It simply is not. And that is my case, esp. for OpenOffice, which is far too weak compared to Office 2003.—You said it was open, right? I filed three bugs regarding Far East support, someone told another to have a look, and nothing happened thereafter. Do you expect office users to fix the bugs in OpenOffice? No way!
I do have many F/OSS applications installed. Ethereal is superb, and it satisfies all my needs. Vim is great, and I do not want other editors, though some of them have a more attractive interface. GIMP is OK, because I do not want to pay for Photoshop; but I cannot flatter it, since one even cannot ‘Paste as new image’ before foolishly creating a new image. Celestia is fantastic, and I think such applications are worth the highest award....
BTW, I get the Win32 version of Celestia from the Ubuntu live CD. Those guys did the ‘Via Applications’ very early. Vive la Ubuntu!
The conclusion of the article is a little surprising, considering the performance advantage of the HP Viiv PC. But it makes sense: people regard video quality and game compatibility as more important. It makes sense, since NVIDIA simply has a long history delivering video solutions.
It is worth while that the AMD Live! solution uses NVIDIA instead of ATI for the graphics. It is a requirement of the Viiv platform to use the Intel graphics solution.—Intel should really consider a closer collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver better quality products.
Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner.
Agreed. Programming was hard, is hard, and will remain hard in the foreseeable future. This is not to say things are not improved. On the contrary, many things are simplified. Go check the lines of code of a big project twenty years ago and of that today. Systems are becoming more and more complex.
When old stuff is automated, people will always find new things that need programmers to spend their efforts and time. This is the way of life.
regardless of the views of a vocal minority, most people
Since you are very vocal, I am not sure whether you are in the minority.
Torvalds is being to vocal in winging... given his lack of forethought
I'll call that a slander. As far as I can see, the only reason you do it this way is because Linus does not agree with your opinions.
DMCA is a bad thing, DRM in the normal form (to ‘protect the premium content’) is a bad thing: I have no intention to argue about that. Forbidding others to change the code does have its value in some cases, for security reasons. For example, in business environments for access control. GPLv3 will prohibit such legitimate usage, which is what Linux does not want to do.
Check your wording carefully before you utter such baseless statements!
Really Steve has explained in his article: I do not know why so many people can’t get it.
In the current PC architecture, the video and audio cards expect non-encrypted data. That means, in order to feed data to it, you have to decrypt the DRM'd data in main memory and transer them to the video/audio cards. That means, it has to be crackable, esp. when DRM is done in the user land. When done in the kernel, it will be more difficult, but still you may be able to get all the data on the hardware interface or by hacking the kernel.
That already implied two ways to ‘enhance’ DRM. You may choose to encrypt all the data going through the hardware interface, and you may choose to sign the kernel modules and use TPM to establish and chain of trust and verify the OS kernel. And you can do both. The second approach is quite difficult for general-purose OSs, but works fine for embedded systems (thus TiVo). The first approach is already used by Windows Vista.
So as far as we are not talking about special DRM hardware, there is no such thing as open DRM. DRM cannot be open, and that is very nature. At least before the days when standardized DRM hardware are dominant....
Foxit. Windows and (now) Linux. Takes about 1/2 a second to open.
Foxit is fast, but lacks some features. Apart from the fact that its interface is a copycat, it does not support non-Latin1 characters well. Although I was able to display a Chinese PDF file, I could not successfully copy the text correctly. With Adobe Reader it was OK.
they don't really get to dictate the terms. "derivative work", for example, isn't something they get to define.
It is their product and their licence, so they have the right to interpret their licence. It is unlike the case of the Linux kernel, where FSF has no right to interpret the licence for Linus and other kernel developers.
Initial setup fee of $108.00 is bullshit. You don't expect such an amount even for big corporations when there are thousands of PCs to set up.
According to the article, the annual amount spent on a teacher is $6003. Take care, we are talking about countries where the annual income of teachers is much less than this amount. (I am in a big corporation, and I do not have such a big amount of training budget.)
Internet access is the biggest portion in it. You can't expect Intel access is so expensive when there are a lot of users, and in the following 5 years! USD$56.31 one month for twenty hours: it is ridiculous! For a comparison, in China you can get a 2 Mbps ADSL connection for about $150 a year for unlimited Internet access. If 20 students share this connection, the five-year total amount for each is $37.5, i.e., about 1/14.2 of the amount mentioned in that article.
If Microsoft has patents that cover GPL licensed software that Novell wants to continue distributing, Novell must secure a license for anyone who receives the software from Novell not only to use the software, but also to redistribute the software. If they don't, they are in violation of the GPL and can therefore not distribute the software.
You are right here that Novell cannot distribute the patent-infringed software either—Novell wrote that clearly on the online statement (are you anti-Novell guys really reading?). However, you missed one important point. Just think about SCO. SCO was threatening to sue the existing enterprise Linux users, but not just IBM, Red Hat, etc. And I remember somebody even paid to avoid suits. By signing this agreement with Microsoft, Novell customers can at least rest assured that they will not be sued by Microsoft. That is some relief, and that can give Novell some advantage in the enterprise market.
Software patents are proved that they are needless and very anticompetitive. They must go. Period.
What are software patents, anyway?
Don't be mistaken, I am a software developer, and I don't like patents. However, I cannot see enough reasons why there must be a clear boundary around software. To take a no-so-good example, ClearType (I know that it was Woz who invented a similar technology more than twenty years ago). It is about sub-pixel font rendering. Is it a software patent? I suppose people will say yes. However, it is related with the physical display device. With the fast development of the ‘software industry’, everything might be related to software soon.
My point? Advocate ‘No patent at all’—that is the logical end. If this does not look like possible, think more about how to improve the process.
(By the way, I think ClearType is an innovation, though maybe not necessarily an invention. Just think about the fact that no one before Microsoft thought about using sub-pixel font rendering on modern display devices.)
It makes sense that OSS is more valuable than closed source software, all else being equal. You get the source code, you are allowed to edit it, you are allowed to sell it, you're allowed to incorporate it in your own products, etc. etc. You can maintain the software even if the vendor won't. These are huge advantages.
One car vendor sells me not only the car, but all the design information along with it, so that when anything goes wrong, I can fix it by myself (well, at least if I have the time and resources). These are huge advantages, so it is OK that they charge me thrice the money.
Wake up, boys! At least some software are like cars: you just want it to work, but not to learn it interiors.
A more accurate comparison of prices might be Fedora Core for $0 (just the license to use the software, no implied support contract) versus $140 for Windows XP Professional.
One version of FC provides about 6 months of software update support. Both Windows and RHEL provide at least 5 years of software update support for one specific version. That is the real difference, and that is the support people really need most.
That assumes they are, which they arent. As you say, Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. The problem is that support for Windows is $35 per call, per email, or per online chat. Of course, this only includes end-user support. Developer support is 250$ per call.
I really can't see why this post is 5-point insightful. (299-140)/35 = 4.5. How many supports have you requested for your OS of choice in the recent year?
You can compare QT to GDI+ all you like, but GDI+ works on one platform, and QT works on many. Expect to pay more for an increased feature set. Law of the land, open versus closed never has and likely never will have any effect on that.
It is horses talking to ducks. If I sell software on Windows, why I need the other platforms? The multi-platform support is beneficial to the vendor, but not to the end user (as long as I can find the software for my platform). And did I mention that Visual Studio is far easier to use?
BTW, additional platform support for Qt costs additional bucks.
It is sad that many free software advocates can't see that for many people software is just a tool to get work done, instead of a freedom.
The original reporter is not accurate enough. It is not "Powerful Chinese company threatens local media". It is "Powerful Taiwanese company in China threatens local reporters"! The translated content in the first link is correct. FoxConn wants RMB30,000,000 (US$3,750,000) of compensation from two reporters. It is simply ridiculous.
Side comment: The worst labour conditions can occur in the Taiwan, Hong Kong, or foreign invested factories in South-East China. It is really the "blood and dirt" period of capitalism.
The Linux kernel without any tools at all is essentially useless. What's the point of having a running kernel if you don't even have a shell?
A lot of probably usage:
TiVo
Smart phone
Router
Other devices you can imagine...
Motorola has Linux-based phones. Do they ship with GNU components? I have not a ready answer, but it is quite probable that they don’t. And as a result ‘GNU/’ is not relevant.
So for me, GNU/Linux is just a way RMS advertises FSF.
Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. [canonical.com] is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.
Nonsense. I can tell you that even Mark Shuttleworth himself is personally involved in the project. Once I received his personal e-mail commenting on my Chinese test report!
Bullshit. People don't check things worth a damn on Wikipedia unless it's on something controversial or something that has some editor who gives a damn. And in particular, people don't check up on cited references, which is the latest trend in trying to lend legitimacy.
I suppose you never looked up technical terms on Wikipedia. Recently I have been interested in output the PC screen to TV, and Wikipedia has such entries as `480p', `composite video', `component video', `S-video', and so on. Has Britannica such items?
To say the least, Britannica is better for things like classical studies. It lags behind in modern stuff.
But they may do it if the market starts insisting on Open-Source software.
Brave idea! I dare say you are as enthusiastic as RMS himself. I really wonder how the market can insist on open-source software.
Again, the disagreement between Eric Raymond and RMS is not one of absolute moral polarisation, but rather of degree and methodology.
You did not get the essence of the debate. While RMS wants a whole GPL'd software world, ESR does not want it. The basic question is how programmers earn a living then. Do they live on supporting? (I would rather pay once for a good application that never needs support, and I believe at least most of the non-developers are on my side.) Or do they live by government allowances? (Who decides who gets how much and how the decisions are made?)—A completely GPL'd software world is simply unrealistic, infeasible, and unwanted by most people. Linus and ESR realize this and are willing to co-operate with the corporate world, and RMS does not confess it and just let himself marginalized.
Uhh.. wouldn't he? Linus chose to use the GPL for Linux. Doesn't that endorsement (and huge personal sacrifice) say anything to you about his opinion of free software?
So you do not know the differences between Linus and RMS? You really should google for it. Linux does not appreciate the Four Freedoms of RMS, and RMS calls Linus "only an engineer without an ideal". You might also have interest to know the conflict between Eric S. Raymond and RMS, specifically the former's question "if you have the power, would you prohibit all software unless it is licensed under GPL?", which RMS could not, or dared not, answer.
The quotations are not the original words, but the essence should be there.
Absolutely nothing.
So you know your "ideal" has nothing to do with SUN, and I could not say too much about it, but only SUN needs practical reasons to open-source Java.
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest, NOT to contribute to the code, NOT to get something for free, or even to become the "commodity" implementation of a specification.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded. This is the original philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU project, who were collectively the inspiration for the "open source" movement.
Yes, this is your GPL'd paradise, as RMS advocates.
First, what you have stated is not everybody's ideal. Linus, for one things, would not agree here. Second, what has this do with SUN? SUN has no duty to invest in your paradise. SUN is a corporation, and will do whatever benefits a corporation. If open-sourcing Java does not help SUN survive, SUN will never open-source Java, whatever you GNU advocates feel or say! It seems that you never understand that ideals alone cannot make open-souce software thrive.
The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.'
Come on, FSF is not the copyright owner of Linux kernel, what are its rights to disagree on such stuff? Linus (and other kernel developers, of course) has the right to elaborate on the licensing terms, even though GPL was written by FSF!
In most distros, the display of unicode/asian homepage is weird. You can see a combination of varios fonts. For example, a few character using Japanese fonts, most characters use a simplified Chinese fonts and the rest are traditional Chinese.
This is really an issue about UTF-8 without proper language specifications. It has become more and more serious a problem now. It is even not only in the Linux world, but a universal problem! I wrote a specific page about it, and maybe you will find it useful:
Slashdot Mirror
It simply is not. And that is my case, esp. for OpenOffice, which is far too weak compared to Office 2003.—You said it was open, right? I filed three bugs regarding Far East support, someone told another to have a look, and nothing happened thereafter. Do you expect office users to fix the bugs in OpenOffice? No way!
I do have many F/OSS applications installed. Ethereal is superb, and it satisfies all my needs. Vim is great, and I do not want other editors, though some of them have a more attractive interface. GIMP is OK, because I do not want to pay for Photoshop; but I cannot flatter it, since one even cannot ‘Paste as new image’ before foolishly creating a new image. Celestia is fantastic, and I think such applications are worth the highest award....
BTW, I get the Win32 version of Celestia from the Ubuntu live CD. Those guys did the ‘Via Applications’ very early. Vive la Ubuntu!
RIAA even does not need to win! Letting people know that it is suing old ladies may make people hate it, but also make people fear it.
The conclusion of the article is a little surprising, considering the performance advantage of the HP Viiv PC. But it makes sense: people regard video quality and game compatibility as more important. It makes sense, since NVIDIA simply has a long history delivering video solutions.
It is worth while that the AMD Live! solution uses NVIDIA instead of ATI for the graphics. It is a requirement of the Viiv platform to use the Intel graphics solution.—Intel should really consider a closer collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver better quality products.
Agreed. Programming was hard, is hard, and will remain hard in the foreseeable future. This is not to say things are not improved. On the contrary, many things are simplified. Go check the lines of code of a big project twenty years ago and of that today. Systems are becoming more and more complex.
When old stuff is automated, people will always find new things that need programmers to spend their efforts and time. This is the way of life.
Since you are very vocal, I am not sure whether you are in the minority.
I'll call that a slander. As far as I can see, the only reason you do it this way is because Linus does not agree with your opinions.
DMCA is a bad thing, DRM in the normal form (to ‘protect the premium content’) is a bad thing: I have no intention to argue about that. Forbidding others to change the code does have its value in some cases, for security reasons. For example, in business environments for access control. GPLv3 will prohibit such legitimate usage, which is what Linux does not want to do.
Check your wording carefully before you utter such baseless statements!
Really Steve has explained in his article: I do not know why so many people can’t get it.
In the current PC architecture, the video and audio cards expect non-encrypted data. That means, in order to feed data to it, you have to decrypt the DRM'd data in main memory and transer them to the video/audio cards. That means, it has to be crackable, esp. when DRM is done in the user land. When done in the kernel, it will be more difficult, but still you may be able to get all the data on the hardware interface or by hacking the kernel.
That already implied two ways to ‘enhance’ DRM. You may choose to encrypt all the data going through the hardware interface, and you may choose to sign the kernel modules and use TPM to establish and chain of trust and verify the OS kernel. And you can do both. The second approach is quite difficult for general-purose OSs, but works fine for embedded systems (thus TiVo). The first approach is already used by Windows Vista.
So as far as we are not talking about special DRM hardware, there is no such thing as open DRM. DRM cannot be open, and that is very nature. At least before the days when standardized DRM hardware are dominant....
Foxit is fast, but lacks some features. Apart from the fact that its interface is a copycat, it does not support non-Latin1 characters well. Although I was able to display a Chinese PDF file, I could not successfully copy the text correctly. With Adobe Reader it was OK.
It is their product and their licence, so they have the right to interpret their licence. It is unlike the case of the Linux kernel, where FSF has no right to interpret the licence for Linus and other kernel developers.
Initial setup fee of $108.00 is bullshit. You don't expect such an amount even for big corporations when there are thousands of PCs to set up.
According to the article, the annual amount spent on a teacher is $6003. Take care, we are talking about countries where the annual income of teachers is much less than this amount. (I am in a big corporation, and I do not have such a big amount of training budget.)
Internet access is the biggest portion in it. You can't expect Intel access is so expensive when there are a lot of users, and in the following 5 years! USD$56.31 one month for twenty hours: it is ridiculous! For a comparison, in China you can get a 2 Mbps ADSL connection for about $150 a year for unlimited Internet access. If 20 students share this connection, the five-year total amount for each is $37.5, i.e., about 1/14.2 of the amount mentioned in that article.
Simply put, it is FUD.
You are right here that Novell cannot distribute the patent-infringed software either—Novell wrote that clearly on the online statement (are you anti-Novell guys really reading?). However, you missed one important point. Just think about SCO. SCO was threatening to sue the existing enterprise Linux users, but not just IBM, Red Hat, etc. And I remember somebody even paid to avoid suits. By signing this agreement with Microsoft, Novell customers can at least rest assured that they will not be sued by Microsoft. That is some relief, and that can give Novell some advantage in the enterprise market.
What are software patents, anyway?
Don't be mistaken, I am a software developer, and I don't like patents. However, I cannot see enough reasons why there must be a clear boundary around software. To take a no-so-good example, ClearType (I know that it was Woz who invented a similar technology more than twenty years ago). It is about sub-pixel font rendering. Is it a software patent? I suppose people will say yes. However, it is related with the physical display device. With the fast development of the ‘software industry’, everything might be related to software soon.
My point? Advocate ‘No patent at all’—that is the logical end. If this does not look like possible, think more about how to improve the process.
(By the way, I think ClearType is an innovation, though maybe not necessarily an invention. Just think about the fact that no one before Microsoft thought about using sub-pixel font rendering on modern display devices.)
One car vendor sells me not only the car, but all the design information along with it, so that when anything goes wrong, I can fix it by myself (well, at least if I have the time and resources). These are huge advantages, so it is OK that they charge me thrice the money.
Wake up, boys! At least some software are like cars: you just want it to work, but not to learn it interiors.
One version of FC provides about 6 months of software update support. Both Windows and RHEL provide at least 5 years of software update support for one specific version. That is the real difference, and that is the support people really need most.
I really can't see why this post is 5-point insightful. (299-140)/35 = 4.5. How many supports have you requested for your OS of choice in the recent year?
It is horses talking to ducks. If I sell software on Windows, why I need the other platforms? The multi-platform support is beneficial to the vendor, but not to the end user (as long as I can find the software for my platform). And did I mention that Visual Studio is far easier to use?
BTW, additional platform support for Qt costs additional bucks.
It is sad that many free software advocates can't see that for many people software is just a tool to get work done, instead of a freedom.
The original reporter is not accurate enough. It is not "Powerful Chinese company threatens local media". It is "Powerful Taiwanese company in China threatens local reporters"! The translated content in the first link is correct. FoxConn wants RMB30,000,000 (US$3,750,000) of compensation from two reporters. It is simply ridiculous.
Side comment: The worst labour conditions can occur in the Taiwan, Hong Kong, or foreign invested factories in South-East China. It is really the "blood and dirt" period of capitalism.
A lot of probably usage:
Motorola has Linux-based phones. Do they ship with GNU components? I have not a ready answer, but it is quite probable that they don’t. And as a result ‘GNU/’ is not relevant.
So for me, GNU/Linux is just a way RMS advertises FSF.
I suppose you never looked up technical terms on Wikipedia. Recently I have been interested in output the PC screen to TV, and Wikipedia has such entries as `480p', `composite video', `component video', `S-video', and so on. Has Britannica such items?
To say the least, Britannica is better for things like classical studies. It lags behind in modern stuff.
Brave idea! I dare say you are as enthusiastic as RMS himself. I really wonder how the market can insist on open-source software.
You did not get the essence of the debate. While RMS wants a whole GPL'd software world, ESR does not want it. The basic question is how programmers earn a living then. Do they live on supporting? (I would rather pay once for a good application that never needs support, and I believe at least most of the non-developers are on my side.) Or do they live by government allowances? (Who decides who gets how much and how the decisions are made?)—A completely GPL'd software world is simply unrealistic, infeasible, and unwanted by most people. Linus and ESR realize this and are willing to co-operate with the corporate world, and RMS does not confess it and just let himself marginalized.
So you do not know the differences between Linus and RMS? You really should google for it. Linux does not appreciate the Four Freedoms of RMS, and RMS calls Linus "only an engineer without an ideal". You might also have interest to know the conflict between Eric S. Raymond and RMS, specifically the former's question "if you have the power, would you prohibit all software unless it is licensed under GPL?", which RMS could not, or dared not, answer.
The quotations are not the original words, but the essence should be there.
So you know your "ideal" has nothing to do with SUN, and I could not say too much about it, but only SUN needs practical reasons to open-source Java.
Yes, this is your GPL'd paradise, as RMS advocates.
First, what you have stated is not everybody's ideal. Linus, for one things, would not agree here. Second, what has this do with SUN? SUN has no duty to invest in your paradise. SUN is a corporation, and will do whatever benefits a corporation. If open-sourcing Java does not help SUN survive, SUN will never open-source Java, whatever you GNU advocates feel or say! It seems that you never understand that ideals alone cannot make open-souce software thrive.
Er, it is the first time that I know Mark is the Chief Developer of Ubuntu....
Come on, FSF is not the copyright owner of Linux kernel, what are its rights to disagree on such stuff? Linus (and other kernel developers, of course) has the right to elaborate on the licensing terms, even though GPL was written by FSF!
No, Woz is the genius engineer, and Jobs the visionary and businessman.
This is really an issue about UTF-8 without proper language specifications. It has become more and more serious a problem now. It is even not only in the Linux world, but a universal problem! I wrote a specific page about it, and maybe you will find it useful:
Specify LANG in a UTF-8 Web Page!