Please quote for me where I said "Microsoft" could "change the license" on Mono?
"If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync"
Going from open source to closed source is a change in license, which you then say might induce a fork. Of course, since Microsoft does not own Mono, there's no need to fork the GPL version, as Microsoft cannot close what they don't own.
how would Microsoft kill an open-sourced product like all the chicken littles around here are claiming they will as soon as they get around to it?
This question has been answered many times. By suing users and distributors of Mono over patent rights not granted in Mono.
The patent threat seems remarkably flimsy, given the probability of various estoppel & laches counter-claims
Quite the opposite, given all the software patent nonsense we've seen in practice. Patent trolls have been successfully suing companies for many years now, often waiting around until a company gets successful or a technology widely adopted.
Microsoft has, one more time, encouraged, supported, and even contributed code to this project that it is now claiming "infringed" on its patents and which it is now suddenly seeking damages from.
Microsoft has encouraged specific parts, and entered exclusive agreements with Novell in others. That's not a blanket permission for all of Mono for other distributors and users. Also,.NET and Mono are always adding new features, so even if you think laches will save you for an early version of Mono, it may not for last year's hot new feature.
Not answering how Microsoft can change the license on a project it doesn't own. Yes, it is pointless discussion, since you can't admit your mistake. Congratulations.
No, clearly, I thought "IT" (being Mono) was released under LGPL, GPL, and MIT licenses. Which, surprise surprise, it *is*. I never said "MICROSOFT" released it under those licenses.
You asked: "Once it's been released under GPL, how exactly could they sue someone for using it, or forking it and continuing to work on a parallel implementation?". That question would make sense if it actually was Microsoft who released the code.
Oh, and there's more quotes from you. You're definitely backtracking:
"If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync, and that forked version somehow implemented a new feature for compatibility, I could then see *some* possibility they'd go after the competing implementation, but I think if they changed the licensing on Mono back to closed, it would die from neglect soon enough anyway."
How could Microsoft change the licensing on the Mono project when they don't own it, and never did?
So then, I was correct? The DLR, written by Microsoft, *is* in fact a part of Mono? Or is it not?
We're talking about the whole Mono project here, not one late addition to the game. I wish you would stop pretending like you knew the situation. You clearly thought Microsoft was the owner of Mono.
I fail to see how anybody could open themselves up to a patent lawsuit over use of Mono as it exists today.
Easy, by using a technology included in Mono that isn't part of any patent grant. The Community Promise is for specific technologies, not a general grant for Mono.
You said: "It's released under LGPL, GPL, and MIT licenses... how would Microsoft ever "kill" it?" They may decide to no longer officially support it, certainly, and they could stop contributing future changes to the open source implementation... but serious question:
Once it's been released under GPL, how exactly could they sue someone for using it, or forking it and continuing to work on a parallel implementation? That seems like it wouldn't stand up for a single moment in a court."
Clearly you thought Mono was released by Microsoft under open source licenses. That's just not the case. Now you're backtracking. The DLR is a late addition and only part of Mono.
The other issue is that the Community Promise only applies to the ECMA standards. All the other crap that comes bundled with Mono isn't covered. Novell has a special deal with Microsoft with regards to Silverlight, which means Mono isn't open source for other Linux distributions.
Finally, even if Microsoft applied the Community Promise to all of.NET and Silverlight, they'd still screw you over. If you want vendor lock-in, follow Microsoft's lead. They will pretend they're interested in being cross-platform while trying to gain popularity, and then yank the rug out from under you on all future versions.
"Anyways, I'm not arguing that the free market is perfect or even better than a regulated market. I'm just arguing about the definition. Making up definitions to suit your ideology isn't right."
You're the one who came out with the Turing completeness argument. This is what you responded to:
"there's no way any normal person can write easily in C what is possible in Haskell."
You completely missed the bolded part and attacked a straw man:
"Languages like Haskell just make certain concepts and constructs quicker to write, not possible to write. And since a lot of haskell interpreters are written in C ergo whatever you can do in Haskell you can do in C."
You even say yourself that it's easier, but then go on to the Turing completeness argument. Complete straw man, and another poster dinged you on it too. You just can't admit you fucked up.
Monopolies have imploded before without regulation, and cartels are notorious for members who break away. "Deadly force" is one of the things not allowed in a free market.
Anyways, I'm not arguing that the free market is perfect or even better than a regulated market. I'm just arguing about the definition. Making up definitions to suit your ideology isn't right.
Yet if you were processing SQL expressions you'd have written a SQL interpreter, and we were talking about writing Haskell expressions. Got it yet, fucking moron?
You're going a long way just because you latched on to one sentence and failed to read the rest of the post.
Which is exactly the kind of mindset I called OCPD. If it's not perfect, it's crap. A.k.a., the Nirvana Fallacy.
I never talked about perfect. The poster who started this thread had a dozen crashes. People who have defended it say they have only had a few. Another person replied to me in this thread and say they didn't have crashes, but 8 hangs. Are you starting to get the picture? This game is one of the buggiest games around. There's no way I'd buy it and hope that I'd only have a few crashes.
People who haven't even played the damned game at all, making the biggest fuss, either that it's the greatest ever or that it's unplayable crap.
It's a backlash against a trend to release buggy games. This game just has the unfortunate position of being extremely buggy. Too bad, people like to have their voices heard.
Yes, anecdotes aren't data, but second hand hearsay and wild confabulations are even less material to base judgments and pronouncements on.
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. People have been reporting their direct experiences, even the ones writing to defend the game. This isn't hearsay or wild confabulations.
I'm not forgetting any such thing -- I gave you definitions of what a free market is. Ideally, in a free market such monopolies or cartels would succumb to competition. If they don't, then it just means that the free market doesn't work ideally, and regulation may be preferred over a completely free market.
You're full of shit. You made a Turing completeness argument when the poster you replied to already acknowledged it. This post is getting even dumber, because now you claim that a C program that can interpret Haskell expressions is not a Haskell interpreter.
"A free market is a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to enforce private contracts and the ownership of property."
First off, you've made several statements in this thread along the lines that Mono was a Microsoft project with Microsoft code. Obviously you were wrong. Second, Mono implements much more than the ECMA standards. They aim to implement all of.NET, including other Microsoft traps like Silverlight.
I just don't see how they could argue in court that some company using Mono would be infringing, when it's a project *they* had a huge part in creating, releasing, and supporting.
What are you talking about? Mono was written independently of Microsoft.
If you understood anything about programming and Operating Systems
Do you, except to defend the existing crap around you?
I mean, if it were that easy then why are there still Buffer Overflow Attacks, an attack originally discovered in 1988?
Why indeed, when they are completely preventable in languages that don't allow buffer overflows. But, OK, even if think you absolutely need the performance of C or C++, there's no reason why a buffer overflow in a game should trash a user's machine.
Or maybe, just maybe, its much more technical with HOW THE HARDWARE WORKS
You mean hardware that disallows processes from stomping on each other's memory?
unless you want a crippled machine running much much slower as it checks and double checks and triple checks even the simplest things like adding variables together, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the Operating System itself to protect the user like you are saying
Asinine. For instance, there's no reason why a game should have any ability to corrupt a file system, read or write files that don't belong to it, or probe hardware beyond specified limits. This isn't even a performance issue as much as it is a permission issue. Programs are just given way too much authority by default, and it's not because of performance.
I don't see how the US firing mystery missiles off it's own coast would be a wise saber-rattling move, as it's just as likely to panic the population on the coast. When the US wants to rattle its saber, it sends out carrier groups or holds military exercises, and tells everybody what it's doing.
This is mostly likely China or Iran fucking with us.
It's not a positive when somebody chimes in that they've only had a few crashes. I know people like to say the plural of anecdote isn't data, but at some point the avalanche of reports and reputation a product gains means something.
Which boils down to an average of one crash every 3 hours or so... hmm, well, I guess your mileage may vary, I think I didn't get as many myself.
The problem with using such an average is that probabilistically speaking, you are not going to play for 3 hours and then crash. You're going to end up with clusters of crashes. The other problem is that crashing takes you out of the immersion of the game and loses any unsaved progress.
There are you, having fun, and *boom*, crash. That fucking sucks. I could put up with that once or twice for a game. A dozen times? No way.
I guess you're really not into MMOs, are you? Because I can tell you that getting disconnected after a few hours or hitting some heavy lag happens on every one of them, by simple virtue of having a public network in between.
No, I don't play MMOs, but I do hang out on a board game server, and my connection has been fine for years. I certainly don't expect to crash on the order of once every three hours, and if I did, it would be highly annoying.
Pretending that only one aspect alone should determine what I buy, is on the other hand OCPD material.
Not when the quality is so low compared to other games on the market. I can't think of a single game that I've played that is anywhere near this level of buggyness.
The problem is that the game is massively buggy, much more than is reasonable. A dozen crashes in a single 35 hour playthrough, post-patch? Missions that can't be completed? Poor graphics performance on a popular brand of video card? A few glitches would be acceptable, but this is extreme.
Bashing the game for these bugs isn't obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as you put it. Glossing over these bugs is massively forgiving on your part. You're a fanboy. No finished product should be this buggy.
There are other RPGs to play. There's no way I would reward a developer for putting out such a shoddy product. There's no way I would even want to play a game with so many problems. It would totally detract from the enjoyment -- unless you think random crashes add to the excitement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think for once we can fill in the "????":
2. Sweep.
Rather than continuing to go in circles, I'll stop here.
Please quote for me where I said "Microsoft" could "change the license" on Mono?
"If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync"
Going from open source to closed source is a change in license, which you then say might induce a fork. Of course, since Microsoft does not own Mono, there's no need to fork the GPL version, as Microsoft cannot close what they don't own.
how would Microsoft kill an open-sourced product like all the chicken littles around here are claiming they will as soon as they get around to it?
This question has been answered many times. By suing users and distributors of Mono over patent rights not granted in Mono.
The patent threat seems remarkably flimsy, given the probability of various estoppel & laches counter-claims
Quite the opposite, given all the software patent nonsense we've seen in practice. Patent trolls have been successfully suing companies for many years now, often waiting around until a company gets successful or a technology widely adopted.
Microsoft has, one more time, encouraged, supported, and even contributed code to this project that it is now claiming "infringed" on its patents and which it is now suddenly seeking damages from.
Microsoft has encouraged specific parts, and entered exclusive agreements with Novell in others. That's not a blanket permission for all of Mono for other distributors and users. Also, .NET and Mono are always adding new features, so even if you think laches will save you for an early version of Mono, it may not for last year's hot new feature.
You guys are two peas in a pod.
Not answering how Microsoft can change the license on a project it doesn't own. Yes, it is pointless discussion, since you can't admit your mistake. Congratulations.
No, clearly, I thought "IT" (being Mono) was released under LGPL, GPL, and MIT licenses. Which, surprise surprise, it *is*. I never said "MICROSOFT" released it under those licenses.
You asked: "Once it's been released under GPL, how exactly could they sue someone for using it, or forking it and continuing to work on a parallel implementation?". That question would make sense if it actually was Microsoft who released the code.
Oh, and there's more quotes from you. You're definitely backtracking:
"If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync, and that forked version somehow implemented a new feature for compatibility, I could then see *some* possibility they'd go after the competing implementation, but I think if they changed the licensing on Mono back to closed, it would die from neglect soon enough anyway."
How could Microsoft change the licensing on the Mono project when they don't own it, and never did?
So then, I was correct? The DLR, written by Microsoft, *is* in fact a part of Mono? Or is it not?
We're talking about the whole Mono project here, not one late addition to the game. I wish you would stop pretending like you knew the situation. You clearly thought Microsoft was the owner of Mono.
I fail to see how anybody could open themselves up to a patent lawsuit over use of Mono as it exists today.
Easy, by using a technology included in Mono that isn't part of any patent grant. The Community Promise is for specific technologies, not a general grant for Mono.
But picking the definitions to suit your ideological goals is?
Unlike the other posters in this thread, I supplied sourced definitions. Where is yours?
You said: "It's released under LGPL, GPL, and MIT licenses... how would Microsoft ever "kill" it?" They may decide to no longer officially support it, certainly, and they could stop contributing future changes to the open source implementation... but serious question:
Once it's been released under GPL, how exactly could they sue someone for using it, or forking it and continuing to work on a parallel implementation? That seems like it wouldn't stand up for a single moment in a court."
Clearly you thought Mono was released by Microsoft under open source licenses. That's just not the case. Now you're backtracking. The DLR is a late addition and only part of Mono.
The other issue is that the Community Promise only applies to the ECMA standards. All the other crap that comes bundled with Mono isn't covered. Novell has a special deal with Microsoft with regards to Silverlight, which means Mono isn't open source for other Linux distributions.
Finally, even if Microsoft applied the Community Promise to all of .NET and Silverlight, they'd still screw you over. If you want vendor lock-in, follow Microsoft's lead. They will pretend they're interested in being cross-platform while trying to gain popularity, and then yank the rug out from under you on all future versions.
"Anyways, I'm not arguing that the free market is perfect or even better than a regulated market. I'm just arguing about the definition. Making up definitions to suit your ideology isn't right."
You're the one who came out with the Turing completeness argument. This is what you responded to:
"there's no way any normal person can write easily in C what is possible in Haskell."
You completely missed the bolded part and attacked a straw man:
"Languages like Haskell just make certain concepts and constructs quicker to write, not possible to write. And since a lot of haskell interpreters are written in C ergo whatever you can do in Haskell you can do in C."
You even say yourself that it's easier, but then go on to the Turing completeness argument. Complete straw man, and another poster dinged you on it too. You just can't admit you fucked up.
Monopolies have imploded before without regulation, and cartels are notorious for members who break away. "Deadly force" is one of the things not allowed in a free market.
Anyways, I'm not arguing that the free market is perfect or even better than a regulated market. I'm just arguing about the definition. Making up definitions to suit your ideology isn't right.
Yet if you were processing SQL expressions you'd have written a SQL interpreter, and we were talking about writing Haskell expressions. Got it yet, fucking moron?
You're going a long way just because you latched on to one sentence and failed to read the rest of the post.
Back for more?
Which is exactly the kind of mindset I called OCPD. If it's not perfect, it's crap. A.k.a., the Nirvana Fallacy.
I never talked about perfect. The poster who started this thread had a dozen crashes. People who have defended it say they have only had a few. Another person replied to me in this thread and say they didn't have crashes, but 8 hangs. Are you starting to get the picture? This game is one of the buggiest games around. There's no way I'd buy it and hope that I'd only have a few crashes.
People who haven't even played the damned game at all, making the biggest fuss, either that it's the greatest ever or that it's unplayable crap.
It's a backlash against a trend to release buggy games. This game just has the unfortunate position of being extremely buggy. Too bad, people like to have their voices heard.
Yes, anecdotes aren't data, but second hand hearsay and wild confabulations are even less material to base judgments and pronouncements on.
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. People have been reporting their direct experiences, even the ones writing to defend the game. This isn't hearsay or wild confabulations.
I'm not forgetting any such thing -- I gave you definitions of what a free market is. Ideally, in a free market such monopolies or cartels would succumb to competition. If they don't, then it just means that the free market doesn't work ideally, and regulation may be preferred over a completely free market.
Still, I guess that Wikipedia must know best. It's not like it can just be edited by anyone...
It has sources cited. What's your source besides your 30 year old education? I just looked at an online UK newspaper and saw the following:
Last November, he was arrested by the police and then charged in March with "creating a disturbance".
You're full of shit. You made a Turing completeness argument when the poster you replied to already acknowledged it. This post is getting even dumber, because now you claim that a C program that can interpret Haskell expressions is not a Haskell interpreter.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/free%20market
"An economic market in which supply and demand are not regulated or are regulated with only minor restrictions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
"A free market is a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to enforce private contracts and the ownership of property."
First off, you've made several statements in this thread along the lines that Mono was a Microsoft project with Microsoft code. Obviously you were wrong. Second, Mono implements much more than the ECMA standards. They aim to implement all of .NET, including other Microsoft traps like Silverlight.
I just don't see how they could argue in court that some company using Mono would be infringing, when it's a project *they* had a huge part in creating, releasing, and supporting.
What are you talking about? Mono was written independently of Microsoft.
Java is the new COBOL.
People have been saying that for years, but what has replaced it? Is the pie really shrinking? What are new projects being written in?
If you understood anything about programming and Operating Systems
Do you, except to defend the existing crap around you?
I mean, if it were that easy then why are there still Buffer Overflow Attacks, an attack originally discovered in 1988?
Why indeed, when they are completely preventable in languages that don't allow buffer overflows. But, OK, even if think you absolutely need the performance of C or C++, there's no reason why a buffer overflow in a game should trash a user's machine.
Or maybe, just maybe, its much more technical with HOW THE HARDWARE WORKS
You mean hardware that disallows processes from stomping on each other's memory?
unless you want a crippled machine running much much slower as it checks and double checks and triple checks even the simplest things like adding variables together, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the Operating System itself to protect the user like you are saying
Asinine. For instance, there's no reason why a game should have any ability to corrupt a file system, read or write files that don't belong to it, or probe hardware beyond specified limits. This isn't even a performance issue as much as it is a permission issue. Programs are just given way too much authority by default, and it's not because of performance.
I don't see how the US firing mystery missiles off it's own coast would be a wise saber-rattling move, as it's just as likely to panic the population on the coast. When the US wants to rattle its saber, it sends out carrier groups or holds military exercises, and tells everybody what it's doing.
This is mostly likely China or Iran fucking with us.
It's not a positive when somebody chimes in that they've only had a few crashes. I know people like to say the plural of anecdote isn't data, but at some point the avalanche of reports and reputation a product gains means something.
Which boils down to an average of one crash every 3 hours or so... hmm, well, I guess your mileage may vary, I think I didn't get as many myself.
The problem with using such an average is that probabilistically speaking, you are not going to play for 3 hours and then crash. You're going to end up with clusters of crashes. The other problem is that crashing takes you out of the immersion of the game and loses any unsaved progress.
There are you, having fun, and *boom*, crash. That fucking sucks. I could put up with that once or twice for a game. A dozen times? No way.
I guess you're really not into MMOs, are you? Because I can tell you that getting disconnected after a few hours or hitting some heavy lag happens on every one of them, by simple virtue of having a public network in between.
No, I don't play MMOs, but I do hang out on a board game server, and my connection has been fine for years. I certainly don't expect to crash on the order of once every three hours, and if I did, it would be highly annoying.
Pretending that only one aspect alone should determine what I buy, is on the other hand OCPD material.
Not when the quality is so low compared to other games on the market. I can't think of a single game that I've played that is anywhere near this level of buggyness.
The problem is that the game is massively buggy, much more than is reasonable. A dozen crashes in a single 35 hour playthrough, post-patch? Missions that can't be completed? Poor graphics performance on a popular brand of video card? A few glitches would be acceptable, but this is extreme.
Bashing the game for these bugs isn't obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as you put it. Glossing over these bugs is massively forgiving on your part. You're a fanboy. No finished product should be this buggy.
There are other RPGs to play. There's no way I would reward a developer for putting out such a shoddy product. There's no way I would even want to play a game with so many problems. It would totally detract from the enjoyment -- unless you think random crashes add to the excitement.