenarios you are describing, it makes little difference whether it's OpenDocument or the Microsoft "Open" XML, this does not make them the same. They are not.
He is a Romanian citizen and it's very unlikely that he will be extradited. Romania does have a extradition convention with the US from 1924, which become valid by the Constitution change in 2003 (before that no Romanian citizen could have been extradited by the Constitution). However, the list of crimes that this convention covers does not include breaking into computer systems (it was signed in 1924 so it's quite normal). And this would not be the first time when these kind of things happen, there were other cases when the US authorities needed to give up. -- Link to an article about this in Romanian
If he is found guilty in Romania he risks several years in jail. Romanian laws are quite mild, in particular against this types of violations (compared to the absurd ones in the US). He didn't kill anybody, so 54 years in jail would be more than the maximum you can get in Romania for murder (25 years).
Just by looking at his name (Faur) you can tell this guy is Romanian.
Finally, he is a Romanian citizen and it's very unlikely that he will be extradited. Yes, Romania does have a extradition convention with the US from 1924, which become valid by the Constitution change in 2003. However, the list of crimes that this convention covers does not include breaking into computer systems (it was signed in 1924 so quite normal).
Maybe they also want to suggest to you that a change of OS would also be welcome. So that you can run IE7 :)
At least for Software it would make a whole lot of sense.
Still Xbox is not the first but the second try. And its relative success has a lot to do with Sony and Nintendo not being able to deliver fast enough. Now they did, so let's see whether the Xbox 360 can keep up with the PS3 and the Wii.
Don't know whether parent has some data to support his claims. From where I stand the balance seems to be quite evenly distributed between KDE and Gnome. What I know is that KDE is great for what I do, and I use Slackware which no longer even ships with Gnome.
a) Sure, many contributions can be tracked. The question is: can the origin of every single line of code be tracked? And even if the best effort is made, will there ever be any guarantee that the code is not tainted by one line which is under GPL v2.
b) You assume that all contributors will also want the change, which is not the case now. Linus has pronounced himself clearly and repeatedly against it. Also there are contributors from companies which will dislike v3 (Novel?), so it's quite unlikely it is going to be easy (if possible at all) to convince all important Linux contributors to make the switch.
c) Maybe I'm wrong, but if things are like I presented them above the change to GPL v3 would be a huge effort (if possible at all) and would necessitate a lot if things to be rewritten in the clean room. This is why looking for alternatives which won't have this license problem is so important.
So the switch to an alternative kernel is not just a theoretical possibility, it's something most of us are going to have to go through after FSF moves GNU to GPL v3. However, the kernel alternatives seem mature enough. And if Sun (re)releases Solaris under under the GPL v3 (which I think will happen right after v3 is released, since Sun would be total idiots not to do this), then there will be a third major alternative: GNU/Solaris.
Will this hurt Linux (the kernel)? Sure it will. However, for the FSF people this would be great news, since this will make them right all these years when saying: "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels".
Will this fragment the community?
Not more than it's already fragmented.
More important, will this hurt the users?
Maybe I'm wrong, but having more kernels to chose from will benefit the GNU/Linux users, to the extent one considers having more choice as being something good. Sure, the process of choosing will be a little harder, but every distribution will have its preferred kernel so it will still be just a matter of choosing a distribution. Also, at the same time I expect such a move to benefit Mac, BSD or Solaris users since there will be more developers interested in working on their kernels.
What I'm curious about, is not whether this switch will occur (I'm pretty confident it will), but which will be the kernel officially endorsed by the FSF (if there will be such a thing), and which kernel will be the one that will gather the largest user community.
But well, OpenOffice handles Office documents quite well.
(Unlike with windows) there is not only one distribution of Linux, so different distributions have different mindsets. With distributions like Ubuntu nobody has to recompile anything himself/herself.
However my point still holds: having the source available is much better than any sort of bug-for-bug binary backwards compatibility. Whether you compile it yourself (like the Gentoo or even Slackware users love to), or the distribution provides precompiled binaries for everything is just a matter of choice. A matter of freedom. And this is something Windows will never offer.
The only problem is that in the Windows world almost everything is closed, proprietary, binary only. And I'm extremely glad that Microsoft has to spend huge amount of resources trying to prevent things from going crazy. They created this sick ecosystem!
And open source is the solution to it.
I think this would be the best way to support SUN and AMD, and not (semi-)monopolies like Microsoft and Intel.