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Salon's Free Software Project (Part 2)
jsa writes "Salon has released Chapter 2, part 2 of the Free Software Project Book"
It's by Andrew Leonard again. He's been busy, it's a long one, but there's lots of cool parts that you probably don't know about (including a gratuitous pinball reference ;)
I disagree with you. Big business *is* inherantly more evil than smaller businesses. A large business can not have any degree of social consciousness under American-style capitalism because it is only held accountable to making profits. Even if a CEO did feel obliged to sacrifice some profits in the interests of sustainability it would actually be a violation of his "fiduciary responsibilities". A small company is not necessarily accountable to the corporate system, and can choose to act for other motivations than maximizing profits if it wishes to.
The second problem is that large organizations, especially hierarchical ones create ever larger and larger communications overhead with size. In a 20 person company everyone in the company can have a clear idea of what is going on and attempt to influence what is happening effectively. In a 10,000 person company with six layers of management, information gets distorted at each pass up the chain (as subordinates alter their opinions consciously or not to agree with the reality of their managers). by the time this gets up to the CEO it is so distorted that he often has no clue what is really going on below.
Large corporations also decouple decision making from the people who do the work. Developers generally know the most about development, Sales people know the most about sales etc. These are the people who should choose how to do these things. In a large organization they often can and in a small organization they often cannot.
Sure, Amazon's financial structure may be a house of cards, but there's no question that they have been a huge influence on the development of the B2C e-commerce industry.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The free software you referred do did indeed get the internet off the launch pad and into the public consciousness, but it's the Amazon's and AOL's of the world that have taken it to an entirely different level. Greed is a powerful motivator...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I totlly disagree.... The distinction does not lie in buisness vs. hackers. Its a question of availability and interface.
The use of computers skyrocketed in the 80's not because of the BASIC language as the first root of the thread sugests but because computer were financially feasable to John Q Public. With the advent of cheaper hardware, any individual with the PC spec could write their own operating system and drivers. But Nancy, a school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin is not about to buy a machine and learn how to write an OS for it, however if someone would do it for her, she would find a computer useful.
The internet is a good exmple as well. The internet, as stated OVER AND OVER, began as a military program ARPANET. This was handed over to universities later and beagn using open systems and protocols. (not entirely acurate but an adequate summary) Out of this camne the birth of gopher, ftp, www, irc, etc. Once again the use of email, web, news, IRC, goper, ftp would be great things for Nancy to use, but do you expect her to setup her own modem configuration, connect to an ISP (which were not heard of in most circles) and configure every little program need to do this (mail client, mosaic, etc.)
Here we get into one of the prevalent flaws in hacker style development, hackers code for hackers, a.k.a they code what they want. This means that tools for the average user are not usually develloped initially. I would cringe giving my dad a Linux ditro disk of two years ago for him to install on a computer. It was not designed for use by an average user. Now is a different situation because hackers (and companies) have started to realize the importance of the average user.
Big buisness on the other hand relies on the average user to be willing to pay for making something easy to use. Microsoft became who they are based on this principle, they made things so users didn't have to. When my dad was installing Windows 98, my cringing had nothing to do with his ability to install the OS (it had more to do with him installing THAT OS) The Internet was usable by the average user, but it wasn't until the prodigy/AOL/Compuserve all-in-one-Internet applications made basic Internet access easy to install/use that the average user got online.
--- Linux... a college project gone horribly right
Damn, bitch, ease off! You be href-in' like you on bathtub crank! You can't be hikin' up yo skirt like dat an' expect t'be gettin' da johns. Dey likes a little bit o' dat mysterious shit, like maybe you ain't a ho, you dig?
You wanna be a karma whore?
Fine, but don't forget...
...who buitlt the first airplain? NOT a big corp. In fact it was 3 brothers. How many western US cities (and I'd rate a city over a skyscraper) were founded and developed without government or big business? Who, for that matter, discovered penicilin?
I agree that "big business" not only has it's place, but is what makes our society the way it is posable, but don't EVER underestimate your abilities. If you wanted to organise the money and manpower you COULD build that skyscraper. It may take you longer, but then you should realise that the "big businesses" have a had start.
Start thinking about one-legged men running LENGTHWISE accross Canada and making it most of the way before dyeing of Cancer (not fatuge) [Terry Fox, for thoes of you who are wondering]. Or how about the deaf and bling girl who developed brail? [If you can't figure that one out, I'm not going to help you!] --} OR her parents for that matter!
"big business" is usually one guy pushing a dream/goal of his forward to an extreem. While Bill Gates' dream may be any of 1,000,000,000 things, he pushed as hard as he could at just the right moments and was rewarded for it. Realise that EVEN M$ was once just a bunch of computer-nerds trying to develope an almost non=existant industry.
Maybe this post is less off=tropic than I thought oit would be!
This post brought to you from Istanbul!
Everything and everyone is an aspect of Gd. So remember to show proper respect!
Anyway, this does bring up briefly the important distinction between software and hardware. This is something I have been wondering about lately: what is software, and what is hardware? How can you define them? After all, "software" does exist in the physical worlds, whether as bumps in a CD or magnetic direction in a hard disk. So what is a clear and universal definition for "hardware" and "software?"
No, it really is simply. Hardware is the set of physical parts that store, retrieve and execute instructions. Software is the particular set of instructions that the machine executes.
The fact that you may use a physical storage mechanism (hard disc, CD-ROM, net connection, whatever) to hold the software does not turn the instructions into a piece of hardware.
Its like a story. A story is the actual sequence of events, characters, ideas etc. A story is a piece of software. Writing a story down on a piece of paper may produce a book, but it doesn't change the nature of the story itself - its still that collection of abstract parts.
Sailing over the event horizon
Second, I'm not saying open standards didn't help the net. But they didn't build it. Like I originally said, open systems are good for getting ideas flowing, but it's Big Business (in this case AT&T) that can actually implement these ideas.
AT&T created UNIX (more a research project than a business initiative), but who wrote the TCP/IP stack that made the internet route and forward? Was it K&R, no....was it Bill Gates, no...was it Steve Jobs, no....it was Bill Joy, working as a grad student at UC Berkeley. His group was under a grant from DARPA to create an open system with these new fangled packet switching networks that had been developed in several universities. Big business that had been hired to develop a TCP/IP stack ended up using Joy's implementation since theres sucked.
Business has its place, but I think that business is extremely compatible with open source projects, even though the goals are sometimes orthogonal.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Marge, I agree with you -- in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory.
--Homer J. Simpson
Really, it's almost eerily appropriate.
But really, in a way, communism comes down to giving one body a benevolent monopoly on anything, so the quote does apply.
And I agree with you that, in theory, a monopoly COULD use its leverage for good, it certainly hasn't happened in the U.S. to this point.
And all the Linux geeks out there wouldn't be programming for whoever because no Big Business wants to invest in software.
[A bunch of other shrieking strident unprovable assertions deleted.]
OK, so where in all this weird ranting do you get to the point where you prove that without Bill Gates, we wouldn't have something better?
In either case, the argument is nonsensical. By the very construction of IP law software is the expression of an idea and therefore covered by copyright. Certain methods, also by their very nature, are covered by patent.
With or without Bill Gates, that would be inevitable. Of course, without Bill Gates, a lot of people would not have jobs supporting their constantly-crashing trashy software.
I thank Bill Gates for untold hours of income hand-holding bozos every time they get a blue screen.
Ben and Jerry's, for instance
Speaking of which, a company called Jeremy's Microbatch has a flavor called "Wired" which is essentially excessively caffeinated vanilla ice cream you can eat with your Jolt Cola.
Great stuff.
The Microbatch site is majorly Flash-heavy. Maybe I just brought it up to start a Flash sucks flamewar.
I really don't care at all about mass production. The important part is the development phase. The rest has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with whether it was implemented correctly or not. It has nothing to do whether the design is good or bad. Its just marketing. After the "product" is mass marketed, progress slows to a standstill.
true, true.
;)
But I think the point needs to be made. Those that use Amazon and AOL are indeed utilizing BeeTwoCeeEee-commerce (sounds like a chess move), they were the first to do the obvious correctly. Of course it's obvious now because they did it.
However. This is Internet time. I can do B2CE-commerce, as a concept, in about 20 minutes (or 1 "business day", to be honest, I did this very thing last Friday, sold about 450 $15 t-shirts in an afternoon. Anybody listen to WHTZ in New York?). I remember a quote from someplace, I think it was Clancy, actually, "The genius of one generation is the commonplace of the next." That makes about 18 months by my clock, err, overclock.
The "morons" comment was about the people who use AOL or Amazon and think they are the end all be all of the Internet. In such a competitive environment it is important to support a diverse number of companies ("diverse number" look! new jargon..maybe...). They'll probably get bought later on, but competition is more important and more efficient for everyone.
Please excuse the long post, I had a busy week at work,
--
+&x
MS is evil (except for their successful lobbying to get copyright on software), but big business is not.
How is Big Business not evil? Why do you think we had to create the Sherman Anti-trust Act? What about the court decision in Carnegie Steel Co. v. U.S. (Case # 240 U.S. 156) in 1916? Or 279 U.S. 263 (1929), Sinclair v. U.S.?
Take a long hard look, and maybe you'll change your mind about big business.
big business can innovate and often does a damn better job than what comes out of somebody's garage
Yes, Bill Gates put it best:
"The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft."
After all, who would spend THREE WHOLE MAN YEARS developing software. Free software could never put that much work into programming, bug finding, or documenting, and distributing for free hobbyist (free) software.
Seriously, don't be so myopic. Believe it or not, there were personal computers before the IBM PC, and operating systems (and BASIC interpreters) before Microsoft. In fact, the success of these other models is what enticed Big Blue and the nascent Evil Empire into the field...
I understand that slashdotters too often knee-jerk condemn certain companies. But let's try not to swallow Microsoft propaganda hook, line, and sinker, OK?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
> It's not really all that hard to scam the Slashdot moderation system. You can sign up with a bunch of unique emails, and when you get a random chance to be moderator, you spend all your points on some lame post you write with your other accounts.
/. search on users for one reason or another, and whenever I do, I almost always turn up lots of accounts that don't show any posts. Possibly it's just that we have lots of lurkers that use logins so they can customize their views, but I suspect it's what you say - lots of throwdown accounts to increase certain individuals' odds of landing a moderatorship.
I occasionally use
At least, that's what I would do if I wanted to scam the system.
Also, it seems that the majority of those non-posting accounts have very high user IDs, numbering from about the time the "first post" and "hot grits" nonsense got completely out of hand.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But Open Source derives from a different model. People aren't doing it for economic gain. There's something more, be it acclaim, strutting rights, or (gasp!) the joy of doing well something worth doing. Open Source partakes of an impulse similar to artistry, and so it is incomprehensible to droids like Gates. Traditional business is, by its construction, soulless. Open Source leaves room for human dignity.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Even then, the Department of Defense required that it be open, with source code available, and threatened to pull defense contracts if the contractors did not comply.
This is way too misleading. You aren't even contradicting me, but you make it sound like I'm saying open standards are useless. Still, this isn't even a good reply.
First, the net was started by ARPA (think ARPAnet), who in 1973 became known as DARPA. I don't recall if they were funded by the DOD or what, but if you don't know it was DARPA that did this, I really can't trust any of the other points you make as being informed.
Second, I'm not saying open standards didn't help the net. But they didn't build it. Like I originally said, open systems are good for getting ideas flowing, but it's Big Business (in this case AT&T) that can actually implement these ideas.
This set the foundation for the modern internet, which was created using open protocols, an open standards process (IETF), and open software.
I never said this was not the case. I said Big Business is what gets into the hands of the public. Big Business is what made the internet big (think AOL).
The internet may have been jump started by an expensive government contract for which a monopolist company happened to win the bid, but it was built collaboratively by developers from numerous universities in a manner which is almost precisely what the open source/free software folks employ today.
You've got it bass-ackwards. It was thought up by a bunch of liberal college folk and some DARPA (well, at that point, ARPA) folks who thought it would be a neat idea. But they needed Big Business to implement it. And that's what I've been trying to say all along, is that private individuals or a couple of college kids rarely ever end up running the show with something they invented (ironically, the only contrary example that springs to mind is that of Microsoft). To use an exploration analogy, Big Business usually doesn't forge the path, but they consistently are the ones that pave the road into 12-lane highway.
Look at companies like Walmart, Borland, Mattel, Foley's and Red Hat and tell me corporations are bad. Free software has had it's day. It'll be useful again in getting new technologies, but it will always be Big Business that adapts and expands these technologies to get them in to the hands of more than just some small elitist faction of hobbyist hackers.
commercially, but became more or less free software due to anti-trust
law against Microsoft. (Then it became two families of proprietary OS
again and now both are free...).
One of the points of the article is that software doesn't need to
be restricted to be commercial: IBM's software was both open and
proprietary. It's just that they (= business) need to make money
*somewhere*. UNIX was like that in the pre-OSF days.
But admit it -- computers didn't become big business until Bill Gates got copyright protection on BASIC back in the early 80's. Then computers took off. I know, you think this is flame-bait, but I'm serious. Free software is good to get things going, but copyright makes it big business and if you look at companies like IBM or Sony, big business can innovate and often does a damn better job than what comes out of somebody's garage.
I think the problem is that everybody thinks MS when they think computers, and yes, MS is evil (except for their successful lobbying to get copyright on software), but big business is not. Who can honestly call Borland a bunch of money-grubbing bastards? I didn't think so.
Nothing wrong with free software, but don't knock the commercial stuff. It has it's place.
This was the lead story on Salon yesterday. Sort of old-ish news.
/. should start putting Salon's headlines in a the sidebar, given how often stories are linked to Salon.
Perhaps
I just found out that Salon had an IPO last year. The stock is hovering around 1.5 dollars right now. Lots of it is available to the public - few institutional shareholders. I hope they don't get bought out by Time-Warner or Conde Nast. I've always been pretty impressed by how ambitious they can be with the reporting.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Free software is good to get things going, but copyright makes it big business and if you look at companies like IBM or Sony, big business can innovate and often does a damn better job than what comes out of somebody's garage.
As others have pointed out, correlation != causation. In the case of the computer boom, one can argue much more plausibly that the commoditization of cheap PC hardware was the primary cause of the boom of computers, and the software which runs on them, than Bill Gates' petty greed or precident setting copyright were. Even before the emergence of Windows as the One and Only Platform sales of PCs were booming, some running DOS, some running MacOS, some running windows, some running Geoworks, etc. etc.
Another counter example is the internet, which was developed with open and free protocols and software implimentations, some in the public domain, some under FreeBSD style licenses, and some under the GLP (all three can reasonably be considered counterpoints to traditional copyright -- they make use of a system they are philisophically opposed to but have no choice in being subject to). None of the software responsible for the infrastructure of the internet, be it USENET news, FTP, IRC, the World Wide Web, or email (SENDMAIL) was commercial. Oh, Sun and others offered commercial clones of some of the products (where the license permitted), but the reference implimentations, and the most widely used versions, were Free. For that matter, they still are, despite overwhelming efforts by various large entities (MS, AOL) to co-opt the net into a distribution channel for their own proprietary products.
The Big Boom in Internet Business appears to be dwarfing the PC boom, stock market fluctuations notwhithstanding. Draconian copyright isn't helping make this happen, it (and other forms of intellectual property such as patents) are actually hampering it and even beginning to threaten it entirely. Examples include Amazon's one click patent vs. Barns and Noble, patents on the RSA algorithm which have seriously hampered the adoption of widespread public key crypto (a prerequisite to online business transactions and contracts), the DMCA and copyright law being used to fragment open standards such as Kerberos, etc.
There is a place for commercial software. I run applix myself, and have used AcceleratedX in the past. I have numerous commercial games, all of which I've paid for. However, that does not mean that IP laws are enhancing progress; indeed to all appearances they seem to be doing the opposite.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
>talk troll
What do you want to say to troll?
>ask troll about "Signal 11"
Which Signal 11 do you mean, SIGSEGV or (Slashdot User #203709)?
>oops #203709
TRoLLaXoR stares at you and says "New around here, eh, Karma Whore? Signal 11 is much older than that, but we Trolls have destroyed his account and burned his webpages! The Great Karma Whore is no more!"
>ask troll about "Great Karma Whore"
TRoLLaXoR chuckles in delight. "The form errors were only the first step in our plan to overthrow the evil moderators. Now he has been reduced to his mortal form as the lowly 'Bojay Baggins'."
>bojay
The vaporous shapes envelop you; you are teleported through a rabit hole.
>look
You are in a rabbit hole. All the posts have expired. There is a dead link to the east. There is a dangling HREF here.
>look HREF
The link text says "The Search for Signal 11 begins here". The anchor is unreadable.
>i
You have a cookie, and 5 Karma.
>xyzzy
What do you think this is, boy? Adventure?
>
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Nicely put, Sv0f.
I likewise fail to recall any major products coming out of MS between their BASIC for the Altair & MS-DOS several years later. In fact, until MS-DOS, MS was just another manufacturer of programming languages. And considered an also-ran in that catagory.
Amazing how far Gates played out one lucky break.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
The internet was founded under public contract, designed for the defense department.
Even then, the Department of Defense required that it be open, with source code available, and threatened to pull defense contracts if the contractors did not comply.
This set the foundation for the modern internet, which was created using open protocols, an open standards process (IETF), and open software.
The internet may have been jump started by an expensive government contract for which a monopolist company happened to win the bid, but it was built collaboratively by developers from numerous universities in a manner which is almost precisely what the open source/free software folks employ today.
Brush up on your history before claiming that the internet was your creation or even created using your methods.
Boy, you must be bitter. What's the matter, MSFT stock options not what you would have liked? Nowhere did I claim to have created the internet, I leave such claims to Al Gore and Bill Gates.[1]
It was not. The internet was created by Big Busines
No. The internet was founded by Big Government spending taxpayer dollars, then built in its modern form by universities collaborating in an open manner using what today is referred to as the "free software" or "open source" paradigm.
Brush up on your history. I've been using the net for 13 years and have had the privelege of watching much of this happen, and your characterization is completely inaccurate and misleading.
[1]Bill Gates actually claimed to have invented the PC during an inverview. He often makes claims to have invented internet services that have been present as free software in one form or another for over a decade.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Or else Salon might go out of business before they finish the book. They'll probably be delisted from NASDAQ before they come out with another chapter. Bloomberg.com's Christopher Byron just had a great column this week about the scam that is Salon and its IPO (Salon.com Typifies Demise of "Content" IPOs). However, because of the abundance of self-important twits over there, and their gutter ethics (Dan Savage or David Talbott, anyone?), I certainly won't miss 'em. Oh well, good thing they're doing this lame-ass Free Software Project, so someone can pick up the pieces when they go bankrupt. Hope Camille Paglia ends up at a good place, though, 'cause she rocks. I really do recommend that article, though -- it's actually a Hell of a lot more critical of the scams that dot-com underwriters are pulling than it is of Salon itself.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"...computers didn't become big business until Bill Gates got copyright protection on BASIC back in the early 80's."
True. John Lennon being shot in 1980 was a big factor, too.
Just because Gates got in on the ground floor doesn't mean he drove the elevator.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Sent chills up and down my spine. Geek pride! Anyway, this does bring up briefly the important distinction between software and hardware. This is something I have been wondering about lately: what is software, and what is hardware? How can you define them? After all, "software" does exist in the physical worlds, whether as bumps in a CD or magnetic direction in a hard disk. So what is a clear and universal definition for "hardware" and "software?"
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=4, Troll=1, Funny=6, Overrated=1, Total=12.
l ity3.html
OK. Six moderators have said this is funny. Six other moderators have marked it down.
Can somebody explain the humor in this to those of us who don't get it? It looks like a straight troll to me....
The only references I could find to Caleb Jaffa on net searches was as the author of some peice of software available at developer.com
http://www.developer.com/downloads/code/dir.uti
And the Sherman Antitrust Act isn't really about big business. It's about monopolies. There's a difference. A monopoly is a problem because it harms innovation and favors the status quo in its field. Furthermore, it limits the choices of consumers to one.
Big businesses may not be necessary in developing software. Although I'm not convinced on that. But regardless, the open source model demonstrates that it's at least POSSIBLE for quality software to be developed by a group of people outside of a business.
However, there are advantages to big business. You or I could not build a jet. We could not develop the next wonder drug. We could not construct a skyscraper. You know why? Because we don't have that kind of money, and we can't pool that kind of manpower. It takes a business or a government to pool the resources to accomplish things like this -- and in nine out of ten cases, I'd rather have the businesses doing it.
Take a long, hard look, and maybe you'll change your mind about big business.
I'm sorry. You just flabbergasted me. Let me try and articulate.
And WHY exactly don't we have that kind of money? Because big business sucked it off us. Think about it a little.
Thanks for clearing that up. So I take it that, if it weren't for big business, I'd have the resources necessary to put together a 747? Shoot. Not even my Philosophy of Karl Marx prof mentioned that one to me.
Furthermore, I should point out that considerably before the advent of business, there was something called feudalism. In that, you or I probably would have had no money or resources of our own. Instead, we'd be hauling stone to build a castle for our lords. So I'm not sure when we got this money that corporations stole from us in the first place.
That's exactly why big business (tm) gives us presidential candidates one can only laugh at; so that people like you and I will prefer to have our society run by big business instead. The pitty though is that big business will own society in order to run it, and that's most often a one-way route, as there are actually laws against taking back our property from the rich.
Believe it or not, we're not in nearly as bad a state of corporate oligarchy as we have been in the past. From about the end of the civil war to, I don't know, at least 1910, it was worse. In the words of one of my teachers back in high school, the change came when "the government realized the Morgan Trust basically owned the whole country."
I think I've gotten a little away from my point, though I'm going to leave that in. However, what I'm trying to say is that big business really isn't as in control as you seem to think. Assuming that you actually believe what you're saying, you just seem to make it more probable.
Yes, there definitely is a place for innovation in a larger corporate laboratory. Just look at Thomas Edison (who practically invented the concept of a corporate research laboratory), the old Bell Labs, and even some of the stuff comming from IBM. One consistant theme of all of these companies is that the projects they are involved with require a large amount of capital to even get the projects off of the ground (which was the original idea of a corporation in the first place).
Doing something completely original out of your garage or basement workshop requires a little bit of innovation. In fact, because you don't have access to a muti-million dollar budget it tends to sharpen your mind a little and try new approaches by necessity. If you are a little lucky you can take that garage idea and turn it into the next Microsoft or Apple Computer (both of which were very small companies that grew based on unique idea fostered with a decided lack of capital).
I guess I'm trying to say that the kinds of project and ideas that come from different development environments are just simply different. And they meet the needs of a different group of people. Free software is more a product of the garage workshop mentality (although with some groups like the Linux distro companies this is beginning to change).
The only problem is that it's rotten from the top down. I'm sure we could both name a couple of disreputable writers at any publication -- but at Salon, it's the very people who set the tone for the entire staff who can't seem to muster any journalistic integrity. The fact David Talbot is the Editor in Chief (!) pretty much says it all.
But, if that weren't enough, during the whole Savage/Iowa Caucus dustup, Salon actually had the stones to send an editor to CNN's Reliable Sources to start telling lies in order to defend Savage (my apologies, but I can't remember the editor's name, so I don't want to make a guess). Hey, if they want to defend Savage's right to do what he did on some journalistic grounds, fine, but to go on a show whose raison d'être is to critically cut through the spin of the media, and then to actually sit there and lie to the other panelists, that's just insane. The look of sheer incredulity on Howie Kurtz's face, that "Who the fuck does this guy think we are?" expression, was, however, priceless. :)
So, you're somewhat right, I probably was too hard on Mr. Leonard because I'm so down on the rest of the rag. I think I'm still looking forward to it folding, though -- hopefully the features I like will end up elsewhere (I know I don't have to worry about Camille ending up on her feet, but there are other articles besides hers that I enjoy at Salon), and the ethically-challenged higher ups can depart ungracefully from the public eye.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
For the home computer market to expand, it needed a lot of customers. Not just hobbiests. Buisnesses, followed by people buying computers for home due to exposure to them at work. But why would business be interested in a microcomputer? You needed a killer app.
That killer app was VisiCalc. If you look a bit in to its histor y, you'll find that VisiCalc was that killer app. It quickly paid for itself by reducing errors and reducing hours spent crunching numbers. VisiCalc was THE reason for a business to buy a microcomputer. What was once scoffed at as a non-serious hobbiest toy suddenly became a valuable tool and spawned a whole new industry. BASIC didn't do that, much less copyright law.
Take a look at the IT industry. Look at big names such as Apple, Cisco, Sun. Where did these massive corporations spawn? From very humble "garage" beginnings. Even VisiCalc was developed in an attic of a rented apartment.Sure... things have changed since then for all those companies. And Corporations are able to do things on an amazing scale - something required to make some innovations and manufacture products. But so much of what we enjoy today does not exist because of corporate innovation - it exists because a corporation has expanded on the innovative work done in somebody's garage. Without that work, there would be little for corporations to offer.