The BSA's latest study says $200 billion in software will be pirated in the next 4 years.
Note that the BSA usually includes people that use free software in the pirate category, as it usually does not generate any significant income for its member companies.
What this is about is getting the format accepted by ISO.
So that Microsoft can go to those governments that have declared that they will only use document formats that ate international standards and say "Look, look, ISO standard" (pointing to Open XML). "Now you can stay with safe Microsoft instead of going for that strange communist OpenOffice.org".
But the putrid substance called "surströmming" (a.k.a. "pure evil in a can") is considered repulsive even by the Swedes themselves!
It may not have been obvious from my post, but I am Swedish, and just the smell makes me feel sick. I live in Stockholm though and it might be more popular deep in the forests of Norrland.:)
No specific tool. I vaguely recall that I read several years ago that some tool in this category had a license that would have generated this type of issue. My post was just meant to point out one category of programs where a license may apply to the output of the program.
That the arm-twisting may have benefited Linksys itself overall (as was credibly suggested by other poster) is not really relevant here -- they did not want it, and all of us would've objected to such arm-twisting.
So people should just ignore license violations, because the licensee does not want to abide by the license? Does this also apply to licenses by BSA members, or just open source licenses?
By the way, who is this "all of us" that would have objected to Linksys being compelled to abide by the GPL? You? Certainly not me. Actually, your use of the word "arm-twisting" have some negative connotations in that it implies some unfairness to Linksys, which I cannot agree with.
Some people think that anything that you can (legally, i.e. The Pirate Bay et al. excluded) find on the internet for free must be free in every meaning of the word. Then they are surprised and angered that this might not be the case.
Granted, you can create a discussion about the commercial value of it all
I'd say it could have a lot of commercial value. After all, the WRT54 series is recommended all over the 'net just because of the moddability of the product and the community around those mods. This could certainly bring in more sales.
No FOSS tool that I know of limits what you can do with its output.
One category of programs that may cause such issues are lexical and syntactical analyzers (also known as lexer and parser generators), since they often include parts of themselves in their output.
This is a feature of WCF - Windows Communication Foundation in.NET 3.0 (part of Win V). WCF is designed for next gen CPUs with large numbers of cores. It spawns worker threads for you as needed and sychronises these calls for you automatically. You have the option of manually creating and sychronising threads, but out of the box it does it all for you behind the scenes.
So WCF takes care of parallelizing your compute-intensive tasks for you? Sorry, but I don't believe you. It might spawn threads for communication-related tasks, but those aren't really compute-intensive anyway.
Both multi-threading and message passing systems are parallel systems, they are just different subsets of the parallel computing paradigm. You cannot really claim with any authority that multithreading isn't parallel computing, and that only message passing is.
Multithreading is used on a shared memory multiprocessor, and message passing is used on distributed memory multiprocessors. They are just two different ways of implementing parallel code, and none of them is more parallel than the other.
Well, that sounds like the distributed SETI project and the like, which would seem even more ambitious than a compiler that would help write MPI code for Beowulf clusters.
Actually, the parallelization is much more complex in the cluster case than in the distributed computing (e.g. SETI@Home) case. Distributed systems are often processing data packages that are inherently independent of one another, and require no communication between the compute nodes at all. In this case, parallelization just amounts to splitting the work into pieces and handing out to the worker nodes, as well as collecting and aggregating the results.
Clusters, on the other hand, are primarily used for tasks that need (often intense) cooperation between the compute nodes to solve, such as solving large systems of linear equations. Such parallelization is much harder, and I won't hold my breath waiting for such a compiler to appear.
This may or may not work, depending on how the processes communicate over the network, but it is certainly a substantially easier task than writing a multi-threaded distributed program in most any case.
Actually, if the message passing implementation is done right, communication between processes on the same node is done though shared memory, and not network communication. Actually mixing threading and message passing in the application code just means unnecessary complexity in this case.
It may or may not be easier to program, but will it perform well enough? Does it support high-speed low-latency interconnects like Myrinet or Infiniband? Will it perform well enough to make up for the high price of such interconnects? Gigabit Ethernet performance is not enough on such systems, as latency is a major factor, and the latency of Ethernet is typically high compared to HPC interconnects.
Jokes aside, this is bull. It requires the coder to mark sections that he wants to run in parallel, making the "automatic" part a bit of a stretch. And then, there already is a system that does this, and has done it for 10 years. It's called OpenMP, and features wide industry support in compilers such as the upcoming gcc 4.2, MS Visual Studio.NET 2005, the Intel compiler suite and compilers from traditional SMP vendors such as IBM and SGI.
Someone saying "if we can put a man on the moon, we surely should be able to do X" is a certain sign that this someone does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
They way they say that "this has been going on for ages and we are now just passing a law for it" is nothing but BS, which purpose is to make the matter seem less drastic.
This reminds me about the rejected EU software patent proposal. The same argument was used there, probably with the same motive.
How about instead of Kubuntu, we just stuck with Unbuntu, and got someone to maintain some sort of system for installing KDE. Why do we need a new distro.
Perhaps those that want to install Kubuntu does not want to install Gnome just to install KDE? Installing another desktop environment from within the distribution is fine, but when installing from scratch, why install the "wrong" desktopå just to change when the install is complete?
P.S. I run none of the *ubuntu's, but I can see the reason for these multiple versions.
1. You have a Linux application. Create a package that'll install gracefully on most of them. Assume you want to charge them a few bucks so you can't rely on a repository. Provide it in a tar.gz file, or even better, a shell archive. Let the installer put the software in/opt if run as root or in some subdirectory of your home directory in ran as non-root.
How difficult is it to agree to a package format for everyone?
It didn't happen yet. What makes you think that it would be an easy process?
How difficult is it to have applications actually work no matter how lame the directory structure is? Give it environment variables, hardcoded paths are so 1980s. Paths are often hardcoded because software is usually built from source. If you don't want that, feel free to use environment variables in your application, it is entirely up to you.
How long until everything works if I have spaces in a path?
It already works fine. What's your problem?
I don't see a reason for more than 5 desktop distros.
Who are you to stop anyone from creating their own distro? Are you suggesting a world-wide law against having more than five distros?
I've wondered about this many times. Every time that you mention that you mostly use Linux, you ge a blank face and a question why you don't use Windows instead, claiming it is much better if everyone use the same system "for compatibility" (as if that would be impossible with several different systems). The same people would not even dream about claiming that it would be best if everyone used the same brand of cell phones, computer hardware, home electronics, cars, food, etc, etc.
I just don't understand the constant hostility toward Microsoft from the Linux community. Why? I mean really, why?
The hostility is not unilateral. There is also a lot of hostility towards Linux and F/OSS in the Microsoft camp. Why? I mean really, why?;)
When almost anything goes wrong in Linux that I don't understand, I google it. Nearly every solution I find involves opening a terminal and editing something. My goodness, whose mother is able to do THAT?
I thought you were talking about yourself. Why suddenly add some random mother into the mix? Do you base your software-using decisions on what some random mother/grandma would think?
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I agree, but Amazon et al. obviously don't. They put it under the DVD category, as well as calling the format DVD (Blu-Ray) in several places.
To me, this would apply to their Windows machines too. Last time I checked, they did not restrict what software packages could be installed.
Note that the BSA usually includes people that use free software in the pirate category, as it usually does not generate any significant income for its member companies.
So that Microsoft can go to those governments that have declared that they will only use document formats that ate international standards and say "Look, look, ISO standard" (pointing to Open XML). "Now you can stay with safe Microsoft instead of going for that strange communist OpenOffice.org".
At work, I have (I work at a supercomputing center).
It may not have been obvious from my post, but I am Swedish, and just the smell makes me feel sick. I live in Stockholm though and it might be more popular deep in the forests of Norrland. :)
No specific tool. I vaguely recall that I read several years ago that some tool in this category had a license that would have generated this type of issue. My post was just meant to point out one category of programs where a license may apply to the output of the program.
So people should just ignore license violations, because the licensee does not want to abide by the license? Does this also apply to licenses by BSA members, or just open source licenses?
By the way, who is this "all of us" that would have objected to Linksys being compelled to abide by the GPL? You? Certainly not me. Actually, your use of the word "arm-twisting" have some negative connotations in that it implies some unfairness to Linksys, which I cannot agree with.
Some people think that anything that you can (legally, i.e. The Pirate Bay et al. excluded) find on the internet for free must be free in every meaning of the word. Then they are surprised and angered that this might not be the case.
I'd say it could have a lot of commercial value. After all, the WRT54 series is recommended all over the 'net just because of the moddability of the product and the community around those mods. This could certainly bring in more sales.
That might be why MySQL also offers commercial licenses, which presubaly do not carry any such requirements.
One category of programs that may cause such issues are lexical and syntactical analyzers (also known as lexer and parser generators), since they often include parts of themselves in their output.
So WCF takes care of parallelizing your compute-intensive tasks for you? Sorry, but I don't believe you. It might spawn threads for communication-related tasks, but those aren't really compute-intensive anyway.
Both multi-threading and message passing systems are parallel systems, they are just different subsets of the parallel computing paradigm. You cannot really claim with any authority that multithreading isn't parallel computing, and that only message passing is.
Multithreading is used on a shared memory multiprocessor, and message passing is used on distributed memory multiprocessors. They are just two different ways of implementing parallel code, and none of them is more parallel than the other.
Well, that sounds like the distributed SETI project and the like, which would seem even more ambitious than a compiler that would help write MPI code for Beowulf clusters.Actually, the parallelization is much more complex in the cluster case than in the distributed computing (e.g. SETI@Home) case. Distributed systems are often processing data packages that are inherently independent of one another, and require no communication between the compute nodes at all. In this case, parallelization just amounts to splitting the work into pieces and handing out to the worker nodes, as well as collecting and aggregating the results.
Clusters, on the other hand, are primarily used for tasks that need (often intense) cooperation between the compute nodes to solve, such as solving large systems of linear equations. Such parallelization is much harder, and I won't hold my breath waiting for such a compiler to appear.
Actually, if the message passing implementation is done right, communication between processes on the same node is done though shared memory, and not network communication. Actually mixing threading and message passing in the application code just means unnecessary complexity in this case.
It may or may not be easier to program, but will it perform well enough? Does it support high-speed low-latency interconnects like Myrinet or Infiniband? Will it perform well enough to make up for the high price of such interconnects? Gigabit Ethernet performance is not enough on such systems, as latency is a major factor, and the latency of Ethernet is typically high compared to HPC interconnects.
Nothing new here, move along.
Jokes aside, this is bull. It requires the coder to mark sections that he wants to run in parallel, making the "automatic" part a bit of a stretch. And then, there already is a system that does this, and has done it for 10 years. It's called OpenMP, and features wide industry support in compilers such as the upcoming gcc 4.2, MS Visual Studio .NET 2005, the Intel compiler suite and compilers from traditional SMP vendors such as IBM and SGI.
Won't that require some runtime support, like mpirun in MPI (that takes care of rsh/ssh-ing to each node and starting the processes)?
And the difference would be?
Someone saying "if we can put a man on the moon, we surely should be able to do X" is a certain sign that this someone does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
This reminds me about the rejected EU software patent proposal. The same argument was used there, probably with the same motive.
Perhaps those that want to install Kubuntu does not want to install Gnome just to install KDE? Installing another desktop environment from within the distribution is fine, but when installing from scratch, why install the "wrong" desktopå just to change when the install is complete?
P.S. I run none of the *ubuntu's, but I can see the reason for these multiple versions.
It didn't happen yet. What makes you think that it would be an easy process?
How difficult is it to have applications actually work no matter how lame the directory structure is? Give it environment variables, hardcoded paths are so 1980s. Paths are often hardcoded because software is usually built from source. If you don't want that, feel free to use environment variables in your application, it is entirely up to you. How long until everything works if I have spaces in a path?It already works fine. What's your problem?
I don't see a reason for more than 5 desktop distros.Who are you to stop anyone from creating their own distro? Are you suggesting a world-wide law against having more than five distros?
I've wondered about this many times. Every time that you mention that you mostly use Linux, you ge a blank face and a question why you don't use Windows instead, claiming it is much better if everyone use the same system "for compatibility" (as if that would be impossible with several different systems). The same people would not even dream about claiming that it would be best if everyone used the same brand of cell phones, computer hardware, home electronics, cars, food, etc, etc.
The hostility is not unilateral. There is also a lot of hostility towards Linux and F/OSS in the Microsoft camp. Why? I mean really, why? ;)
When almost anything goes wrong in Linux that I don't understand, I google it. Nearly every solution I find involves opening a terminal and editing something. My goodness, whose mother is able to do THAT?I thought you were talking about yourself. Why suddenly add some random mother into the mix? Do you base your software-using decisions on what some random mother/grandma would think?