Its not a clause of the software license's legalese, they just made the 'KDE Free Qt Foundation' a co-author, in effect, giving that organization the right to relicense Qt if TT ever disappeared, or got taken over by someone hostile to FOSS.

There was, I believe, a separate document, a kind of legal 'memorandum of understanding' or whatever the lawyers call them, separately between those 2 entities that spelled out under what conditions the later could do the relicensing, but it was separate from Qt's software licenses.

And this entire, long story is really moot now, since Nokia has subsequently dual-licensed Qt under the LGPL as well.

You make it sound as if they were forced into something, but they would have not bought Trolltech if they didn't like the Qt license arrangement. This wasn't a shotgun marriage, neither one was brought kicking and screaming to the altar. :)

They did not have to invest all their own time and money that they are doing in leading the now more open & collaborative development of Qt. I'm not an insider, but they seem to be putting *more* resources into its development than TT could have.

A very open & Free Qt is part of their *plan* for their future smartphones, a foundation stone of their (also very open) Maemo OS. Being open & collaborative with Qt will (they hope) help convince devs to support their platform. They're thinking more 'open' right now than Google is with Android, never mind Apple.

They *wanted* to do this.

Sun's problems had nothing to do with the FOSS that they supported. This is the other big problem with TFA summary: Sun was never 'focused almost entirely on open source'. They were a hardware company.

They should have left Sun/MySQL out of the summary. Invalid examples.

Understood, the only reason this gets brought up all the time is because that many of the anti-nuclear folks who get obsessed about a nuclear plant's emissions don't fully realize what their current non-nuclear power plants are emitting.

Which ought to tell us that most nuclear radiation fears are vastly overrated, if not irrational (its a common natural phenomena), but hey, its got that word 'nuclear' in it, so most rationality usually gets tossed within the first 5 minutes of a discussion.

Not exactly. Its only part of the argument against coal. The CO2 and CH4 parts constitute the main part of the anti-coal argument. When you add them all up...

Of course, nuclear has its own issues too. There are no silver bullets for this problem.

That is just bizarre.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

I count 5 references there to US companies and universities involved Pebble Bed reactor design.

Not sure what you mean by 'accelerated' thorium but on the list of thorium reactors from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle, the US has been involved in that as well. The only country still actively running thorium reactors is India, and thats because, understandably, they have a *lot* of thorium and very little uranium available in their own country.

As for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation

You do realize that Hyperion is a US-based company don't you?

Name one commercial Westinghouse nuclear reactor that was built without a containment building. Just one.

Please, comparing any commercial nuclear reactor built in the West to the Soviet RBMK-1000 is a crime against logic.

Their current design, AP1000, is Gen3+, Chernobyl is considered 'early' Gen2, and that is probably an insult to all the other reactor types that fall under the Gen2 classification - its design was that bad and its implementation was, unbelievably, even worse. Hell, it was nothing more than a spiffed-up copy of an older Soviet military reactor that was designed solely for plutonium production.

Ahh, so this is an anti-US rant? Well, you're in luck, Westinghouse is A-OK-Joe, since they're now owned by Toshiba, as well as having several (separate, originally independent) European subsidiaries involved in nuclear power. Nuclear power is big, but also expensive, business, thus the players went international a long time ago.

Oh wait, do you have something against the Japanese and Europeans too?

only because it has the most headroom to grow into, considering that its *still* dead-last behind everyone else.

That later part (still dead-last) is the interesting thing, given that Silverlight's master is also the master of Windows: why hasn't Silverlight jumped to a usage percentage similar to Window's own market share?

Given the Windows monopoly, I'm astonished that Silverlight hasn't even reached 50% penetration yet. Heck, until I saw your link, I thought it *was* more wide-spread.

Wow, MS caves on SVG, and now I discover Silverlight isn't even over 50% of the market after 3 years of being pimped hard by MS. Dunno if I can handle this much good news from a Microsoft-related thread simultaneously, its certainly not what I'm used too...

[cut-n-paste of a response I made above here]

Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.

There is one crucial difference though: DRMed Flash works on my OS, Silverlight does not. All other technical details are irrelevant.

Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.

Boycotts against monopolies almost never work by definition (IE), but for your response to the GP to be relevant we would have to consider Netflix as a monopoly... I don't think so.

Until now, I didn't even know how Netflix delivered its movies, and now that I do know, I'll not ever waste my time going there.

NetFlix.com != IE (when it was a monopoly)

With a publicly traded company, the only thing that matters is what the stockholders think.

If its the shareholders demanding 'progress' on an annual, or even quarterly, basis, then who the CEO happens to be, won't make a damn bit of difference. A company's officers answer to the stockholders, and *only* the stockholders. This is the root problem: shareholders only interested in the short-term.

P&G is merely an exception to the rule; they aren't the only one, but its difficult to buck the normal stockholder's expectation of regular, near-term profits.

Ah, but what do you do when the sarcasm is *both* funny and insightful? Such a dilemma! :)

Well, since funny doesn't add to your karma, but insightful does, when I'm faced with this kind of dilemma, I go with insightful too, as the mods did in your case.

At some point Firefox was in the exact same position, yet it eventually managed to take marketshare away from IE, and without the advantage of Google's ad budget.

At this point it probably doesn't even matter. We don't even know yet how much of this rapid adoption is permanent or not. Its a lot harder to guess who are the 'winners' and 'losers', especially long-term, with so many players now in the game.

Choice is good, and nothing beats a little friendly competition at getting a complacent player off their duff and back in the game (yes, I'm looking at you Firefox: at some point you lost your 'lean-n-mean' under an avalanche of XUL chrome and plugin hell - you need to work on getting that back).

And your comment would be even more believable if you had any UID at all. At least the GP has one.

'hearing about' != 'registering as a user'

I lurked here (read-only) for at least a year or so before bothering to sign up. Maybe the GP, when he was at Google, was just too busy doing Real Work(TM) to bother?

Besides, its not like Slashdot is the center of the IT universe. What reason would anyone have to expect that every current and former Google employee is a /. member?

/. may be the center of *our* universe, but its not everyone else's Prime Attractor. :)

It was a binary driver, they were not forced to release the source code to it, only the source to the rest of the FOSS software they were using.

Which you can do with Linux.

Not being applicable to internal usage was a deliberate intent of the GPL, it is only concerned with distribution to the larger public.

??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...

Thats obvious. My only point is that for some companies the risk/reward of a GPLed OS makes better sense for them.

Not completely different in the technical sense, only in its licensing.

Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually. Just as those for whom the BSD works better already have been, or will be in the future, switching to the BSD over time.

Fair enough. That part of my post was a 'hypothetical of a hypothetical' for which I have no evidence.

You keep going back to non-OS examples, when my point was all about licensing issues related to operating systems...

And you keep ignoring my point that neither the GPL nor the BSD work for everyone, so obviously there will be plenty of examples for each side...

Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.

Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone? All I said was the corollary of your above point is also true. Thats why the GPL and BSD will always both be around.. because neither one works best for everyone.

If there are enough of those people to form a large enough dev community for the BSDed OSes, then the BSDs will eventually catch up to Linux, and those people will switch.

My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...

Not at all, you keep making the mistake of assuming I'm one of those 'GNU zealots' who hates the BSD and wants to see it die.

My only point from the beginning was that the 'BSD zealots' who believe that Linux and the GPL will die once they've caught up to it, are simply deluding themselves. There is a reason both exist and are being actively used.

And yet C has been eclipsed by many other languages since then, in terms of 'popularity'. On the other hand, its still around and being used because its still useful to some people. Really, I don't understand your point here.

No, that's what you think I'm arguing. You're not reading what I'm actually saying.

I think I'm done here.