I was informed today, sadly, Netscape — or should I say AOL — has given up on its Web browser After 12 long years, Navigator has passed on, and by 2008, support will be removed from it. AOL commented:

“AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”

Personally I will never move to Firefox. On OS X, Firefox is really only Safari with memory leaks. Netscape was my second favorite browser, and now it is finally gone. AOL in my opinion is a greedy company that doesn’t seem to understand the market. All you have to look at is its ISP business, which it is closing soon as well.

-Thanks to Kteck for telling me.

I’ve worked with many people switching to the Mac platform, and have seen many questions about Mac compatibility. This gave me an idea for this blog post.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, the Apple platform was huge.  The Macintosh platform, that superseded Apple computers, however did not have a good run in the market.  Macs eventually gain ground, but around when Windows 95 came out, it was bought back down again.

Note: for People that never used an Apple, i.e. Apple II, might be confused.  Apple was not just the name of the Company, but the name of the first genre of computers they made.

Many Mac users or just people that have used a Mac around this time switched to Windows completely, and never came back.  Today many of these people have become loyalist to WIndows, some even bashing Macs.  The only problem with this, is that they are bashing Macs from the 90s, not the current one.  One of which is the whole big thing about a one button mouse.  Over time these types of rumors have spread.  One big thing you must understand, is Mac  OS X is not a new version of MacOS 9, it’s a completely different OS.  If you want to know why, see my other blog post here.

Mice/Keyboards:
One big difference with OS X from MacOS Classic is compatibility.  For instance, in the old Mac OS needed drivers for even the simplest things like Mice and Keyboards.  OS X, released in 2001, has something that removes the need of drivers called the I/O Kit.  The I/O Kit allows you to dynamically hook up any mouse with a variable amount of buttons or a standard keyboard. It is also used to create drivers as well.

PDFs, Images, and Vectors:
Mac OS X, uses a technology called Quartz.  Quartz is a graphics engine that renders and composite 2D images based off of Pixar’s Renderman.  Quartz uses a ver simiar system to PDF, so simlar that PDF’s can be opened natively in the OS itself.  Any program that can load or view an image can also show a PDF.  Final Cut Pro, a video editor can even use PDFs just as if it were an image or video on the timeline.  Besides PDFs, Mac OS X understands many forms of images natively.  It is able to do this because of the Quicktime framework.  On Windows, Quicktime is a player, but in OS X, it’s part of the operating system.  The Quicktime library integrates with the Quartz engine, quicktime reads the data and renders it, quartz adds the final touches like anti-alias and shadows, then it composites everything together.  A few image formats OS X understands natively include:  pict(Legacy), jpg, gif, tiff, png, and bmp.

Video and Audio:
Just like with images, video and audio are done through the quicktime library as well.  OS X can understand everything quicktime, this includes:  Mov, avi, flv, and dv.  It can also understand many types of audio files like:  aiff, mp3, MIDI, aac, and wave.

Drivers:
Mac OS X comes with over 2 gigs of Drivers.  These drivers are for printers, video cards, and other odds and ends.  When installing, you can check a box to not include these, or you can go in deeper and tell the installer what brand of drivers not to install.  The OS also comes with a standard set of frameworks to work with firewire or USB devices like hard drives and  Camcorders.  This allows the old feeling of “It just works”.

Quicktime expansion:
Quicktime uses an open architecture allowing plugins to be added for more formats.  Two plugins that a Mac user should get are Flip4Mac and Perian.  Flip4Mac allows quicktime to read and show Windows media files.  If you pay for it it also allows you to convert videos to the windows media format.  Perian, is a army knife of media formats and is a must have.  I’ve used a media player called VLC to play avi’s and divx’s, but it doesn’t stand up to Perian with the Quicktime player.

Microsoft Application documents:
When OS X first came out, it had many problems with reading files from windows.  Today OS X is very compatible with windows files, and besides that Microsoft’s Office document formats are built right into the OS.  You can even use OS X Leopard’s Quicklook feature to browse through a powerpoint presentation.  TextEdit, the application equivalent to NotePad on OS X, can read and write the old, new, and xml formats of Microsoft Word.  Now I don’t mean, TextEdit or any other application can import and export these, I mean OS X natively understands them.  Actually just to show how compatible OS X is, TextEdit can save and open:  plain Text, RTF, HTML, Web Archive, Open Document text(the open standard), Word 2007, Word 97, and word 2003 XML.  If you get Apple’s iWork, you can even work with more formats.  iWork, is Apple’s equivalent to Microsoft’s Office suite.  It comes with Pages(Word publisher), KeyNote(Presentation), and Numbers(Spread sheets).  iWork is completely compatible with MS Office, but MS Office is not fully compatible with iWork.

UNIX, X11, and POSIX:
Steve Jobs once commented in 2001 when OS X was launched, that the Mac OS is now linux like.  This is not the case anymore,  OS X is now not just linux like, but has the certificate showing it is now full UNIX.  This means OS X is above which linux has not gotten to yet.  Anything that now follows the rules and guidelines of POSIX and uses X11 can run in OS X.  That includes not just UNIX, but Linux and BSD applications as well.  In the past, Linux applications had to be recompiled with a little tweak of the code.  Today, many Linux programs work right away in OS X with out you having to recompile the code. Last time Apple’s OS was POSIX compliant was with A/UX(Apple UNIX).

Networking with others:
OS X works with many different operating systems.  Mac OS X Leopard is one of the only operating systems that seamlessly connects many different system together, including Linux, UNIX, and Windows.  OS X Tiger and down also have good compatibility with other operating systems, but Leopard does it so much more.  To connect to other computers(Macs, Windows, etc), it’s as easy as going into the system preferences, and turning on personal file sharing.  OS X finds all computers on the network whether wired or wireless.  After the computer pops up in the finder just click on it and your in., it’s as easy as opening a folder.  OS X Server, unlike Windows Server, can also manage other computers with other Operating systems.

OSes:
Although it appears many people have forgotten, Apple has always been big on software compatibility.  It was once the only operating system that could read both Mac and Dos applications and documents natively.  Later Apple designed a few computers with motherboards that supported two processors.  With this, you could add an intel chip allowing you to run x86 software on the Mac, this was around 1993-1994.  In 1995,  AIM alliance created a powerpc processor that could understand it’s native code along with x86, SPARC, and 68k.  Apple only used this with one computer which was not very successful.  In 1998,  Apple released Rhapsody 5, based off of OPENStep 4.  Rhapsody was designed as an OS for PPC, x86, and SPARC processors as well as an Add-on to the MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Solaris.  Because of low developer support  Rhapsody for other platforms but the Mac faded after Developer release 2.  Rhapsody in 1999 was renamed OS X server 1.0, and then the aqua interface came out in 2000.  In 2001 Darwin, the open source OS by Apple was finally finished and Rhapsody was put on top of it with the name OS X(Darwin was beta until OS X 10.1.1).  After 10 years or so, Apple has finally made the Mac x86 compatible again, but in a different way.  They have completely switched over to Intel after to many problems with IBM’s power4(PowerPC G5) processor.  This means that any operating system that is built for x86 can now run on a Mac.  There are many ways to run UNIX, Linux, and Windows on a Mac.  You can, for instance, use Parallels or VMware which use native virtualization.  Native virtualization means that an operating system is running inside a parent OS on it’s native platform(CPU).  Native virtualization normally can get up to 98% performance out of the OS.  You can also use Apple’s Boot Camp.  Boot Camp is a partitioner.  It splits your hard drive in to two or more with different partition systems so you can run Mac, Windows, and Linux on the same computer.  Boot Camp also installs the needed drivers to run Windows.  Boot Camp is not a virtualization system so it does not have the features that virtual machines have, but it does let you run Windows or Linux at full speed.   PC Magazine, Computer Magazine, and MacWorld Magazine all claim that a Mac is the best computer to run Windows on(as in performance only).  For open source users, WINE is being ported to OS X Leopard.

For a very long time I’ve heard people talking about video formats and codecs and container files, but I’ve rarely heard them in the right context.

To start off, a format is used in two contexts. One has to do with video, and the other has to do with a file. A video format is about how a video is sent to a device and shown. You might kind of know what PAL or NTSC are, these are analog video formats. PAL is 25 frames a second and has a resolution of 720 x 576. NTSC is 29.97 frames a second and has a resolution of 720 x 486, although this is D1-NTSC. Most Analog televisions only show the old NTSC or 648 x 486. This is why shows and movies are “clipped” on a CRT tv, but show the whole picture on HDTVs.

Digital video formats include: ATSC, DVB, and ISDB. ATSC is the format that the FCC said will replace NTSC in 2009. This will finally be the end of analog video formats.

Now on to a file format. A file format tells the computer what it is associated with. A text file is in a text format, but if the text file was a binary format designed for a specialized program, it would be seen as just a document format until the application that uses it was found. Once found it would be considered a format that the application deems it, like a Mircosoft Word format. In Mac OS X, you would always see it as a MS word format since this format is built into the OS itself. As you can see it can get very confusing, and although this is a technology blog website, I’ve seen many people in places like creativecow.net get confused by this whole formatting business.

Most files have an extension, this tells you what format it is. This can also get confusing, because some formats have the same extension as others. I’m not sure about Windows, but Mac OS X doesn’t just look at the extension. If it needs to, it’ll look at the header in the file itself to determine what it is. There is also something called Mac Type/Creator for OS X applications. This helps OS X determine what a file is for with out using the extension.

The idea of a format is sometimes confused with a codec. A codec is a device or formula designed to compress a video or audio file into a smaller size with out losing to much quality. A few codecs include: MPEG, DivX, Sorenson 3, RealVideo, WMV, and Cinepak. The MPEG codec, which is at MPEG-4 part 10(H.264), is the standard and should always be used if you can use it. DivX is also a big standard, and considered the open standard of media codecs. There are also some closed source codecs like RealVideo. RealVideo is a good compression codec, but do to it’s closed system it is now fading away. A codec works by take each frame of a video or a section from audio, normally from another codec, and converting it to it’s own file format. The only way a codec can convert an other codec to it’s own is through a 3rd party like the Quicktime player. You can also find free applications online, they are normally associated as video converters.

As you see above, I should a few examples of video codecs, but there are a few missing like MOV. This is because a file like: MOV, ASF, AVI, MP4, IFF, Ogg, OGM, and 3gp are not codecs. These are called containers. A container file is like a virtual disk(iso,dmg, etc), it holds a number of codecs inside of itself. This is the number one place that people get confused. When someone says “The MP4 format” what they mean is “The MP4 container format”. Just about every container format today is based off of IFF. IFF is the first platform independent format, it was created by Electronic Arts(EA) in 1985. Now IFF isn’t necessarily a container format, it’s actually a generic format. Generic means it can be used in many different ways, one of which is as a container.

Apple created one of the first multimedia APIs for computers(Apple computers only), called Quicktime. Intel was astounded at how a video could be played on a computer with only a Motorola 68K processor. The file format quicktime understood was MOV, this allowed people to add almost any media format to a MOV file and play it back as a movie or even as an interactive application. Quicktime even had it’s own qHTML format(failed), which today is only being used by Apple themselves. To compete, Microsoft entered the field with “Video for Windows”(the Quotes are to show this is the actual name of it) a year later. With it Microsoft came out with the AVI container format. It was based after the IFF format, and was designed only to playback media. It had to use Windows’ drawing API which meant very low quality and high processing power. It soon failed against quicktime until 1994. MS had acquired, unofficially, the API of quicktime. Suddenly Video for Windows was running as good as Quicktime. Apple investigated and found this out. After going to trial Apple won in 1997.

After this Microsoft started work on a new container format called activeMovie. This format was much more superior to AVI and Video for Windows. To help with this, Microsoft bought WebTv. WebTv was partly founded by Bruce Leak, a pioneer developer of Quicktime who left Apple. Using this asset, they created a new container format called ASF along with WMV/WMA. In 2000 Microsoft went to the Motion Picture Group(MPG) to make ASF a standard, but instead MPG choose Quicktime’s MOV format. A little later MP4 came out based on MOV.

At this point AVI is a big standard in the opensource world, ASF is still not widely used, and MOV is the standard container format in the media world.

So to rap up: A “video format” means how a video is shown or rendered on a screen or television, a “file format” tells a computer what to do with the specified file, a “codex” is used to compress a file into a smaller size with out losing quality or in some cases data, and a “container file” is used to house many different codecs in one file.

side-note: I hear a lot of people saying “Codex” and not “Codec”. A Codex is something entirely different.

Oxford Dictionary for the word Codex: “an ancient manuscript text in book form.” 16th century

Oxford Dictionary for the word Codec: “a microchip that compresses data to enable faster transmission or decompresses received data.” 1960s

I’ve heard so many people asking for GPS in the iPhone, and now it’s coming true. Although not done by Apple, a 3rd party company has created an attachment to the iPhone, via the power connector underneath. This device connects to GPS satellites and uses google maps to show your location. At this time the application for this is just a hacked one like all the others, but once Apple releases the SDK for the iPhone in February this device will go on sale for $89.

I’m not sure what Apple is going to do for GPS, if anything at all. They might add it eventually, but right now they are more worried about battery life then putting another power hungry chip in the iPhone.

Here’s the link about it: http://partfoundry.com/iphonegps.html

This is not really an iPhone vs PSP post, but it has to do with the possibility of the iPhone as a gaming platform.

First off the PSP comes with a 333Mhz Processor with 32 MB of RAM.  It has a  4.3 inch screen and has a pixel resolution of 480×272.  For video RAM the PSP has 4MB embedded.  The wireless network standard on it is 802.11b.  So how does this compare to the iPhone or iPod Touch?

The iPhone’s processor is between 680Mhz-700Mhz(breaking the mobile record), although it appears to be under clocked for more battery life.  The President of ARM also stated back in February(2007), that the iPhone’s ARM processor has three cores, Apple wouldn’t comment on this.  As for system memory, it has 128 MB of RAM, which is twice the amount of most current smart phones.  Besides this, the iPhone supports not just 802.11b, but it also supports the g standard as well.  This means it has a much faster network setup than the PSP.  The screen on the iPhone is 3.5 inches, but it’s pixel resolution is 480×320.

Last year and again around June this year, it appeared that Nintendo and Apple were in talk about something, yet nothing has happened. In August  Nintendo patented a new sensor, similar to the Accelerometer in the iPhone, for a portable gaming system.  The pictures look like an old Gameboy, although Nintendo officially declared the Gameboy dead back in September.

In February 2008,  the official SDK for the iPhone will be out.  This will allow you to build native iPhone applications, meaning even better programs and even 3D games using opengl.

Ever since I got into computers I have always been fascinated with making my own games. This fascination is what got me into programming. Video games like Wolfeinstien 3D and Zelda 64 are what really got me into game programming. I originally started out with what many geeks would call newbie languages. The first was Hypercard, a card based programming environment written by Biil Atkinson an Apple employee. Bill is also recognized as the creator of the modern graphical user interface. Eventually Apple got rid of hypercard, so I moved on. The next one I found was something called Realbasic, originally called CrossBasic.

Around 2000, a new game engine came out using Realbasic and C++ plugins. It was called Coldstone. This was about the best and easiest system I had ever used. Sadly though it got bad and then even worse. It had many problems adapting to OS X, being based heavily on classic libraries from OS 9. Eventually Coldstone stopped working with OS X 10.2.7, and although updates were promised, none came. Coldstone sales were eventually suspended in 2003. I never used another game engine until 2007.

Although I hadn’t used another game engine, I still looked. I found another that used Realbasic called Torque. It had okay graphics, but took up a lot of resources. In 2005 a new fully featured game engine came out called Unity. Unity is an advance engine that can render high-end graphics for top of the line machines, but can also lower quality to the point that it can run on an old ATI Rage card. At this point(December ,2007) Unity could make high-end 3D games that could run on the Mac, the web, dashboard(OS X), and Windows. Unity will soon support the Wii as well.

I got Unity about a week ago, and after using it for a little bit, I got to say, it ’s powerful. The games that it can make look as good as 360 or PS3 games, it’s AI and physics are incredible. I downloaded a demo game showing what Unity could do. It had enemies that if shot they didn’t have a set way to fall, but actually every limb independent; the NPCs actually have “true” skeletons. Besides this, it comes with a speedy ray-tracer for shadows, reflections, and refractions. This means it’s real, not some texture map or a cheap(fake) flat reflection.

As far as networking goes, Unity is all setup for networked games. It does most of the work for you, but is open enough for expansion. It also natively supports many file types and programs, meaning no waiting time, and actually Unity only shows a loading screen when it’s compiling. This is by far the best engine I have ever used.

Unity is comparable to $500K game engines, but starts at $199 for Indie and $1999 for Pro. If your a mac developer and want to get into making games try Unity.
www. Unity3D.com

This is an article that continues from: Apples and Oranges: A Chronicle of the Computing Industry

Prologue: The Forefathers, Part 2

I hyperlinked many of the words below to other sites for more detailed information, some of these links might go down or the url might change. Sorry if this happens.

When people think of AT&T, they think of a phone company, yet it’s more than this. AT&T is one of the largest developers of the modern computing world. With out them we might still be using vacuum tubes in computers or still have physical film in our cameras.

The story of AT&T starts with the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and his father-in law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Now you need to understand, Bell did not necessarily invent the telephone from scratch. There were many people that contributed all over the world, like Antonio Meucci with his teletrofono in 1860.

Around 1875, Bell had discovered with his phonautograph invention, a pen that draws shapes by using sound, that sound travels by waves. This meant he could turn sound into electric signals then use the signals to vibrate electromagnets which would create the sound waves. In other words, Bell invented the electric speakers. With the funding from Hubbard he used his theories and concepts to create and patent the telephone. In 1877, he founded Bell Telephone Company along with Hubbard who became the president of it.

In 1879, the company was renamed National Bell Telephone Company, and only a year later was renamed American Bell Telephone Company. To expand the long-distance network, American Bell created a new company: American Telephone and Telegraph or simply AT&T. This was the beginning of a monopoly that would concur the US. In 1899, AT&T bought American Bell, it’s parent company.

The president of AT&T, Theodore Vail, gave his vision of the Phone industry in 1907, “One Policy, One System, Universal Service”. He wanted AT&T to be the only company. The first step was buying out all of the competitors. To build better and more sophisticated products AT&T started to buy patents as well. They, for instance, bought the patents to the Vacuum-tube in 1913. This created disputes with RCA, which had it’s own patents on the Vacuum-tube.

In 1925 AT&T created a new development laboratory commonly called Bell Labs. Two years later AT&T demonstrated the first television, showing that moving images, not just audio, could be turned into data and broadcasted. Later on in 1946, AT&T started a mobile telephone service. This was nothing like cell phones though, and could only handle up to 20 people at once per city.

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947, invent the transistor at Bell Labs. This was the fuel to start the modern technological world. All three scientists shared a Noble Prize in 1956 for this invention. In the same year, AT&T agreed with the US Justice Department to restrict activities related to the national telephone system and to continue it’s governmental projects. This was after receiving an antitrust suit.

Two years later in 1958 Bell Labs created the first commercial modem. In 1962, AT&T launched the first satillite dedicated for it’s communications network. A year later they introduced the touchpad phones, replacing the old dial phones(If you even know what these are).

In 1969, two assets were created that are now common to the modern world. One of which is just becoming standard, that being flash as a means to store data. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith were working on two inventions that were combined together. One was a video telephone, the other was bubble memory. Combining the two, Boyle and Smith created something new called a Charged Bubble Device. In the 1970s Bell Labs were able to use CBDs to capture light, and in other words: images. This was the beginning of Charged Coupled Devices or CCDs. Today, CCDs are in almost everything. Every modern camera has a CCD, more professional cameras have three of them. They are also used for telescopes, with out them we wouldn’t be able to see what we see today in space.

The other invention was started in 1969, it was called Unics. Originally in 1964, AT&T, General Electronics, and MiT started work on a new computer operating system called Multics. AT&T how ever dropped out in 1969. Unics originally used a programing language developed at AT&T called B. B was not a very transportable language so the creation of C was made. C was used to rewrite Unics, which was finally finished around 1971. A few years later the spelling was changed to UNIX. UNIX is the most based after OS on the planet. Every modern operating system is based off of it’s design, and just about every operating system uses it’s programming language, C. Mac OS X for instance, uses ObjectiveC, a language on top of C. Windows and others use C++, which was designed on top of C as well.

AT&T at this point was a data network monopoly, and had created UNIX, a proprietary OS. AT&T and IBM are two Giants, that would soon see their downfall. One with the Government, the other with Microsoft.

The last two Giants of the 1970s computer Era were Xerox and HP. Both contributed much to the computing world. Xerox with the concept of the GUI, and HP as the “founder” of Silicon Valley.

continues to, Prologue: The Forefathers, Part 3

Summary/Background:

MacPorts is an environment or installer to make downloading and compiling Open Source files easier, but it’s more than this. MacPorts is a huge community hosted on macosforge.org. I’ve been using MacPorts since it was called DarwinPorts, they have thousands of files and applications. Many of these applications are ports from Windows including the emulator Qemu.

Some people who have never been into Open Source software, or think Mac OS X is a completely closed system need to know that MacPorts is easy and safe. The website, macosforge.org, is actually Apple’s. Apple is a huge contributer to open standards. Apple’s subdomain for many of their Open Source projects is, opensource.apple.com. Here you can download their projects, or browse through the reference libraries. On macosforge.org, they host the download of Darwin, and others like MacPorts.

If you really don’t want to use the terminal to download and install files you can also use one of three GUI applications for MacPorts. Two of these are still in beta though, one is shareware called PortAuthority for $20.

Some examples of open source applications in the MacPorts library include: JHymn (remove DRM from iTunes songs), Gimp (Free alternative to Photoshop), GNUStep (API library similar to OPENSTEP), and Transmission (Torrent client).

Now many people might be thinking, well you can just go online and search for these files. Yes you can download these files online, but some of them like JHymn, and GNUStep still need to be compiled. Also MacPorts compiles it specifically for your computer, this means all excess code is removed, making the file size smaller and making the app run faster with less resources. Also MacPorts compiles it for you with out you needing to know how, it does all the work. If it finds that you need a framework to compile the application, it will download it for you.

HowTo:

To get MacPorts go here. To install, you need to first install Xcode, you can get it from Apple here(need an account to download). If your using Mac OS X Leopard and doing a custom install for Xcode 3.0, make sure the UNIX tools are selected. Xcode installs GCC in Developer/usr. Selecting the UNIX Tools as well will install a second GCC into the location that Darwin(UNIX) can see it. If you don’t know, GCC is an Open Source compiler that Apple uses. GCC means GNU Compiler Collection. GNU is a project that formed in 1984 dedicated to creating a free UNIX operating system called GNU System. The acronym GNU means “GNU’s Not Unix. This is similar to OS X’s kernel, XNU, which means “X is Not Unix”.

Also don’t forget to install X11, this is already installed with Leopard, but on Tiger it is an optional add-on with Xcode. X11 is used to give UNIX applications a graphical interface and is need for some of the applications downloaded with MacPorts..

After Xcode is installed, you can install MacPorts. After you’re done, open the terminal and type:

“sudo port -d selfupdate”

This is to make sure that MacPorts is up to date. That’s all you have to do your done. If you run into a problem like, it can’t find a compiler, this means you did not install the UNIX tools from the Xcode installer.

To be able to use X11 applications and others, open up the terminal and type:

“cd ~/”

then type:

“open .profiles”

The file should open in TextEdit. Now remove the line that has the word: “export.” It’s the fourth line I believe. Add the lines:

“export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export DISPLAY=:0.0″

It might all seem a little confusing to people not use to the Open Source UNIX community, but it eventually becomes very easy to use. To access MacPorts, just type “sudo port”. To install an application add “install ” then the application’s name. There might be a few extra entrees like adding “+universal” or “-macosx”, but it normally is pretty straight forward. The word sudo from above means you want to access something that you don’t have permission for, it will ask for the admin password to give you permission. Every time the OS has ever popped up the Authentication window asking for a password, it has been using the sudo command to access secure files.

example: “sudo port install qemu -macosx”

More links/References:

• www.macports.org

• www.macosforge.org
• opensource.apple.com
• developer.apple.com
• www.gnu.org

If you do get MacPorts working, and you enjoy the free software, please help out the Free Software Foundation. The FSF is what keeps the GNU project going, along with the individuals that contribute.