What is Digg?Sponsored by Travelzoo
$52 and Up—Airlines Slash Fares On Peak Holiday Flights. view!
travelzoo.com - This year, waiting until the last minute is NOT the best strategy. See why.
20 Comments
- LeeSoong, on 10/10/2007, -2/+30The hardware manufacturers should support Open Source, Because less profit margin going to software can mean more profit margin going to the hardware manufacturers.
Microsoft has made a fortune off of other people's creativity - Windows is worthless without Intel, it's time Intel gets more of its fair share of the profit pie. - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18Intel is a _HUGE_ company, there are people at the company who believe wholeheartedly in open source, and there are people there who don't care. Intel's OS Policy (in general is): if we stand to profit from it, it's probably a good thing. Case and point: Intel opens software drivers for many of its components because, that's right, they'll sell more of them that way. They don't need a "charitable, not-for-profit" reason to do business; they're a business, any move they make is because they want to make money, first and foremost.
The moves they have been making lately aren't moves they can just "take back" like many other companies have made (botched licensing, purposefully picking incompatible open source licensing to hinder cross-pollination, etc). This product is a very good example of that; it has been released to the public under the GPL(v2 for those who care), making it compatible with all of the big names in Open Source (Linux, GNOME, KDE, and thousands of their sub-products are all GPLv2). They've basically given up ownership of the code to the community, saying "do with it what you will." They've done the same with their drivers for their GMA parts (GPL and MIT) and parts of their wireless hardware (GPL'd driver with a binary blob, likely to remain legal due to Software Defined Radio power output FCC laws), which is pretty damn good.
Then we also forget all of those Linux engineers they employ, all of those people working on products like GCC, the actual Linux kernel itself, Intel's recent push into making and marketing mobile devices running Linux (moblin.org ), and their works with Ubuntu.
So yeah, I'd much rather put my money behind Intel right now than the competition; AMD _STILL_ has refused to give us a credible driver for their video hardware, absolutely downright refuses to give us any documentation at all about their video hardware and stonewalls any requests from users regarding this nasty, simple fact. Intel's no Saint, but they're doing a hell of a lot better than just about anyone else. - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11Consumer hardware especially: it's bizarre that wireless card manufacturers insist on closing their specs and spending programmer-hours developing drivers when, just by releasing the specs would allow some FLOSS hacker to write them for nothing...
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10Dear Digg,
Once again, you disappoint me. Where the hell are the line breaks I entered into that comment?
Even more frustrated, Geminitojanus. - profOblivion, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7What I've noticed is that on any comments I have set to expand by default (one level of replies in my case), line breaks show up just fine; anything I click to open (except buried top-level comments) gets wallified. Digg's gotta fix that.
- Phocion55, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6I can't attest for ALL of Intel, but I've just recently started playing around with some Moblin projects for the new UMPC's.
There's a bunch of Intel guys working on it who clearly care about open source as far as I could tell. - gcnaddict, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7Finally, a chance for developers to improve on their concurrent threading skills!
It's about damned time smaller applications started using more than just one core. - BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Nah, I'd put it on " AT&T Bell Labs UNIX Time-Sharing System "
- jellystones, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3I think IBM's Eclipse was one of the first commercial products to become open-source .
- Topher06, on 10/10/2007, -5/+6Utterly don't understand mutiple thread programming now, do you? "Smaller Application" don't necessarily benefit from multiple-cores or threads, and Intel's software is not what limits people to write proper multi threaded applications. Witless wonders will post comments like "Damn, about time applications use multiple cores" without understanding anything about multiple thread programming. They just assume more cores = better, who cares about details.
Also, more witless wonders will go on about how great this is simply because sompone put "Open source" in the title. Open source = better, who cares about the details. - BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Umm... Intel is the only vendor with open-source 3d accelerated graphics drivers, they've open-sourced their wifi drivers ( most of 'em, anyways ), and they contribute to tons of open-source projects...
If anything, Intel's one of the companies that cares /most/ about open-source - zirconx, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I was thinking the same thing.
- Garfunkel, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1This is fantastic news, Intel really has done a 180 in regards to supporting the open source community, and for that they should be congratulated.
- HonoredMule, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I'm betting he utterly DOES understand, and you're the twit. It IS about time small applications starting using more concurrent threads because they should have been doing so in the first place, BEFORE multi-core CPUs. Besides which, it is totally appropriate and frankly preferred that software follow hardware's lead (as opposed to the current opposite) because hardware is the true source of innovation (this coming from a software developer). Nevertheless, "witless wonders" such as yourself will continue blindly assuming that the multi-threaded advantage is all about simultaneously running different threads for the sake of distributing workload across cores. 90% of the time (those 90% of applications that don't do heavy workloads), the benefits have nothing to do with that, but with fair, prioritized THREAD level scheduling for such things as a responsive UI, more efficient use of CPU cycles, and keeping programs busy even while they wait for I/O in ways that make good, clean coding practices.
Furthermore, lack of OS-abstraction in programming tools is a serious problem and is hurting the adoption of good coding practices and development of OS-agnostic software. - mpirecv, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2A very clever move on Intel's part. Apart from allowing applications to become more CPU efficient - should also help INTEL tout better performance for their CPU's given that such applications will be tuned to their specific architecture! Almost like buying long term automatic adverts for their products !
- schestowitz, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Good point, but I wish the company /as a whole/ got its act together. They do too much to anger that angers and breaks the market.
- jacob3, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0you can use for commercial development if you use "runtime exception" as Intel did - just like gcc does for c++ standard libraries
- ulric, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1doesnt' change anything for commercial or close-source developers, who will still need to buy the commercial version of this. (because you can't use GPL code inside a close-source c++ app)
- ikastin, on 10/10/2007, -7/+1eh chu know ey i deyts gondosn uer aodie.
- schestowitz, on 10/10/2007, -38/+5Nice publicity stunt, but everyone already knows that Intel doesn't give a *uck about open source (unless it means money).
Intel: Only "Open" for Business
,----[ Quote ]
| These vendors often want a quiet private discussion, because in a
| quiet private discussion they can continue to dismiss the requests and in
| the end do absolutely nothing. They do not want a noisy public
| discussion, because then they look bad. But they DESERVE TO LOOK BAD,
| because they are being bad to those who bought their hardware!
|
| [...]
|
| By withholding, Intel is being an Open Source fraud.
|
| [...]
|
| So let's win back the rights to run the hardware we purchased.
|
| Please feel free to let other open source communities know about this
| matter. Thank you.
`----
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060930232710&mode=expanded
Doesn't Intel have another charitable not-for-profit project to sabotage today? And trust me, I say this because I know. Intel deserves this treatment because it has earned it over time. Not to mention monopoly abuse and many misuses that directly hurt rivals, destruction of E-mails (court evidence), fake benchmarks...
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is