Slashdot

Foxconn has no obligation to support

They went out of their way and expended extra effort to prevent Linux from working on their system. This moved beyond "not supporting", to "breaking" hardware that should have functioned without any effort at all on foxconns part, using what was probably considerable effort on their part to detect what kernel was booting, then developing a fake ACPI table to show only when it detected linux.

The interesting part is that a year or so back, there was an article here about how Microsoft floated a letter around manufacturers asking how to make ACPI harder for Linux to implement. Everyone asserted that we were just paranoid and the only reason ACPI was hard for Linux was because "Linux developers suck", but now it seems we know.

Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.

I am referring to the new iPhone - and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build 'native' applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn't even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.

Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?

What is more worrying is what the next move could be. Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn't Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes - both desktop and mobile? There is no reason for them not to - the response to AppStore has been so enthusiastic that it is almost assured that you will start seeing desktop apps distributed in the same way. As soon as users are ground into looking at everything through iTunes, distribution of software in the traditional manner would be near impossible. Apple would become the gatekeeper, and both developers and users will enthusiastically pay the toll in exchange for pretty devices with pretty applications.

Apple has a very strong following in the open source community, and I can no longer understand it nor justify my own support (I am writing this on a Macbook). They built OS X on FreeBSD (a project I have enthusiastically supported, contributed to and been a user of for 10 years or more), they built Safari on KHTML, and are now using libraries such as SproutCore in MobileMe. They have taken open source and everything it built and leveraged it to get to market faster - yet they have now, with iTunes and the new SDK, built a layer on top of it that excludes others. For Apple, open source is great when it furthers their own goals, but not when using it with Apple software where it may further the goals of others.

The solution is simple. If you truly believe in open standards, open source and the good that it has created, then don't accept it. The spirit of open source was about building on the work of others in a transparent fashion, as the gains further the common good of all. Despite not taking over the desktop market, the philosophy and its resultants have destroyed the old enterprise market and many others. Open source and standards keep Microsoft and other big companies on their toes, the movement as a whole and the philosophy is very real. The solution isn't to adopt new licenses to try and prevent this, as it results in the mess that is GPL v 3.

It should be very possible to attach a simple BSD license to code, and if a large company utilizes the effort from others in a way that is unacceptable - the market should be able to sort that out, we simply wont buy it. The community needs to do more than just wear their support for openess and standards on their sleeves (and on their laptops). The problem with Apple is that the blind demand is driven by a distorted reality, so those same developers who poured thousands of hours into the BSD kernel now turn around and purchase an iPhone running that code, but it is now tied up in DRM, licenses and restrictions placed there by others.

Apple users are definitely wacky. I bought a MacBook recently because of the stability, ease of administration, nice kernel, reasonable dev environment, etc.

Now I can't stand it. The Apple GUI is a piece of shit. They have gone to weird symbols in their GUI instead of nice buttons with labels.

Example: I needed to add a user. I bought up the little user management app and didn't see any add user button. After a short Google, I found that to add a user, you click the small plus sign at the bottom. Maybe I should have figured that out without Googling, but it sure didn't seem obvious at the time.

It seems like Apple is generally going for a pretty interface over a useful interface. That may impress some people but it drives me batshit. The only question now is whether to put KDE on top of OS X or put some Linux Distro on it.

I heard so many great reviews of Mac and now I'm looking at having paid too much money for a Linux notebook ... sigh.

Now for a normal home user, this may be different, but I've had no problems at all.

Well... we're happy for you? And impressed with your ability to brag about what you're able to purchase for your work?

In answer to your question, it's difficult because we're not you and are, in fact, normal home users.

I'm pretty sure that shouldn't have needed explaining...

They will obviously pay in Linux CPU licenses. I hear they're worth $699.

And save the environment a little bit?

Maybe.

Here's the thing:

If [insert RIAA member here] notices that I am a program director at a radio station and sends me a promo CD in the mail with my name on it, then it's mine. I can listen to it, sell it, throw it out, give it away, copy it to my iPod, dupe it for the car stereo, and set it on fire. About the only thing I can't legally do is give a copy to a third party (in violation of copyright law).

Merely receiving something in the mail does not obligate me to do anything that the sender asks. If the sender wants it returned, that's fine; they can want it all week and it'll still never happen.

I mean, imagine it if you will, AC: Suppose I sent you a CD with a label on it which said "Please return to avoid a $250,000 fine, 5 years in jail, or both." Worse, suppose such a CD gets lost in the mail.

Either way, you don't have to do a thing. Were things any other way, we'd see huge numbers of positively ugly scams circulating the USPS, where by inaction alone, simple homeowners would be victimized by their own fucking mail.

(I'm sure that one of Slashdot's resident lawyers can come up with some fancy polysyllabic Latin verbiage to exactly describe this non-problem, but for now you'll all have to grasp this concept without it having any specific title.)

Did you read the history of Slashdot when it hit 10 year anniversary mark? I think someone should go read and stop asking silly questions.

without uninstalling...

So, did Vernor? Or are you just throwing some bullshit out there like "We should just kill everyone because they might commit a crime"?

At Fordham Law School's annual IP Law Conference this year, Slashdot member NewYorkCountryLawyer had a chance to square off with Kenneth Doroshow, a Senior Vice President of the RIAA, over the subject of copyright statutory damages. Doroshow thought the Jammie Thomas verdict of $222,000 was okay, since, he said, Ms. Thomas might have distributed 10 million unauthorized copies. NYCL, on the other hand, who has previously derided the $9250-per-song file verdict as "one of the most irrational things [he has] ever seen in [his] life in the law", stated at the Fordham conference that the verdict had made the United States "a laughingstock throughout the world". An Australian professor on the panel said "The comment has been made a few times that America is out of whack and you are a laughingstock in the rest of the world. As the only non-American on the panel, that's true. We do see the cases like Thomas in our newspapers, and we think: "Wow, those crazy Americans, what are they up to now?" This whole notion of statutory damages is not something that we have within our Copyright Act. You actually have to be able to prove damage for you to be able to be compensated for that." NYCL also got to debate the "making available" issue, saying that there was no "making available" right in US copyright law, despite the insistence of the program's moderator, the "keynote" speaker, and a "majority vote" of the audience that there was such a right. The next day 2 decisions came down, and a month later yet another decision came down, all rejecting the 'making available' theory.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/05/transcripts-available-from-fordham-ip.html

TheLinuxSRC writes "The problem: Many DVDs do not have subtitles for certain languages or (more importantly to me) for the hearing impaired. Closed captioning, while a good solution for its time, does not compare to subtitles. Having a deaf sister and being a Linux user, I began looking for subtitle utilities that can be used in Linux to add subtitles to media. I recently found an excellent article which gives a nice rundown of open-source tools for working with subtitles."

http://www.linux.com/feature/125978

Karzz1 writes "Ok, so here I am relaxing after a wonderful Thanksgiving and I check my personal email which is subscribed to Newegg's newsletter and I see a wonderful little toy (Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Asus or Newegg). It is a tiny laptop with a really low pricetag. It is made by a brand I am familiar with (Asus) and it is under $400! Even better, it has a solid state hard drive!! Judging by the description this thing almost crosses the line between PDA and laptop featuring a small (wide) screen size of 800x480, dimensions of 8.86" x 6.30" x 0.79-1.26" and weighing in at 2.0 lbs. Now for the best part of all... It runs Linux!"

After recently claiming that only 400 to 600 Linux users visit the BBC website, the BBC's Ashley Highfield has now admitted that they got their numbers wrong. The new estimate is between 36,600 and 97,600 according to his blog post. He stops short of describing how Auntie arrives at these two widely different sets of numbers and how their initial estimate is two orders of magnitude out.

An anonymous reader writes "Sourcefire is buying ClamAV. For fans of the ClamAV applicatinos, is this good, bad, or neutral?"
http://investor.sourcefire.com/phoenix.zhtaml?c=204582&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1041607