Actually, I think Michael Johnson has the best header design (it lacks a search box, but I think it wouldn't be hard to add one), but Michael's design of the content area looks a lot too generic in my opinion. Jason's content area design is immediately recognizable as Slashdot, and it still looks good.
The design by Peter Lada looks too cluttered in my opinion (at least at the top, the article summeries at the bottom look better). I'm not a designer, but I guess that is because the tagging box that is added to the article summary divides it into too many horizontal regions (green, grey, white, grey, white, grey; not counting shadows), plus yet another box is added below if there is a headline-only article link. And a lot of these regions have extra lines as borders (shadows, dark grey line, etc.). But I think Peter has the best sidebar design of the three entries.
Encryption does not impose any restrictions upon you after decryption. When you know the algorithm and have the key, nothing can stop you from decrypting a message and saving it somewhere else, unencrypted. But this is exactly what a DRM system must prevent.
I admit I haven't read Sun's proposal yet, but I believe that this is a problem that is not solvable. Any DRM system must maintain central control over production or playback (or both). If anyone could develop a playback device that will play back all content (which requires decoding it), and anyone could develop a recording device that will produce original, protected media, I cannot be stopped from developing a device that decodes its input and then re-encodes it, producing a copy that will look original to all playback devices.
As far as I know, one problem is the AGP interface, which gets data from main memory to the graphics card fast but not the other way. This will be fixed with PCI Express, so maybe when more computers have that we will also see some non-display applications of GPUs.
And you're adding load to Slashdot's service without recompense. Slashdot has to pay for that, not you. Are you a thief? If your answer is "no," please explain to me the difference between accessing a public web server and accessing a public access point.
If technology offers a way to distinguish between offering a public or a private service (by using passwords, encryption etc. for private services), those technological means should be used.
To try a different analogy, there are "technological" ways (design, architecture, signs) to distinguish between e.g. stores and other buildings you're not supposed to enter. If you lived in a house that looks very much like a store, has a big sign with your name above the entrance, a parking lot, and a glass door that opens automatically when someone walks by, do you believe you should still be able to sue people who enter your home for breaking in?
The corporation just acts as a "pass-thru" entity.
In the same way, I could claim that individuals are just "pass-thru entities." They receive money from corporations (as employees), then they go and spend the money, i.e. it flows back to corporations or other individuals. Our economy is based on the circulation of money, so everyone is, in a way, a "pass-thru entity."
So why, exactly, do you think that a fictitious pass-thru entity such as a corporation should pay taxes which reduce the amount that it can pay in wages and dividends which, at the end of the day, are taxed anyway?
I believe you would create the same negative effects that "double taxation" may cause.
One effect of "double taxation" is that investors will be reluctant to pay out dividends. Let's say a corporation has made a profit of $100. Let's also say that we have a tax rate of 30% and "double taxation." So the corporation has to pay $30 to the government and keeps $70, which it can either give to its investors or keep. If the investors decide to not pay a dividend, they will indirectly own $70 more, because the corporation that they own is worth that much more thanks to its profits. If they pay a dividend, they will have only $49 more, because they'd have to pay taxes on the dividend payments. So "double taxation" discourages dividend payments.
Now let's assume that corporations are not taxed. This system will also discourage dividend payments. In the above example, the investors choices would be either to pay a dividend, which would increase their wealth by $70 ($100 minus the 30% income tax), or not do so, which would increase their wealth by $100 (because the corporation they own will then be worth that much more).
I don't think that discouraging dividend payments is a good idea. It will cause corporations to accumulate cash even if they do not currently need it for investments within the company. In that case, it is probably more efficient to give the money to the investors, so each of them can make an individual decision about where to invest the money. This creates a more diversified investment market than if only the corporation decides where to put the money.
If they made an operating system that wasn't backwards compatible, they would be in the same boat as, say the Mac OS, or Linux.
Yes, but they have to break backwards compatibility at least for some applications. Alternatively, they can chose to not fix some of their major security design flaws.
One of these flaws is, for example, that users require lots of priviledges to run many applications. Of course this isn't directly Microsoft's fault but the fault of the developers who wrote those applications, however Microsoft doesn't exactly help things by making every user an administrator by default in Windows XP (Home, don't know about Professional).
One of these applications, as far as I know, is Adobe Photoshop. The latest Windows version uses a "product activation" that writes to the boot sector of your hard disk, which obviously only administrators are allowed to do. So you can't use Photoshop unless you're an administrator on Windows. (I think this applies to the retail version of Photoshop only, but I'm not a Photoshop user, so I don't know for sure.)
So basically, Microsoft has two choices: they make Longhorn work The Right Way(tm), but then "Windows broke my Photoshop" and users have to consciously lower the security of their setup in order to continue to use it; or they can make Loghorn also create administrative users by default, but then they'll have some of the same security issues they're facing now.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs
on
A New Look For Firefox
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Qute was a great Default theme. It looked great as a default theme, and really made switchers from IE feel comfortable.
I agree. Replacing this comfortable feeling with a uniform cross-platform look is a stupid idea. Who benefits from a uniform cross-platform look, anyway? Most computer users use only a single platform. They probably don't care at all how the browser looks on some other platform (hell, many don't even know that there are other platforms), but they do care if it looks like it was designed for the platform they use.
People who use multiple platforms are likely to be experienced computer users anyway, so if they want a uniform look, they'll probably be able to install whatever theme they prefer on all the platforms they use.
You're right with your description of a car's interface, however you also have to note that computers are general-purpose tools. The only thing you can reasonably do with a car is drive, and because everyone uses the same controls and needs the same information to perform that task, it's not a big surprise that at least for the important things that every car has, standards have evolved.
Computers, on the other hand, can be used for thousands of different tasks that require different controls (commands) and information to perform.
A simple example might be that we put things that can happen in the future at the top of the screen (like commonly used programs, start button, "My Computer" browser), and current or past stuff at the bottom (logs/graphs/gkrellm, running programs, time, weather).
So, is a weather forecast something "that can happen in the future" and is shown at the top? Ok, just kidding... but really, it isn't as simple as that.
For example, when you have a dialog, something that obviously might happen in the future is that the user will have provided the required information and then wants to continue with whatever operation the dialog is used for, e.g. opening a file. So should the "Open" button be at the top of the file open dialog? That seems quite unnatural.
On the other hand, would putting all future actions at the bottom be a good idea? I doubt it.
I know that your example was just a simple idea, and your general idea is a good one -- my point is simply that it is probably impossible to make all actions on a computer work in the same way simply because the actions themselves are not similar in any way. Of course this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve things as far as it is possible:-)
'The EU has now directly attacked the authority of the United States and our economy in general,' [Senator Patty Murray] said in a statement.
Actually, the only one who was directly "attacked" was Microsoft.
If a direct attack against Microsoft is also a direct attack against "the authority of the United States" and the US economy, does this imply that Microsoft and the US government are a single entity?
IF someone were to ask me to key them into a secured area that they didn't have access to I would say no.
Huh? You mean you would invite people, then not let them enter the building you invited them into? Did you notice that RMS said "I have often asked visitors [...]"? I don't know, but this seems to imply that he's talking about visitors that he invited, not simply anyone who happens to knock at the door.
There may be reasons that the building has security you know.
Yeah, but if you had read RMS's mesage without an anti-RMS bias, you would have noticed that he claims that the security is not necessary. He says that they're adding it just because they can.
What happens when they buy back the shares to keep the price high a bit longer, but than it drops below $8.50 for 25 days anyway? Will SCO then still have enough cash to pay back Baystar?
I think that while MS may be somewhat totalitarian in their practices, a better parallel to the Cold War would be capitalist versus socialist ideals. In this scenario, it is obvious that MS is the pinnacle of capitalist practices, [...]
Sorry, but I think you're mixing up "capitalism" and "capitalism."
In you first sentence, you were talking about capitalist (and socialist) "ideals," and I don't think that's the same kind of capitalism you're talking about in the second sentence. Or do you really think that Microsoft is an example of how capitalism should work?
This I think invalidates your comparison. Yes, you can call Microsoft "capitalist" because they are an example of real-world capitalist practices, and you can call Linux "socialist" because some of the ideas in its development style are somewhat comparable to socialist ideals, but then you're picking those two terms for vastly different reasons (the one because it matches a real-world implementation, the other becaues it matches a theoretical idea), and that doesn't make a valid comparison.
Hrm.. Let's see here. Eclipse, the IDE, keeps an internal history repository of my source code.
Yes, but it's an internal history. It's not stored in the source files, so if you send your sources to someone else, you don't accidentally also send the history. You have to explicitly do that if you want to.
Note that if you combine a GPL'd and an APL'd work, it's the GPL'd works license that is infringed, [...]
Well, that depends on what license you use for the combined work. The GPL requires you to use the GPL, so if you do that, there's nothing the publisher of the GPL'd work could complain about. What might be infringed however is the Apache License: iff the GPL does not fulfill all of the terms of the Apache License, then by publishing the combined work under the GPL, you have not fulfilled all of the Apache License's terms, which is obviously illegal.
No. However, the FSF makes a big deal whenever they think that an open source license isn't GPL-compatible.
They don't "make a big deal." Slashdot makes a big deal.
The FSF advocates that people use the GPL (that's kind of what you would expect them to do, given that they wrote that license). And since they suggest to use the GPL, they also try to help people who use that license by telling them which code they believe can be legally used in a GPLed project, i.e. which licenses are "GPL-compatible."
This is just trying to help people to not get into legal problems. I really don't see how this is a reason for flaming the FSF.
No, the main argument behind the GPL is "screw people who don't wish to give users of their software the freedoms that we think users should have."
You may disagree with that attitude, but it is certainly not "anti-corporate." I'm sure that the Free Software Foundation welcomes corporations to publish free software, just like they probably dislike individual, non-corporate developers who publish non-free software.
Say John writes some Apache licensed code, and Jim writes some GPL covered code. Then Joe comes along, takes Jim's [GPLed] code, writes an Apache module that includes Jim's code (after all, the Apache license says it's ok). Joe's module becomes popular and gets included in the big distributions.
Then, to comply with the GPL, they must license the Apache package as a whole under the GPL. You're correct, the Apache folks claim that the Apache License allows that.
At that point, however, Jim gets an offer he cant refuse from our darling Darl, and promptly sues every Linux distributor he can think of for copyright infringement since he doesnt consider the GPL terms on distributing his code fulfilled.
Umm, no. See above. To fulfill the conditions of the GPL, the distribution as a whole has to be under the GPL, so there's nothing Jim could complain about. The only one who could potentially sue here is John (who wrote the Apache-licensed code), if he doesn't consider the terms of the Apache License for his code fulfilled by the distribution under the GPL.
So there is a risk only if the GPL does not fulfill all of the Apache License's requirements. This is what is meant by the term "GPL compatibility": that a license contains only requirements that are also fulfilled by the GPL, so it is possible to distribute that code under the GPL.
The ASF says that this is the case, so if their reading of the licenses is correct, there is no risk.
But I'm not sure the ASF's statement is correct. The Apache License 2.0 contains a patent termination clause that might also affect the use of the program. The GPL clause, on the other hand, only talks about distribution. I am not a lawyer, so I don't think I'm qualified to judge whether or not the license is GPL compatible. But I won't be convinced by the ASF's statement before I have heard some reply from someone at the FSF who is qualified and thinks different.
If you want to link stuff with Apach, it's Apache-specific anyway, [...]
Not true. If you're thinking of the Apache HTTP Server, then you're right, but the ASF is hosting far more software by now, including lots of great libraries. For example, as a Java developer, I regularly use packages developed as part of Apache's Jakarta project. Their logging libraries (Log4J etc.) are also quite widely used, as is for example the Xerces XML parser. I'm sure some of these libraries are also interesting for people who wish to develop free software that is licensed under the GPL.
There are many programmers that enjoy giving to the world without needing anything in return such as those that release software under the BSD license.
There are also many programmers that do not enjoy that.
As much as I hate to say it, the answer to this is tolerance.
Excatly. (Why did you hate to say that?)
The OS community needs to realize that not everyone thinks that all code should be free [...]
The community does realize this, that's why there is a huge number of non-copyleft licenses.
[...] and that if someone wants to allow others to profit off of their code then they should be allowed to and not criticized for it such as Sun or Apache are.
Why should they not be criticized? While at the same time you are criticizing the FSF? I think that it is a good thing that there are different approaches to licensing and that different groups are advocating different positions. It allows people to look at the different arguments, and decide for themselves which approach they like best.
Times like this are when I realize the communist nature of the FSF [...]
Didn't you just advocate tolerance?
[...] and understand why so many corporations are driven away.
Attracting corporations code doesn't seem to be the goal of the FSF.
This is idiocy. We are making SCO's FUD into FACT by behaving this way.
"See? They just want to steal code! Look how they treat one of their own!"
Uhh, but you realize that using XFree86 4.4 would actually be "stealing" code?
If a distributor ships a GPLed software that was linked with code from XFree86 4.4, he has to violate the license of one of the two programs. Either the resulting code is shipped under the GPL, but that license doesn't include the acknowledgement requirement of XFree86. Or the resulting code is shipped with the additional restriction of requiring the acknowledgement, but then the distributor is violating the GPL which doesn't allow adding any restrictions.
Also, what you've said in a previous posting in this thread ("The FSF/GPL community can't be bothered to give you credit for your work.") is complete bullshit. Take a look at clause 2.c) of the GPL.
This issue isn't at all about not wanting to give credit. This is about not wanting to violate the copyrights of any contributors, which among other things means not to combine things that have incompatible licenses. I think this whole mess is a great counterpoint to SCO's FUD.
Yet we don't see Linux distributers refusing to include products with those licenses.
No, but they hopefully refuse to link code from these products with GPL-licensed code.
This isn't a problem with, for example, the Apache Web Server, because it doesn't have to be linked to any GPLed code to work.
This is a problem with, for example, your favorite GPL-licensed desktop environment, because that does require linking with XFree86. Which unfortunately is illegal (well, not the linking itself, but redistributing the resulting binary) because the licenses are no longer compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is my favorite, too.
Actually, I think Michael Johnson has the best header design (it lacks a search box, but I think it wouldn't be hard to add one), but Michael's design of the content area looks a lot too generic in my opinion. Jason's content area design is immediately recognizable as Slashdot, and it still looks good.
The design by Peter Lada looks too cluttered in my opinion (at least at the top, the article summeries at the bottom look better). I'm not a designer, but I guess that is because the tagging box that is added to the article summary divides it into too many horizontal regions (green, grey, white, grey, white, grey; not counting shadows), plus yet another box is added below if there is a headline-only article link. And a lot of these regions have extra lines as borders (shadows, dark grey line, etc.). But I think Peter has the best sidebar design of the three entries.
Encryption does not impose any restrictions upon you after decryption. When you know the algorithm and have the key, nothing can stop you from decrypting a message and saving it somewhere else, unencrypted. But this is exactly what a DRM system must prevent.
I admit I haven't read Sun's proposal yet, but I believe that this is a problem that is not solvable. Any DRM system must maintain central control over production or playback (or both). If anyone could develop a playback device that will play back all content (which requires decoding it), and anyone could develop a recording device that will produce original, protected media, I cannot be stopped from developing a device that decodes its input and then re-encodes it, producing a copy that will look original to all playback devices.
No, BSD would be a 0xdead ;-).
As far as I know, one problem is the AGP interface, which gets data from main memory to the graphics card fast but not the other way. This will be fixed with PCI Express, so maybe when more computers have that we will also see some non-display applications of GPUs.
That doesn't matter though. The company we're talking about here already is Scaled.
And you're adding load to Slashdot's service without recompense. Slashdot has to pay for that, not you. Are you a thief? If your answer is "no," please explain to me the difference between accessing a public web server and accessing a public access point.
If technology offers a way to distinguish between offering a public or a private service (by using passwords, encryption etc. for private services), those technological means should be used.
To try a different analogy, there are "technological" ways (design, architecture, signs) to distinguish between e.g. stores and other buildings you're not supposed to enter. If you lived in a house that looks very much like a store, has a big sign with your name above the entrance, a parking lot, and a glass door that opens automatically when someone walks by, do you believe you should still be able to sue people who enter your home for breaking in?
With free software, you're free to remove the time-bomb code, so this argument doesn't apply.
"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation
In the same way, I could claim that individuals are just "pass-thru entities." They receive money from corporations (as employees), then they go and spend the money, i.e. it flows back to corporations or other individuals. Our economy is based on the circulation of money, so everyone is, in a way, a "pass-thru entity."
I believe you would create the same negative effects that "double taxation" may cause.
One effect of "double taxation" is that investors will be reluctant to pay out dividends. Let's say a corporation has made a profit of $100. Let's also say that we have a tax rate of 30% and "double taxation." So the corporation has to pay $30 to the government and keeps $70, which it can either give to its investors or keep. If the investors decide to not pay a dividend, they will indirectly own $70 more, because the corporation that they own is worth that much more thanks to its profits. If they pay a dividend, they will have only $49 more, because they'd have to pay taxes on the dividend payments. So "double taxation" discourages dividend payments.
Now let's assume that corporations are not taxed. This system will also discourage dividend payments. In the above example, the investors choices would be either to pay a dividend, which would increase their wealth by $70 ($100 minus the 30% income tax), or not do so, which would increase their wealth by $100 (because the corporation they own will then be worth that much more).
I don't think that discouraging dividend payments is a good idea. It will cause corporations to accumulate cash even if they do not currently need it for investments within the company. In that case, it is probably more efficient to give the money to the investors, so each of them can make an individual decision about where to invest the money. This creates a more diversified investment market than if only the corporation decides where to put the money.
Yes, but they have to break backwards compatibility at least for some applications. Alternatively, they can chose to not fix some of their major security design flaws.
One of these flaws is, for example, that users require lots of priviledges to run many applications. Of course this isn't directly Microsoft's fault but the fault of the developers who wrote those applications, however Microsoft doesn't exactly help things by making every user an administrator by default in Windows XP (Home, don't know about Professional).
One of these applications, as far as I know, is Adobe Photoshop. The latest Windows version uses a "product activation" that writes to the boot sector of your hard disk, which obviously only administrators are allowed to do. So you can't use Photoshop unless you're an administrator on Windows. (I think this applies to the retail version of Photoshop only, but I'm not a Photoshop user, so I don't know for sure.)
So basically, Microsoft has two choices: they make Longhorn work The Right Way(tm), but then "Windows broke my Photoshop" and users have to consciously lower the security of their setup in order to continue to use it; or they can make Loghorn also create administrative users by default, but then they'll have some of the same security issues they're facing now.
I agree. Replacing this comfortable feeling with a uniform cross-platform look is a stupid idea. Who benefits from a uniform cross-platform look, anyway? Most computer users use only a single platform. They probably don't care at all how the browser looks on some other platform (hell, many don't even know that there are other platforms), but they do care if it looks like it was designed for the platform they use.
People who use multiple platforms are likely to be experienced computer users anyway, so if they want a uniform look, they'll probably be able to install whatever theme they prefer on all the platforms they use.
You're right with your description of a car's interface, however you also have to note that computers are general-purpose tools. The only thing you can reasonably do with a car is drive, and because everyone uses the same controls and needs the same information to perform that task, it's not a big surprise that at least for the important things that every car has, standards have evolved.
Computers, on the other hand, can be used for thousands of different tasks that require different controls (commands) and information to perform.
So, is a weather forecast something "that can happen in the future" and is shown at the top? Ok, just kidding... but really, it isn't as simple as that.
For example, when you have a dialog, something that obviously might happen in the future is that the user will have provided the required information and then wants to continue with whatever operation the dialog is used for, e.g. opening a file. So should the "Open" button be at the top of the file open dialog? That seems quite unnatural.
On the other hand, would putting all future actions at the bottom be a good idea? I doubt it.
I know that your example was just a simple idea, and your general idea is a good one -- my point is simply that it is probably impossible to make all actions on a computer work in the same way simply because the actions themselves are not similar in any way. Of course this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve things as far as it is possible :-)
Actually, the only one who was directly "attacked" was Microsoft.
If a direct attack against Microsoft is also a direct attack against "the authority of the United States" and the US economy, does this imply that Microsoft and the US government are a single entity?
Huh? You mean you would invite people, then not let them enter the building you invited them into? Did you notice that RMS said "I have often asked visitors [...]"? I don't know, but this seems to imply that he's talking about visitors that he invited, not simply anyone who happens to knock at the door.
Yeah, but if you had read RMS's mesage without an anti-RMS bias, you would have noticed that he claims that the security is not necessary. He says that they're adding it just because they can.
What happens when they buy back the shares to keep the price high a bit longer, but than it drops below $8.50 for 25 days anyway? Will SCO then still have enough cash to pay back Baystar?
Sorry, but I think you're mixing up "capitalism" and "capitalism."
In you first sentence, you were talking about capitalist (and socialist) "ideals," and I don't think that's the same kind of capitalism you're talking about in the second sentence. Or do you really think that Microsoft is an example of how capitalism should work?
This I think invalidates your comparison. Yes, you can call Microsoft "capitalist" because they are an example of real-world capitalist practices, and you can call Linux "socialist" because some of the ideas in its development style are somewhat comparable to socialist ideals, but then you're picking those two terms for vastly different reasons (the one because it matches a real-world implementation, the other becaues it matches a theoretical idea), and that doesn't make a valid comparison.
Yes, but it's an internal history. It's not stored in the source files, so if you send your sources to someone else, you don't accidentally also send the history. You have to explicitly do that if you want to.
Well, that depends on what license you use for the combined work. The GPL requires you to use the GPL, so if you do that, there's nothing the publisher of the GPL'd work could complain about. What might be infringed however is the Apache License: iff the GPL does not fulfill all of the terms of the Apache License, then by publishing the combined work under the GPL, you have not fulfilled all of the Apache License's terms, which is obviously illegal.
Also see on of my earlier posts on the same issue.
Disclaimer: IANAL etc.
They don't "make a big deal." Slashdot makes a big deal.
The FSF advocates that people use the GPL (that's kind of what you would expect them to do, given that they wrote that license). And since they suggest to use the GPL, they also try to help people who use that license by telling them which code they believe can be legally used in a GPLed project, i.e. which licenses are "GPL-compatible."
This is just trying to help people to not get into legal problems. I really don't see how this is a reason for flaming the FSF.
No, the main argument behind the GPL is "screw people who don't wish to give users of their software the freedoms that we think users should have."
You may disagree with that attitude, but it is certainly not "anti-corporate." I'm sure that the Free Software Foundation welcomes corporations to publish free software, just like they probably dislike individual, non-corporate developers who publish non-free software.
Then, to comply with the GPL, they must license the Apache package as a whole under the GPL. You're correct, the Apache folks claim that the Apache License allows that.
Umm, no. See above. To fulfill the conditions of the GPL, the distribution as a whole has to be under the GPL, so there's nothing Jim could complain about. The only one who could potentially sue here is John (who wrote the Apache-licensed code), if he doesn't consider the terms of the Apache License for his code fulfilled by the distribution under the GPL.
So there is a risk only if the GPL does not fulfill all of the Apache License's requirements. This is what is meant by the term "GPL compatibility": that a license contains only requirements that are also fulfilled by the GPL, so it is possible to distribute that code under the GPL.
The ASF says that this is the case, so if their reading of the licenses is correct, there is no risk.
But I'm not sure the ASF's statement is correct. The Apache License 2.0 contains a patent termination clause that might also affect the use of the program. The GPL clause, on the other hand, only talks about distribution. I am not a lawyer, so I don't think I'm qualified to judge whether or not the license is GPL compatible. But I won't be convinced by the ASF's statement before I have heard some reply from someone at the FSF who is qualified and thinks different.
Not true. If you're thinking of the Apache HTTP Server, then you're right, but the ASF is hosting far more software by now, including lots of great libraries. For example, as a Java developer, I regularly use packages developed as part of Apache's Jakarta project. Their logging libraries (Log4J etc.) are also quite widely used, as is for example the Xerces XML parser. I'm sure some of these libraries are also interesting for people who wish to develop free software that is licensed under the GPL.
There are also many programmers that do not enjoy that.
Excatly. (Why did you hate to say that?)
The community does realize this, that's why there is a huge number of non-copyleft licenses.
Why should they not be criticized? While at the same time you are criticizing the FSF? I think that it is a good thing that there are different approaches to licensing and that different groups are advocating different positions. It allows people to look at the different arguments, and decide for themselves which approach they like best.
Didn't you just advocate tolerance?
Attracting corporations code doesn't seem to be the goal of the FSF.
Uhh, but you realize that using XFree86 4.4 would actually be "stealing" code?
If a distributor ships a GPLed software that was linked with code from XFree86 4.4, he has to violate the license of one of the two programs. Either the resulting code is shipped under the GPL, but that license doesn't include the acknowledgement requirement of XFree86. Or the resulting code is shipped with the additional restriction of requiring the acknowledgement, but then the distributor is violating the GPL which doesn't allow adding any restrictions.
Also, what you've said in a previous posting in this thread ("The FSF/GPL community can't be bothered to give you credit for your work.") is complete bullshit. Take a look at clause 2.c) of the GPL.
This issue isn't at all about not wanting to give credit. This is about not wanting to violate the copyrights of any contributors, which among other things means not to combine things that have incompatible licenses. I think this whole mess is a great counterpoint to SCO's FUD.
No, but they hopefully refuse to link code from these products with GPL-licensed code.
This isn't a problem with, for example, the Apache Web Server, because it doesn't have to be linked to any GPLed code to work.
This is a problem with, for example, your favorite GPL-licensed desktop environment, because that does require linking with XFree86. Which unfortunately is illegal (well, not the linking itself, but redistributing the resulting binary) because the licenses are no longer compatible.