In its second such agreement this week, Microsoft has struck a deal under which it will extend amnesty to a company that's using what the software maker claims is patented Microsoft intellectual property embedded in the open source Linux computer operating system. Under a deal with LG Electronics, disclosed late Wednesday, Microsoft will forgo any Linux-related patent claims against the South Korean electronics manufacturer. In return, Microsoft will gain access to certain intellectual property produced by LG.
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Member since:2006-04-10
MS is not "racing to get ahead of GPL3".
MS _adores_ GPL3, it _wants_ GPL3 as soon as possible and it wants GPL3 to be as exclusionary as possible.
Then it can turn to businesses and say, "C'mon, you don't want to use software that is licences under GPL3 do you? Why that gives those smelly longhairs the right to all your code, invalidates all you patents and Stallman will come in at night and rape the company cat".
MS couldn't give a twopenny shit about what happens to Novell, Xandros etc. after GPL3 - they're just so much toilet paper.
And GPL3 will fragment the Linux codebase into two incompatible halves, to the disadvantage of developers and folks trying to keep their licences in line. That'll suit MS down to the ground.
Oh no sirree, LS is crazy for GPL3, and all these shenanigans are designed to provoke the FSF to release GPL3 as soon as possible and make it as tight as possible.
Member since:2005-07-18
And GPL3 will fragment the Linux codebase into two incompatible halves,...
Unfortunately, that is a possibility. And maybe you are right that MS is expecting it to happen. So maybe their current actions are simply intended to goad infighting amongst the principals of free software, whom they no-doubt view in they way you have depicted Richard Stallman.
But I am hopeful that whatever Microsoft thinks, expects and wants will be held at arm's length and not be allowed to affect the course of free software.
Member since:2005-07-24
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And GPL3 will fragment the Linux codebase into two incompatible halves, to the disadvantage of developers and folks trying to keep their licences in line.
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That was a real danger, and my main objection to GPLv3 last year. However, as of draft 3, the FSF really seemed to start listening to the criticisms and took action to address them instead of just blithely claiming that the critics didn't understand the license.
I believe that we have averted most of the damage that might have been done.
It will still cause some needless license fragmentation. But I think that the danger has been reduced from the "catastrophic" variety to the "damned nuisance" variety.
As things stand, the advantages may actually outweigh the disadvantages, in the long term.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-18
but the big winner may be Microsoft because...
I'm sure that what Microsoft wants. But there's another issue alluded to in the article. Microsoft may be racing to get ahead of GPL3. So maybe it's Microsoft that has the "Sword of Damocles" (PLan's analogy) hanging over its head.