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The Billion Dollar Kernel
jesgar writes "The Linux kernel would cost more than one billion EUR (about 1.4 billion USD) to develop in the European Union. This is the estimate made by researchers from the University of Oviedo (PPT), whereby the value annually added to this product was about 100 million EUR between 2005 and 2007 and 225 million EUR in 2008. The estimated 2008 result is comparable to 4% and 12% of Microsoft's and Google's R&D expenses on whole company products. Cost model 'Intermediate COCOMO81' is used according to parametric estimations by David Wheeler. An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR was estimated from the EUROSTAT. Previously, similar works had been done by several authors estimating Red Hat, Debian, and Fedora distributions. The cost estimation is not of itself important, but it is an important means to an end: that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition that would set it as an alternative to decision-makers. Ideally, legal and regulatory frameworks must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare."
/pinky to mouth ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That 1 billion would soon seem like chicken feed!
It would be cool if companies involved in open-source development would not have to pay taxes for related activities.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Something based on lines of code like COCOMO is probably not a good estimate for a kernel. Kernel debugging is harder for one. Many of the drivers required some level of reverse engineering as well.
I'd say every "Kernel line of code" is probably worth 10 lines of code in userspace, if not more.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
What you call your 'American perspective', I call brainwashing
...if developed off-shore
Cathedrals are susceptible to top-down error. You know, the idiot at the top who doesn't know he's an idiot and leads the whole company into ruin over a few decisions. The bazaar of Linux is much more resilient to this at the cost of speed. Also you have not touched on the Freedom aspects (capital F) at all which for most, including myself, is the real reason to use F/OSS.
Shh.
...but in order to make comparisons with Google, Microsoft or Apple, you have to add many, many lines of code. If you start to include the OSS equivalent of the standard installation of windows XP + MSOffice + Visual Studio: Linux + GNU + Firefox + GNOME/KDE + various drivers + open office + Eclipse ... you get much much more code. I think that more man-hours have been invested in the regular Ubuntu install than in the premium XP install.
But please, don't use dollars as a metric for that. As soon as any sum reaches more than one billion, a politician will try to tax it.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Most of that development time is not initial implementation. It's debugging and interoperability. Initial implementation is trivial, yes, but initial implementations do not a platform make.
Given a dozen developers and a hard spec, Linux could be developed in 8 to 9 months.
I would call that a billion-dollars hard spec then :-)
The value of a program is not in its number of code lines, but in its architecture and in the cleverness of its design. Sure, given a good spec, all you have to do is convert it into line code literally and it may be a short job. But such a spec would be the value of the code and writing it would be an enormous effort.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Wait a minute...Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes? Am I allowed to charge the $50 an hour I think I'm worth? I'm sure this has been asked before, but it's the first I've ever actually thought about it...
not yet. But there's always mañana...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Quote 'The cost estimation [implies] that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition...." I don't think that is how the US system works, which is by market recognition. It doesn't matter how hard you work or how much money you put into it; what matters is if people buy it. That assumes, somewhat naively, that people are "rational economic actors" and that companies like MS and GOOgLE don't have massive FUD machines (aka marketing)
Ideally, legal and regulatory framework must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Since the code has been released as open source, it isn't really an asset of the company that wrote it anymore than it is to anyone else who uses it. It isn't something that could be liquidated to pay off debts, and allowing them to specify it as an asset on their balance sheets seems like just another way to distort the books and confuse investors. I don't see any good coming out of that.
Secondly, I don't see the point in letting them receive tax deductions for their contributions. They made these contributions because it was in their best interest to do so regardless of the tax status. And while it is nice that their contributions help the community as a whole, they themselves are helped by contributions that others have made. If they weren't taxed on the later, why should they get a deduction for the former? Open source is already provides economic and social benefits to those that participate in it's development - government wealth distribution is not needed in a system that already does so inherently.
Finally, even if I did agree with these goals, I don't see how having an estimate of the cost of the kernel as a whole would help - what matters are the specific contributions of the company and there are better ways to figure that.
Its an interesting estimate, but I don't buy the argument for favorable tax treatment for "social welfare." For many companies, open source is one side of a many-sided business model: i.e., they're making their money somewhere else. Giving special tax treatment for such a thing would be similar to giving Adobe special tax treatment for Adobe Reader, or AT&T for giving away free cell phone. The freebie is a necessary for them to build a profitable market elsewhere.
What would be lovely is if I could get tax credits for committing to open products that further help mankind in my spare time!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Did they factor in two-hour lunch breaks and the afternoon nap? I guess this calcultion was something to keep amused with as the day goes by.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
31,000 euro for a _kernel_ developer?? Probably closer to 3 times that. I know it's an average, but do you really think the maintainer of a memory system, or the scsi stack, etc are worth less than 6 figures?
You are nuts.
12 people at 40 hours a week for 9 months is 1123200 minutes. The kernel is about 12 million lines of code. That works out to a line of code every 5 and a half seconds.
Good luck with that.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Vitriol aside, "Social Welfare" can mean anything, like a organization (say, a Church) in a community providing a non-trivial benefit to said community, while operating as a nonprofit. To put it tactfully, you need your "American Perspective" checked. It improves the welfare of the society (albeit in a somewhat hard to measure way). Saying that society as a whole (outside the open source community) has not benefited from Open Source (to which it pays no material compensation for) is ludicrous, therefore donations to open source should be treated just as any other donation to a nonprofit group.
You have the right idea, but the wrong implementation.
How much would it cost to professionally produce every video on youtube? I heard somewhere that roughly 20 videos are posted a minute, so that would be about 10.5 million videos per year. There's a lot of good content on youtube, excellent science demonstrations (look up SF6, and see an aluminum boat floating on a gas), some excellent comedy, and some great drama. However, the remaining 95% of the videos on youtube are trash that needs to be burned, and then shot into the sun to keep it from infecting the rest of us.
I'm sure that producing all of these videos would run into many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. On top of that, the writing staff needed to produce the comments would probably break the billion dollar mark. The real question is, is this an accurate measurement of value?
Maybe, Maybe not.
What I would be more interested in seeing is a comparison of what the open source community has been able to produce, compared to what the closed source community has been able to produce. Is open source labor as cost efficient as hiring a real programmer? If I paid a team of 20 experts to write code for a year, would their output be better than the same number of lines produced from open source?
I don't know. However, if I had to guess I would say no. If you look at the state of 3d video drivers, and gimp, the closed source version is typically better. Windows drivers are almost always better for video cards. Photoshop is better than gimp.
It's all about the apps and drivers - mostly the apps.
It does not matter how fast, secure, reliable, or inexpensive an OS may be; if it doesn't run the apps, it's not of much use.
at that price, I'd consider outsourcing rendering php webpages to india. How many line of php an indian may interpret by hand? how many line of php are interpreted by all the linux web servers?
People who write windows drivers are usually given specs for the hardware.
Given the additional difficulty of reverse engineering, it's a miracle open source drivers work at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
40 hours a week? We don't hire slacker programmers here. 80 hours a week minimum means they have 10 whole seconds per line. Plenty of time.
No, what you'd get for a billion Euros is that many lines of code. No idea if the code would be any good. But usually when managers are fixated on the LOC, you get lots of LOC, not necessarily GOOD or FAST code. Just lots of it. Been there, seen it, upchucked, many times.
Is open source labor as cost efficient as hiring a real programmer?
Wait, are you saying that Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Cohen and Bram Moolenaar are not real programmers?
Or... well, exactly what do you mean by "open source labor"? As I understand it, a copyright license can be open source, as can software* released under an open source license. But I don't know how to extend that to labour---do you mean the labour that goes into producing open source software? If I look at a work process, how do I tell whether it qualifies as "open source" by your definition?
(* and music, movies, books, and other copyrightable stuff)
Want to know WHY the Closed source drivers are better?
Closed source driver programmers get the full specs and all details of the hardware including several hardware samples in a test jig setup.
Open source driver programmers get NOTHING. they have to go out and buy the hardware, then buy equipment to reverse engineer it, spend months poking at it trying to figure out how it's supposed to work and then write a driver based on those assumptions.
IT does not have to be that way, it's just that hardware makers really enjoy being raging assholes and intentionally go out of their way to screw with Open Source developers because it's how they get their kicks and gives them something to brag about at parties. There is no legitimate reason for holding back the full hardware interface documentation. NONE.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe they estimated Chuck Norris would do the coding.
I bet, even when you offer 1.4 mrd USD (aka "billion USD" in US) to commercial delelopers and it would take 20 years, they would not manage to write something like Linux. It would rather be a concept on paper or on powerpoint slides. But... they would take the money anyway.
If anyone actually funded its development to the tune of a billion dollars, it would be considered a catastrophic failure...
Yeah, right. If Linux is so inadequate that IBM and Cray should be interested in using it, then everybody else should shun it too.
Come on. This was an artfully crafted troll. Comparing open source to YouTube crap videos, without ever making a direct comparison, yet implying that most open source is like most crap videos: textbook propaganda. Then we have the 'real programmers' line, again implying that open source programmers are not real programmers, without ever stating it directly. Finally, there's the 'twenty experts' line, again, implying that no open source programmers are experts.
Seriously, people pay good money to learn how to write propaganda of that quality. And people who are that good at writing propaganda get paid very, very well. I wonder who 'useful wheat' is working for?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It is no longer true. A lot of Linux drivers are written by the hardware vendors themselves, often sharing code with other platforms. In some areas Linux drivers are a MUST, and are released simultaneously for all supported OSes.
However it also means that some drivers, despite being open source, are badly written by the same people who are used to closed source standards, with very questionable quality.
An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR
What kind of silly number is that? I am 100% sure there is no single person who earns that little... is there?
Definitey not with all the taxes included. That would result in 2299 EUR a month (plus 1.5 months of holiday and christmas bonus.)
Or about 1250 EUR net money on your bank account. Or just below 8 EUR (net) an hour.
As a programmer?? Just... Silly.
That wouldn’t leave you with much, after apartment, food, phone/internet and basic clothing & co. With a bit bad luck (in a big city), you couldn’t even pay for a car. (= expensive fuel)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yeah, like monkeys need pants. Haven't we had enough of you-hide-it-we-find-it accounting? The cost of this work should be realized when the funds are spent, not in some theoretical future when the benefits of FOSS may come back to the roost. Why? Because the primary benefit of FOSS is the avoidance of those costs in the future. To handle it otherwise would be double counting the benefit.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
That's assuming that a replacement would be 12m lines of code. I recently rewrote a few classes for an open source project that I contribute to and replaced 5,000 lines of code with 500 (which did more, ran faster, and fixed some bugs along the way). Just because the current implementation is 12m lines, doesn't mean that the correct implementation is 12m lines. From the Linux kernel code that I've read, I suspect that there is a lot of redundant and duplicated code in the kernel. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could implement it with a cleaner design in closer to 1m lines of code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The last that I've heard is that Spain faces some fiscal difficulties, they need to raise some revenue.
Though the study only considers the kernel, a starting point has been established. Downloading an entire operating system for free (other than ISP charges) denies the state the revenue from sales/VAT tax that would have been paid on shrink-wrapped product. The downloader receives benefit from the download similar to the benefit received by someone who purchased the shrink-wrap product. Should the downloader be taxed similarly to the tax-paying purchaser?
Now that a value is placed on something that is free, it is ready to be taxed like any other product on the market. What I wonder is, did U of O undertake the study at the behest of the government.
Is that street- or dealer-value ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
where is your paycheck? Hmmmmm?
My paycheck is in the code. For example, I wrote the Objective-C code generation stuff in clang for the GNU Objective-C runtime. Apple employees wrote most of the parsing logic. I get a full-featured Objective-C 2 compiler that I can use on non-Apple platforms. Apple gets some bugs fixed for free. Both of us get out more than we put in.
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If you are writing cheating software, better to hook in at the API layer like DirectX or OpenGL so that you don't have to write a version for every card. I doubt that cheating is a strong consideration regarding witholding the hardward docs.
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I don't think an average developer salary is the accurate number to use in this estimate. The developers working on the kernel are probably anything but average.
Can someone decode this for me?
"Donation to Social Welfare" means that an action benefits society as a whole. In this case the author is saying that companies that improve the kernel are doing something that benefits others, and perhaps governments should set up incentives to encourage this good behavior. A tax break ("equitable tax treatment") is given as an example.
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
Your in-built translation seems to be broken by your ideology. The fact that you believe something should not keep you from being able to read, even if you disagree with the author. Please don't insult Americans by pretending that this failure of your intellect inflicts all of us.
Can someone decode this for me?
Do they want to tax companies that sponsor F/OSS development? Or subsidize them? Or do they want the flexibility to do both, and will change their mind depending on which company and which year we're talking about?
Normally, my in-built translation apparatus resolves "Social Welfare" as "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence". But that's perhaps just my American perspective..
In the US there are several very deeply entrenched political biases against the responsibility of the individual to society... so yes your background influences how you are taking both the words "social" and "welfare".
Try reading it this way instead;
"Developing commons-based software contribute towards improving the standard of living in a very real way. Most tax entities provide for tax deductions of goods and services to charitable organizations. If FOSS development was given the same tax-reducing benefit that donations to religious and political organizations have, this would greatly foster (and to an extent subsidize) corporate interest in creating, contributing, and releasing commons-based software."
If such development contributions can become "intangible assets" (things that have value but not a price tag), then they can be "donated" to a charitable non-profit. The non-profit then assesses a value for the donation, and this amount now becomes tax deductible to the company.
Since this wasn't clear I'm just guessing that "intangible assets", "equitable tax treatment", and "donation" are the real things that you didn't understand... and "social welfare" was just the political trigger that you focused on.
If you genuinely want to learn the complexity of taxes, capitalism, freedom, and responsibility; I'd recommend you change where you get your news from.
p.s. As a personal recommendation; if you're able to disarm your "political triggers" try NPR instead of the usual network ratings whores. You'll learn a lot rather than be told a lot.
Not just that but also consider that the video card manufacturers will be judged by the quality of their product based on the end user experience and little else. If they refuse to let anyone else write drivers for their hardware then they can directly control the quality of said drivers. Additionally, they will test for different configurations on the set of operating systems for which they wrote drivers for. As soon as they open their spec, even if they claim that they only officially support Windows, people will still judge the quality of their product based on the word of a friend who couldn't get that darn card to work on their Linux box. So instead people write sub-par reverse engineered drivers that the manufacturers can sweep under the rug since most of the people using them will be tech-heads who better understand that they won't get ideal performance or stability. Even if you have little faith in humanity you have to at least trust that if the sales folks saw $$ in fostering 3rd party driver development that they'd dive on the opportunity.
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http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
Intel has provided open source drivers and specs for their graphics hardware for several years now.
"Social Welfare" can mean anything
Yes, but it in the US it only means "commie-style income distribution". It's a perfect example of reversed (corporate) doublespeak: By systematically equating social welfare with communism, the US government has succesfully tainted even the slightest notion of progressive tax systems (i.e. the largest shoulders carry the largest burden). The GP is a perfect example of that (but at least he is aware of it). It has come to the point where any non-uniform tax reform will be resisted by all layers of the population, regardless of whether they would benefit from it or not.
At least that's what it looks like from my non-American perspective...
Ok, so you read it as, the EU should setup tax incentives for companies to release code under F/OSS license, as F/OSS software benefits "society".
It's an interesting point of view for a few reasons. While on its face, I'd tend to agree that "F/OSS is good for the world", it's an interesting thing to actually measure.
One way to naively consider the point is to say that fewer than 5% of computer users are direct benefectors of the linux kernel and all linux / GNU distributions combined, as in, linux has had little penetration into the desktop thus far. Is a subsidy that benefits 5% of computer users appropriate for a government body to take on? Perhaps.
Widening the scope a bit, you might say that most computer users end up _communicating_ with a web server running F/OSS software [i.e. LAMP]. This is a bit spurious, however. In this case, the providers in question, who are often for-profit entities, are benefitting from F/OSS software. A person navigating to a website doesn't often know what software they are communicating with, much less its license, and much less drive financial or intangible benefit from same.
Services like Ebay and Hotmail have wavered between various F/OSS and commercially licensed systems over time, and their customer experience, impact, and costs have remained the same.
So if you want to argue that Apache has been a transformational peice of F/OSS software and has made society better, I might be inclined to agree, but I'd clarify that it has primarily made it cheaper for _corporations_ to deploy IT infrastructure. They may or may not pass on any such cost savings to the world at large.
In terms of what would do the most "good for society", and where government should either spend money it's taken (or collect less of it if certain conditions are met), would you argue for or against the EU paying extra money to Microsoft [or some 3rd party] for EU-specific security patches to Microsoft software. Naturally the EU would then freely distribute these fixes to its member nations and citizens.
Releasing software under an F/OSS license certainly benefits some people. I think there is a defensible argument that releasing features or security fixes for popular commercial software benefits many, many more people. How would one justify the former without making an even stronger argument for the latter?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The assumption was that it would be programmed in the EU, so you have to work in the 6 weeks of vacation and the half day off on fridays.
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
I am a little concerned when something done with the power of government can "mean anything". That's a recipie for problems. There are actually a number of people in the US that would argue that Churches and other religiously affiliated entities should stop receiving preferential tax treatment because the benefits are conditional and are distributed "unfairly".
I think this is actually the case with all things done in the name of "social welare". Some individuals receive benefits and others do not, and the distribution mechanism is always conditional to some extent.
I don't think it is ludicrous to question the benefits to "Society" afforded by F/OSS. I tried to do it in a quasi-numeric method in a different response on this thread. I agree with the _sentiment_ that the world is better off with F/OSS than without it. However, what governments should be funding in the name of "benefit to all" is a different matter, and requires discussion rather than mere sentiment or claims of self-evident truth.
The article is about the attempt to quantify the the _value_ of one F/OSS project, probably as the first step of this political endeavour.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
There is no legitimate reason for holding back the full hardware interface documentation. NONE.
I always assumed hardware manufacturers were concerned about trade secrets-- like if NVIDIA released all the information on their cards, there might be some information in there that ATI could use to make their cards faster. Is there really absolutely no possibility of that sort of thing?
Your in-built translation apparatus is simply too simple. "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence" is HOW "Social Welfare" is frequently accomplished. It isn't the Social Welfare itself. While this does happen, it isn't the only way to give to Social Welfare. The article is suggesting that Linux developers have already willingly donated to Social Welfare, so should get the benefits that are usually reserved for those that have been victims of "unethical extortion of wealth via the threat of state violence".
I'd be very surprised if the Linux kernel code is so badly written that it can be reduced in size by an order of magnitude. It is not exactly your random open source project. Besides, I assume you had the 5000 lines of code at hand when you rewrote the classes? And presumably, you had some kind of framework to test and compare the implementations in. That is an entirely different thing than writing something from scratch.
And by the OP's metric, you'd still only have 55 seconds per line, even if you could hypothetically reduce the code size by a factor of ten. Nobody can write bug free low level operating system code at that speed.
Wow, you rewrote a few classes and do now think you know anything about a 12M LOC project... Good luck crunching down all those drivers to 1M, good luck!
L4 is a minimal kernel, it only covers task switching, inter process communication and context protection. Everything else, including memory management, is done by the Linux kernel, which sits on top of L4 and is just modified to hand off task switching and IPC to L4.
I suspect that there is a lot of redundant and duplicated code in the kernel. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could implement it with a cleaner design in closer to 1m lines of code.
You'd be wrong. There's actually relatively little duplicated code in the kernel, mostly due to the fact that it's constantly being refactored. The vast majority of kernel code is drivers and arch-specific stuff.
You do know that (some) kernel developers have jobs at places like OSDL, Red Hat, etc where they get paid to contribute to the kernel.
some ones trying to get some eu pork(tax breaks) for OS projects
Kudos for your contribution.
:P
You just forgot to mention, that you have probably also added a few bugs "along the way"
Cheers c(_),
-S
Well, gee ... if Linux went away, there'd still
be unix ... both of them "free" (you get what you
pay for).
If you paid 20 experts to write code for a year, and didn't allow anyone other than those experts to see it, would their output be better than the same 20 experts writing code for the same year but allowing anyone in the world to see it?
Few people are writing open-source software out of the kindness of their hearts. It's either because they are being paid specifically to do so, or because they're being paid to do something else and they can get their job done better by submitting a patch to an existing codebase than they could by writing something from scratch.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
> 1) First, the installation disc refused to boot. Just crashes immediately after loading.
Past this point you are just engaging in intentional self-flagellation just to have something to whine about.
Perhaps you should not use relics you find in warehouses next to the Ark of the Covenant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Linux has improved a bit recently, but for a while it included three complete 802.11 stacks, because driver developers at different companies had a massive NIH mentality and implemented their own entire stack for their devices. The Linux driver model doesn't really encourage code reuse, especially compared to something like IOKit on OS X, and drivers account for the majority of Linux code. If you pick any two related drivers in Linux, you are likely to find a lot of copy-and-pasted code. 55 seconds per line is still a lot too few, but it's a lot closer to being feasible than 5.5.
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I understand where you are coming from, but your notion of 'support by the government' in terms of tax breaks on contributions basically breaks down to the government saying "if you are willing to give money to a properly registered nonprofit group, so are we (to the tune of 15% or whatever your bracket is)." By "mean anything" in this case, it means "only what a person willing to give their income for no tangible return wants it to mean."
What more could you expect in terms of the government democratically supporting social programs? They are letting the *people* decide where the money goes. Do you think we would be better off by having the federal government say that they alone will decide which social programs will be supported with tax dollars (putting aside for a moment the argument you are about to make that no social programs are to be supported with tax dollars... it's not going to happen.)?
He didn't claim that the resulting kernel would contain 12 million lines of code. 12 geniuses might come up with the same functionality coded in considerably fewer lines. That being said, I actually doubt it's possible. Not even for 1 billion, because projects of such size have a high likelihood of cost explosion.
Yes, it grew out of Bell Labs v7 Unix, but the Berkeley Unix work was done at a public university.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It did start out as a student's project, after all.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reading has to do with the recognition of word boundaries and matching ordred sequences of letters to plausible patterns.
Comprehension is different: understanding what the author was attempting to communicate to you.
The original article used several words that have socio-politically ambiguous meanings. You have used "social welfare" to mean two different things in two consecutive sentences in your dismissive and condescending response. I beleive you've unintentionally highlighted part of the problem.
I was asking for feedback regarding my parsing of what the author meant. Specifically, I recognized a number of weasel-words and thus needed to try and translate them to something with actual meaning.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
They dont need to release ALL information about the cards just ALL the interface information for control. which should easily hide all their secrets unless they are cheating and doing a lot on the computer with a software application masquerading as a driver. Like Winmodems did.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Back in the mumblety-80s, standard Bell Labs* Unix licenses came in binary and source versions. Binaries were cheap, source more expensive, universities got discounts so it was nearly free to them. At one point the US Government wanted a license that would give them unlimited rights to the code, because that was what they got for software that they'd paid to have develop, and their contracting bureaucrats insisted strenuously that they wanted that option for Unix as well. The Bell Labs Obnoxious Licensing Lawyers thought about it for a while, decided ok, and gave them a price - One Billion Dollars. The government bureaucrats said "ok, thanks", checked the box on their forms saying it was available, didn't actually order it :-)
* Actually, depending on the year, it might have been Bell Labs, or Western Electric, or various parts of AT the bureaucracy you ordered Unix from changed over the years.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On top of that, the writing staff needed to produce the comments would probably break the billion dollar mark.
Ummm...apparently you haven't read any of the comments. More like a few million banana's.
Who is John Galt?
I don't know. However, if I had to guess I would say no. If you look at the state of 3d video drivers, and gimp, the closed source version is typically better. Windows drivers are almost always better for video cards. Photoshop is better than gimp.
You do know the hardware drivers for Windows are written by the hardware companies. Of course drivers written by the hardware manufacturer are better than reversed engineered ones.
Lets see. I can take some hardware stick in a linux cd and install a pretty much fully functional system 99% of the time with a few possible issues like wireless network drivers. I pull up fancy software installion app and have at my fingertips 1000s of applications that met pretty much any functional requirement I can think of that can be installed with a mouse click or 2. I take the same hardware and install Windows. Now the fun starts. First I have figure out what kind of network interfaces are used. Then I have to go to another computer and find the network drivers online, load them on a cd and install them on the windows system. Ok next I have to register my system with Microsoft or else they'll shut my system down in a month or 2. Now I go searching for video drivers, wireless network drivers, etc... Ok drivers are all installed and functioning. Now I have to buy and install the anti-virus software. Next it's off to the store to spend $1000s on office software, photoshop and whatever else I need. Then I have to come home and stick in the cds for all the software I bought, enter the software keys or whatever else DRM crap they implement. Heaven forbid you loose the key and have to reinstall something.
Now which is better again?
Who is John Galt?
How much would it cost if it were developed for a government contract?!
[T]he US government has succesfully tainted even the slightest notion of progressive tax systems (i.e. the largest shoulders carry the largest burden).
Except that in the US, the largest shoulders do carry the largest burden. The bottom 40% of tax payers have an effective income tax rate of between -2.3% and 0.3%. The top 20% earned slightly over half of the income, and paid over 80% of income taxes.
What exactly was your point?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States
Why shouldn't the goverment simply do what Google SoC does. Or they could spent 80 million to do a "winter of code" in their name. In government terms that is peanuts but it would make a huge difference to internet development and raise international attention.
Direct funding, not tax incentives. In fact the EU funds a lot of development, just that it is not open source.
You can't claim that Linux's supposed "bazaar" model is resistant to top-down error when the whole premise of the project was to build a clone of an older, successful top-down "cathedral" project: Unix. Somebody else took the risk of top-down error.
Are you adequate?
A couple of years ago I went to a seminar by HMRC (Revenue and Customs) on R&D Tax Credits here in the UK. I stood up and asked the speaker how Open Source is seen by HMRC in terms of R&D tax credits. I explained to them that the software we help develop (Plone) is used by numerous public sector organisations in the UK. One of the key criteria for R&D Tax Credits is that you need to own the IP of whatever it is you are developing. I explained to them that our entire business model was based upon us *not* owning the IP of the software we are helping to develop.
I was laughed at. Seriously. The speaker and a good portion of the audience laughed at my ridiculous idea of my business not owning the IP of the software I was developing.
The Plone Foundation recently valued Plone using COCOMO at US$3 million.
-Matt
Competition...
I'm standing in a computer store isle trying to chose a video card. The maker of the card on the left strictly guards their super secret driver recipe. The one on the right released their info and has really great drivers for my favorite OS. Hmm... Who won that competition?
I get it when it's a fully software product but what is a company going to lose from sharing the driver. I'm sure there's quite an underground market for pirated drivers. I think I'll go download the latest Video drivers from bittorent tonight.. Oh Yah.. my computers going to run so much faster now!
I think you have too much faith in businessmen. It really comes down to they equate sharing with giving their product away and turn their minds off at the mention of it. That and certain instances where functionality that should be in the hardware has been cheapened up by implementing it in software.
Honestly, open source drivers for hardware for which the specs have been released almost always work as good if not better than the ones the company makes themselves. It's only the reverse engineered ones that ever truly suck and even the closed source drivers crash now and then. Of course, Windows BSOD rarely indicates which driver or that it was even a driver at all causing the crash in a way that a normal user could understand. Maybe there is something to that...
Am I understanding this right? The game relied on info from the graphics card to determine where the player is? And it was ASUS that took the reputation hit?
I'm sure GM can read something in a Honda service manual and use it to make a better car. Would you buy a car if no one could get a service manual for it?
I've set up a lot of Windows computers. I've also set up a lot of Linux computers. Either one can go really easy or really hard. Of the two I have found Windows is the more likely one to be difficult. (I'm not talking about installing Windows on a factory made machine using a factory restore disk with the computer's exact drivers pre-setup, what kind of fair comparison would that be?)
Now, that being said, I'm not trying to belittle you for trying but I have a few observations about people who try Linux, have a horror story and then tell everyone else how much it sucks...
First, they are usually experienced Windows users trying to set up Linux on their own. As an experienced Windows user you have access to an experienced Windows users advice at all times. It's yourself! If you are going to make a fair comparison get a Linux user to help you... in person... just like you are there in person.
Second, it's usually a laptop. Of course you can run Linux on a laptop. But you really shouldn't make a laptop your first Linux experience. Laptop hardware is not anywhere near as open as desktop hardware. If there is ever going to be one-off hardware with a custom driver available only for windows then it's in a laptop. Laptops just aren't really made or marketed as multipurpose devices. They are designed to be Windows boxes used as/is for their short lives until they burn out. If you really want to see what Linux is about start on your desktop if you have one. It's just easier. Then, if you chose to continue, after having some experience under your belt there are plenty of people out there who will help you figure out the intricacies of upgrading your laptop to Linux.
Now, as to your specific install... If your machine didn't want to boot off of your install disk then that's a pretty big red flag. Either something was wrong with your disk or with your machine. My first bet is it was a bad burn. That, or the disk media wasn't totally compatible with the machine. A lot of older machines don't boot very well off of burnt media even if they read it just fine. I wonder if your XP disk was burned or original? OK, you don't have to answer that. If burned then I wonder if it was the same kind of disk, burned with the same burning software, at the same speed... I'm not familiar with "Unetbootin" but it sounds like you went for the uber-Linux hacker approach before trying the easy stuff... like re-downloading a fresh copy and burning a new disk.
You received numerous errors even with the "Unetbootin" approach. Yup, that fits, probably a bad burn. If the disks boot sector wasn't right no doubt there were other corrupted areas too.
I could sum up any complaints after that with saying you can't trust an install from a bad disk to be representative of the norm. Still, that is assuming too much, I wasn't even there.
Slow KDE & Gnome? If this was a recent, up to date Linux it probably defaults to having lots of 3D effects. Hey, geeks just like eye candy so give them what they want. If your graphics chip just doesn't have 3D drivers in Linux then those effects can be turned off. There's plenty of back and forth posts here about whose fault that is so I won't bother. Just about any nVidia device is supported though. You just have to install the closed source nVidia drivers. Most RECENT Linux distros make that easy with just a minimal number of clicks.
Another common Linux onetimerism I forgot to mention. Trying to install an old out of date distro. Linux and OSS in general moves much faster than closed source customers are used to. If you see a Linux CD stuck in the cover of some dusty library book LEAVE IT THERE! A Linux disk from 6 months ago will be significantly behind a new one. Once you get to a year or two it's like trying to learn Windows by installing Windows 95! The nice thing is though... Linux is free. Just download the latest today and use that. All you lose is the cost of a CDR and a couple minutes time. If your co
Honestly, open source drivers for hardware for which the specs have been released almost always work as good if not better than the ones the company makes themselves.
There's one notable exception: ADM/ATI Radeon HD series. Catalyst has been a PITA on cutting-edge distros (because they seldom support the latest X server releases), and the OSS drivers are far behind, despite the specs being in the open. To be fair, the release of specs was a bit delayed, and AMD does spare a few devs to work on the open-source drivers. My guess is that they'll eventually drop Catalyst for Linux and let OSS drivers replace it. Probably cheaper for them that way.
Meanwhile, nVidia doesn't release the specs, but they do have quality closed-source drivers.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
Intel has provided open source drivers and specs for their graphics hardware for several years now.
Too bad their cards aren't as good as their intentions, though. But those drivers do work very well for me and my laptop.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Rewrite in APL and its only 13 lines of code. (Showing my age, huh?)
Rewrite it in Lisp and its 120 Million parentheses.
And if you use the old cut-and-paste-code-reuse pattern it doesn't take as long to generate one line of code anyway.
I just fucked around with trying to get Linux running on one of my computers.
Here's how it goes when I fuck around with running Linux:
1) pop in the install disc, and it boots cleanly into a nice menu
2) select "Space invaders" and play for a while, just for kicks
3) reboot and select "Install"
4) go through a few screens, partitioning, package selection, yada yada
5) system asks me to edit some conf files, and I do, set root password
6) reboot
7) install my favourite x, y, and z, set up my user account, password, confirm password
What? It only takes around an hour? Yes, an hour's work installing everything. Rinse, repeat, on my laptop, and the other laptop.
Thing is, I do this once in two years, and only when I get bored with the current distro, and want to try new things. Otherwise, I don't even need to do all this.
As with everyone who's got problems with Linux, and thinks Linux must suck because of that: Linux does work for some people. Really. I think it's actually good that unfortunate people like you can still use an alternative, like Windows or OSX.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does your ass hurt after pulling those numbers out of it?
Sure they would.
I am not devoid of humor.
Given a dozen developers and a hard spec, Linux could be developed in 8 to 9 months.
With that amount of code, and the geniuses that are already working on it? And you expect any hardware to work, since thousands of people have worked on the drivers? No chance in hell.
I am not devoid of humor.
where is your paycheck? Hmmmmm?
Plenty of open-source developers out there coding for companies that have at least some commercial interests. And I'm not talking small companies per say, I'm talking Google, Sun and Intel, for example.
Me, I just like sharing to the world what I've made so others can potentially improve it. OSS is kind of like a charity if you think about it.
I am not devoid of humor.
Some did. Mostly the ones working on it full-time for their companies.
I am not devoid of humor.
Hey now, I was only making guesses based on your post and my observations of other one-time Linux attemptors. I'm quite aware that I wasn't there and don't know you personally.
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. I'm not sure how the fact that we both thought of trying the same things shows either of us has more or less experience than the other though... but no hard feelings. I suppose you may have been configuring Unics servers (yes with a C, that's the original spelling) before I was born but you certainly couldn't have configured a FreeBSD server before I was born. Unless of course you invented a time machine. I am 30 years old.
I'm sorry if I assumed you fit the one time Linux user that I described. Honestly, seeing as you post AC I didn't expect you to even come back and read it. I was hoping some of the people who do fit that pattern might read it instead of the more flaming posts, recognize themselves and go get a fresh CD and a Linux using friend to install on their Desktop.
I do still stand by what I said about not starting with a laptop though. I suppose, yes, that is a Linux weakness. I can certainly defend it with a rant about how proprietary and hard to support laptop hardware tends to be but I do understand that it isn't on the owners of such hardware to care. You paid for it. Windows works on it. You expect an OS to just work. I do get that but at the same time how can any OS ever take off without vendor support? Why would a vendor support an OS if the market isn't there for it? It's a chicken/egg problem but I for one don't like the Windows monopoly very much. Actually, I think that Windows has a monopoly in that it's much larger user base causes hardware vendors to only make Windows drivers but I think Linux has in other ways provided Microsoft with some competition. Windows has made quite a bit of improvement in stability, Microsoft has released versions of it's compilers for free use and worked on building a community. I suspect this is due to competition with OSS and I would like to see it continue.
Now, you had a horrible time trying to install Linux on your laptop. I've installed both Windows and Linux on many computers. Either one can be easy or difficult. I've seen some Linux distros up and detect every piece of hardware and run perfectly with no user input on some machines. Linux is the only OS I've ever seen do that. Windows comes with a lot more drivers built into the install CD than it used to but Linux still has it beat there.
I've also seen a couple computers like yours where it just won't work. That seems to be the exception though. Will you really NEVER install Linux again because of this experience? Will you own this one laptop the rest of your life? I've had hardware which only ran Linux although to be fair it turned out the CPU was broken in a very specific way. My current laptop was running Gentoo just fine until I decided last night that I didn't need that level of customization on a machine I only use for special occasions. I installed Kubuntu, it installed directly off the CD first time and auto-detected everything. I pretty much just hit enter the whole way through. It even installed drivers for the built in winmodem. I'm not sure I can even get Windows drivers for it anymore unless I use the original factory CD with all HP's extra bloatware.
Personally I've barely touched any of the actual Unixes. I think I installed FreeBSD once for about a day a long time ago. I've met a couple very rabid FreeBSD fans who like to put down Linux a lot. I don't really get it. It's just a kernel! You are still running GNU, X and probably Gnome or KDE or maybe some lightweight window manager if your tastes go that way. At the end of the day if FreeBSD likes your hardware better go for it! But why rant against the other choice? It really does work great on MY hardware. Does FreeBSD work better on your laptop? Have you tried it yet?
There are two things I am mildly curious about with FreeBSD.
On the desktop, for the vast majority of users? Yes, precisely. Some of us would like that to change, but you really need to see things for what they are now if you want to make change happen.
Depends if 6m lines are comments, you arent going to reduce the comment lines, or is that 12m lines true code lines not including comments/empty lines/braces.
Sure any one can reduce 6 lines of IFs into one IF statement that looks more ugly.
Total lines should not 100% be used as a measurement of goodness.
Can we measure total functions plus average/mean lines of code per function?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.