Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Now needs a better phone app (Score 1, Interesting) 77

Great anecdote. Right here, right now, today, OSM believes my location is a country that's at the opposite side of the world from the one I actually am in.

None of the commercial services ever get this wrong for me these days. They all pinpoint me within a block.

That means OSM has fallen at the first hurdle. If it doesn't get the continent, let alone the country right, it won't recognise my locations when I type them in to the router.

Maybe I'll check back again in a few more years.

Comment Re:RMS' GNU license is a license that gives away (Score 1) 551

I'm going to pick my line of work.

I'm glad you did. Because you've just illustrated why you have no appreciation of the uselessness of GPLed software to most people. You are neither a software developer, nor do you make much use of mainstream application categories. You are in a tiny niche that lies on the brink of commercial software having to be extremely expensive or not being economically feasible because there are so few users.

As it happens my brother is also in that tiny niche, and has been for 3 decades. And I know from conversations I've had with him that it's a mixed bag. Sometimes the best (or only) software for the task is open source, sometimes it's commercial but free of charge from chip companies, and sometimes it's very expensive commercial stuff.

But as I say it's pretty irrelevant to mainstream software developers, let alone to the majority of application categories.

Comment Re:Bit of a hatchet job (Score 1) 551

Obviously they are not Android is an Operating system and LLVM is a set of compiler tools. The point of analogies is to compare similar things that are different. Analogies comparing the same thing really don't work. For example, if doesn't make sense to draw an analogy between the digestive system of a Guernsey cow and the digestive system of a Guernsey cow does it?

Well that was pointless verbiage, when the point was they are not the same in the direction you are trying to make an argument.

A student whose name is Chris Lattner. Who has been the project maintainer his whole life. Who went to work for Apple to bring the code up to snuff and created a team there to maintain it.

Companies employing people to continue their open source projects is supposed to be a good thing to the "open source community" remember? That doesn't change just because you dislike the company. And it certainly doesn't mean Apple own the project, and more than Red Hat owns Linux. Either now when they employ lots of people working on Linux, or back when they employed Linus Torvalds.

and whose core was open sourced. It's called AOSP. and like LLVM anyone can contribute to it.

Wrong. Google drops their version of AOSP when they release a new version of Android. You can only change it after that. (and add all the bits that are needed to make it actually work.) It's a one way flow. You can't put your changes back into Android. That's why CyanogenMod exists.

Comment Re:RMS' GNU license is a license that gives away (Score 1) 551

Ah, so GCC is low quality because reasons.

Well if you want to deny reasons, you're clearly not open to debate.

LLVM may very well be cleaner, but that doesn't make GCC low quality.

I'm afraid that's exactly what it means. Quality is not equal to number of features. If it were, Microsoft would win with most of their apps.

I think, I have found the root cause of your understanding of the issue: you're an idiot.

And with that you've just shown you know you lost the argument.

Comment Re:RMS' GNU license is a license that gives away (Score 1) 551

Except now you're going to claim that GPL'd apps are "worse" on averege than proprietary ones without a jot of evidence.

You'd have to be very lacking in experience of software to not realise it. Pick pretty much any category of app and the best app is a commercial one for OSX or Windows.

Comment Re:RMS' GNU license is a license that gives away (Score 1) 551

GCC is low quality because it's a virtually unmaintainable mess of #ifdefs. It's being maintained by old hands because no-one new has a chance.

LLVM has a decent modular architecture. It's in a different league to crappy old GCC.

Sure GCC has accumulated more languages and targets over the years. But that's features, not quality. It's just a matter of time before LLVM has the non-obsoltete ones all covered.

Comment Re:Bit of a hatchet job (Score 1) 551

But that is clearly contra-productive for the whole community,

What community? Virtually no one wants to be part of RMS's community. They just want to use software. That's what the GPL is dying.

and also for the poor users of your software.

What did the users do to deserve access to my source code by right?

it benefits only to you.

Bullshit. 99.999% of people only ever want executables. They wouldn't know what to do with source if you gift-wrapped it for them. The only people who MIGHT want my source are other developers. And I choose if they get it not RMS.

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Working...