Subject: Re: consumer-level DVD authoring apps? Cc: macosx-talk@omnigroup.com To: Roger Howard From: xah Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 14:07:15 -0800 On Thursday, December 26, 2002, at 03:51 AM, xah wrote: >> Sorry i don't have answer to your question, i hope someone does >> answer. On Thursday, December 26, 2002, at 09:43 AM, Roger Howard wrote: > But you'll take the opportunity to sidetrack the thread instead of > starting your own (so we can ignore it and respond to legitimate > questions). No Roger. i post my unpopular opinions and expressions as complete new thread sometimes. xah wrote: >> On the related issue, the reason you cannot burn DVD with iDVD is >> because Apple want it so. >> >> see >> Apple: Burn DVDs--and we'll burn you >> By Declan McCullagh >> Staff Writer, CNET News.com >> August 28, 2002, 3:04 PM PT >> >> http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955805.html >> >> ---begin excerpt >> WASHINGTON--Apple Computer has invoked the Digital Millennium >> Copyright Act to prevent its customers from burning DVDs on external >> drives. >> ---end excerpt roger wrote: > Lovely way to summarize to put Apple in the worst possible light. it was not my selective doing. Rather, the first paragraph of a news article is a concise summary, and that's standard practice of news industry. roger wrote: > The reality is, this move - of invoking the DMCA - was not made > against customers, it was made against a vendor. We really know > nothing more than that, and speculation is pointless... iDVD is a > free, bundled app (though also offered seperately as an upgrade for > those who got older models with iDVD 1) designed to work with > "Superdrives", which is Apple's branded DVD-R burners. It does what > you paid for. Look at it this way: Apple "crippled" their iDVD so that it won't play on external DVD burners. I think they have every right to do it, but to say this would be changing the subject. Let me rephrase: Apple, as a for-profit money making giant corporation, consciously made the decision to not let their software working on hardwares not made by them, and when somebody did make it work, Apple invoked the much hated DMCA to stop it. >> This is why recently Apple made Free Software Foundation and GNU >> people angry, as recently brought up in this list in the thread about >> GNU Darwin. > > Nonsense, this has nothing to do with the GPL and the whiners at GNU > Darwin. I don't recall this was about making the FSF and GNU > themselves angry, if Stallman or anyone ranking had any comments I'd > love to see a reference; this was a branch project GNU Darwin I > believe, which had its own agenda. Even calling them a branch is > probably an overstatement, it was a project portending to uphold the > ideals of GNU while trying to strongarm Apple, but not a > mainstream/official GNU effort - funny that they love to talk about > freedom, as often its very much about the opposite. Good point in particular. You are probably right that GNU Darwin is not an official GNU project. But I'm sure you are aware that Richard Stallman and in general his followers have expressed disapproval towards Apple's Darwin license and OpenSource trumpeting. (the "free/opensource" license quarreling in recent years went proliferating and berserk by the silly unixers, but for those interested in FSF's painstaking view, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ) (PS i just found out why GNU-Darwin is started in the first place. http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-25.en.html in short: a GNU platform that can run both unix & mac programs. (silly unixers. I'd suggest they drop it completely, and stick to GNU/Linux/Gnome.)) xah wrote: >> A bit history for rather ignorant modern-day unixers: Back in around >> 1989, Apple sued Microsoft for using Graphical User Interface in >> their Windows product. (hard to believe, i know.) Back then, Free >> Software Foundation people officially made a boycott against Apple >> because of it, among the action is not to port any GNU software to >> the Mac. (The FSF is rather fond of using boycott to chide >> corporations. They also boycotted amazon.com's one-click shopping, as >> well as Unisys's GIF image format (which has a patented encryption >> algorithm that Unisys later on charged money for.), Free Software >> documentations published by O'Reilly as copyrighted material by many >> Free Software authors (such as Larry Wall & cohorts), and most famous >> for their hatred against Microsoft in just about everything.) roger wrote: > The rest is just grandstanding; your histories are as usual full of > holes and heavy interpretation. You're like a sports fan who's not > particularly rooting for either team, doesn't really know the rules of > the game, but loves to see a bloody nose or a foot to the groin now > and then without any context so he can tell his mates about it > (without remembering the little details, like who was who, what really > happened, etc). I disagree with you Roger. But since you recently started a brawling style of message writing, i'll entertain you. (^_^) xah wrote: >> footnote: >> * Imagine if Apple won the GUI suite. Then Apple today just might be >> the hate target instead of Microsoft. roger wrote: > Imagine all the people... You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will live as one. Before we get carried away, let us remind everyone that: Apple in ~1989 sued another company for implementing the Graphical User Interface, and they lost the suit in court. xah wrote: >> * FSF's boycott of Apple has been rescinded by them around 1995, >> pretty much because "let bygones be bygones". roger wrote: > Boycott? And what does this tell you then? If they were bygones, would > this not imply that Apple has at least satisfied FSF on whatever > massive sorepoints they were complaining about? Yes Boycott. check out this well-respected "Free Online Dictionary of Computing" loved by many unixers: http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=boycott+apple it tells me that "whatever massive sorepoints they were complaining about" is sometimes worthwhile. ---begin quote Some time before 1989, Apple Computer, Inc. started a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, claiming they had breeched Apple's copyright on the look and feel of the Macintosh user interface. In December 1989, Xerox failed to sue Apple Computer, claiming that the software for Apple's Lisa computer and Macintosh Finder, both copyrighted in 1987, were derived from two Xerox programs: Smalltalk, developed in the mid-1970s and Star, copyrighted in 1981. Apple wanted to stop people from writing any program that worked even vaguely like a Macintosh. If such look and feel lawsuits succeed they could put an end to free software that could substitute for commercial software. In the weeks after the suit was filed, Usenet reverberated with condemnation for Apple. GNU supporters Richard Stallman, John Gilmore, and Paul Rubin decided to take action against Apple. Apple's reputation as a force for progress came from having made better computers; but The League for Programming Freedom believed that Apple wanted to make all non-Apple computers worse. They therefore campaigned to discourage people from using Apple products or working for Apple or any other company threatening similar obstructionist tactics (e.g. Lotus and Xerox). Because of this boycott the Free Software Foundation for a long time didn't support Macintosh Unix in their software. In 1995, the LPF and the FSF decided to end the boycott. ---end quote xah: >> * Today, Apple's c compiler and Fink project and lots of Mac OS X >> software such as bash and emacs are mostly products of Free Software >> Foundation. (indirect fruit include being POSIX standard (POSIX -- >> the unix standard itself is the brainchild of FSF founder Richard >> Stallman).)\ roger: > Yes, this is great, exactly what free software is about. Yes we agree. One can donate $1 to FSF. https://agia.fsf.org/mp/order.py?make-donation=1 xah: >> * GNU stands for "Gnu's Not Unix", and it is a name of FSF's project, >> which is to write a completely "free" (freedom) and usable system of >> software including operating system & applications. The current >> official GNU OS is GNU/Linux. That is, Linux operating system core >> with GNU tools and applications suit. roger: > And? What again is the relevance of this? That unix is an embodiment of incompetence, as i have exposited many times here. Mac OS X can be considered as a unix. (note: Mac OS X is _not_ unix in the sense it does _not_ carry _unixism_, at least not yet. In the same way we can say NeXT is not unix, Irix is not unix, but Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, and AIX are all unixes,, and Linux is unix, Gnu's Not Unix is unix too.) most unixers will have a hard time to articulate clearly what is unix. Sometimes you see email sign-offs that says "Linux is unix", while other times "Linux is NOT unix". They know little other than smugly aware that Unix is a trademark. The world unix should mean unixism, that is, the way things are done in unix platform, their culture, their hacking attitude, their social attitude, their preferences, their people, their tools, their languages, their ps grep config make shebang tartall gunzip README manifesto et cetera. Without special context, the world "unix" should not mean the Trademark, or an operating system core, or a particular version of Unix, because these interpretations are suitable in rather more specialized contexts. xah: >> * The _GNU's Not Unix_ name came from a hatred of Unix. (Unix then, >> being much free and hack, wiped out lots of good engineering, among >> them is AppleTalk.) roger: > No, it was not hatred of Unix; it was a reaction to licensing policies > taken by major Unix vendors at the time, and the desire to have an > open/free/libre alternative for lower-cost computing as microcomputers > took off in the market and hackers could suddenly afford their own > systems. If it was hatred of Unix - as a system or an abstract model - > as you seem to have, they would not have modeled their project on > > Unix. Here, Roger, is where your lack of programing involvement shines thru. Richard Stallman, and in general the Lisp community and functional programing community, has an immense hatred towards unix the platform (unixism). One can see this if one read sufficient GNU technical docs, or get to know the lisp community. (Of course, it is undeniable that the FSF do hate the commercial/non-free AT&T aspect of it too.) xah: >> * The "Free" in "Free Software Foundations" stands for freedom, not >> gratuitous. roger: > Yes, like the freedom of Apple to incorporate GNU tools into their > product, as long as they meet the licensing restrictions Yes. Apple fans can donate $1 to FSF. https://agia.fsf.org/mp/order.py?make-donation=1 roger: > (remember, GPL is not really free as in libre as it places > restrictions on integration with and distribution/licensing of > derivative products; the BSD license family is far more libre as it > places no such restrictions on use of code). The gist of people who dislike FSF's license in favor of the more free almost-public-domain BSD license can be summarily brought to light thus: Active freedom fighters vs carefree freedom loving people. Personally, i'm not against the carefree freedom loving people, but when they start to condemn the freedom fighters, i kick their ass. xah: >> * Another famous acronym associated with FSF and GNU is GPL, which >> stands for General Public License, which is a software license used >> by FSF. The gist of the license being that anybody using software of >> such license is bound to publish the source code and make no >> restraints on its use. roger: > No, you clearly don't understand the GPL. It does not require "anybody > using software of such license... to publish the source code"; that'd > mean all of us would have to host SourceForges on our iDisks just to > comply. It requires anyone distributing binaries of GPL'ed software to > also make available source code to anyone who is a valid recipient of > such binaries. This means I could choose, as author of an app with GPL > components, to only distribute binaries to private customers; then, > I'd only be required to provide source to them, though of course > they'd be free to redistribute the source with some restrictions. In any sort of summary, information is lost. The question is whether the summary mis-represented the gist. ---- The following files on your Mac OS X should make an interesting read. To see it, fire up your Terminal and do: open /usr/share/emacs/21.1/etc then you can drag files to TextEdit to read them. some of the interesting articles are: MOTIVATION CENSORSHIP INTERVIEW (to unixers: you didn't know that GNU propaganda comes pre-installed with OS X, eh? get rid of it quick! (there used to be one about Boycotting Apple there. Gone around about 1997 i think, but probably easily dug up on the web.)) Xah xah@xahlee.org http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk