And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple’s allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week’s my take is a prelude to the one for next week.
Week in Review
Personally, my most significant news items this week had to do with two major projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives. The Debian project is aiming to replace GLIBC with EGLIBC, due to the rather unfriendly and uncooperative attitude of GLBIC’s maintainer. At the same time, FreeBSD is working closely with the LLVM boys and girls, which may one day mean a switch away from GCC, preferring Clang instead. This is pretty significant, as the GNU compiler tools are more or less the assumed default.
We also had two stories about storms in teacups. Early in the week we handled the way overblown “Internet Explorer 8 as default” controversy, which turned out to be a case of self-proclaimed expert users unable to read dialogs properly. Later in the week we had a similar case about XPM and Intel processor support. Supposedly, to many it was news that XPM required virtualisation extensions – even though this was made clear from the get-go.
Another item that has really started to irk me over the week was the letter Psystar’s lawyer sent in reply to Apple’s accusations. The letter made some very valid points, but to my own very, very sad surprise, absolutely none of the major Apple news sites covered it, despite the fact that they did cover Apple’s letter. This all is just further evidence of the decay in quality on Apple reporting. Heck, even Ars’ Infinite Loop, which I hold in high regard when it comes to Apple reporting, failed to mention the letter.
If you cover Apple’s letter, then you should cover Psystar’s defense as well. That’s just plain fair. On OSNews, whenever any of the editors writes an editorial with harsh opinions, we have no qualms about reporting rebuttals. When I wrote a rather unfriendly article about KDE4, Aaron Seigo’s reply to that was properly published on OSNews as well, to give our readers both sides of the story – even though I didn’t agree with Seigo back then (Seigo commended me on that, by the way). It’s sad Apple websites are apparently unable to show such fairness.
We also saw some nice releases this week. FreeBSD 7.2 was put out in the wild, and the Windows 7 RC soon followed. OpenOffice.org 3.1 was also released, as well as KDE 4.2.3.
Mark Shuttleworth made a few comments on Wine, and picking up from that we asked our readers what their experiences with Wine were. We also learned that Chrome users are most up-to-date with their browser thanks to Chrome’s silent update functionality.
To finish this Week in Review off, Jordan reviewed the Asus EeePC 1000 HE.
My Take: Two and a Half Men
I’ll dive into this excellent comedy series more in-depth next week, but let’s kick off with this brilliant scene, favourite of my friends and I.
I’ll detail next week why I love this series so much.
who reads Psystar as “FISTER”?
Is this companies name supposed to be joke in light of how they’re treating Apple?
Is this really a play on words about http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fisting
Edited 2009-05-11 00:26 UTC
Yes, I think you might be.
The letter made some very valid points, but to my own very, very sad surprise, absolutely none of the major Apple news sites covered it, despite the fact that they did cover Apple’s letter.
You can’t be serious. Do you really think “The dog ate my financials” is a valid defense in court?? Apparently, the Judge wasn’t impressed, and from Groklaw comes the following:
“Psystar’s excuses for not providing discovery didn’t fly at the May 5th hearing, I gather, and the judge has granted Apple’s motion to compel…” …”The judge took care of the final issue, and the outcome is that Psystar is to produce the discovery items by 5/18, by high noon. Does that mean the dog didn’t eat *all* the financial documents after all?”
And if only the courts had been so diligent with SCO…
it’s amazing how much special treatment certain favoured US companies get by the US legal system…
How a software company can limit what hardware you run the software is on is beyond me, any common sense would tell you that it’s unfair to the consumer, and is bordering on legal stupidity. But then, law has never been based on common sense logic.
Dave
I hate to burst your bubble but Psystar had all legally required paperwork – it did not have the extra paperwork a corporation would have generated due to their public obligations.
Psystar simply may not have quarterly anythings – they CAN file yearly. Other documents requested were merely projections made for would-be investors. A company so young will lose documents – simple as that. I’ve been in the game for more than a decade and I still occasionally discover that I am missing some odd hard/soft copy of something I need. Sometimes the actual data is gone for good ( which ain’t good ).
The U.S. Fscking Government has made things more complicated than need be – and most states make it even worse. The good side effect of that is the job creation virtually every successful upstart will create – but fewer will succeed. And fewer still will have their documentation in order for the first year or so.
In any event, whereas the documentation requested is not legally required it does hold importance for Apple – so it can prove and document damages. The requested documentation would also likely make things easier for Psystar – if they had it. Lacking the documentation Apple will have a more difficult time calculating “losses.” As such, the judge would agree with Apple’s request to compel – he certainly can’t say much of anything else without essentially rendering a verdict without trial.
–The loon
The problem seems to be unique to Apple sites. What seems to happen is that once you start to court Apple people, you go down an awful path which extinguishes real critical journalism. To my mind, Ars has gone down there, but is now tiptoeing back.
The Apple readers are avid consumers of any news or gossip however trivial that puts Apple in a good light, and fierce trashers of anything at all critical. They also are avid enthusiasts of any stories which relate to the experience of being an Apple buyer or user. So this leads to stories like those appearing on Ars where they show you a series of photos of someone opening a cardboard carton and taking out a bit of computer or phone, and head that section ‘The Out of Box Experience’. Jacqui Cheng is the worst example. That idiotic recent ‘story’ about some nutter who had painted his keyboard white to match his iMac or some such piece of vapid gossipy personal interest story.
The result is that gradually people stop writing or publishing critical journalism in that forum. Every competitor of Apple is then regarded as Bad. Everything Apple does is Good. Even if, and maybe especially if, it is the opposite of what Apple did last week.
Psystar has become a sort of villain for the Apple people for no other reason than that they take a different view of the law. But in the eyes of the Apple enthusiasts, they disagree, so they are Bad. Actually, something interesting is at stake in the Psystar case, and its to do with our freedom. But you’d never guess that from Infinite Loop.
We finally end up with what started out as a journal publishing articles with no particular point of view on the industry, turning into a mixture of this and an Apple fanzine. The next step is to segregate the craziness, and so we end up with Infinite Loop. In the process we gained yet another fanzine, and lost another outlet for normal critical journalism about Apple.
Thom is right – it doesn’t exist. The fans, inspired by Cupertino Marketing, will do everything they can to eliminate it. OSNews is about the only place on the net that has not succumbed to this. Keep it up.
I think the debian move to eglibc cannot be seen as a move away from the gnu software. Firstly, eglibc has the same licence as glibc, the LGPL or lesser GNU public licence. Secondly, eglibc follows the same copyright assignment rules as glibc, i.e. the FSF owns the copyright to eglibc as well.
See http://www.eglibc.org/faq:
So by no means a move away from GNU software.
J
cycoj wrote:
–“I think the debian move to eglibc cannot be seen as a move away from the gnu software. Firstly, eglibc has the same licence as glibc, the LGPL or lesser GNU public licence. Secondly, eglibc follows the same copyright assignment rules as glibc, i.e. the FSF owns the copyright to eglibc as well.”
Yeah, I guess Thom was desperately looking for a trend of ‘projects leaving gnu’ or something. Also Freebsd wanting to drop gcc for llvm isn’t exactly a shocker since afaik they haven’t upgraded gcc from 4.2.1 (due to not liking gplv3 iirc).
Either way it’s great that a large and complex project like an operating system is focusing on using llvm since that will expose alot of the functionality that llvm/clang needs in order to mature into a stable and complete solution and hopefully it will also help speed development up a bit.
Yeah this isn’t one of my finest phrasing moment there :/. It was late, had a loooong weekend, you know how it is
. Fixing right now.
eglibc is completely GNU software, with all copyrights assigned to the Free Software Foundation. It’s an effort to bypass a recalcitrant release manager. If Drepper doesn’t learn to work and play well with others soon, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Free Software Foundation eventually de-recognizing his branch and calling the eglibc branch the official GNU libc. That’s exactly what happened with the egcs split, and the eglibc people are following the exact same model.
Errrrrr . . . don’t you mean “prelude”, Thom?
This is ridiculous. Apple sites did report on this.
But this company is obviously attempting to stall and hide important information. To say that they supplied all legal information is just making things up. What was asked for is perfectly legitimate, and the court properly required them to come up with it.
In SCO’s case, it was far more complex, as they initiated cases against several companies, and had cases initiated against themselves as well. The court in SCO’s case bent over backwards to give SCO time to come up with documents it lied about, as we saw in the end. It also allowed them to conduct a fishing expedition against IBM for quite some time.
But all ended up as was expected. SCO had nothing, and Psystar is showing the same lack of reality that SCO showed.
How is an EULA forbidding you from using the software/operating system on a different hardware set not a monopoly? Can you please answer that? By enabling such an EULA, you are limiting competition.
I don’t expect Apple Lovers to realise this, because they’re usually such a self loving, egotistical “look at me” bunch of wanker$, who thinks the sun shines out of you know who’s a$$. They’re also usually too stupid to own a PC, hence having to own a dumbed down computer, i.e Apple.
Dave
I’ll dive into this excellent comedy series more in-depth next week
Oh boy…