Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Arch, Bubbles, Keystrokes
This research could still lead to new and powerful sink cleansers. mrsalty writes "A topic of brief and skeptical discussion back in april, Sonoluminescence as a fusion catalyst seems to be circling the drain. According to this BBC News article, new research shows that the collapsing bubbles' temperatures fall a bit short of that needed for fusion. A bit in this case being a few million degrees."
Discretion is sometimes the better part of avoiding attention. stinky wizzleteats writes: "Looks like OddTodd got off on charges that he defrauded the State of New York by starting www.oddtodd.com (Laid Off Land) while receiving unemployment payments. I didn't know he was only getting 67% of the take (his provider was getting the rest, which sort of explains why the site didn't get /.ed when the first story about him was run."
Try explaining this one to your parents. Earlier this year, we posted about Project Dolphin, an effort to measure the number of keystrokes you make as you IRC, email, program, whatever. Now, Wes N. a.k.a c3 writes with a largish update from the project's homepage, excerpting:
To this end, Dolphin has found itself its own dedicated server that serves as a home that is now (finally) suitably equipped to handle the growth we want to see, and fully expect. Previous participants will notice that this site itself has been fully redesigned and revamped toward a more professional look, while remaining commercial free in the original spirit of the project.At the very core, this is a research project for its designers. It's made by geeks and it's made for geeks. The positive feedback received over the last few months since its initial launch has ensured that it will continue along it's current path of growth in the spirit of fun and experimentation for the forseeable future. (end from website) The new version of project-dolphin's Pulse is due to come out any time now. The new version is supposed to have a few bug fixes and how loads of new features. to check how the progress is coming along check out The development website some of the new features include . Typing Activity tab, Keystroke Frequencies chart , and alot of other neat stuff check it out on the website or goto irc.project-dolphin.net #projectdolphin on IRC."
"Arch" is adjective, verb and noun in one. When it comes to replacing CVS, Subversion is not the only game in town. We posted in May about the even-more-ambitious arch revision control system. Now, bshanks writes: "Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system (slashdot article here), needs some monetary help."
Looks like the judge agreed that the site was meant as a joke, even if he did end up cashing in - good for him, but I don't think I'll go into business being out of work :)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
That is wierd and funny! Now I've typed 57... No 66... No 75... No 84... Eeeerh, 98... DAMN nevermind...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Hands up if you saw this coming from the start.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
This person has been typing an average of 305 keystrokes a minute since May 31.
THAT'S 5.1 KEYSTROKES A SECOND, NON STOP, FOR TWO MONTHS.
And you thought that you didn't have a life.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Could this perhaps be stealth R&D for SourceForge 4.0, which might perhaps act as a front-end for all types of source maintenance tools? Given VA's past record, they're not apt to be that savvy. Perhaps Taco et. al. are just trying to convince upper management that they need to do something Real Soon Now. Perhaps they desire to have said higher powers become so disgusted with /. that they will decide to sell it to someone like Salon or NYT so that the editorial staff can finally become real journalists like they always wanted.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
At least keystrokes are sometimes productive. Check out The Kill Everyone Project for a truly pointless exercise in mouse-click-counting. I used to be in the top 100, before those were all in the millions.
My deviantArt site
"Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system . . . needs some monetary help."
He should just make a website or something.
Steve
Little Timmy has a terminal disease. But a large corporation has pledged to donate $0.000000000000001 to fulfill Little Timmy's (TM)for every keystroke you make wish. You help by typing 23 hours a day, leaving a book over your keyboard,etc.
I am grateful to supporters for the purchases and contributions received so far.
I'm still a rather far from having enough to stay on-line, but the contributions so far suggest that there is a chance.
The problems faced by arch aren't unique. Whenever I've talked to those more senior engineers who are my friends and who have lots of "open source" involvement, they say "We're hearing this same sad story from a large number of very talented hackers.".
The botttom line: please do contribute to arch. It really is a fiscal emergency and your support is much appreciated. But in addition to sending support, please also send a short, polite note to your favorite budgeted manager or exec at an open source or free software friendly company. Point out to them that you are doing their job and spending money in a way that will benefit them. Ask them to be more proactive in supporting free software researchers, including working on their host organizations to establish some winning policies in this regard.
Perhaps the problem is the overinsistence on advertising the products as free software as opposed to advertising them as useful products that can be licensed, for a price, at whatever terms the buyer wishes. The problem appears similar to that solved by Sleepycat.
The claims of hackerlab and arch are that they are technically superior solutions to important subareas of computer science. This is precisely what Sleepycat claims for Berkeley DB. As a GPLed library, hackerlab already qualifies as a product that cannot be used commercially unless the distributor wishes to distribute the source code for the application under the GPL. If hackerlab really has value, that ought to be enough to pry some money to continue its support. Similar considerations should apply to arch if it was designed properly.
I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.
FS/OS has a totally different model. It certainly needs funding, because pgmrs gotta have their Twinkies&Jolt [or is that now Carob&Gingsing?] :)
This funding comes _internal_ to the organization or individual.
They have a burning need for the code, so will fund it's creation.
This burning need drives the code creation, not some prospective
market. It is very likely that the code will meet the need [ROI]
-- not always the case in the commercial market.
The tricky bit with FS/OS becomes what to do with the code. The code [or more likely embedded data] might be so valuable that it is a competitive advantage. This code will never be licenced and guarded like the crown jewels. The code may be so duplicatable that you might as well give it away for the goodwill. Or now, thanks to Mr Gates, some managers will consider trying to sell the code. This usually proves awkward, since the producing entity usually looks more like a customer than a saleman, and will need all sorts of new functions.
The FS/OS model breaks down when there is no burning need, when the code becomes the crown jewels, or when people see no goodwill in publishing. I would have said that FS/OS isn't good for large GUI bloatware because no-one has that kind of burning need. But the existence of both Gnome and KDE proves that the World is a big place, and people have all sorts of needs and motivations.
In the specific case of SCM software, I would expect that a large organization that writes lots of software would have "the burning need". IBM, NASA, RedHat, the USDoD, MS, Oracle, SAP, CA, and looser organizations around Linux and *BSD come to mind. Many of these probably already have SCM in the "crown jewels" category, and the commercial software houses certainly aren't about to release code -- they're all about selling it. IBM might release code, and RedHat certainly would. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see RedHat fund `arch`. Patronage is not ignoble.
Yes, but that underfunds the projects. You can see this clearly when Microsoft can sell lots of buggy software and of the best OSS developers can't earn a decent salary.
I'd love to see a new license, that could be called the fGPL. That would be the "Funded GPL". To be able to use fGPLd programs you'll HAVE to contribute some small amount of money to the fGPL foundation. You'll not be required to pay for any individual fGPL software, just a plain simple yearly $10 or $20 charge. And you will be able to distribute exactly where that money goes, among all the different projects. If you can't pay $20 a year it will be no problem, just a bit penalty: all fGPL software would be free as in beer once the year passes (old releases).
The money paid to the developers would only cover salaries and some expenses that are needing to continue developement. So if any proyect gets over-funded, you'll be noticed that you must reasign some of your credits.
It'd always be free as in freedom. We only need to bring some beer for that to happen. It'll also kill the anti OSS argument that the system is for comunists or anti-american. I know that is FUD, but does your representatives know that? It will also kill most of the FUD targeted at OSS and will also bust developement to unknown levels.
What do we need for this to happen?
To have the Linux Kernel, the Red Hat distro, mplayer, X and gcc (for example) adopting the fGPL for the next releases. After that, we'll see most every GPLd program adopting the fGPL. After that, you'll start to see how much sense it made to pay $20 a year. And even the ones that can't pay (if any) will be able to use the software (though 1 year old, but their hardware si severla years old for sure).
This is my opinion. I'd gladly pay the $20, as long as EVERYONE ELSE pays their $20. That's why we don't see many donations now: because you have this filling everyone else is just waiting for a fool like you to contribute to project X in order to save it.
unfinished: (adj.)
Just a side note to my other post.
I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.
It doesn't work well for two reasons:
1 - Market price reflects value when you can exclude people from using it if they don't pay a price. In any other case it means free-riding. This is why taxes are not optional (though the problem with taxes is you don't get to choose what public goods you do fund).
2 - Distributed development and a lack of a formal structure in the organizations: "Hey, pay me some money, i promse to keep working on this project!" is not good enough. There must be some way to make sure where the money goes and that it's used for that porpuse. This may not look like a problem but it is. For example, people are bidding to open the sources to Blender. But what happens if they don't reach the 100k limit? Donations are not good enough in the sense that companies try not to donate but prefer to fund (meaning the developer just can't do whatever he likes with the money).
That's about it. The misconceptions about the "market and it's benefits" are so widespread, but not their limitations. So I felt like posting my view (which is by no means different than what an economist will tell you)
unfinished: (adj.)
There's a simple solution to this dilemma, which is, don't make your products open source if you want to make money out of it. Free software is great for writing operating systems, but only Stallman has ever claimed it is the be all and end all of software development. Note that you can write open software without giving away the source, simply by documenting the file formats and protocols. I don't respect companies that don't do this anyway, as it implies that they feel they need artificial lockin to stay afloat rather than just producing quality software.
Having said all this, I have a problem with Tom Lord asking for donations, and ditto for Rob Levin with openprojects.net. There are countless open source projects in the world, many of which are very important. The Linux kernel, KDE and so on are all huge projects, yet I don't see them begging for cash. I also write open source software, but I do it in my spare time, and delegate work that I cannot handle, because my projects are by necessity non commercial. No project should be so dependant on one person that they have to work on it full time. This goes for writing source control systems, or running IRC networks. I think projects should either be non commercial, in which case you have a paying job during the day and work on it in your spare time, or you figure out a way of making money from it (ie by keeping the source closed).
I don't see any good way, or any good reason, for attempting to make money directly from donations for open source projects. BitMover has got the right idea, they are getting mindshare and free testing by giving away their product to free software developers, but charging for it for commercial operators. They've figured out a way to tread the line, but most don't.