'Commercial Partners'

[Eric S. Raymond]

Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com>:
> I don't see any evidence for this for 2D.  The problems all seem to be 
> to do with 3D acceleration hardware in the past, present, and presumably 
> in the future. 

If true, that would still a problem.  The one guy I know who's a serious
graphics maven says that the wave of the future is 3D texture maps for
everything, including individual font glyphs.

>          And that in turn, like everything this thread touches, 
> seems to come down in the end to patents.

My graphics guy says that's true, but not in the way you might
expect.  He thinks the reason the graphics vendors are all doing locked 
firmware is because they're all violating *each others'* patents
and don't want to get found out...

> Macromedia’s Flash - 98%
> Viewpoint Media Player - 64.3%.  (<-- possible dodginess)
> Shockwave - 58.1%
> Windows Media Player 9 - 57.5%
> RealNetworks RealPlayer - 46.5%
> Apple’s QuickTime - 43.1%

RealNetworks we've got.  Flash and shockwave we can get.  I dunno
what "Viewpoint Media Player" is.  That leaves WMP9 (hopeless) 
and QuickTime (possible).  57% of users locked out because of one format
would be bad, but way better than where we are now.

>                       This is why I said there 
> is no end to that path of trying to make everyone happy, and that by 
> defining winning as doing that, you can never win.

Not absolutely, but once you know the percentages and costs you can
pick a minimax.  The goal of the game here isn't perfection, it's
maximizing adoption rate.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>