If the point of open source is to give people the freedom to do what they want with the source then there should be no ethical issue (at least within the framwork of open source ethics) with a fork. If I want to do something different from what linus, or any other open source developer, wants to do that should be within my rights both legally and ethically within the open source doctrine.
To say anything else is a bit hypocritical. After all, the whole point is to give people freedom, not bind their hands.
What if Linus, or any other lead developer of an open source project, simply stopped supporting it. This person wont let anyone else take the job, and owns the project and the name. Under these circumstances it is clearly OK to fork. I dont believe you can draw some arbitrary line and say, past here, its not OK (ethically, not leagally) to fork a project.
Forks might no always be necessary, they might not always be the best thing, but to call the wrong is very dangerous.
Besides, if the licenses are the same between the forks they can still share code and if the new fork gathers more momentum than the original and the original dies off, well, thats just survival of the fittest and the community has made their choice.
Anyone can fork a GPL2 project, there is nothing morally wrong with me taking linux (which I have never contributed to) and starting my own fork of that project that does something different. This is quite appropriate to the spirit of free software and the GPL.
What if Linus decided to do something with linux that many users found unappealing. Is it wrong for those users to branch the code and make their own version?
What you say about making a new fork GPL3 might be correct though I believe it depends on the way in wich the code was licensed originally, isn't it possible to make your code licensed under GPL2 or higher which would allow a future fork to use GPL3 or even 4? I don't know a ton about this and I certainly don't know what the licensing terms of CUPS actually are.
where, exactly, did I say that I haven't played any games?
Or did you mean that I haven't played the games that haven't come out yet? OK, thats fair, its possible that the new Halo will be totally different from the old one, but more likely than not it will be a graphical update with some nice new maps. GTA, pretty much the same, but now with more bitch slappin' action.
I can tell you right now that the game play in Madden wont be significantly different from the last version (except maybe on the Wii where I assume they are still working on the control system).
Look, I'm not saying that these games don't have merit and don't have value, but they sure aren't innovative and they aren't likely to introduce anything new in terms of game play. The primary changes are likely to be graphics.
Wow, thats a lot of games to pick up in 18 months. When I read the first part of your post I was shocked that you would buy an new 360 if your old one was busted but with that kind of investment I guess i understand.
Shame though, if your computer went to shit in 18 months you probably wouldn't buy another one of those computers.
Depends on what you mean by "innovation" and it depends on what you mean by "gameplay"
All too many games these days are just rehashes of last years crap. Look at the games that Microsoft is touting here. Madden, GTA and Halo. These games will be small iterative improvements over the last version that was released. Probably not even that in the case of Madden which is pretty much just a roster update every year.
I'm not saying there are absolutely no innovative games but all too many are just rehashes of what has come before.
In my experience, verizon has better coverage in more places than any of those carriers and I always liked the fact that I could bring my phone in to a shop and get it fixed pretty easily. That said, verizon only sells phones which are very tightly locked down and wont provide a feature unless they can force you to pay through the nose for them. They never would have accepted apples terms on the iPhone, it has too many features that can be used without verizon making money.
No doubt! I might have qualified as a hardcore gamer at one point in my life. I have been playing FPS games since Wolf3D and one of the big things that has driven me away from gaming is that pretty much everything out there is just a derivative of Wolf3D. Sure there has been some good stuff, I loved the story lines in the Marathon series and the AI in Half-life, but I swear, whenever I see quake or even halo there is a part of me that expects a Nazi to come around the corner shouting "Achtung."
Why play the same game over and over again.
Sure there are other types of games and I still play those, but the Wii has provided me with many games that are new and different and a lot of fun to play. I only wish there were more games out for it.
all the covers on that album are fantastic, they are not direct copies of the original and they bring something of the covering artist to the music. This is the key to a high quality cover, just check out any of the covers Hendrix did (all along the watchtower, hey joe) or any of the Beatles songs covered by Joe Cocker.
The best part about that cover of 'Hurt' is that its so emotionally charged. Johnny Cash has such a powerful and believable presence that it makes it clear that Trent Reznor is a bit of an emo boy by comparison.
Easily extendable? they locked down many of the features that you could modify easily in QT3. Many functions are no longer virtual and they use private implementation classes under the covers which are hard to replace.
Your concerns about cross platform compatibility are very valid, but I don't find QT to be all that extensible compared to many other UI frameworks and it is no where near as extensible as Cocoa (mostly due to the nature of objective C)
thats all well and good but when you want to use QStrings everywhere in your application (because they work well, support translation nicely and are compatible with your UI) all of a sudden everyone needs a license or you have to have some kind of compatibility layer so that your back end doesn't need QStrings.
So your saying that GPL v3 changes the rules and if Steve doesn't like those rules then he shouldn't use LGPL v2 software?
wait, what?
Apple agreed to certain things when the chose to use that software, they comply with the license of that software. You don't get to change the rules on them after the fact. The code they have is released under a license that lets them use it the way they want to and thats that. At some point there will be a new version of that software that is released under a new license that Apple will not likely agree too, but all they have to do is not use that new version.
They will fork the old version and continue to develop it and chances are the community at large will no longer benefit from their work because they wont use the new license.
Not everyone even agrees that GPL v3 is actually all that and a bag of chips. If there isn't even consensus in the "community" about what is "libre" software you cant go telling me that Steve doesn't live up to it. Hell even linus has been apprehensive about GPL3, are you going to call him out as an enemy of "libre" software.
"The role of the FSF is to promote freedom of software and computing platforms. Systems like the iPhone which are closed to their owners as a matter of policy rather than technology are the antithesis of what the FSF stands for. "
Then let them release their own phone and stop slinging mud at people and making accusations with no supporting evidence.
This is a pathetic move from the FSF and it should be condemned by everyone here. I don't recall ever seeing them make an accusation based on such flimsy evidence for a violation as "they use GPL software in other products." If apple wants to release a phone that is proprietary that is well within their rights. If you want to champion open solutions then go out and make one and beat them at their own game. Thats how its supposed to work.
This would be like all the linux coders in the world hanging it up and turning into PR machines simply accusing MS and apple of violating the GPL and hoping the go away rather than trying to produce a platform to provide an alternative.
Im sorry but I really think the hype over the iPhone has gone way past apples marketing. People keep acting like apple is driving this hype machine but they really aren't. They barely talk about the iPhone compared to how much everyone else seems to talk about it.
Apple doesnt drive that hype machine because they don't have to. Not since the iPod came out.
Universal is going to demand DRM with their new provider. They will be cutting themselves out of that market (which I doubt is actually a huge consumer of online music since those players probably contain mostly ripped CDs, but that is besides the point) no matter what.
They just want more money and they dont want to give up DRM to get it. If they went somewhere else and sold their music DRM free I would probably buy it (assuming they have anything I want) but if its got some other DRM I wont buy it, because I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
The book had too much of a "beat you over the head with the point" slant to it that really just puts me off. If I feel badgered by the point of a book (or movie or whatever) then I just cant get into it in the same way. Maybe this is related to the focus on religious themes, I don't know.
yes, games have been few and far between for the Wii, but the console has sold like hotcakes. This implies that games will be released for it in the future.
A lot of game development companies bet against the Wii and that was a poor bet for them to make. I'm sure many of them would like to go back and release on the Wii just to get a crack at the installed base. I doubt they will make the same mistake now that the Wii is on the market and outselling the other consoles.
That said, Nintendo is probably close to the peak of its value and would not make a fantastic investment right now. Even if the console continues to sell well and the new games come out and Nintendo is fantastically successful, how much higher can the stock reasonably go?
You could totally market this in many different iColors. I have no doubt it could be the next big thing. The commercials practically write themselves, just use the same silhouettes with big colored sashes on them. Make sure the sash has a build in network and your good to go!
Fry: You know, now you can live in an actual biodome!
Pauly Shore: An unappealing prospect. While researching for the part, I ran computer simulations proving, incontrovertibly, that the whole bio-enclosure concept is fundamentally flawed. Be it expressed via dome, sphere, cube, or even the stately tetrahedron,...Bu-u-ddy.
I dont think its a killer app but it sure would be nice to be able to make international calls on my cell phone without paying a fortune. Even if I could only do it in certain places.
Also, I went on a vacation through Europe a little while back. I didnt bring a laptop but it would have been great to have a small device that could get on wifi networks and let me check/send email or browse the web (plenty of trains seemed to have WiFi from what I could see) so even though I couldn't use the iPhone overseas, it would have been nice for that.
Certainly not enough reason to buy one from just that, but I think the wifi and things like skype if you could get it on there, would be a great bonus feature on the iPhone.
very true, it must not be that big, which is a good thing.
But, personally, I just cant deal with something that fragile in my pants pocket... I feel like it would get destroyed. Also, I carry my wallet in my front pocket (much better for your posture than sitting on it) and keys in the other front pocket. Maybe I'm the only one who deals with this but when summer rolls around and I'm not wearing a coat anymore, I just don't seem to have enough pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
If the point of open source is to give people the freedom to do what they want with the source then there should be no ethical issue (at least within the framwork of open source ethics) with a fork. If I want to do something different from what linus, or any other open source developer, wants to do that should be within my rights both legally and ethically within the open source doctrine.
To say anything else is a bit hypocritical. After all, the whole point is to give people freedom, not bind their hands.
What if Linus, or any other lead developer of an open source project, simply stopped supporting it. This person wont let anyone else take the job, and owns the project and the name. Under these circumstances it is clearly OK to fork. I dont believe you can draw some arbitrary line and say, past here, its not OK (ethically, not leagally) to fork a project.
Forks might no always be necessary, they might not always be the best thing, but to call the wrong is very dangerous.
Besides, if the licenses are the same between the forks they can still share code and if the new fork gathers more momentum than the original and the original dies off, well, thats just survival of the fittest and the community has made their choice.
Anyone can fork a GPL2 project, there is nothing morally wrong with me taking linux (which I have never contributed to) and starting my own fork of that project that does something different. This is quite appropriate to the spirit of free software and the GPL.
What if Linus decided to do something with linux that many users found unappealing. Is it wrong for those users to branch the code and make their own version?
What you say about making a new fork GPL3 might be correct though I believe it depends on the way in wich the code was licensed originally, isn't it possible to make your code licensed under GPL2 or higher which would allow a future fork to use GPL3 or even 4? I don't know a ton about this and I certainly don't know what the licensing terms of CUPS actually are.
where, exactly, did I say that I haven't played any games?
Or did you mean that I haven't played the games that haven't come out yet? OK, thats fair, its possible that the new Halo will be totally different from the old one, but more likely than not it will be a graphical update with some nice new maps. GTA, pretty much the same, but now with more bitch slappin' action.
I can tell you right now that the game play in Madden wont be significantly different from the last version (except maybe on the Wii where I assume they are still working on the control system).
Look, I'm not saying that these games don't have merit and don't have value, but they sure aren't innovative and they aren't likely to introduce anything new in terms of game play. The primary changes are likely to be graphics.
What boggles my mind is that his 360 had only 200 hours of game play on it. 40 games, 5 hours a piece? yipes!
Wow, thats a lot of games to pick up in 18 months. When I read the first part of your post I was shocked that you would buy an new 360 if your old one was busted but with that kind of investment I guess i understand.
Shame though, if your computer went to shit in 18 months you probably wouldn't buy another one of those computers.
Depends on what you mean by "innovation" and it depends on what you mean by "gameplay"
All too many games these days are just rehashes of last years crap. Look at the games that Microsoft is touting here. Madden, GTA and Halo. These games will be small iterative improvements over the last version that was released. Probably not even that in the case of Madden which is pretty much just a roster update every year.
I'm not saying there are absolutely no innovative games but all too many are just rehashes of what has come before.
In my experience, verizon has better coverage in more places than any of those carriers and I always liked the fact that I could bring my phone in to a shop and get it fixed pretty easily. That said, verizon only sells phones which are very tightly locked down and wont provide a feature unless they can force you to pay through the nose for them. They never would have accepted apples terms on the iPhone, it has too many features that can be used without verizon making money.
No doubt! I might have qualified as a hardcore gamer at one point in my life. I have been playing FPS games since Wolf3D and one of the big things that has driven me away from gaming is that pretty much everything out there is just a derivative of Wolf3D. Sure there has been some good stuff, I loved the story lines in the Marathon series and the AI in Half-life, but I swear, whenever I see quake or even halo there is a part of me that expects a Nazi to come around the corner shouting "Achtung."
Why play the same game over and over again.
Sure there are other types of games and I still play those, but the Wii has provided me with many games that are new and different and a lot of fun to play. I only wish there were more games out for it.
all the covers on that album are fantastic, they are not direct copies of the original and they bring something of the covering artist to the music. This is the key to a high quality cover, just check out any of the covers Hendrix did (all along the watchtower, hey joe) or any of the Beatles songs covered by Joe Cocker.
The best part about that cover of 'Hurt' is that its so emotionally charged. Johnny Cash has such a powerful and believable presence that it makes it clear that Trent Reznor is a bit of an emo boy by comparison.
But I liked their version of Ghost Riders
Easily extendable? they locked down many of the features that you could modify easily in QT3. Many functions are no longer virtual and they use private implementation classes under the covers which are hard to replace.
Your concerns about cross platform compatibility are very valid, but I don't find QT to be all that extensible compared to many other UI frameworks and it is no where near as extensible as Cocoa (mostly due to the nature of objective C)
thats all well and good but when you want to use QStrings everywhere in your application (because they work well, support translation nicely and are compatible with your UI) all of a sudden everyone needs a license or you have to have some kind of compatibility layer so that your back end doesn't need QStrings.
Its doable, but its not trivial.
So your saying that GPL v3 changes the rules and if Steve doesn't like those rules then he shouldn't use LGPL v2 software?
wait, what?
Apple agreed to certain things when the chose to use that software, they comply with the license of that software. You don't get to change the rules on them after the fact. The code they have is released under a license that lets them use it the way they want to and thats that. At some point there will be a new version of that software that is released under a new license that Apple will not likely agree too, but all they have to do is not use that new version.
They will fork the old version and continue to develop it and chances are the community at large will no longer benefit from their work because they wont use the new license.
Not everyone even agrees that GPL v3 is actually all that and a bag of chips. If there isn't even consensus in the "community" about what is "libre" software you cant go telling me that Steve doesn't live up to it. Hell even linus has been apprehensive about GPL3, are you going to call him out as an enemy of "libre" software.
FAIL!
Office Space
But it sure would be obstruction of justice, which is what he was going to prison for.
Right, so its ok to spread fud, as long as it is about apple and not about open source. Classy.
"The role of the FSF is to promote freedom of software and computing platforms. Systems like the iPhone which are closed to their owners as a matter of policy rather than technology are the antithesis of what the FSF stands for. "
Then let them release their own phone and stop slinging mud at people and making accusations with no supporting evidence.
This is a pathetic move from the FSF and it should be condemned by everyone here. I don't recall ever seeing them make an accusation based on such flimsy evidence for a violation as "they use GPL software in other products." If apple wants to release a phone that is proprietary that is well within their rights. If you want to champion open solutions then go out and make one and beat them at their own game. Thats how its supposed to work.
This would be like all the linux coders in the world hanging it up and turning into PR machines simply accusing MS and apple of violating the GPL and hoping the go away rather than trying to produce a platform to provide an alternative.
Im sorry but I really think the hype over the iPhone has gone way past apples marketing. People keep acting like apple is driving this hype machine but they really aren't. They barely talk about the iPhone compared to how much everyone else seems to talk about it.
Apple doesnt drive that hype machine because they don't have to. Not since the iPod came out.
Universal is going to demand DRM with their new provider. They will be cutting themselves out of that market (which I doubt is actually a huge consumer of online music since those players probably contain mostly ripped CDs, but that is besides the point) no matter what.
They just want more money and they dont want to give up DRM to get it. If they went somewhere else and sold their music DRM free I would probably buy it (assuming they have anything I want) but if its got some other DRM I wont buy it, because I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
The book had too much of a "beat you over the head with the point" slant to it that really just puts me off. If I feel badgered by the point of a book (or movie or whatever) then I just cant get into it in the same way. Maybe this is related to the focus on religious themes, I don't know.
yes, games have been few and far between for the Wii, but the console has sold like hotcakes. This implies that games will be released for it in the future.
A lot of game development companies bet against the Wii and that was a poor bet for them to make. I'm sure many of them would like to go back and release on the Wii just to get a crack at the installed base. I doubt they will make the same mistake now that the Wii is on the market and outselling the other consoles.
That said, Nintendo is probably close to the peak of its value and would not make a fantastic investment right now. Even if the console continues to sell well and the new games come out and Nintendo is fantastically successful, how much higher can the stock reasonably go?
Brilliant!
You could totally market this in many different iColors. I have no doubt it could be the next big thing. The commercials practically write themselves, just use the same silhouettes with big colored sashes on them. Make sure the sash has a build in network and your good to go!
Fry: You know, now you can live in an actual biodome!
Pauly Shore: An unappealing prospect. While researching for the part, I ran computer simulations proving, incontrovertibly, that the whole bio-enclosure concept is fundamentally flawed. Be it expressed via dome, sphere, cube, or even the stately tetrahedron,...Bu-u-ddy.
I dont think its a killer app but it sure would be nice to be able to make international calls on my cell phone without paying a fortune. Even if I could only do it in certain places.
Also, I went on a vacation through Europe a little while back. I didnt bring a laptop but it would have been great to have a small device that could get on wifi networks and let me check/send email or browse the web (plenty of trains seemed to have WiFi from what I could see) so even though I couldn't use the iPhone overseas, it would have been nice for that.
Certainly not enough reason to buy one from just that, but I think the wifi and things like skype if you could get it on there, would be a great bonus feature on the iPhone.
very true, it must not be that big, which is a good thing.
But, personally, I just cant deal with something that fragile in my pants pocket... I feel like it would get destroyed. Also, I carry my wallet in my front pocket (much better for your posture than sitting on it) and keys in the other front pocket. Maybe I'm the only one who deals with this but when summer rolls around and I'm not wearing a coat anymore, I just don't seem to have enough pockets.