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IT Giants Accused of Exploiting Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "A top European Commission official has accused major IT players such as IBM, HP and Sun of using the open source community as mere subcontractors rather than encouraging them to develop independent commercial products. Jesús Villasante, head of software technologies at the commission, said: 'The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals. Open source communities need to take themselves seriously and realise they have contribution to themselves and society. From the moment they realise they are part of the evolution of society and try to influence it, we will be moving in the right direction.'"
But aren't they also helping Open Source by increasing it's popularity? They are huge companies that carry a lot of weight, and they can get people to adopt it who wouldn't have thought to before. Which can bring in more developers through increased recognition of the movement.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
From the moment they realise they are part of the evolution of society and try to influence it, we will be moving in the right direction
Sorry, but no. The *real* moment OSS will be moving in the right direction, is when the OSS movement works out that source is nothing, operational hardware is everything, and getting that hardware into the hands of people who will use it is more important than any and all of the above.
OSS means Hardware Rules.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think someone is taking himself - and open source - too seriously.
People write code because they enjoy it.
99.9% of the time what they do has no meaningful impact on 99.9% of existance.
People who write code because they think they're going to change the world never do.
--
Toby
He seems to forget a lot of OS software gets coded today by people who get a check for it. If half of the devellopers on a big project are paid by corporations, is it that difficult that the project does what the corporations want?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
The OS community (and those who appreciate and respect it - like many on slashdot) seem to be pleased when there is some big name take-up on open source software.
When you write software for pleasure, you like others to use it.
When others make loads of money from it, the feeling is mixed.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
Everyone who contributes to open source has their own adjenda. Private individual programmers may just love using the community software, business may just love the low price tag. Who can complain when everyone (open) wins?
__
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Big vendors may well presnt themselves as an open source "portal", saying "OK - you want open source; this is our IBM open source product..." but this is only slightly harmful now. I still believe the future development of open source is in the hands of individuals who are relatively uninfluenced by big business interests, focussing instead on the technology, and just making a better product. Plus, the open source community has this ingrained ethic about doing it yourself - the ability to fork at any time on a principled issue acts as a sort of safety valve.
I guess an analogy is two fish swimming in a stream - at the moment the shark of big business is swimming alongside the remora of open source in the same direction, but should things change, both will take their gained advantages from the arrangement and swim away in different directions once more.
However corporations package it, the community is strong to its principles and will not be subverted for capitalism. Contrary to what Villasante says, the open source community does not need to actively work to achieve social change - by its very nature any success it will accrue will do that job for it.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Business is moving in the (right-wrong, pick one) direction are no more useful than 'all lawyers suck'(bad example) or 'fish is good for everyone'.
"The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals."
To be fair, although the multinationals do have a lot to thank the OSS community for, I think the OSS community has a lot to thank the multinationals for in return. Take Open Office, where would that project be without Sun buying StarDivision in 1999 and open sourcing StarOffice 5.2 in 2000?
Personally I feel that the current relationship is symbiotic and works well. Sure in the future the OSS community should probably become less reliant on the multinationals, as long as they don't bite the hand that's fed them.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
it boils down to "code for food, shelter, amusement"... Those open source programmers, helpers do it to earn a living, doing what they like to do, and in return get money, which allows them to live where they want to. The return for multi's is working software done by motivated workers.
The side effect is that the code is also usable by third parties, even competitors (remember who ships samba with their unix products, or who ships linux with their hardware).
If open source is a public interest thing, the correct way of sponsoring public things is with taxes.
So Politicians have the right tool to drive open source if they want.
...why on earth does he expect IBM, HP or Sun to encourage development of independent commercial software products - products that would compete with those offered by the IBM, for instance?
The owls are not what they seem
Don't believe him. He's trying to turn us against IBM. Look at what happened to Anakin.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Subcontractors? Since when are subcontractors usually not paid? Open source developers are free labour, simply put.
The article definitely oversimplifies the point. Of course there are instances of the commercial players abusing the open source community, but likewise there are also plenty of examples of where the relationship really works to the benefit of the community.
Surely each open-source commercial tie-up needs to be evaluated on its individual merits.
I think Red Hat's arrangement with Fedora Core is pretty good. Fedora Core - great community operating system. Every other year Red Hat stick it in a box, say ooh it's certified and offer support, and sell it.
Each of those corporations has made major contributions to open source. If they were simply "using" it, they would not have made these contributions and investments. For example, the first cross-platform port and first 64-bit port of the kernel were by HP (DEC at the time). IBM has released Eclipse and made major contributions to both the kernel and multiple projects.
Does this individual have an agenda? Is he anti-American? Is this an excuse to counter those that oppose Microsoft as it is an American company? In other words they should be able to use Microsoft and open source equally as both are controled by American companies?
Gee. If only Stallman had thought of it that way.
KFG
This is because university is a mainstream cult now. You must go, or else. The kind of people that would never have had a technical job in the past, are now telling you what to do because they have the kind of degree required by .. the people who have the same degree.
You have absolutely no idea what kind of bullshit I have to go through to earn a living.
Maybe that's simply because you aren't very good at what you do.
... as long as the giants don't get exclusive ownership of the code. And if the the code was developed with their funding and remains in the public domain, it is they who are getting "exploited".
Wall? Meet head. Head, wall. Have fun you two.
KFG
Richard Stallman might disagree with you.
Is anyone else sick of hearing about SCO. (That was a lame attempt at a joke. I did RTFA.)
I'm sorry, but that's just utter crap. The reason people from a university get employed is because:
1) It shows they have the concentration to sit through several years of education, so there's less chance of them quitting within a few months
2) It shows they have learnt basic software engineering skills that many geeks do not learn by themselves, such as UML.
Another common arrangement is where a company like IBM employs the open source developers directly.
Companies that independently develop open source "products" generally are the weakest from the point of view of business.
I think Villasante's problem is neatly summed up in this statement:
Villasante seems to think of "open source" as a kind of industry sector or group of companies. But it is just a way of licensing software, and open source will continue to be a "complete mess" in the sense of not having a single business model. But among business models, subcontracting is one of the best for open source firms.
In different words, the people who are confused is the EU politicians and administrators. But what else is new?
(Taken from a presentation I made explaining open source as a development model for large businesses)...
A common misconception about open source is that because it is "free" it is somehow a charity operation where programmers work bene-vola because they want "to contribute".
This is, however, wrong. When Adam Smith said: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest", he was accurately describing a world in which self-interest creates mutually-beneficial structures.
Open source contributors are attracted for different reasons, depending on how far they understand and identify with the technology at hand. We can identify the self-interest of each role, while seeing that the overall structure serves everyone:
* "Users" will evangelise (seeking security in the company of others using the same technology).
* "Power users" will help others who have problems (seeking the kudos that comes from helping others).
* "Pundits" will discuss the technology in public forums (seeking the fame that comes from being able to accurately identify trends and future winners).
* "Insiders" will take on parts of the testing process (seeking better familiarity with a technology that may become an important part of their skill set).
* "Players" will delve into the technology itself, taking on smaller roles in the process (seeking the kudos and fame that can come from being on a winning team).
* "Key players" will take on major roles in the project (seeking to impose their ideas, turn a small project into a major success, or otherwise earn a global reputation).
* "Patrons" will provide financial support to the project (looking to sell services, often to the users, that require the technology to succeed and be widely used).
The naive view of open source focuses only on the players, ignoring the wider economy of interests. A successful open source project must attract and support all these classes of people (and others, such as the "troll", who vocally attacks the project in public forums, thus stiffening the resolve of the users and pundits who defend it).
Thus we can understand the needs of each role:
* Users need a pleasant and impressive product so they can feel proud about showing it to others.
* Power users need forums and mailing lists where they can answer questions.
* Pundits need pre-packaged press releases, insider tips, and the occasional free lunch. Some controversy also helps.
* Insiders need regular releases, frequent improvements, and forums where they can propose ideas for the project.
* Players need extension frameworks where they can write their (often sub-standard) code without affecting the primary project.
* Key players need badges of membership, and access to the right tools and support.
* Patrons need a high-quality and stable product that supports their services and additional products.
The only people working full time, and usually professionally, on an open source project are the key players. All the others will take part in the project as a side-effect of their on-going work or hobbies.
While a traditional software company must pay everyone in this economy except the users, an open source economy must only pay the key players, who make up perhaps 2-5% of the total. Further, the key players will work for significantly less than the market rate, since they also derive a real benefit from working on successful projects, which I call the open source "payload". The most important part of a future programmer's CV is the section titled "Open Source Projects". This is the payload. It translates directly into dollars, proportional to the impact and importance of the open source projects involved.
When compensation plus payload does not cover the cost of working on a project (in terms of loss of compensation for alternative work), the key player will suffer "burnout" after 12-18 months, more or less depending on the person's tenacity.
My blog
"The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals"
Big corporations getting free labor. Who would have thought they would take advantage of that? The CEOs, CTOs, etc. must be laughting their way to the bank when they see how many people are willing to do their work for free.
Bears shit in the woods, the Pope wears a funny hat, and in Soviet Russia, Open Source Exploits IT Giants!
What, you expect me to call Jesus a liar?
ps - funny, not troll.
If anything, commercial backing helps keep projects focused. One of the great things about OSS is that anyone can start a project, however far too often you end up with 10 separate understaffed projects all working on the same goal and in many cases the differences could be bridged, but everyone wants things done absolutely their way. In the end, development drags on, everything takes longer than it should and the product suffers.
When you have a abundant resources and effective project management things can often turn out better in the end. The community loses nothing and everybody wins. The corporation receives a top-quality product in a timely fashion and the community receives some excellent source. OSS is further legitimized in the corporate world - which is absolutely necessary in getting anyone to even consider abandoning Microsoft - and more OSS programmers get jobs where what they do during the day helps the side-projects they work on in the evening.
Kind of funny stance when you think of The Commission's push for software patents.
The European Commissions worries about the Open Source Community? Stop software patents and we are fine!
Read the whole article and it becomes quite clear what Villasante's intentions are.
"Villasante used his keynote speech earlier in the day to express concerns about the European software industry."
"What I think is that Europe doesn't have a software industry today -- the only one we have today is in America. In the future we may have China or India. We should decide if we will have a European software industry in the future," he said.
"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today," Villasante said.
Villasante is interested in exploiting the open source software community to weaken the non-EU software companies. His stated goal is to create a European Software industry. He can't just create one out of nothing, but he can begin spreading the idea that big evil companies are exploiting poor programmers all across the world. Once he's sold that, he'll look around and ask rhetorically, "What should we do?... why... I think we need to legislate to protect the poor unorganized software developers from these evil corporations!" Legislation to "protect" open source will have the opposite impact. This is pure buerocratic rhetoric.
If we make software for commercial reasons, it is evil. If we fund open source, it is evil.
This is my sig.
And software patents will make things better for OSS exactly how?
Check this out (cache), it's the same article title but the cache shows a different outcome. Did IBM pay off someone at ZDNet to re-write it?
Not all of us - I get paid to write (mostly) open source software by a small Danish company. Although it is "multinational" too - we have one man in England and two in USA.
In Murphy We Turst
It's funny he didn't mention the likes of Novell, which is doing the same thing. It even setup Novell Forge to get people to write software for their SuSE OS with Mono. Granted a couple cool projects have come out of it, however if you are going to throw stones at a couple companies you have throw stones at them all.
This some more like America bashing than a ligitimate claim.
Nowadays we often _have_ to be "mere subcontractors" because of the ever looming threat of software patents. If the commission wants us to be more independent then create the legal framework to allow and and stop pushing for software patents.
I don't know who in the EC wrote the directive but it certainly does NOT encourage open source developers to become more indepentent. It scares developers into only developing under the protection of their feudal lord (ie, a large company who can afford and is interested in wasting money on patents and patent litigation)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
I might be tricking myself with this, but one of the reasons I tend to stay away from koffice is that I really don't like having to load all of he kde infrastructure underneath in order to actually load it. If I was using KDE in the first place I wouldn't care as much because that runtime environment would already be loaded. I actually use WindowMaker, however, because in comparison it's so fast with most simple tasks and I can get away from all of the extra stuff that tends to be loaded underneath.
In effect, I spend a lot of time looking for lightweight alternatives to run in WindowMaker rather than something that's going to (often unnecessarily) load the entire KDE runtime when I open it, not to mention requiring a truckload of KDE dependencies to simply install it. OpenOffice isn't exactly lightweight, but using it is still consistent with the habit of not wanting to load the KDE runtime.
I suggested I might be tricking myself, because I don't know how the generic KDE runtime stuff compares with whatever it is that OpenOffice loads internally on its own. I'd be interested to see a more formalised comparison for all of us who steer away from KDE unless we really have to use it.
We know we're being used. We like being used. It brings us fame and glory and the respect of our peers.
[irony]
I know: I think all those people working for non-profits or for the European Commission should instead turn their efforts toward running a business.
After all, those evil business people are just using the Red Cross, the universities, and the governments of the world.
[/irony]
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
My best example is Sun with their Solaris OS. Another example is their OpenSolaris approach.
Now, I only know of these two from mind because I happen to like Solaris. But there is more; like Microsoft which is considering to open some of its code.
And all of this has been set in motion by the Open Source idea, and the way its being promoted (like Linux, *BSD, etc.).
"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today," Villasante said.
But isn't that also just the beauty of it ?
For a while there, I almost thought we were going to run out of opinions about what the open source community is, or should be. Boy, was *THAT* close.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Openoffice was only opened up after KOffice had started. I think without OOo linux office suites would actually be in a better place - koffice is cleaner, less bloated, and better documented
KOffice- or more specifically, KWord- crashed horribly on the few occasions I tried to use it (circa early 2002).
To be fair, this may have been a beta version, but I doubt it. And it happened when I was changing the font on a very basic document; the kind of bug you'd think would have been caught. Irritating as heck, especially 15 minutes before an assignment deadline.
I've avoided KOffice like the plague ever since. If OOo hadn't been available, I'd probably be rebooting into Windows to use MS Office a lot more often.
I wasn't particularly impressed with KWord's look-and-feel either; it felt slightly cheap for some reason. OTOH, that's a criticism I'd also apply to Windows XP; how on *earth* did MS end up designing something so toy-like and yet unprofessional-looking next to the Apple UI?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Doh Ray Mee Bah So Latte Doh
Yeah, Richard Stallman might disagree with me, too. But that is okay, because I often disagree with Richard Stallman....
>> "From the moment they realise they are part of the evolution of society and try to influence it, we will be moving in the right direction."
A lot of ideological assumptions are in that statement, which not everyone shares. Such as: corporations are inherently bad; small is always better than big; etc., etc.
Whatever relationship exists between open source developers and corporations is there because those open source developers want it to be there. Have any developers been conscripted to labor for dorporations? Have they been abducted off the street and tied to their desks?
Sometimes I think these people believe the Industrial Revolution was a mistiake, that we'd all be happier living in little stone huts in little villages, toiling in the fields and milking the cows, all the while smiling appreciatively at all the green grass. Of course, they'd be in charge because they know best. OR, so they keep telling us.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
1) It shows they have the concentration to sit through several years of education, so there's less chance of them quitting within a few months.
Nice so they can safely be dead wood/office drone, they might even fit in a japanese company if they stop breathing
2) It shows they have learnt basic software engineering skills that many geeks do not learn by themselves, such as UML.
Yeah... it show they passed the test... not that they understood the questions
EU bureaucrats know it best. They know what the "right direction" is, so they certainly can tell who needs to do what so "we" move in the right direction. One more reason why the US leads in and the EU has 'authorities' talking about technology.
Suppose some guy is laboring in a factory making widgets; selling the widgets is making the factory owner rich but the people who actually make them are struggling economically.
Let's leave aside the fact that this paradigm has always been a crappy one. You can't look at this situation in isolation. It makes a difference for example what the laws are and who, in practice, gets to make them. It makes a difference what the labor and widget markets are like, and whether the skills needed to compete really are commodity skills. It makes a difference how the boss treats the workers in general.
Leaving aside the fact that such a paradigm pretty much leads to pointless arguments based on incompatible assumptions, the the fact that it does incite these arguments is instructive. How you react to it depends on whether you are socialist in temperment or capitalist.
The Socialist temperment in its extreme form automatically looks for an fixates on anything smacking of inequity. The Capitalist temperment is quick to dismiss the possiblity that inequity can exist; any economic transaction is in their view tautologically fair.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
He Said:
He Meant: He Said: He Meant: He Said: He Meant: He Said: He Meant: He Said: He MeantOr am attributing to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
People write open source software for a number of reasons, the best being that they *need* that particular bit of kit for what they do.
So what if someone else makes billions out of it as well, good luck to them, that just increases the popularity and encourages others to invest, look at, support and contribute, all of which help the original author do what he does.
It also encourages others to write software in a similar manner, all of a sudden you have entire operating environments of free software, from the ground to the sky which the original author can use. Everyone who contributes to free software gets more out of it than they put in, who cares if others also get everything free as well, copying information costs bugger all.
Deleted
I'm getting sick of Americans trashing America.
I'm also getting sick of people on Slashdot trashing America.
I'm also sick of people on Slashdot trashing Slashdot (figure that one out).
There really is nothing quite like sitting at dinner with an American girl explaining to her dining companions, all or almost all American, what a bunch of heathens we are, and how much we could learn from those overseas. What really bothers me is that this is intended to somehow exempt them from judgement. Americans explaining how dumb their countrymen are really do not sound any more intelligent for having done so.
Perhaps it's just that big companies apparently seem to donate code that independant Open-Source developers enjoy working on? Surely it must be since otherwise, those independant coders simply would not work on the code.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I actually went and read the article, and (surprise, surprise), Villasante is really not saying what Slashdot reports that he's saying.
If you read the entire article, he's not specifically complaining that corporations are abusing the free coding of open source. What he is saying is that the corporations who release open source are also very responsible for lobbying for a lot of things that are later likely to inhibit open source development in the future. His working example is the European intellectual property legislation, that would ultimately inhibit open source in the wider view but is still being campaigned for by the likes of IBM and Sun.
His point is that open source is the future of the software industry for Europe, yet by putting these laws in place that will give more power to the multi-national corportions, Europe is inhibiting its own future software industry.
He's suggesting that open source developers are happily working with these corporations at ground level, but the same organisations might ultimately lead to a less productive open source model. This is what he means about the open source communities not taking himself seriously.
I'm inclined to agree with him in many respects. Being able to develop in conjunction with businesses is a win-win scenario in terms of actually getting software developed, but we shouldn't necessarily ignore what else these businesses are doing just because they're cooperating in one aspect.
Yes, and that is the strength of it. "Many people do lots of different things". Zillions of ideas are tried out, the vast majority fails, a few bring forward the state of the art. It is evolution in action. It is how the capitalist market is supposed to work, except when we let it be subverted by private monopolies.
He's not trashing America, he's not even trashing American companies, he's trashing *companies*.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Open Source is like a special kind of bank account, where every investor receives an amount of interest dependent on the total amount ever deposited by all investors {even if since withdrawn}.
.....
If some company using, say, exim for their e-mail servers find they need to make an improvement to exim, then every exim user can potentially benefit from that improvement -- and, just as importantly, nobody can ever undo that improvement.
Or to put it another way: When you light an unlit candle from a lit one, the room does not get any darker.
Almost all the "old" rules of economics -- and the political theories which followed on from them, including Capitalism and Marxism -- were written in an Age of Scarcity, where the demand for goods outstripped supply. As the supply of certain goods is beginning to exceed the demand, we are moving out of the Age of Scarcity and into an Age of Plenty. New rules will have to be written to deal with this. Simply creating artificial scarcity has already been shown not to work
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I see this as one of the strengths of open source. Lots of people are doing lots of different things. There isn't a plan that everyone's following. That's how nature works, and that's how open source works. And it seems to work just splendidly in both cases.
If I hire you as a sub-contractor, what you write isn't your property, it's mine. If, OTOH, you are an open-source programer, then what you write is shared by you and me. And if, as is normally the case, the code is made publicly available, it could be considered a charitable contribution, just as if you requested that some or all of your paychecks be sent to UNICEF or something.
Admittedly, current accounting practices aren't set up to handle these types of values transfers, but that doesn't mean that they aren't occurring.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
"A top European Commission official..." Wait a minute... This is the same commission that hands the IT multinationals the patent guns to kill innovativion in SMEs and free software, right? "IT giants exploiting open source" is a good thing. It helps grow the free software ecosystem. No slavery involved, just people doing what pleases them. Nothing "uneuropean, controlled by US multinationals" here.
OK, I actually read the article and he's got some good points. However the whole reason that these companies have a lot of sway with the open source community is that they are actively participating within it! I agree with him that the open source community could use some added independence and the solution is simple: the EU should increase their participation within open source community!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Can't just leave something alone, has to tell everyone how to live their lives and try to make them change to fit his view of the world. Or is that just all French people?
Ah well frenchie, us liberal free wheeling, free market brits are coming to take over the EU presidency, you just keep an eye on your subsidies.
Deleted
http://www.kontraband.com/show/show.asp?ID=1660
We have had this discussion over and over in the past. Somebody should go and tell this bureaucrat to think, listen and learn before he opens his mouth. That way we will saved a nuissance and he won't have yet another reason to be embarrassed.
From the moment the EC realises it is part of the evolution of society and starts to give real support to FOSS, we will be moving in the right direction.
Philosophers have to cure many intellectual diseases in themselves before arriving at the notions of common sense.
and they will tell you they aren't. Geez, do we just hate big corporations or what?
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
To a large degree you are correct, though your wording is what generates the negative responses.
Having a properly educated employee is the key to what will make them useful in whatever field they go into. The problem is that most schools have lost sight of what a "proper education" really is.
The problem I have with the college/university system is that for most majors, the number of "in major" courses tends to be fairly small compared to what is required for the degree. Having to take non-major classes is useful IF the non-major classes contribute to the career the student wants to go into. If you are required to take a lot of non-major classes just to get students into those classes because of lack of interest, that's where the system fails.
Many businesses require a degree, not because it would make them a better employee, but because of obsolete ideas that indicate that someone with a degree has a better chance of being a good employee. The level of education in the elementary/high school level is also very low, so a college education may be required just to have students be ready for the real world, which is probably a more realistic reason.
But the worst problem is the idea that an MBA means that someone will make a better manager/executive than someone who works his/her way up from the bottom. That a high GPA is an indicator about how well someone will do in a company, and in some companies, you need a high GPA just to get a job there. These two things are why most businesses end up failing due to poor management. Knowing the right people, or having an MBA may be useful, but I've seen a lot of people with business degrees get promoted and then destroy a positive work environment. People who would work 14 hours a day willingly and enjoy it end up getting harassed by these business majors for not meeting their perceptions of what makes a good employee.
What a poser idiot. I loathe self-proclaimed open source experts who couldn't name more than 3 or 4 projects if pressed without an internet connection.
"IBM, HP, and Sun" are accused of "using the open source community as subcontractors". Guess who is NOT mentioned. BSD TCP/IP stack used in Windows 2000? IE based on NCSA Mosaic? Hmmm... The FUD is rather thick today, a little clumpier than usual.
Nobody is "using" the open source community as subcontractors, although some of the largest names in IT have been exploiting it for years. But that's OK. Just as greed is the fuel of capitalism, exploitation is what makes the open source system work.
If you make something of value that people want, and you offer to give it away, there will surely be takers. It's hard to see who would have a problem with that. Well, maybe not so hard after all.
Your precisely correct. Look at the work of the OpenBSD developers to open up hardware documentation. Recently they have worked on (since the vendors will not work with) Intel's Centrina and Adaptec's RAID controllers.
The Linux crowd often doesn't get it. NDA == EVIL.
He's not trashing America, he's not even trashing American companies, he's trashing *companies*.
Shrug.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Probably one of those left-wing guys who thought Open Source is this great new community thing against those nasty American corporations.
Now he finds that many American corporations support Open Source in some way or other. And, due to the nature of Open Source, vice versa.
Damn! There goes his theory.
Open Source isn't the revival of communism after all.
Just because you tag the word "American" onto it doesn't mean it applies to all over America.
Although I always thought the US was a bit of a plutocracy.
How much do you want to bet that the people commenting against the article are just pissed off Americans who hate Europe?
I wonder what fraction of open source coders *really* are Americans?
The parent poster said "he's not even trashing American companies" -- I think the quote stands against that assertion quite nicely.
"Actually it was more likely to be drug prohibition that did it."
/ 10/1238?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&f ulltext=Actual+Causes+of+Death+in+the+United+State s%2C+2000&searchid=1117628499274_996&stored_search =&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=jama
That argument would make more sense if the legal drugs in the US didn't kill more than the illegal ones.
Tobbaco use is the #1 cause of preventable deaths.
Alcohol use is preventable killer #3.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/291
Maybe Villasante should get together with Enderle and decide whose FUD to believe.
opensource has to be really open indeed !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Agreed. Competition is all well and good, it's what makes free markets work. But I'm rather tired of this "must balance the USA" mentality in some EU politicians. I guess they're sad because without a constitution and a United States of Europe they can't have the world's attention turned to *their* political scandals.
If he has a problem with big multinationals, then he can say it without tacking "American" on there. As if there weren't any big European multinational companies. Granted, some of them have their headquarters in Switzerland, not part of the EU, but many others do belong in the EU.
In my opinion, wether something is good or bad doesn't rest so much on wether it's American or not. I'll leave Princess Bunhead to explain:
Princess Bunhead: "You'll never get away with this, Black Helmet Man! You are bad! You are bad and we are good! Your badness will be the end of you, and our goodness will be our triumph! Bad is bad - good is good! Bad-bad-good-bad! Good-good-bad-good, bad! Good."
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Of course open means out. No worries, mate. That's eCon for you. But judging by results, I'd say that one Open Office.org, one PostgreSQL or even one MySQL community edition mitigates a great deal of monopoly practice pain by killing off the "killer apps," from user perspective.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
How can you get anyone on the right, or the left to agree with you? ;o)
The overarching assumption of our time is that all change is the product of, and requires intent; if the intent is not in man, it must be God's. In our post-Christian [European] era, that which is not the product of the 'will' of a corporation must be that of a state entity, or else explicitly goodwill of a collection of individuals.
Natural selection is not part of such thinking. Emergent behaviour is perceived as the result of as-yet-unseen forces.
The power of FOSS is the is delivers results beyond that of the intents of the participants. The commoditisation of software spreads technology further afield. The availability of soure code does wonders for software development everywhere. By increasing the availability of resources everywhere, so must more can be down, so that the comparable harm to 'incentives' becomes a joke.
Yet the 'outcome requires intent' mentality means that the world moves steadily toward ever-stronger intellectual property regimes, and that the opposition, insofar as it comes from politicians is hopelessly idealistic, since they fail to grasp why FOSS is so very pragmatic.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Look, I code for KDE and use KDE. I truly love it. But kword had absolutely NOTHING to do with OpenOffice being created. MS makes money on 2 products (and loses on almost all the rest); Windows and Office. If not for the monopoly on those 2 products, MS would have died long ago ( their code sux, their support is horrible, they really do not have original ideas, etc. etc.).
Sun opened StarOffice in an effort to depieve MS of their monopoly. They also supported Linux for quite some time thinking that much of the sale would be in the MS market.
OpenOffice/StarOffice is making inroads into industry. It is obvious that this idea is working the way that Sun meant it to. The Linux route, though, has been killing Sun as well as Windows. They never thought that Linux could compete in numbers (financial or benchmarks).
With all that said, I do use and like kword. But every so often I use OO as it gets the job done nicely.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Big Business puts own profits ahead of other people's.
Big Business recomends using its own products ahead of competitors.
Well bugger me backwards with a minimac, who'd have thunk it! Companies using other people's generosity to line their own coffers. What ever is the world coming to?
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
Some sites used to provide maps... but I don't see any at the moment.
Villasante used his keynote speech earlier in the day to express concerns about the European software industry.
"What I think is that Europe doesn't have a software industry today -- the only one we have today is in America. In the future we may have China or India. We should decide if we will have a European software industry in the future," he said.
Villasante argued that open source is vital to the development of the European software industry...
So, something that Villasante considers vital to the greater good of his community (the E.U.) is threatened by outsiders (American Multinational Corporations). So, what does anyone do in this situation? Go on the offense and claim that the outsiders are evil, whether they truly are evil or not. If they are not evil then spin something to make it appear that they are evil.
Surprising? Not really. I wish the world could be viewed in such broad black and white strokes as good/evil, but it can't. But, it seems to me that Villasante is merely trying to bring to the forefront the death of the European software industry. Whether this is true or not I have no idea, but if he believes that Open Source is vital to rebuilding the European software industry, then of course he will try to break ties to that evil of all evils, American Multinationals.
Many would agree that Richard Stallman, with his GNU manifest, has in fact initiated the Free Software movement, that later also yielded the opensource movement.
I wouldn't argue with this, but I'm not sure it contradicts the previous assertion (People who write code because they think they're going to change the world never do.) because I don't see that it was code-writing that did it.
The public-key encryption algorithm from RSA may be a better example of world-changing code, but I'm not sure it counts either.
If I'm missing something(s) obvious, I'm sure someone will let me know.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
If we make software for commercial reasons, it is evil. If we fund open source, it is evil.
Getting sick of stupid people treating Europe as if it was a single person, summarizing extremely complicated discussion as a one-liner, and saying populistic things about it.
Grow up and see the world around you !
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
from article:
"IBM says to a customer, 'Do you want proprietary or open software?' Then [if they want open source] they say 'OK, you want IBM open source.' It is [always] IBM or Sun or HP open source,"asserted Villasante,
There's only ONE kind of open source software. By the very definition of open source, "IBM open source software"(if there is such a thing) lets you do the same things as all the other similarly licensed software.
Does IBM push certain kind of open source software and no others?.. YEAH! And there's good reason for that. Supporting a SUSE and RedHat Linux distros is much easier than supporting SUSE, RedHat and 30 other distros. Besides why wouldn't you push open source software that you invested heavily in developing, have intimate knowledge of and can certify its quality.
Villasante sounds like a dumbass and definitely is a nutcase and the Open Source movement does not need people like him.
"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today," Villasante said.
All it needs is good old fashioned European regulation.
We are influencing in our own little flame war way.
Compare and contrast:
"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today," Villasante said.
With:
"Firstly, I'm not responsible for software patents -- the software patent directive is managed by the director general of Internal [Market]. The opinion of the director general of Information Society [the division where Villasante works] is not necessarily the same as the director general of Internal."
Which of these is a more complete mess?
"American multinationals"? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?
These companies employ people worldwide, and are owned by shareholders worldwide. What makes them American?
True, they are listed on U.S. stock exchanges, but so are many companies that are incorportated elsewhere.
Dejan
write code or change the world?
Did you plow/plant/weed/harvest/transport the plants that you use to grind to get the flour that you used to bake the bread that you eat (or the plants that you used to feed the animal that you killed/butchered/packaged conveniently that you eat)?
Did you also invent, mine, drill, smelt, refine, design, assemble, code all the steps to get the computer that you use to post silly things like that?
I KNOW that you didn't buy the computer that I used to read your post and give it some of the attention that you wanted when you wrote it.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Extremely complicated discussion? Where exactly is the complexity? Responding to the invocation of the "American multinational" bogeyman, one gets called out for populism. Interesting.
And remember, there's more to "the world around" you than Europe.
I don't mean to start a flame war. Yes, I know this is exactly what people write before they do start a flame war.
I really mean it though, this is what my honest opinion is.
The quote for this thread is how I feel about some open source licenses of the BSD style.
I see too many companies( like Microsoft with their network BSD sockets ) taking code, not giving code back, not contributing financially to the project, and not even giving credit where credit is due.
If I spend my spare time coding for free of charge I want my work to benefit the community, not some pointy haired boss who lives in a better house than I do looking for a freebie.
I mean absolutely no offense to the BSD license or the good companies like Red Hat that give, as well as take from the open source community.
The problem is companies that use open source and dont give anything back (i.e. those who violate the GPL)
Why do companies like that NOT follow the licence anyway? Its not like the GPL requires them to Open Source whatever fancy UI they have for their router/firewall/PVR/whatever it happens to be, only the changes they have made to the open source packages they are using.
We're working (almost) for free for ibm and sun when we could send the cv to microsoft and use their operating systems. Obviously the second one is the best choice... i don't know what i've been thinking the last years.
Regards
r.
Are there restrictions on who else can package and offer support for fedora?
just because sucky lawyers are bad examples for the children is no reason for you to single them out
Here is an online version of the relevant part of the presentation:
http://imatix.net/opus/opensource.html
My blog
As long as the source is open, I don't really care who is writing it or what their motivations are.
Companies "take without giving back?".. as long as they follow the license, that's fine.
Companies encouraging open source developers to write stuff because it's cheaper for them? Again, as long as everyone involved agrees to and abides by the licenses, who cares.
Open Source software would not be as "good" today if it weren't for corporate cash. However, corporate cash has also distorted development of important packages like GCC and Linux, where minority platforms and user communities get marginalized because the developers are focused on the needs of their corporate sponsors.
Those are simply the facts of life; the needs of Red Hat, IBM, and Novell outweigh the needs of many users, simply through the application of cash. Adam Smith would be pleased.
My frustration is with companies -- big and small -- who use free and open software without attribution or support for the original author. A case in point: I've stopped updating and upgrading Jisp, my Java database engine, because too many people, ranging from Apache (who want to take ownership from me over the GPL) to SenseLogic use Jisp without even so much as a thank you. I've found closed-source products that blatantly ship my JAR file to customers -- and to add insult to injury, some of these companies send their users to me for free tech support!
I've had two commercial compiler companies and two major distributions -- including Ubuntu -- tell me that they want to use Acovea for optimization, but they don't offer any funding or support. And it isn't just corporations: How many Gentoo users have sent me a donation or code? Two. How many support requests have I had from the Gentoo community? Hundreds. Leaching from others is human nature; the corporations merely reflect the community in general.
All about me
Eff this guy. Who cares what he thinks about anything. Once again, someone who should be simply laughed out of the room is taken seriously because he's an "official".
Stop giving these government pigs credit. Give them the hate they richly deserve. Viva libertad.
Hell, he's probably only raising a stink because OSS jeapordizes his nice fat Microsoft kickbacks.
Sounds like he's just been listening to ESR and the like and never heard RMS. Had he, he'd noticed not everyone is just hacking for the good of the big companies but for themselves and everyone.
Open Source was a reaction on the, from an american view-point "too business unfriendly" Free Software, to get acceptance from and win supporters among businesses and thus make the free software more popular and ubiqous.
However in taking the descission to promote the licenses this way, one did not only distance oneseleves from the idealistic Free Software advocates, but also from the leftists, who, in the rest of the world aren't as few and unimportant as in the US. I think that one could argue that this descission was taken on a bit too US-centric arguments.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
In other words, without Richard, we'd be stuck in the 80's or early 90's where all software is commercial crap, shareware crap, and all of the power over computer users would belong to big companies - forever locking them in and controlling their computer usage.
That's funny. When I was growing up with computers in the 80's, there was TONS of Freeware, and none of this ridiculous license bickering that's argued about at least 5 times a day on Slashdot. People wrote programs, and gave them away. It was that simple. If anything, RMS killed Freeware.
This Jesús Villasante has to be one of the biggest duches ever. Dude... shut up, they're one of the only sources of INCOME you have!!! Go cut off your nose to spite your face, and when you're done go bite the hand that fed you.
Open source communities need to take themselves seriously and realise they have contribution to themselves and society.
Jigga wha...? Grammar check... it's not that hard. This is my second language too.
If EU want OS programmers to be free from major software companies EU should PAY $$$.
Free software is a nice concept, but the everyday life is not free, not even cheap.
Big companies influence OS dev because they pay (for some projects, sometimes). Of course, this is NOT a real freedom. This is just a cool modern way to make money.
I love it when Americans trash America. It means that somebody really cares about the shithole that our society is turning into and wants to see it change. People who complain that people shouldn't complain about America (Hello Mr. Bush) simply don't understand this country and those people (such as yourself) are the real traitors.
I've met a lot of talented IT folks that never went to college, and a lot of worthless ones who never went to college either. But the good ones still regret not going, because they understand that there are things you can miss when you learn in an unstructured environment, and you have opportunities to meet people and expand your skills in all sorts of areas. It's only the immature losers that bad-mouth the college education they never had. Adults who are worth working with would never be glad they missed the opportunities college offered.
I think the fallacy that a lot of these people make (both europeans and americans)is that they believe that America is so evil due to some other circumstance than the amount of power it has.
All nations are essentially corrupt and only looking out for themselves. The amount of damage that they are able to do is proportional to the amount of pull they have on the international scene.
It's easy to look at a country like Belgium today and marvel at its high average income, its low poverty rates, etc, etc, but one doesn't have to look back very far into history to find times when Belgians commited atrocities in Central Africa (ones which most Belgians I've spoken to seem to forget about when they are lecturing me on the idiocy of American foreign policy). The fact is they didn't commit these atrocities because they were at one time a less enlightened more barbaric society; they commited them because they could, because they had the power, money and ability to lay waste to whatever lied in the path to their resources and riches.
Yes, compared to the world the US commits more crimes via their foriegn policy, but it's only because they have the opportunities to commit them. When the US has fallen from its most-powerful-nation-on-the-Earth status even if Switzerland takes this position I guarantee they will become the biggest assholes on the planet.
s/soure/source/
s/down/done/
Wikileaks, no DNS
Where does the original post ever claim or treat Europe as if it was a single person?
It _IS_ a valid observation that European leaders publically trash Americans as if we are the plague of the world. And frankly, it has become an on-going theme. Perhaps with exception of UK, many European leaders vocally trash America just to get popularity votes. The prime example is that of the Germany election. What's utterly shameless and ignorant was badmouthing large American companies supporting the OSS. If IBM HP SUN and a plethora companies drop support for OSS, Who stand to lose the most? The large multi-national companies, or the users? IBM can always subcontract out to someone else, especially programming companies in China and India, while keeping the cost relatively low.
I don't think Americans are stupid. The "Weed out" process in America doesn't happen until colleges and universities while the rest of the world start at middle school or high school. There are also many factors such as the media promotion of "Stupid American" image. You are right, Americans love to compress and concentrate while being quick to judge. But that's not a sign of stupidity, just insensitivity and bluntness. And so what some Americans treat Europe as if it was a single person? European leaders treat American like a single person very very often, not take in account of the fact America is comprised of immigrants from many many countries. Maybe I should start calling Europeans stupid, see how you guys like it.
I consider myself pretty far out in terms of my ideas about open source (more or less in line with rms), but this guy is way out of the ballpark of even rms. So not only must all software be open source but it can only be used in certain ways by business?
If this is the direction that open source evangelists are heading they seem to be paralleling the popular environmentalist movement, which is no longer a movement for the environment but one against business. An evolution which abandoned myself.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
"Freeware" without the source is destined to rot and disappear.
Free Software with source, is maintained as long as there is interest, and its code and ideas can be reused in other projects.
Stallman replaced "Freeware" with the huge amounts of Free Software nowdays. And now, the users have the freedom, too.
Even if you are arguing that more software was free of charge back then, you are being rediculous.
What !?!?! Both of them !?!?! Mary and Kate...I'm de-vasted
No but, yeah but, no but...
I'm no thoroughly-read RMS scholar, but I wonder if this fear of exploitation is part of the reason for the strictness of the GPL.
Also, funny this should come up, I just read this linked to by Linux Today:
Dana Blankenhorn (an IT journalist) writes:
Whenever something goes bad in Europe, European leaders are running around saying "America this", or "America that". It's not America's fault that Europe cannot both have a cradle to the grave welfare state with guaranteed social stability and a dynamic capitalist society at the same time. It's not America's fault that France and Germany have huge unemployment rates.
All of our transatlantic problems are because of that simple quandry. Europe sees that America's trade policies are trashing its way of life. But Europe doesn't have to follow them. Europe doesn't have to have giant economic growth and doesn't have to try and become a unified alternative to America. Those are European decisions, not American ones. IF Europe wants to have a slower economy and fall behind economically but have more social stability, then let it.
What I hate is blanket statements. Americans are a bunch of heathens that should be more integrated with the world. Americans don't understand foreign countries. Americans are stupider than their more civilized European counterparts. I mean, America has more people in more countries, both in businesses and in the military, then no nation in the world has ever had. America leads in many areas of research, has a robust economy, and yet, we're "stupid".
Look at how much Europeans trash Texas. I'm no fan of that whole Southern Texas thing, but, if Texas were a country, it would be comparable to many European States in terms of economic activities. It's certainly larger!
This is my sig.
Like http://worldwide.kde.org/ and http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide.
Mada mada dane.
Actually, this article is a thinly disguised anti-American diatribe, which is what commonly comes out of Europe today when someone is dissatisfied with a particular aspect of European society or business; it's easier to blame America or American corporations for their problems than to fix them.
Of course, for the last 6 years there has been some significant truth to it, at least in the global security realm!
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
How do you get that Villasante is right about anything he said in that article?
Villasante says "Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today."
Is the Mozilla project a complete mess? Is OpenOffice.org a complete mess? Is the Linux kernel? I don't think so. Millions of people are getting their work done every day with these superb tools, two of which were donated to the open source community by big evil American software companies that Mr. Villasante likes to villify: Sun spent millions of dollars to acquire and market Star Office and turn it into a major open source project, and AOL/Netscape launched the Mozilla project which has spawned Firefox and Thunderbird, two best-of-breed internet tools that are now threatening Microsoft.
Linux itself has been aided immeasurably by paid programmers from IBM and HP and elsewhere who have added "big iron" features to the kernel to make it an enterprise class OS. We have all benefited tremendously and Microsoft is being threatened in its core growth business.
This article is nonsense. It's just another anti-American EU bureaucrat trying to say something meaningful on a panel and ending up totally putting his foot in his mouth. He even admits that he's really just worried about the flagging European software industry.
Sure, there are instances of private companies stealing open source work and trying to sell it, but they get caught from time to time, and the big guys actually are pretty conscientious about procedures. Why would IBM steal from the open source world after spending a billion dollars to promote and enhance Linux?
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Who is John Galt?
He is not saying this because he thinks open source is bad. He is implying that American corporations are getting a competitive advantage over european corporations by having a tax free source of programmers. It is just posturing for later sanctions as are now occuring in the Airbus case in Europe where our government is claiming that Europe gave tax breaks and help to Airbus which is in violation of trade agreement. It really has nothing to do with open source it is more about trade negotiations.
..has been pointing out two things that he'd like to fix with the GPLv2:
1. Patents
2. ASP solutions
As for revenue stream, no. Code, yes. You see, there's a small but big difference here:
a) I sell you my software, but I have to release it under the GPL, so the price is effectively $0. I can still sell support etc. but that's it.
b) I license you to use my software on my server as an ASP. Suddenly I can charge a commercial price for it, and I can embrace and extend it so noone can interoperate with me.
Basicly, it twists the market making you choose one specific business model simply to circumvent the GPL, and it works. Fully legal. I don't think he's going to charge for using it internally. But if what you are selling is in practise access to a GPL'd application, then yes.
The biggest problem is simply momentum. Many people do not like to license their code under terms they do not know what will be, so many have replaced the "GPLv2 or later" clause with just GPLv2. Other people have incorporated them into other projects, some have gone missing, others have died (literally), and some simply don't want to change. If you want to add code to a GPLv2-restricted project, you must also release it under GPLv2 (as GPLv3 is obviously incompatible with v2), so there's very little incentive to actually make a GPLv3 project. Maybe if you start a new project from scratch, but even then you normally want to rely on some libraries, which are likely to be GPLv2.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The GPL does not prevent anyone from making a profit from selling GPL licensed code. It only requires that you also provide the source and not limit others from doing the same. This makes it theoretically difficult to sustain a profit from it.
If they are able to sustain a profit, then it's not because the code is bringing in revenue, but because they are providing a useful service (marketting / support / hardware, whatever) that others with equal access to the source code and redistribution rights aren't able to complete.
For myself, if someone is profiting from my hard work, I'd like to encourage them to become a patron. Help contribute an income so that I can continue to provide source code that they directly benefit from. This is no different from a day job at a large coorporation, except I'd expect to have greater flexibility/independance with a patron than an employer, and I retain the copyright (neg.).
In other related news, OSDL recently announced that it has relocated most of it's workforce outside of the USA, and that all open source software projects are now in the process of being outsourced to India.
The company is investigating how to relocate it's massive software project hosting facility, sourceforge.net, to the new Indian headquarters, and how many ships it will take to transport all of the equipment and backups to the bandwidth constrained country which has public power grids controlled by microsoft servers.
Sorry, I was just having a really strange dream...
--
podz
Never reply to an AC troll. It gets modded away, and then your comment looks very stupid.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Ever hear of BSD? We could have lived in a world dominated by a truly free operating system, but instead we have to live under Stallman and his insane communist GNU manifesto. (Have you ever actually READ the gnu manifesto?)
Cripes. I am a graduate student at an Ivy league institution. I've watched equally awkard, and equally graceful American citizens, immigants, and foreign nationals.
Please don't call me a traitor for taking some pride in my country. I don't have to agree with George Bush to believe that despite American citizenship, I can be cultured, well educated, and well mannered.
We here at The Government are worried about you open-source and free software developers being exploited.
Therefore, in the interests of humanity, we take it apon ourselves to regulate, control, and licence all free software. Yes, don't worry, we don't want these companies taking advantage of your free labor, so we are going to tax these companies for their use of free software. We will keep the money for ourselves, after all, the Government IS the people, so when we make lots of money off of this, you will make lots of money off of this.
Don't worry, it will only cost you $200 a year to get your open source developers permit. Hardly a sacrafice at all! And just don't try to work on anything controversial like file-sharing and what not, otherwise we will have to revoke your licence, and perhaps send you to jail for coding without a licence.
Thanks for your support!
Your Big Brother
"THE USA is getting the most benefit from the open source community, and anything that benefits the USA is always bad. The EU has not figured out how, yet, if we cant have it, how we are going to screw it up worldwide." Dont tell me, this guy is FRENCH, right?
American multinations are, like any public company out there, greedy. Open source is a methodology for freedom. Full stop. America is losing its grip on the software/IT industry at a fairly rapid pace. What with India, China, Vietnam, Romania, etc. slowly gearing up and taking over a good portion of duties for some companies. Face it, America is not putting the amount of people through university that these other countries are. India graduates over a million engineers a year, as does China. It's just a matter of time before America is just another country on the map.
Globalization is a game that America will lose. Like open source, it cannot be stopped.
Fair enough. But then don't go spouting off how you went to an Ivy league school. It completely negates you claiming to be cultured and well educated by having to tell us so.
Didnt any of you people see google offering 4500 bucks for successful completion of open source code projects they will want to use ?
But only for students, of course.
And you people dont see Google exploiting open source as just a cheap labor pool?
Take off the rose colored glasses, for fucks sake guys..
is he ? :-) DOnt be suprised with new 'FUD'
Why do we want all coders to turn into that? If people don't want to waste their time capturing every last million dollars in value that their code produces, then whatever. It is true that the average geek is way too averse to the conflict around splitting surplus, but to say that anybody who doesn't get the most surplus s/he possibly can is some sort of tool is to impose MBA values on the rest of us.
[Personal PS to multinationals: here is my own open source project. Please, find a way to make millions of dollars off of it.]
If he has such a vision for open source, why not sponsor his vision and make it happen, instead of trying to tell others what to do without himself lifting a finger?
The bottom line: don't stick your nose into everyone's private business.
"So what?"
It was merely an argument.
I initially never stated that I was a student at an Ivy league school.
What would you have suggested that I do instead? I suppose that I could have left the fact out, but the purpose was to make commentary about the foreign nationals, not to hold my school's status over his head.
I've been saying this for a long time now (check my post history). IBM gets tons of free labor.
My view is undoubtedly very skewed on this since I literally just finished university and I'm going back in the fall for a second round (convocation in 2 week - I'm not joking when I say fresh out). But, personally, I don't think there's any possible way I could have learned what I did on my own. I just don't have the discipline to sit down and do it without the guidance and motivation of a teacher. Now, I'm not saying that some people can't do that on their own - I know a self-taught sys-admin with no university degree who's better at his job than I could ever hope to be. It's almost like he has a sixth sense about the things. But not everyone is so lucky.
The knowledge and experience and CONFIDENCE I've gained in my field is extraordinary. Not only that, but it exposed me to a wide variety of topics that I don't think I would have ever even considered on my own...I went in thinking the only thing I'd ever want to be was a math nerd and software developer, and I ended up in a grad program designing chips and writing assembly code for dsp. I really doubt I would have ended up in this field on my own.
I think it really afforded me some oportunities and experiences I never would have been able to get on my own - working with new, top of the line equipment, spending 1.5 months with 3 hours of sleep a night trying desperately to get a project working (ok...maybe I could have gotten that at work). Meeting people who really inspire you (I'm working on my first oss project right now with a prof I was ta-ing for). Now I know a degree is not a parallel for the working world or real working experience, but it's a backround, and, personally, I think it IS proof that you have some ability and dedication.
I'm not saying university is for everyone - it's not. But some of us really gained a lot from the experience, and overall, I think I'm better off with my degree than if I hadn't gone at all. but that's just me.
...no two people are not on fire.
Of course Villasante is wrong, but it is important to understand how he arrived at his mistake. It wasn't from empirically studying what is going on. Instead his reasoning was ideological:
1) America is bad, and corporations are exploitative.
2) American corporations are involved in open source.
3) Therefore American corporations must be exploiting open source.
Since he arrived at this belief through ideological reasoning, no amount of empirical counter evidence would ever be able to persuade him he is wrong.
Yeah... it show they passed the test... not that they understood the questions
Ain't that the truth. There were some really clueless people who got good grades in CompSci.
Still, I'm glad I got a CompSci degree, because there are a lot of things I just wouldn't have learned (or taken the time and effort to learn) anywhere else.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Maybe he likes them better? But I will load Firefox and konqueror and not
I like the koan aspect of that.
I forget what 8 was for.
Richard Stallman didn't start open source in early 90s, BSD has been around since the 1970s and doing pretty well(ie Berkeley sockets). Seriously do most of you slashbotters live in some sort of alternative universe?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
From what I've read (I think in Bruce Schneier's "Secrets and Lies"), software was freely shared between mainframe users and manufacturers, even to the point where the source code for the OS was provided with the mainframe. I think RMS could only be credited with the idea of "free as in speech" software, not "free as in beer" software. Software in the public domain has been around for a lot longer than since the 80s.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Quick follow up. The purpose was to back the statement that I know a number of foreign nationals, not to hold some sort of status over the guys head. For all I know, he works with Miss Manners.
You honestly read too much into my statement... quite a bit that wasn't there.
I didn't say "I went to School X, where the hell did you go?"
I live in a community that is about 50% foreign nationals. Most of my closest friends at this point in my life at not from the U.S.
How is it that I can sit at dinner with a few American's from back home, an American from here, and a foreign national or two, and it's one of the Americans who informs us all of what heathens we are?
With mounting pressure from M$, or SCO, or any other company that feels wronged by people "giving things away for free" they will fight against the opposing buisness model with tooth and nail. OSS simply does not have the capital to take on software patents, accusations of stolen code, etc. when they come along.
OSS can take care of a lot of things very quickly. It's model for developing software and man-power availible is simply mind-boggling -- something no corporation could even match. There is not a company in the world that could pay to employ the amount of man-power OSS has on constant active reserve.
But let's face it, in this day and age it's simply not the ideas you have, and the things you can do; it's the money you have. It is unfortunate, but we see it in every walk of life in first world nations: second rate products are allowed to flourish and become main-stream consumer goods due to the capital the company that produces it has (*cough* microsoft *cough*). Mean while these companies will use their capital to destroy their competitors by any means possible. OSS is an easy target because it has no ready reserves of $$. You can always insist that somewhere buried in the kernel is an offending bit of code, or that microsoft was the first to develop a certain code declaration or algorithm. Of course everyone knows that is crap -- but who has the money to back up that fact?
When it comes right down to it, these companies like IBM, HP, and the like are absolutely needed to protect OSS from the imperfections of our own society -- so that OSS is less political and more development. The OSS model works great, but it can be eroded by capitalism on legal grounds unless somebody does something.
With all of that said, I would like to thank all of the large companies who work with OSS to keep it alive. Companies that work for people, and not for a corperate board, are few and far between; it's always nice to see something good done with money and power.
How is it that I can sit at dinner with a few American's from back home, an American from here, and a foreign national or two, and it's one of the Americans who informs us all of what heathens we are?
They are simply providing their own example. The foreign nationals are obviously too polite to point out what heathens we are.
Yeah, I code open-source software... :)
Why ? because I enjoy it, but first because I enjoy helping people, and because I want a better world
His point is that open source is the future of the software industry for Europe
So his belief is that Europe is so incapable of competing in the software arena with the US that their only hope is to make sure their laws make a free market impossible and authorize the European companies to steal the idea created elsewhere for their own use?
Ah, the old European worldview shinign through.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
konsole is great, I even use it in cycwin when stuck on a XP PC.
Tabbed xterms are nice to have, plus you can change fonts easily.
Use Crossover.
Run real MS Office on Linux.
Not free, but worth it if you want to be productive and interact seamlessly with MS users.
Ooh, bigtime fractint user. How can I get a check for working on open-source projects?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I heard a year ago that over 50% of open source developers are European, so if europe manage to avoid Software patents, it should be in a relatively good position in the open source field.
IBM and others fund open source. They aren't dictating the direction of it. They contribute proprietary code to Gnu and linux to improve them, and throw developer resources into projects.
Any developer is free at any time to say no to the funding and help. Developer would need to be a moron to say no. Since it's all GPL'd at the end of the day, who is exploiting who?
For HP and IBM, they get a free OS out of it, which makes their hardware cheaper to purchase and use. They contribute to OSS to make linux more "industrial strength" in order to make linux a more attractive option, and subsequently sell more hardware. We are already seeing the result...
l8,
AC
Pg 536.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
cause that was when they were born.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
The Safari devs took the GPL'ed KHTML code, improved it, and let the open sourcers bite the dust. If that's not subcontracting, at least it looks very much alike.
Come on....
You guys voted for: This guy
T W I C E
And you blame the world?
The very least the U.S. deserves is worldwide mockery. And thanks, for having a president that quite clearly beats most american professional comedians at making the world laugh...Here world meaning, actually, the rest of the world, not just -common american asumption- your 52 states....
NO SIG
There really is nothing quite like sitting at dinner with an American girl explaining to her dining companions, all or almost all American, what a bunch of heathens we are
So how did you enjoy comming along on my date with your mom.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
How is it that I can sit at dinner with a few American's from back home, an American from here, and a foreign national or two, and it's one of the Americans who informs us all of what heathens we are?
If you go to an Ivy league school, surely you know where they learn this impulse?
Kill, Tux, kill!
Kudos!
All of this is absolutely true. Powerfull rich nations are such today BECAUSE they were very very mean killers and rapists of the rest of the world for some, generally prolonged, period of time.
Here are some examples in this light:
A) Spain: Owned all the world for three centuries (the "Felipe" kings,Carlos V and that line in general). They maimed, killed and raped in all five continents, including europe (Especially against the Pays-bas -holland, belgium, luxemburg, it used to be "flandes").
B) France: Heh... they won the last crusade... just add up how many dead can be in that one. They also had a couple of 100 year wars against england.
C) England: DUring the best years of the empire they basically where doing the exact same thing as the spaniards with the added nicensess of stealing national treasures of every nation on earth. GO to those free museums in london to see part of the original freaking gates of Babylon....YES, the ones quoted in the bible....or ALL of the exquisite engravings of the greek athenas Parthenon...hell good thing they didnt have heavy lift helicopters or they wouldve stolen the whole hill.
Want me to go on?
NO SIG
A mistake that many people, including this commissioner, make when thinking about open source development is to think that creating a commercial software product is essentially creating some software and then getting paid. In fact, there is a huge amount of work and even more risk in getting it from the point where it is a perfect piece of software to the point where you have money.
Marketting, sales, accounting, payroll, tech support, and business administration are all full-time jobs that developers don't want to do, and all of them would be necessary to have a successful commercial product. Open-source developers could do all this extra work, and would either get some money or lose some money. But they could also paint houses if they wanted more money, and it would be more fun, and a less risky and faster source of income.
This is simple divide and conquer: pump up the ego of a group or individual so that they resent their ally, then let the two former allies duke it out.
Don't fall for it.
But 99% of Americans are stupid.
A lot of open source work is done for free, but I suspect that a lot of the long term maintenance isn't. If you want to be paid, you'll have to do what you're paid to do.
Secondarily, most development work, as an example, is done IN a field. Business, science, medicine. Having a base understanding of something OTHER than PHP is completely relevent. Do YOU know what kind of company you're going to be working for 10 years from now?
Finally, I think that, as a nation, we're much better off with people having a solid grounding across multiple disciplines. Because the alternative is to have a bunch of well-trained idiot-savants who THINK they know how the rest of the world works.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Europe is losing ground rapidly to the US economically. If it's not the rapid loss of market share by European firms in international markets, it's the flight of large Euro corporations to the US (also helped along by the strong euro). Their answer as of late has been to allege "subsidies", like the $5 billion Boeing supposedly receives from the goverment for their aircraft. The problem is that the EC considers lower tax rates here in the US to be a "tax subsidy". Yes, if you don't charge corporations into the ground the way they do in Europe, then you're actually subsidizing them. So sayeth officials like Peter Mandelson, who on Tuesday did the most unsportsman like thing and filed a complaint with the WTO claiming $5 bn in subsidies for Boeing. This was done in retaliation for a complaint filed on Monday by the Bush administration about the subsidies given to Airbus. Of course, Mandelson could hardly argue that point, since the EU planned € 1.5bn to promote the new A380, and Airbus is also demanding € 450 mn from the British government to build wing assemblies for the A350.
Here's the clue for you pompous gassbags who are slowsly strangling europes economy: liberalize your economy. Stop taxing the shit out of your domestic corporations, and you won't have to subsidize them on the back end.
"Not all software in the 80's commercial or shareware. There was also a ton of FREE SOFTWARE"
Yes, to all 10 freewares or sharewares there was about 1 public domain software worth it.
"Look up small c sometime."
Just googled it. Compiles a small subset of C. I wonder about the performance of the generated code.
It's free software: public domain, to be specific. Any company can take the code, make it one better, close it and make anyone forget about the crappy public domain original. Well, i guess the same argument could be said about non-GPL free software licenses.
"RMS didn't change the world. The real truth is if it was not for Linux there is a very good chance that RMS and GPL would be a footnote."
Regardless, it's still his merit. Thanks to GCC and the other tool from the GNU toolchain.
Still, i doubt such software as GNU Emacs, GNU make, GNU bash and other essentials would go unnoticed...
I don't feel like it...
People from all countries have used random prime ministers to provide nearly all the strong encryption that we use today. The encryption those primes have made available has changed the world.
Wait, did I read that right?
fractionally? I'd say pretty high. Alan Cox? RMS? Larry Wall? what fraction of the "code" do you suppose they contributed? just an off the cuff answer. It is a good question. However my knee jerk reaction is you are just trying to trash americans and their contributions in an underhanded way. There would be no gnu without americans no perl etc. I'd say that represents a significant fraction.
Just because the Open Source Movement isn't as openly communist as some socialist EU official would have liked doesn't mean it doesn't meet its goals of open software.
If the problem is truly that IBM and the like are selling branded Open Source, and people are buying it, then the GPL will lubricate the production of competitors for 'IBM Open Source.' If this official somehow wants society to realize that IBM software isn't so different from, say, Debian software, well then I hope he's got the cash to market to the purchasing managers.
I contend that the "Open Source Community" is taking itself seriously, which is why more and more of these programmers are becoming subcontractors. Hell, a lot of the kernel work is done by people paid by big companies to do so. If it appears to be a complete mess, its because, in part, it is so. Amatuers and professionals alike can write software; by saying something close to "you want IBM Open Source" IBM is putting its professional word behind the software. Open source is not a centrally planned economny, no matter how many people have told you that the GPL reeks of socialism and that RMS echoes the rhetoric of famous Communists.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I'm arguing that the GPL and FSF didn't change the world. Since I'm an anybody, you're clearly wrong.
Truthfully, I think your comment would have been just as effective, if not more, leaving out your schooling. Seriously. It added nothing to the comment, other than bragging rights, for lack of a better term.
I'm sure I'll get flamed, but...
"If you are doing Thing A, you cannot also be doing Thing B. There just aren't enough resources, or something."
It's as if an entire continent of people have been brainwashed into being 2nd Place, for ever!
Listen! You can have BOTH! They aren't mutually exclusive!
Now, Johnny's new cool object oriented command line only perl calander converter may not be making front page news, but it's THERE, and... innovative, if you're into that kind of thing.
I'm going to go snort fiber glass now.
...or maybe not.
I think the OSS is going to have a lot of problems in the future because I see a time where there is going to be conflicts w/ the OSS and Corporations. The recent article in (CNET?) which quoted an IBM spokesperson as saying that they will defend the OSS community by not using their (IBM's) patent's against the community. But at the end of his comment he did say that IBM could use the patents if it felt it needed to protect itself.
Now, I know that the big players like IBM are helping to spread the popularity but I could easily see it becoming a major problem for the OSS community. I def. don't think anyone could stop OSS but big companies could and will down the road place big roadblocks.
Wow. There are just soo many different ways this post is wrong wrong wrong.
1. Europe is Economically Unhealthy
I'd argue that they are doing just the opposite. Streamlining markets, simplfying trade, lowering tariffs. If they can keep the IP free, then they will really be into somethings. You've heard of the EU right? It may not be happening quickly, but there's no doubt it's changing.
2. Europe is "losing" to the US
No. I'd argue that currently both the EU and US are both constantly struggling to maintain GDP growth and maintain high(er)employment. This is not "losing." See #1 for why the EU's growth opportunities are very good. That you think the U.S. is somehow winning shows how much of the USA-is-#1 crack you smoke. It's 2005, not 1950.
3. Subsidies EU-Yes US-no.
This is plain wrong. The American economy is subsidized in -many- ways. They simply aren't as obvious to you.
Please turn off the Fox News and learn a few *-facts-* regarding how the American economy operates.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Actually, the worst of those atrocities occurred when Belgian Congo was the personal property of Leopold II, not a Belgian colony.
to like some big companies, /. has steered me back to the path of hating them all. After all, if a big company is supporting something, especially an American company, it must be to the detriment of society (except Google)
Vote for Pedro
And he's completely entitled to. It wouldn't make him right though and it wouldn't mean that he "changed the world" unless of course you do a radical scaling back of what that phrase means.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
That's just not true.
I could work at just about any company, anywhere. In stating that I am a graduate student, I place myself in a community that contains a largely international population.
The Ivy League bit is merely there to give you a flavor of "where" without making it the focus of the post. Unfortunately, it seems to merely have had the effect of providing a silly side point to nit pick at, bringing us away from the core topic and onto a conversation that has gone from "mild waste of time" to "severe waste of time."
You certainly are funny. You are the cream of the crop.
When you were made, they broke the mold. Then, killed themselves for having been involved in the process.
so no one else to blame but American corporations!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Perhaps you're trying to fit this broad picture into a narrow lens? There many reasons why people do things. You can, if you like, choose to view these as an exchange of resources, or perhaps as a conversation between people, a social ordering phenomenon, or a variety of other ways. But I'd stop short of casting developers motivations as totally resource-oriented.
If I change some programs on my Debian-installations, wouldn't it be counter-productive to:
1) Withhold those changes to myself so that next time I do apt-get, I have to merge my changes with the main tree? Effectively having to maintain my side-fork?
2) Potentially miss out of improvements and bug-fixes from others?
You can always find egotistical reasons for doing good, but of course the Best is to do good just because that's natural to you. It's human and quite natural to share. We've just lost contact with our humanness if it doesn't seem so.
You may call such protections an extension of various natural right to expression, but it takes laws and good, transparent enforcement of them to corral the market and the Invisible Hand and make OSS work.
Not quite. The aim of copyleft (GPL) is to abolish copyright. RMS has stated this many times over, and he's right. Free software is a response to the unnatural laws of copyright which says it's bad to share information. As if somebody can own information.. When these laws go away, there's no need for copyleft, because nobody can now stop anybody from DISTRIBUTING information as they see fit. They will be free to do what is natural to humans: share and enjoy life.
If RMS had not had many bad experiences with proprietary software, he might just have found a better job or watched TV or something. His statements are based on experience, not just airy ideas. That's partly why the Free Software movement is so successfull as it is. It has direction and power because somebody knows where we should be heading.
Unfortunately, I first saw this impulse in a dear old friend of mine a year or two before arriving here.
It really does turn my stomache to consider what a complete ass you must be to make a statement that implies that the upbringing of all residents of your country is inferior, in order to hope to make yourself sound intelligent.
Though I have seen it in American students here... honestly most people here are pretty straight about themselves, how they feel about others, and don't need to attack each other in such a manner.
I'm not going to say that graduate students are a social elite. For the most part, a social exchange with a grad student you haven't met goes something like this... "This is what I research, what do you research... oh really? Have you ever looked at this? You don't say. Kudos." The ones with ones that you know are a bit shorter, and skip to what would be the results section of the paper. That said, it isn't very often that anybody goes about trying to marginalize anybody else based on their nation of citizenship.
It is a shame that Europeans can't take advantage of all this sub-contracted American open source labor... wait.
First, the real reason why they use Open Source has never been to topple MS or support "the movement", and several /.ers have provided significant evidence to wit - they use it because they don't have to pay for it, and they get to pocket the license savings. Note the caller to one OS developer that found they would have to pay for support - they never called again. Free is a catchphrase; and I don't care about the 'speech vs. beer' argument if it costs money they will find a way around it or not utilize it. Period. Sorry, and call me a flamer if you want; but free, not freedom, is the motivation. I know this isn't the case for every individual, but it is obvious that it is for the companies involved.
I have noted that government agencies do not want open source in their environment, not because the code is visible but because they perceive they will not get tech support for it - the only open source I observed Red Hat where they can pay for a support contract. Note that they don't want to pay for a competent IT staff person when they can pay a support contract instead. However; they will not pay a developer for support; they insist on paying a corporate entity. Granted, there are some folks on the contract and government employee side using OS tools; but mostly because they could get it for free and didn't have to wait for a procurement process. These are my observations and not a particular political statement. I love using OS and if I could contribute, and I will in the future, I would - but I am fed up contributing to other people's pockets as many others are.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
NOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo!
fractionally? I'd say pretty high. Alan Cox? RMS? Larry Wall?
Alan Cox is Welsh.
Larry Wall is Canadian.
RMS is from New York.
So it seems you can only name one American OSS coder off-hand.
Only proving the point that ignorance and nationalism go hand in hand.
...but since the king most likely wouldn't have spent much time at all in Congo, the atrocities would have to have been committed by other Belgians, right? Surely whatever foreign mercenaries there were, couldn't have been so numerous as to overwhelm the influence of Belgians in the colony?
In the years that OpenSSH has been available, not one of the major companies using it has given back to the project for its worth.
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
Yep, I've used xephem a little bit, but I've never really been able to figure out its interface. Even though I tend to stay away from KDE for general use, xephem is just too inconsistent for me to use or bother learning properly. For a long time, I resorted to running Skymap (which I'd already paid for) under Wine.
I checked kstars out again a few months ago, though, and it's definitely come a long way since last time I used it. I still keep Skymap around, if only because I have more detailed catalogues for it that are useful when I'm doing more detailed work, and I trust myself to get any information I urgently need from it more quickly at this time, but I've been trying to train myself to use kstars a lot more.
And yeah, Cartes du Ciel looks like it'll be brilliant when it's done, but the linux build of it is still very experimental. I've tried it a couple of times, but getting it to compile seems incredibly difficult on my system. (It's ported from the Windows version which was written in some variant of Delphi, and to compensate there's an intermediate library underneath which also needs a specialist compiler, I think.) So far I've only been able to get the pre-compiled binary running, and not very reliably. It'd be easier in my case if it was packaged up for Debian and I could just apt-get it every so often, but I doubt that'll be happening for a while at least.
The question of business exploiting the open source movement doesn't warrant alarm. As long as the legal requirements are fulfilled, there is no problem. If a company promises one thing and delivers another, then that is a question of corporate malfeasance that is a separate issue than business use of open source software.
Business exploitation of Open Source Software is GOOD
I think his "belief" is that it's silly for European people in European countries to make European laws for themselves that do nothing but disadvantage the European population. If a predominantly proprietary and intellectually restricted software industry does nothing to benefit Europe, and effectively inhibits it, why on Earth should Europeans bother to support one?
I can appreciate that.
One could turn another part of this article on its head and ask about the Commission, to the Commission:
'Just what, exactly, has the fucking European Commission done that's any bloody different?'
Excuse my language. I'm speaking as someone who lived in Europe for ages, has dual European / North American citizenship, and even did an MSc in European politics while living in London. I support Europe, and the principles behind further integration, generally. But the Commission is no public-minded servant of the Union.
Abusing OpenSource? Is there really a way to do that as long as you follow the GPL? I mean, that's like a contradiction. Last I checked, OpenOffice and other major OSS projects would LOVE it if a major IT corp used their product.
The "old boy", "old premier", "old czar" networks must come down, and the publics of each and every powerful nation ought to rule, not be ruled.
It's NOT just the Europeans who "trash America". It's MANY nations. ANd, with good reason. And, unlike what 'dubya says, it has next to NOTHING to do with "freedom", "success", "wealth", or "our way of life" except that "our way of life" means trampling on others, compelling them to "be with us or agains us"; forces them to join the free enterprise world faster than they can cope; expects that 'merku is and shall forever BE the sole leader, second to none, and has rights to take land, minerals, assets and more with impunity, at will, and for the cheapest price around, and to hell with the fact that the minerals-owning tribespeople can't negotiate their way out of a paperbag; to hell with the babies who grow up to realize their ancestors or elders were duped or were myopic or were fools; to hell with any uprisings that the youth stage to break or nullify greed-oriented contracts the youngsers themselves cannot nor want to afford nor honor in perpetuity.
WHY is it that by a factor of THIRTY (30) 'merkuns inflate how much they give to overseas causes?
WHY is it that manifest destiny and God on the currency and so froth, forth, somehow preordain that "And America Shall Lead"?
WHY is it that as a nation WE have one HELL of a hard time introspecting when SHIT (like 9/11) happens to us and we have a prez who says, "Relax; Take the kids to Disneyworld..."?
WHY do we have a hard time taking criticism (don't TELL me about how much good we do, for we don't do SHIT without some strings attached and a little lubeless anal probing actions. Then, when puppets and spies we train and create come home to roost, our leaders play IGNORANT, the public generally IS IGNORANT, and all too many foreigners saw the writing on the wall a decade earlier, just as the DEA, FBI, CIA and others did when they warned the various presidents that Tel Aviv, Palestine, Belfast, and the like would be in the US; not "a matter of IF, but a matter of WHEN" and they predicted 20-25 years, which was only about 4-6 years off prediction. (SO, I'm not knocking ALL of the domestic security, just the dumbshit leaders who micromanage and get in the way of letting experts at least cull and analyze; I mean, why should the FBI and CIA daily briefs have a tough version for in-house assessments and dog-shit-wimp-ass version for feckless presidents? Give me a break...)
WHY is it that or so-called 'leader' has 'merkuns believing that the tsunami aid pledged by 'merka has been delivered (don't tell me about the CVNs on their posture maneuvers...)
WHY is it that 'merka has assloads of damn-near treasonous (don't tell me 'bout 'free market'/etc) business leaders who comfortably make a distinction between profiteering and acts tantamount to selling out and laying off loads of workers.
That said, tho, I have NO problem with the 1970's Weekly Reader predictions that energy, shopping, and work will change. I am ALL FOR automated checkout stands, despite what unions might want. I am ALL FOR hydro-power cars, even if it means plastics will be deprecated (even if IIII have to wave the wand to deprecate and eliminate 85% of our craving to plastics, derived from petroleum...) I am ALL FOR eliminating assloads of product-reproducing store fronts that by over 100 or 200 exceed the local purchasing ability local OR overseas.
We need to quickly reach the point of manufacture-on-demand and curtail that oil-guzzling mentality that has us looking princely with dozens of anchor stores in a metro area with redundant product and merchandising that migth be beneficial for lowering consumer prices, but also inflate and increase the dependency upon petroleum (wrappers, stockings, cups, tires, insulation, laptops, mice, cameras, shoe soles...
Moreover, I am absolutely insanely against mono-nation hegemony, imperialism, dictators, and the like. I firmly believe the US had better get
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I can only guess that you where not around in the 80s.
I was around and tinkering with code before the FSF became known, and I'm afraid that you're wrong.
The vast bulk of the public domain software had no source code provided, and the little source that was available was largely crap, with extremely few exceptions. There was absolutely no cohesiveness, and that's what Stallman provided, focus and commonality, the start of a pyramid of interdependencies which resulted in all the bits working together and building upon each other.
It was utterly invaluable.
Here's a hanky, might wanna rub the foam off your mouth there.
Comment of the year
Ewww. Sharing it. Eeeeeewww. 3rd world disease! Step right up! Get your 3rd world disease! Andele! Andele!
I'm not sure how one can compare anything as democratizing as Open Source with a system as control oriented as Communism.
Exactly! When you think of something like the "five year plan" which comes to mind first - Linux or Longhorn?
And just like the Russians Five-year plans being too large for thier own good, so to was Longhorn too big a chunck to swallow and had to be whittled down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I mostly agree, but I still think it is right to say that open source is the ultimate (best) of both capitalism and communism.
The point is that software (and all IP) is not bound by the most basic prerequisite for capitalism; scarcity of resources. The whole free market economy is based on the allocation of scarce resources (material goods). This is what leads to supply and demand. What open source retains from capitalism is the most important part, the competition. Like in darwinistic evolution, the best (most fit) solution prevails, and is evolved further.
On the other hand, open source also eliminates the "utopia" problem with communism. Communism is utopian because it requires that people are willing to share scarce resources - meaning giving away something so they dont have it anymore. With open source (IP), you share it, but still retain your own. So it is the ultimate communist model; you retain what you had, you get what other people share, and contribute at the same time.
So open source (and all information sharing to a degree) retains the most important parts of two economic models - the competition from capitalism, and the sharing from communism.
I'm sure rhetoric such as this will help build a calmer future. Thank you for your contribution.
Well, that does explain why we're all uneducated, rude, and why we smell bad.
In Communist societies there is not such a thing as Copyright.
We can debate if this is is good or bad, but it certainly is not a feature of communist countries.
FLOSS has both feet frimly planted in copyright priciples. In capitalistic societies people organize themselves in many different ways to increase the wealth of society. Cooperatives come to mind for example.
I wish people would stop taggin FLOSS with the communist moniker, it is not only innacurate and shows a total lack of understanding of copyright issues, but also it is bad PR, that is if you are singing FLOSS prizes that his.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry, I am stupid, why I am asking?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So they are adding value to the software.
And they want to charge for it, the bastards.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
1) You say "I'd argue that they are doing just the opposite...", but you don't. The EU is not, in fact, happenning. Both France and the Netherlands have said no just this week. There is strong sentiment against not merely an EU Constitution, but the EU superstate itself. Polls show Germans trending towards a no-vote, and UK strongly opposed. The value of the Euro has been propped up on the notion of a EU superstate, and this weeks double-whammy has hit its value hard. I'm not out to blow smoke up anyone's ass, economics is economics. The high Euro has driven businesses out of the EU states, shrank the global market for European goods, and shaken confidence in European monetary policy. Now the Euro has lost 9% of it's value in just the last week. The writing is on the wall. If you don't believe me, try to get a job in Germany.
2) Again, you fail to make your argument. The fact that you dismiss the subject matter as nationalism really just shows how ignorant you are. I wouldn't be suprised to know that you are one of the pompous arrogant euro-gas bags.
3) Subsidies. The American economy is probably the least subsidized economy on the planet. Notwithstanding the European worldview that 'failing to overtax a company is a subsidy', there is always a small amount of subsidization of any industry, and to the extent that it promotes job growth that's okay. But there is a wholesale difference between US subsidies to encourage private sector growth, and the straight out direct funding and State control that occurs in Europe. Airbus is the greatest example of a private company supported by government subsidies. The airline industry in France is yet another example, where the government pays privately-employed workers, not the airlines.
And what does fox news have to do anything? Are you so wrapped up in insecurity that you see your favorite boogeyman in every dissenting opinion? Kindly extract your head from your ass, please. You and the moron who marked this post as "informative". Slashdot is so pathetic sometimes.
OK, their country of origin is blah blah blah. Where do they live? America is not a country it is a continent you pretentious twit. Oh, and where is Canada? I believe it is in North America. For that matter where does Linus live? And I would argue that one NY programmer had basically created open source. The linux kernel plugged a huge hole. You missed my point entirely.