(I have my threshold set pretty high, so there's a chance I missed some comments.)
I don't see anyone talking about freedom. Why should we use an un-free product like MS Office (or Corel Office, or Applixware) when there are free alternatives like AbiWord, GNOME Office and KOffice?
Granted, the free products are not as mature as perhaps we would like them (although KOffice is coming along nicely). I think we should spend less time worrying about and campaigning for proprietary products, and instead work on free alternatives.
...is a pretty good geek town. We have some hip tech businesses (Seagate not least of them) and a flamy LUG mailing list, so Slashdotters would feel right at home.;)
I understand this is common, but there are unfilled geek jobs everywhere around here. The only drawbacks are the lack of public transportation (it exists but it sucks) and the nasty weather (which some people like).
Oh yeah and our university is a piece of shit. But I'm not sure how important a geeky university is to a town. Most of the geeks I know are self-taught and without peer in terms of their abilities. I didn't major in CS, and none of my friends did either, but we all have very nice software development jobs. There are several strong geek sub-communities here.
Over the next few years I expect to see evolutionary, rather than revolutionary changes to the desktop. As usual there will be lots of new ideas around, but only some of them will stand the test of time. I think there is likely to be much more emphasis on the 'look' of the desktop, and on improving the ways data is presented. Some trends such as greater use of multimedia, more 3d, more use of transparency are likely to continue, but it is hard to say what else will be around.
Translation: 'We're making it look better, because we already think it works as well as it could. The Windows paradigm is good enough, no sense coming up with new ideas.'
This kind of attitude is deeply worrying. No, the desktop metaphor is not perfect, in fact it has many flaws and weaknesses. (Check out About Face: The Essentials of user interface design by Alan Cooper for hints.) Something new needs to come along! KDE (and GNOME) are just rehashes of Windows 95, the same way CDE was a rehash of Windows 3.1. Do we really want for free software to be chasing the coattails of the lowest common denominator? I think we can do better.
I work in the machine tool industry, where MTBF is measured in thousands of hours.
Consider what's acceptable, given the target market for the product. A Web browser doesn't need thousands of hours of uptime, or even tens of hours -- for one thing, Windows will crash sooner than the browser will, anyway.:)
Unlike a piece of machining hardware, a Web browser is not something that people will use all day, and depend on to get their work done. As applications move from the desktop to the Web,....
Errr, wait a minute...I just realized something...
There are plenty of people out there -- like me -- who would migrate to Linux in the blink of an eye if they could get all the necessary software, even if it is commercial. I need Photoshop (no, Gimp does not cut it), I need CorelDraw (the only version available for Unix is an antique v3.5), and I need something that reads and writes MS Word and Excel well. Until these materialize (and I expect it's only a matter of time), I'm stuck on NT.
There is no point to switching to GNU/Linux 'just because'. There are a bunch of good reasons to use GNU/Linux (or one of the other very good free OSs), like efficiency, stability or configurability (to name a few). You will either choose one of those OSs or you won't. But the real reason to use a free OS is freedom, which you don't seem to get (e.g., you want an MS Word reader).
Consider this. Your life's work (Word files, Excel files, Photoshop art, et c.) hangs on the thin thread of a vendor's whim. What if Corel goes out of business? What if MS decides to change the Word format, again, to force you to upgrade at a cost of $400? What if Adobe stops supporting your platform of choice (any lonely Irix users out there?)? You get the idea.
This is why some people don't want commercial software on otherwise free systems: they draw users and developer interest away from free solutions, and the network effect then locks out users of free applications ('Please send your resume in Word format.'). As everyone knows, the OS doesn't matter -- the applications do. Free applications are even more important than free kernels. This is what really matters, and userland is where the fight for software freedom is taking place.
More important than migrating to GNU/Linux is that you spend the 2 hours it takes to get the basics of (La)TeX down. (Try LyX, it's a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX and very nice.) Ditching Word is more important than ditching NT.
I don't see any Quicktime source code, specs, or third-party (non-Apple) reimplementations. Apple has been pretty tight-lipped about QT, in fact. It is not 'pretty open', or open at all.
A boycott of Quicktime (and proprietary software in general) is most definitely in order.
we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
Give Ivo a cigar. Desktop-environment-specific applications are a drag, especially given the fact that CDE, KDE and GNOME are giant, bloaty, memory- and CPU-wasting piles of dung. If I wanted Windows, I'd use Windows.
I also like the fact that I personally have easy access to 128-bit encryption but that the average stupid criminal doesn't.
Why do you think criminals can't get 128-bit or better encryption? Just because US citizens can't export it does not mean it does not exist everywhere within and without the US. Terrorists in country X are not bound by laws (by definition), let alone US laws. Do you really think encryption is the unique invention of Americans?
And can I get some of that great crack you're smoking?
This is not a Katz-bashing post
on
Weaving The Web
·
· Score: 2
Well Jon, you're still misspelling 'Torvalds' and still using news bits (in this case a review) as a launching pad for your hot air rants. Haven't you learned anything from your too-long stint on Slashdot? This article was only nominally a book review. It's way too long -- look at the other Slashdot book reviews! They have a single coherent point, sometimes two, they are clear and plain, and then they end.
Let's take a closer look:
Berners-Lee appears either not to hear or not to want to pay much attention to the frenzied pace of Web development and change. He's much too reflective.
Perhaps the Web isn't changing all that much? Perhaps Berners-Lee anticipated what small changes have occurred? (He is highly intelligent, after all.) Since you don't give examples of what you think are huge changes (these putative changes are not self-evident), we don't know what you're talking about. And what are the 'rapacious Great Whites circling his creation'? Amazon.com and hucksters of that ilk? I dunno -- I have to guess because you don't say.
As for 'architects of the modern Internet and WWW', Linus isn't one of them. Before you go around claiming to know who's who of the architects of the Internet, read an RFC or two. Your articles will be better for it.
the fundamental software for identifying and sharing information on the Web remains a public, widely accessible standard. This is a monumental political notion, one little appreciated in the offline world, where the very idea of distributing information freely seems traumatizing.
Yes, we know that you are happy with yourself for being a countercultural Wired-schooled neo-Libertarian, and a master hacker too boot ('I figured out the MS Word question mark problem!'), but trust me: author bios are best when they are free of inane commentary.
His failure to grasp the elemental reality of American capitalism permeates this book. "What is maddening," he writes is the "terrible notion that a person's value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money."
Sounds to me like he did grasp the reality of American capitalism. So what if he disdains it -- he's highly intelligent, remember?
Then there is Berners-Lee's style, which is somewhere between low-key and comatose.
No neon green text on a bright yellow background, you mean. He's highly intelligent...remember?
I'd continue, but your review is so long this post would grow like a cancer. So I'll stop. All you've done is demonstrate your naïveté and the fact that you don't understand Berners-Lee. Go back to Wired, if they'll take you back. Boot Kevin Kelley in the groin for me while you're at it.
Stuff, words, faster, MacOS rumours always tells the truth, dude, 500MHz, PC266, zooom, Quake III.
Sure, and that's all true and good. Really.
But we near the point when your CPU becomes a microwave oven (as in, EM radiation), and not even a PC hardware expert like Caesar of Ars Technica can deal with that. Some new, smarter design is going to be needed, because we're about to hit a performance wall.
I don't care much about increased cruft in the instruction set (e.g., MMX, AltiVec). So what. The real bottleneck in PCs (a blanket term including Macs) is the bus. No one except SGI and Sun are doing anything interesting about the bus bottleneck problem.
I think a lot of people are confused about what a GUI is, and what constitutes a user interface.
X is an attempt at distributed computing (compare with Plan 9, a much more developed and sophisticated distributed computing architecture), and a primitive graphics system.
X is not a user interface -- a user interface is a command shell (and 'shell' does not necessarily imply command line). The Mac OS Finder and Windows Explorer are mature graphical shells (GNOME and KDE are still just hacks, and feature-incomplete). A graphical shell embodies a command language just as much as a textual shell is (bash, ksh, et c.)
X has no native support for user commands to the system (Mac OS and Windows have built-in scripting languages -- shells), thus it is not a command shell. It's graphical, but not a UI.
What is needed is a true graphical user interface for Unix. KDE and GNOME, as handy as they are, are incomplete band-aids sitting on top of a bloaty, slow network protocol/graphics library. So I say: Lose X! Write something new! Develop a graphical shell language and implement it on an existing graphics library.
The 'Nothing Succeeds like Success' article suggests that Red Hat is hilariously rich now because Linux is a good OS. (Of course, we know that Linux is a good OS, but Wall Street suits don't know or care about the difference.) This is not the case. Red Hat is hilariously rich because there is a lot of emotional energy behind their IPO and around 'Internet' stocks in general. This energy can make investors overestimate the likelihood that holding stock in a company will be profitable, which is normally their primary concern).
Eventually, the Internet stock energy will wear off and we'll be left with questionable business plans like Amazon.com's. I hope and do believe that Red Hat's business is based on something a little more substantive than simply selling customer information to third parties and invoking a third party (UPS) to mail out pulp novels and O'Reilly books to geeks.
In the short term, though, Red Hat is rich, and let's hope they invest their wealth in the community. There's no reason to believe otherwise, because they have been giving back to the community since the beginning, paying programmers to write GPL'd code and putting together a solid software distribution.
I hope Red Hat will continue to be a positive model for other free software companies.
Thinking about our consumption
on
High Tech Junk
·
· Score: 1
Just this weekend I ran into the problem of computer waste. I was at Best Buy considering a new 128MB PC100 DIMM to replace my 64MB, non-PC100 one. But then I got to thinking, shouldn't I ditch Netscape and thereby free up system memory, rather than just buy more? Isn't upgrading hardware the stupid, bloatware/Microsoft way? Do I really need this memory?
Then I considered the sweatshop laborers who make $~1/MB DIMMs possible. (I fear the fantastic memory price drops have more to do with decreasing standards of living for the laborers than with some miraculous advance in manufacturing technology. But I could be wrong.) And the toxins that go into making ICs. And the lax environmental regulations in Malaysia, China, and other tech-exporting countries. You get the idea.
So I left Best Buy with all my money and no new chips. Instead, I'll speed up my Linux system by erasing Netscape and working on Gzilla to replace it. I'm happier having less junk.
An author of free software gives the source to the community, fully knowing that one of the things the recipients could do with the source is make money. 'Here, make money with this if you like' is an inherent part of the gift.
There are no moral obligations being made, obeyed or denied here at all. 'It's your source too, now. Do what you want. Have fun.'
I am able to see the moral dimension -- that we should share what we learn with our fellows, and let them be free as long as they don't hurt us. This is the highest moral law, and I uphold it at all times.
VARs are bound by the licensing terms of the licenses of the software they use, but not necessarily by Bruce's Feelings on Money and Giving Back. They may well share your viewpoint, but we don't write software because we expect a present from [insert own VAR here]. A high percentage of users doesn't even submit bug reports. By your logic, most users are parasites: using, profiting from and enjoying free software. Is that really what you want to say?
If the recipient of my gift pays some of our friends to write more code, well, that's just icing on the cake -- but by no means required.
Freedom is good. Money is not evil (programmers love that Mountain Dew). Helping out your friends is good. Knowledge is good. VARs are good.
First, thank you Bruce and Neuroid for your helpful answers.
But I must take issue with this:
They take value from the community
How can you take value from a community like ours? Everyone fully owns their copy of a free program, and copies cost near-zero resources to make. Red Hat took their easily-had, fully-owned copy of, say, wu_ftpd, and made it easier for me to use. The creator of wu_ftpd still has his or her original source tree. (No functions or variables were harmed in the making of this RPM.)
It's information. You can give without losing, accept without depriving others. Red Hat (indeed, any free software VAR) is only adding value (more free software, tools to make free software more convenient, support to make it more trustworthy, et c.).
I encourage all of you to 'take' from me as many copies of Gzilla as will fit on your storage systems. Go ahead -- send patches, make an RPM, put it on a CD. See if I care.;)
Calling Red Hat Software anything but a benefactor is wrong. They pay people to write GPL'd code, and they sell a very high-quality software distribution for cheaper than Microsoft Windows 98 (that is, if you even feel like paying for Red Hat Linux at all, since you don't have to). What more do you want?
They are as dedicated to free software as Debian, even if they don't actually have a social contract. They pour all kinds of resources back into the community. Bottom line: Red Hat is a benefactor.
Bruce, if you get this, please make clear why you rated RHS as merely a symbiote. Thanks.
Projects like GNOME and KDE, and now LUIGUI -- efforts to make Linux 'usable' -- ultimately have the wrong idea. As other people have pointed out, Unix is already very usable. The problem is that it's not learnable. The CLI is extremely powerful, yet impossible to learn by guessing and experimenting (it's not 'intuitive'). You have to read most of Unix for the Imaptient or some similar 700-page volume before you can begin. But once you're ready, the power is there.
I think (hope) the WIMP (windows, menus, icons and pointers) paradigm has seen its last days. Something completely new needs to spring up. The best a WIMP project like KDE or GNOME can do is to be pale imitation of the Macintosh. This is not to disparage the very good work being done by the GNOME and KDE developers! It's just that the metaphors and self-contained applications way of designing interfaces needs to die. It's become more a barrier than a path to effective computer use.
The book About Face: The Essentials of user interface design by Alan Cooper, while mostly a WIMP style guide, has a few revolutionary ideas in it (get rid of filesystems as an interface element (PalmPilot!), inherent document management and revision control, et c.). I would suggest that everyone interested in UI design read it. (Judging by a lot of the crap that's out there now -- commercial and free -- people really need Cooper's advice.:\)
One of the things I am working on is a formalism for a non-hierarchical ('super-hierarchical') namespace, something that I think could be a powerful element of UIs of the future. At least, that's my plan.:) (Visit my Web site if you want to get an extremely preliminary look at what I'm dealing with: innerfire.visi.com/pala-ka lloejna/Namespaces.html.
Slashdot Mirror
(I have my threshold set pretty high, so there's a chance I missed some comments.)
I don't see anyone talking about freedom. Why should we use an un-free product like MS Office (or Corel Office, or Applixware) when there are free alternatives like AbiWord, GNOME Office and KOffice?
Granted, the free products are not as mature as perhaps we would like them (although KOffice is coming along nicely). I think we should spend less time worrying about and campaigning for proprietary products, and instead work on free alternatives.
...is a pretty good geek town. We have some hip tech businesses (Seagate not least of them) and a flamy LUG mailing list, so Slashdotters would feel right at home. ;)
I understand this is common, but there are unfilled geek jobs everywhere around here. The only drawbacks are the lack of public transportation (it exists but it sucks) and the nasty weather (which some people like).
Oh yeah and our university is a piece of shit. But I'm not sure how important a geeky university is to a town. Most of the geeks I know are self-taught and without peer in terms of their abilities. I didn't major in CS, and none of my friends did either, but we all have very nice software development jobs. There are several strong geek sub-communities here.
Over the next few years I expect to see evolutionary, rather than revolutionary changes to the desktop. As usual there will be lots of new ideas around, but only some of them will stand the test of time. I think there is likely to be much more emphasis on the 'look' of the desktop, and on improving the ways data is presented. Some trends such as greater use of multimedia, more 3d, more use of transparency are likely to continue, but it is hard to say what else will be around.
Translation: 'We're making it look better, because we already think it works as well as it could. The Windows paradigm is good enough, no sense coming up with new ideas.'
This kind of attitude is deeply worrying. No, the desktop metaphor is not perfect, in fact it has many flaws and weaknesses. (Check out About Face: The Essentials of user interface design by Alan Cooper for hints.) Something new needs to come along! KDE (and GNOME) are just rehashes of Windows 95, the same way CDE was a rehash of Windows 3.1. Do we really want for free software to be chasing the coattails of the lowest common denominator? I think we can do better.
I work in the machine tool industry, where MTBF is measured in thousands of hours.
Consider what's acceptable, given the target market for the product. A Web browser doesn't need thousands of hours of uptime, or even tens of hours -- for one thing, Windows will crash sooner than the browser will, anyway. :)
Unlike a piece of machining hardware, a Web browser is not something that people will use all day, and depend on to get their work done. As applications move from the desktop to the Web, ....
Errr, wait a minute...I just realized something...
There are plenty of people out there -- like me -- who would migrate to Linux in the blink of an eye if they could get all the necessary software, even if it is commercial. I need Photoshop (no, Gimp does not cut it), I need CorelDraw (the only version available for Unix is an antique v3.5), and I need something that reads and writes MS Word and Excel well. Until these materialize (and I expect it's only a matter of time), I'm stuck on NT.
There is no point to switching to GNU/Linux 'just because'. There are a bunch of good reasons to use GNU/Linux (or one of the other very good free OSs), like efficiency, stability or configurability (to name a few). You will either choose one of those OSs or you won't. But the real reason to use a free OS is freedom, which you don't seem to get (e.g., you want an MS Word reader).
Consider this. Your life's work (Word files, Excel files, Photoshop art, et c.) hangs on the thin thread of a vendor's whim. What if Corel goes out of business? What if MS decides to change the Word format, again, to force you to upgrade at a cost of $400? What if Adobe stops supporting your platform of choice (any lonely Irix users out there?)? You get the idea.
This is why some people don't want commercial software on otherwise free systems: they draw users and developer interest away from free solutions, and the network effect then locks out users of free applications ('Please send your resume in Word format.'). As everyone knows, the OS doesn't matter -- the applications do. Free applications are even more important than free kernels. This is what really matters, and userland is where the fight for software freedom is taking place.
More important than migrating to GNU/Linux is that you spend the 2 hours it takes to get the basics of (La)TeX down. (Try LyX, it's a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX and very nice.) Ditching Word is more important than ditching NT.
'There is a difference between mere cleverness and true insight.'
-- Jaco Pastorius, musician
Quicktime is a pretty open standard
And what exactly is that supposed to mean? :P
I don't see any Quicktime source code, specs, or third-party (non-Apple) reimplementations. Apple has been pretty tight-lipped about QT, in fact. It is not 'pretty open', or open at all.
A boycott of Quicktime (and proprietary software in general) is most definitely in order.
we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
Great! So I can already watch The Matrix on DVD!
Christian fundamentalists tend to be stupid, bigoted, and don't know what they're talking about
Luckily, you yourself have no irrational prejudices. :P
(And have the balls to call yourself an atheist, if you're going to be so uppity.)
Give Ivo a cigar. Desktop-environment-specific applications are a drag, especially given the fact that CDE, KDE and GNOME are giant, bloaty, memory- and CPU-wasting piles of dung. If I wanted Windows, I'd use Windows.
I also like the fact that I personally have easy access to 128-bit encryption but that the average stupid criminal doesn't.
Why do you think criminals can't get 128-bit or better encryption? Just because US citizens can't export it does not mean it does not exist everywhere within and without the US. Terrorists in country X are not bound by laws (by definition), let alone US laws. Do you really think encryption is the unique invention of Americans?
And can I get some of that great crack you're smoking?
Well Jon, you're still misspelling 'Torvalds' and still using news bits (in this case a review) as a launching pad for your hot air rants. Haven't you learned anything from your too-long stint on Slashdot? This article was only nominally a book review. It's way too long -- look at the other Slashdot book reviews! They have a single coherent point, sometimes two, they are clear and plain, and then they end.
Let's take a closer look:
Berners-Lee appears either not to hear or not to want to pay much attention to the frenzied pace of Web development and change. He's much too reflective.
Perhaps the Web isn't changing all that much? Perhaps Berners-Lee anticipated what small changes have occurred? (He is highly intelligent, after all.) Since you don't give examples of what you think are huge changes (these putative changes are not self-evident), we don't know what you're talking about. And what are the 'rapacious Great Whites circling his creation'? Amazon.com and hucksters of that ilk? I dunno -- I have to guess because you don't say.
As for 'architects of the modern Internet and WWW', Linus isn't one of them. Before you go around claiming to know who's who of the architects of the Internet, read an RFC or two. Your articles will be better for it.
the fundamental software for identifying and sharing information on the Web remains a public, widely accessible standard. This is a monumental political notion, one little appreciated in the offline world, where the very idea of distributing information freely seems traumatizing.
Yes, we know that you are happy with yourself for being a countercultural Wired-schooled neo-Libertarian, and a master hacker too boot ('I figured out the MS Word question mark problem!'), but trust me: author bios are best when they are free of inane commentary.
His failure to grasp the elemental reality of American capitalism permeates this book. "What is maddening," he writes is the "terrible notion that a person's value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money."
Sounds to me like he did grasp the reality of American capitalism. So what if he disdains it -- he's highly intelligent, remember?
Then there is Berners-Lee's style, which is somewhere between low-key and comatose.
No neon green text on a bright yellow background, you mean. He's highly intelligent...remember?
I'd continue, but your review is so long this post would grow like a cancer. So I'll stop. All you've done is demonstrate your naïveté and the fact that you don't understand Berners-Lee. Go back to Wired, if they'll take you back. Boot Kevin Kelley in the groin for me while you're at it.
Someone said:
Stuff, words, faster, MacOS rumours always tells the truth, dude, 500MHz, PC266, zooom, Quake III.
Sure, and that's all true and good. Really.
But we near the point when your CPU becomes a microwave oven (as in, EM radiation), and not even a PC hardware expert like Caesar of Ars Technica can deal with that. Some new, smarter design is going to be needed, because we're about to hit a performance wall.
I don't care much about increased cruft in the instruction set (e.g., MMX, AltiVec). So what. The real bottleneck in PCs (a blanket term including Macs) is the bus. No one except SGI and Sun are doing anything interesting about the bus bottleneck problem.
Newsflash: freedom entails responsibility.
Judging quality is your responsibility. If you don't take up that responsibility, you don't deserve the freedom of reading.
I think a lot of people are confused about what a GUI is, and what constitutes a user interface.
X is an attempt at distributed computing (compare with Plan 9, a much more developed and sophisticated distributed computing architecture), and a primitive graphics system.
X is not a user interface -- a user interface is a command shell (and 'shell' does not necessarily imply command line). The Mac OS Finder and Windows Explorer are mature graphical shells (GNOME and KDE are still just hacks, and feature-incomplete). A graphical shell embodies a command language just as much as a textual shell is (bash, ksh, et c.)
X has no native support for user commands to the system (Mac OS and Windows have built-in scripting languages -- shells), thus it is not a command shell. It's graphical, but not a UI.
What is needed is a true graphical user interface for Unix. KDE and GNOME, as handy as they are, are incomplete band-aids sitting on top of a bloaty, slow network protocol/graphics library. So I say: Lose X! Write something new! Develop a graphical shell language and implement it on an existing graphics library.
The 'Nothing Succeeds like Success' article suggests that Red Hat is hilariously rich now because Linux is a good OS. (Of course, we know that Linux is a good OS, but Wall Street suits don't know or care about the difference.) This is not the case. Red Hat is hilariously rich because there is a lot of emotional energy behind their IPO and around 'Internet' stocks in general. This energy can make investors overestimate the likelihood that holding stock in a company will be profitable, which is normally their primary concern).
Eventually, the Internet stock energy will wear off and we'll be left with questionable business plans like Amazon.com's. I hope and do believe that Red Hat's business is based on something a little more substantive than simply selling customer information to third parties and invoking a third party (UPS) to mail out pulp novels and O'Reilly books to geeks.
In the short term, though, Red Hat is rich, and let's hope they invest their wealth in the community. There's no reason to believe otherwise, because they have been giving back to the community since the beginning, paying programmers to write GPL'd code and putting together a solid software distribution.
I hope Red Hat will continue to be a positive model for other free software companies.
Just this weekend I ran into the problem of computer waste. I was at Best Buy considering a new 128MB PC100 DIMM to replace my 64MB, non-PC100 one. But then I got to thinking, shouldn't I ditch Netscape and thereby free up system memory, rather than just buy more? Isn't upgrading hardware the stupid, bloatware/Microsoft way? Do I really need this memory?
Then I considered the sweatshop laborers who make $~1/MB DIMMs possible. (I fear the fantastic memory price drops have more to do with decreasing standards of living for the laborers than with some miraculous advance in manufacturing technology. But I could be wrong.) And the toxins that go into making ICs. And the lax environmental regulations in Malaysia, China, and other tech-exporting countries. You get the idea.
So I left Best Buy with all my money and no new chips. Instead, I'll speed up my Linux system by erasing Netscape and working on Gzilla to replace it. I'm happier having less junk.
An author of free software gives the source to the community, fully knowing that one of the things the recipients could do with the source is make money. 'Here, make money with this if you like' is an inherent part of the gift.
There are no moral obligations being made, obeyed or denied here at all. 'It's your source too, now. Do what you want. Have fun.'
I am able to see the moral dimension -- that we should share what we learn with our fellows, and let them be free as long as they don't hurt us. This is the highest moral law, and I uphold it at all times.
VARs are bound by the licensing terms of the licenses of the software they use, but not necessarily by Bruce's Feelings on Money and Giving Back. They may well share your viewpoint, but we don't write software because we expect a present from [insert own VAR here]. A high percentage of users doesn't even submit bug reports. By your logic, most users are parasites: using, profiting from and enjoying free software. Is that really what you want to say?
If the recipient of my gift pays some of our friends to write more code, well, that's just icing on the cake -- but by no means required.
Freedom is good. Money is not evil (programmers love that Mountain Dew). Helping out your friends is good. Knowledge is good. VARs are good.
First, thank you Bruce and Neuroid for your helpful answers.
But I must take issue with this:
They take value from the community
How can you take value from a community like ours? Everyone fully owns their copy of a free program, and copies cost near-zero resources to make. Red Hat took their easily-had, fully-owned copy of, say, wu_ftpd, and made it easier for me to use. The creator of wu_ftpd still has his or her original source tree. (No functions or variables were harmed in the making of this RPM.)
It's information. You can give without losing, accept without depriving others. Red Hat (indeed, any free software VAR) is only adding value (more free software, tools to make free software more convenient, support to make it more trustworthy, et c.).
I encourage all of you to 'take' from me as many copies of Gzilla as will fit on your storage systems. Go ahead -- send patches, make an RPM, put it on a CD. See if I care. ;)
Calling Red Hat Software anything but a benefactor is wrong. They pay people to write GPL'd code, and they sell a very high-quality software distribution for cheaper than Microsoft Windows 98 (that is, if you even feel like paying for Red Hat Linux at all, since you don't have to). What more do you want?
They are as dedicated to free software as Debian, even if they don't actually have a social contract. They pour all kinds of resources back into the community. Bottom line: Red Hat is a benefactor.
Bruce, if you get this, please make clear why you rated RHS as merely a symbiote. Thanks.
The problem is not fundamental to OS X, according to Apple sources.
According to me, Unix kernels should not be whomped on by userland programs. So the problem is fundamental to Mac OS X.
Lifestreams, pie menus, paradigm shifts, wearables, 3d: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
:)
Projects like GNOME and KDE, and now LUIGUI -- efforts to make Linux 'usable' -- ultimately have the wrong idea. As other people have pointed out, Unix is already very usable. The problem is that it's not learnable. The CLI is extremely powerful, yet impossible to learn by guessing and experimenting (it's not 'intuitive'). You have to read most of Unix for the Imaptient or some similar 700-page volume before you can begin. But once you're ready, the power is there.
I think (hope) the WIMP (windows, menus, icons and pointers) paradigm has seen its last days. Something completely new needs to spring up. The best a WIMP project like KDE or GNOME can do is to be pale imitation of the Macintosh. This is not to disparage the very good work being done by the GNOME and KDE developers! It's just that the metaphors and self-contained applications way of designing interfaces needs to die. It's become more a barrier than a path to effective computer use.
The book About Face: The Essentials of user interface design by Alan Cooper, while mostly a WIMP style guide, has a few revolutionary ideas in it (get rid of filesystems as an interface element (PalmPilot!), inherent document management and revision control, et c.). I would suggest that everyone interested in UI design read it. (Judging by a lot of the crap that's out there now -- commercial and free -- people really need Cooper's advice. :\)
One of the things I am working on is a formalism for a non-hierarchical ('super-hierarchical') namespace, something that I think could be a powerful element of UIs of the future. At least, that's my plan. :) (Visit my Web site if you want to get an extremely preliminary look at what I'm dealing with: innerfire.visi.com/pala-ka lloejna/Namespaces.html.
All I can say is, it had damn well better work -- unlike M3.