Good luck if you're planning a crusade against the trends in modern society. All it's about these days is looks and image... :)

The major problem here is that "the author" of that library might be hundreds of authors which all have to give you their "go". Also, the original library might be a fork of another GPL'd library, which brings you in even messier waters...

VMWare a memory hog? What? Running a blank winxp with only helper drivers installed in vmware vs virtualbox, both configured with 512mb ram: vmware: 80mb (all processes including DHCP etc counted), VirtualBox: 230mb

VirtualBox still has a long way to go... Totally unreliable in production or even development environments. It corrupts images on regular bases, crashes without any indication why, and on windows, the drivers are a total mess, bluescreening the entire os on regular bases (yes - also the latest versions). Not to mention the horror a version upgrade is, chances are that you have to uninstall everything again, reboot a few times, manually remove some files and re-install the latest version. WIth some luck, it then works. I gave up on it, and just installed VMWare server - which can be downloaded free of charge to use in the development environment. Is rocksolid and runs without a glitch...

And while it's true that Photoshop has no competition in most area's, Gimp does have a few area's where it can seriously compete with it, after all - most users only use 20% of Photoshop... Too bad Gimp decided to be a Photoshop competitor on "bad user-interface"-level too...

Tbh, I prefer to have both. A GUI for quick & easy configuration, and if needed some manual config-file tweaking for more flexibility, but both can be usefull, and both can be terribly designed.

Sam Raimi doesn't exactly have a better record than Michael Bay tbh... I think they're both B- class directors... Both spiderman movies might have been a huge success - but the movies basically sucked big time. I never understood why so many people think they're good... Same goes for transformers...

The only good 'comic book' movies I've seen were Sin City and X-Men 1&2. Ironman also surprised me. The others? Mediocre at most. I've seen them all in the theaters, but a lot of them don't deserve to spend any money on.

Anyway - both Sam Raimi's movies and WoW don't interest me - so I don't really care he would make a WoW movie :)

Selling those chinese or whatever products in the US however would not be allowed unless they pay their license fees...

Would you invest millions with your company in a new technology - which will take 2 or 3 generations of your product to cover the research costs, if you know that by the second generation - your competitors will have 'copied' your product and got those millions worth of research for free? Why not wait for someone else to do the research and 'copy' it from them? That's why patents were invented in the first place. It's all about money, not control. It's encouraging companies to invest in long-term and/or expensive research and assuring them they won't lose money on it, because companies are NOT about control. Claiming that is just spreading FUD. Money is their primary concern, and if they use it to control things, the reason is easily traceable back to money.

Patents work as long as what they stand for cannot be applied without a cost for each resulting product. This means the final product cannot be given away for free, which means you will make money by selling it somehow. If a company applies for a patent, they are also forced to reveal the general idea, concept or basics of the technology - which means the information is out-there and free. Applying the information however would cost you money if the patent is not expired.

Now the problem is that software doesn't cost a thing to reproduce. Anyone can write a piece of software with very limited cost. Reproducing software doesn't cost a thing, which means you are able to offer and spread it for free. I personally think the 'software patent' is seriously tricky. Without research from labs like Fraunhofer - you would not have an MPEG standard, and audio and video compression codecs would not be where they are now.

I think the licensing of the patents is the most important part of the patent-system that has to be reformed. Having ridiculous licensing conditions or disallowing competitors using the patented technology should be forbidden. The application of a technology in a product that guaranteed to be available at no cost other than the distribution cost should not be required to get a license. Charging for a bundle which includes free products that use patented technology should be allowed without licensing costs when the bundled software van be used independantly from the bundle. Offcourse this is not the only thing that should be changed, ridiculous patents should still be forbidden offcourse. Now this idea is far from perfect, but I think this would pretty much solve most gripes the 'free software movement' has with pattents:
- competition will be there for software. Free software will be able to compete with commercial software even if there is no other commercial competitor.
- Freely available software in any form (freeware or OSS) is possible at no cost without any risk for patent violation claims.
- Companies making money by distributing OSS software are not at risk.
- Selling hardware implementing patented technology costs money.
- Selling commercial software using a patented technology costs money.

Basicly: you're making money off a patented technology - you pay. Otherwise, you don't.

For android it's simple, they can pay for the royalties and include a H.264 codec. Would cost them a lot less than recoding all their video to OGG, not to mention bandwidth costs. And you're confusing the Google freedom for idealistic bullshit you see on /. all the time. People at google are actually able to think for themselfs, unlike most of the /. audience which just blindly believes in "everything has to be free or it's evil".

Ehm Theora is not an 'open standard' by any means. H.264 actually is, but it has some serious licensing issues for 'free software' which is not a problem for Apple since they are already paying for the licenses anyway. Implementing Theora is risky for Apple, and I'm pretty surprised that Google is willing to add it to Chrome. No-one can guarantee that Theora is patent-free, having a codebase in a larger project which isn't covered by any patents at all has become almost impossible, certainly if you specialize in areas like video and audio codecs, where commercial labs such as Fraunhofer Institute operate, which live from patent royalties on technologies they researched. I'm not exactly what you can call an Apple fanboy, I do have an iPhone however, but have no mac, typing this on a HP laptop with winxp, running 3 linux vm's, and developing on a bsd and a linux server remotely. I always get confused when people talk about Apple being "evil". Sure their focus is not on 'standards' - but on user experience. I absolutely don't get the 'lock in'. Apple pushed for DRM-free tunes in the iTunes store - because it's bad for the customers, not because it conflicts with some idealistic bullshit. I don't really get how behavior like this is lock-in? This means anything that can play AAC files - which is quite a lot (AAC is standardized after all and not an Apple propriatry format). This opens the market for competition for their iPod, so explain me exactly where the lock-in is? And that's only one part. Apple clearly supports opensource software. Yes they struggled somewhat with giving back to webkit in the beginning, but now, things are looking fine on that level. They get it that they can benefit from OSS, and they do include a lot of OOS with OS/X ( like Apache etc). Some people say they are exploiting OSS projects, but in the end, Red Hat, Novell & co. are also doing that right? Now - can someone please explain me how Apple would "lock me in" by refusing to implement a non-standardized video-codec of which the creators claim it is patent-free. They do want to implement a codec that most video-capable devices out-there can already play, and is still the standard to which Theora is being compared. Please shut up about 'crippling' products, 'vendor lock-in', 'ignoring open standards'. It may look like I'm "pro" H.264 - but I'm actually not really. I don't care what codec will be used to be honest. Just have the video tag support all codecs supported by the main OS. I think the Mozilla foundation is acting like a bunch of morons refusing to go that way. There's no such thing as "forcing freedom" on people, which is exactly what they're trying to do.

You are clearly a technical user, used to working with computers for how long? You're not a typical "end-user" and used to cumbersome userinterfaces where you have to dig into to find out how the damn thing works. You stating that functionality is an aspect of usability is plain wrong. User interfaces represent usability. Programs are written with a problem in mind and how to solve them. Without any form of UI - you can have all functionality implemented - it will not be useable at all. The UI is the "usability" aspect of the functionality. Opensource mostly focuses on the technical aspect on how to solve it, implement a extremely cool sollution and think "oh well finished!" followed with "wait a minute, I need a UI" - and quickly add something so it is in a more or less usable state. Usability however will be very poor because the workflow of the user had absolutely 0 seconds of thought. This is what Apple is very good at. Their programs are extremely simple to use on the surface. Anyone who understands how a mouse works and knows some very basic stuff is able to use them. But if you look closer - you see how much powerfull functionality is actually available. They have a very high usability for their majority of users, and at the same time offer extremely powerfull tools for their power-users who are willing to dig into more technical aspects of the system. UI's of opensource programs tend to go in extremes. Or they're too simple and dumbed down - or they're overly complicated without having given any thought to usability making it equally hard to use all functionality. Just look at MS Word, and the 2007 revamp. Microsoft finally discovered that 99% of the users only used 20% of the features, and focussed on that. I don't say they did a good job, I don't use their office suit enough to judge on that - but they clearly made the most-used functions easier to use and put them on the foreground, while the more advanced features are a bit harder to find. Word would still be used by the majority of their users - even if they stripped most of the advanced 'functionality' - and still be usefull to them. Power-word-users however would not be very happy...

THE biggest problems companies like Apple, Nokia & co have with Theora is that is uncertain territory. The makers might claim it is patent-free - but this has never ever been proven in court, and it never will be certain that this is patent-free, even if 1 or 10 lawsuits would be won. Since writing any respectably sized piece of software without violating some patents is simply impossible - this is a very realistic problem. For GPL, there's nothing to catch for potential holders of patents applying to Theora/Ogg, there's no-one big enough worth attacking. The previously mentioned companies however are something else - they are big fish and a lot of money can be made off them if they sue them for patent infringement. H.264 is simple, they already pay royalties for this, they're relatively safe. This has nothing to do with moral or technical superiority for them, but with risks and money - which they should. They provide a job and an income for quite a lot of people, and to have this threatened by some idealistic decision would be morally wrong if you look at it that way.

I absolutely like opensource, but honestly - a major part of the GPL-fanatics are morons with their head in the clouds, who are not in touch with 'the real world' out-there. You just have to accept that the GPL is not perfect. It has noble intentions, but it is idealistic - and idealistic things never work out the way they should, they always conflict with other people's ideals and visions. Compromises on the other hand do pretty well in the real world... GPL already did a lot of good things, but this is mostly due to the "free source code if you give the changes back" principle, not the "I want everything to be free" utopia. As a developer I love how I can look at the code and see how it works. If I find a bug, I give back. As a user, I couldn't care less about the legal implications. I don't want a "free" system, I want a system that works.

Yes there's a problem regarding GPL and H.264 licensing, but a perfect world does not exist - and will never exist. Fact is - getting commercial support for Theora is going to be impossible, opensource browsers who don't have a commercial backing (webkit=google+apple+nokia) will never have a 100% marketshare - there will always be commercial competitors with a relatively large piece of the pie. I personally don't have any sollutions - but if Adobe can pay H.264 licenses for it's millions of flash users - I think Mozilla foundation - which makes a shitload of money through advertising - should be able to do the same and have the H.264 'plugin' optionally downloaded if the user agrees with this. Yes this conflicts with the moral the utopia of 'everything is free' GPL stands for, but this is the real world here. I still prefer an open H.264 MPEG standard being used which commercial companies are willing to support over some completely closed propriatry WMV codec - which I imagine someone is going to push forward. Standards are good, sadly enough - video and audio encoding is quite a specialized field where patent-hungry companies are doing a lot of research in. And face it - without them we would never have had stuff like MPEG (MP3 etc) or even stuff like Theora or Ogg.

Ok sorry, you made me laugh... ABS does things which are impossible to do as a 'driver'. You cannot, for example, let your front-left wheel brake independantly from the others. A brake is used to 'slow down' as fast as possible, and it's a simple fact that with ABS you slow down a lot faster if it has to engage. I really wonder what you want to achieve by locking your wheels? When applying brakes and one of your wheel locks (they never lock at exactly the same time) - you lose control over your car. Your reaction time in extreme cases will not be enough to recover from that situation. ABS is used heavily in motorsports for a reason, and so is launch control... In fact, most of the safety features in current cars originate from motorsports - where control over the car is extremely important. So what do you claim? That you're a better driver than professional racing-pilots?

Warsow code is released under GPL...