Linux has a public relations momentum that most other alternatives don't. It's Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke
Probably true, but hardly a Linux fault. I guess this is because technical press cannot handle more than one Next Thing per time:-)
Is proprietary software all that bad? I would say no, as long as it is in moderation.
OK for opplications ( while StarOffice would not be my example of useful closed source app ) However, infrastructures (OS & widely used libraries ) should be as free as possible, since they would give too much power to their owner. The playfield would not be level anymore, if proprietary infrastructures are accepted as standards.
Is it possible that the demand for open source code is to strong at times?
I'm afraid that Open Source is not suitable for current big business model. They invest A LOT in their products, and at the moment the only revenue model they have to recover that much money is selling their product. An alternative model would be to make lesser investment in advancing the shared pool of knowledge/software, then profit from it by packaging/support/selling 'verical applications'. Medium-to-small companies enjoy this model. Corporations, I'm not sure they can.
In an interview last year Linus Torvalds said that open source was going to transform more and more software in a commodity (IIRC). If he's right, big software companies should better hurry to change their revenue model. Or fight open source as hard as they can.
and persuade them to adopt another publishing model.
It's the only way to win this battle. Today middle-men (publishers and sellers ) have everithing to lose with electronic publishing, and will do their best (or worst) to delay/prevent it from happening and/or domesticate it.
Of course, you have to give the authors a working alternative publishing model, where working means that they still make profit of out it ( and possibly more than today ). I don't think there is one already. Open Source would not work, except for specific cases. Shareware model won't, either ( how many people have payed for their copy of WinZip ? ).
YES ---- The job of a company is to generate wealth (i.e. products that others find useful ). As a reward, the company make profits . Well, ideally at least. The job of a company IS NOT solve social problems. Donations may be used to cover guilt ( I've heard that the owner of a chain of Casinos and Brothels in hong-kong has been rewarded for his donation by both USA and Catholic Church institutions ).
NO ---- A company SHOULD NOT exploit social problems to make profit. Not always is easy to make the difference ( a misery wage in USA may be a lot of money in some country ), but it is possible and should be done.
A buyer SHOULD be concerned abouth ethical behaviour of the companies. If you believe in the "vote with your dollar" strategy, well, it applies here too.
In Ender's Game ( by Orson Scott Card ), one of the main characters was a kid that, under the fictious name of Locke[or some very similar name], exploited a futuristic version of The Internet to become one of Earth's 'intellectual leaders'. Any relation?
I have a laptop with Pentium 150 MHz MMX, with a NeoMagic video card and 2 MB of video RAM. Originally, it had 16 MB of RAM. With this configuration Linux was OK, but both KDE and GNOME generated lots of swap and where VERY slow ( about 2 minutes from 'startx' command to fully operational with stardard configs ). The third worst was Netscape, which required 1 minute to come up. The 'top' command told me that the real 'monster' is probably X itself, which had about 7MB of resident memory ( XFree3.3 with 16bpp and virtual resolution of 1024x768 ).
I looked for alternative window managers. WindowMaker offered the right (for me) balance of performance, usefulness and attractiveness. The only GNOME piece I was still using was gmc. Firing up my graphical desktop in this configuration only required 15 seconds.
Later, I bought 64 MB of additional RAM. Now both GNOME and KDE start-up in about 20 seconds. WindowMaker only takes three seconds, however, so I still use it for real work, only occasionally firing GNOME ( I do use a few GNOME apps,however ).
Sorry for this lengty post, but I wanted to add info to my opinion.
Do you feel that the increasing size and complexity of Open Source software projects can undermine the 'bazaar development method' ?
An assumption of this method is that at least part of the users can directly try and fix buggy sofware. Pushing toward trendy but complex technologies (CORBA/Bonobo etc... ) may reduce the number of such 'external helpers', leaving only the core development team to deal with software bugs.
Further, the less experienced the user, the lower the likelihood that he actually owns any executable programs. Therefore, the users who are the least savvy about such hazards are also the ones with the least fertile home directories for viruses.
For a single-user desktop environment, the less experienced user is the same which goes root to install new exciting packages just downloaded from a not-too-safe site. It would hep, if he could install 'not-safe' binary packages in 'user space'(e..g. a sub-directory of his home directory) and then, once he thrusts them, re-install in 'root space'.
Even if the virus successfully infects a program owned by the user, its task of propagation is made much more difficult by the limited privileges of the user account.
Even if it cannot (easily) spread using programs owned by root, it can damage user's files!
My 40 lire ( hopefully soon 0.2 Euro ) : Virus trives in computer user's ignorance. To fight the viruses, educate the computer users.
In my best dreams, the Internet will become the Brain of the World, connecting all the neurons (us) to fire up terrific new ideas. In my worst nightmares, Internet becomes Just Like TV : few will control its contents and the rest of people will passively absorbe them .
but what about writing an open-source censor-ware ? At least, it will allow parents to view and edit the site blacklist and/or the filter criteria...
And, yes, the software could open at start-up a big window saying : THE WEB IS NOT AN ELECTRONIC BABY-SITTER. IT'S REAL LIFE. IF YOU DON'T LET YOUR CHILD WALK ALONE ON THE STREETS AND TALK TO STRANGERS, YOU SHOULD NOT LET HIM SURF ALONE IN THE WEB.
Many models, of different manifacturers, have a very similar design. Yet, no firm (as far as I know) tried to enforce an 'aesthetical copyright' on a car model. Or did it happen?
I may agree that people today would not buy a mainframe ( although I never run any big system myself ). But what if a company has already one of them and does not know how to use it anymore?
Besides, this is a wonderful hack, independently by its pratical usage ( and why people run Linux on Palmtops?).
Oh, and concepts in computer science never dies. Look at how SUN re-cycled the IBM Virtual Machine concept with Java ( ok, it's software instead of hardware, BUT... ). And to me the so much vented 'network computer' idea resembles a bit the 'obsolete' mainframe concept ( or it does? ).
*WHINE ON* I posted this story last thursday, but got ignored. This is life. It's OK. Just let me whine and I'll feel better. *WHINE OFF*
Standards are good for short-term goals, because they allow to reach them without dispersing resources.
But the OSS world cannot operate like a company : it is too wide and too diverse. I like to think that is is operating like a brain, where different clusters of neurons develop different thoughts, often alternative and in competition.
On the long run, it's all for the best (I hope).
Anyway, I read that GNOME and KDE are working on a common Window Manager interface. This is a start. Next thing, a common MIME library (pleeese)?
1 - develop telepresence, i.e. remote control via Virtual Reality and sensorial feedback. With that, we don't have to build expansive life-supporting space infrastructures. And such technology will be greatly useful on Earth, too.
2 - Develop faster-than-light communication. Well, this is the SF part. Without that, telepresence would be limited to the Moon. Any idea out there?
Well, why in Motif example you did not use the Tab Properties Dialog, as in the GTK+ example? As far as I know (and I do program in Motif), it's because is not a standard Motif widget (yes, you you can buy extra libraries, which maybe are not compatible/supported with your GUI builder tool). And what about tree widgets to show hierarchies? Toolbars? A file dialog box in which you can create a new directory on the fly? Text widget with GNU 'line edit' capabilities? ( well, maybe GTK+ has not this either, but it would be a nice idea:-) ).
GTK+ may have some way to go, but IMHO it IS the future of MMI development( or part of it ).
One of the things I expect from the spreading of Linux is that it will increase the general computer-awareness of the common user. Today, an average computer-user knows about its computer less than it knows about a car (they do not usually put the wrong fuel in the car, but they carelessy upload and run infected software).
This was not possible 10 years ago, when M$oft made his fortune by lowering the standard needed to use a computer. But soon, with kids first approaching computers when three years old, it will be maybe time for a system less 'shallow' and more powerful. Linux could be it.
As a programmer, but quite mouse-addict, I must say that I found User-Interface of many OS programs less easy, even though often more powerful, of today commercial programs. On the other hand, I discovered that the so-called user-friendlyness of many programs often scares away the computer-ignorants as much as a command line interface. While a computer-aware person easily learn a new program interface.The thing is to teach CONCEPTS, not how to press buttons.
Last thing: I believe the author under-estimates the power of Internet as a tool to convey then hints of average-users to the OSS programmers. The problem could be : would they listen ?( after all they work for fun! ).
My first professional project ( that is a job I was payed for ) was writing a lisp application half matematical, half AI ( namely : find out a collision-free trajectory for a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm in a partially obstructed environment ). I lovingly remember that period. I worked on a machine with a *Lisp processor* and *lisp-oriented OS* ( an Explorer II made by Texas Instruments ). It had common lisp with object oriented extensions. Lisp program could be complied into assembly code. I also had an high-level, object oriented, AI-oriented, visual programming environment named KEE, by Intellicorp, which made PROLOG and Smalltalk looks as assembler languages. It had a wonderful window-based user-interface toolkit, also.
I just loved programming Lisp ( and KEE, too ). There is nothing better, if you are doing symbolic programming. It's fine for matemathical applications, too ( but you need a smart interpreted/compiler to avoid the performance drawbacks of functional programming ).
My application ended up mostly matemathical, with a few AI algorithms attempting to save computational efforts. It worked fine, but it accumulated LOTS of memory garbage. So, every time the OS started the garbage collection, my application was kicked off CPU and everithing stopped. I hope today lisp interpreters/compiler handle it better.
Sorry, a bit of memory rummaging here... but this is the time for it : we are at the end of Millenium ( or we are ? ).
is that is hard to determine where is the boundary between the idea ( abundand and therefore, hopefully, free ) and the product ( scarce and therefore patentable ).
For instance, programming requires huge amount of man-power from skilled individuals... not a cheap resource, I would say [ even though the Bazaar model tells us how distribute the effort to make it ligther ].
I DO agree, anyway, that the more free are ideas AND software, the more everybody in the field will benefit, including the idea originator/ software programmer. I'm just not sure that the bussines world will ever see it in that way.
Read the book many years ago. Liked most of it. Only the final is a little too much 'mistical' for me [ as I remember it, it ends with a new world wide destruction; during this, there is a sort of 'revelation' : a bit of Holy Mary(?) transpires through a mutant woman hosted at Leibowitz abbey ].
/*** Start Offtopic Speaking of End of World, I reccomend Terry Pratchett's & Neil Gaiman's novel "Good Omens" [if there is anyone who didn't read it yet]! *** end offtopic */
Purchased two weeks ago. Read (almost) everithing in an long intense week. 80% of contents was not new for me (many-years Unix programmer), but I'm happy to find it clearly written somewere, else than in man pages and in my brain (which is not so much reliable anymore ). The 20% I didn'n know ( device drivers, some of perl, some of GTK+, TCL/TK ) is more than enough for my money.
RA Lafferty wrote about that
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
·
· Score: 1
I read once a short novel of R.A. Lafferty, which was about a genius boy, socially disadapted and a little 'out of focus' ( a nerd? ), which built a robot which resebled him, but was also socially a success ( a robo-geek? ). But then the boy got jaelous of the robot... Pity I can't remember the title...
Anyway, I am latin while 'nerd' and 'geek' and anglo words, so I'm not qualified to speak.
BTW : I am a programmer, and I consider what I do as mindcraft : same as handycraft, but using mind instead of hands ( well, fingers too...:-} )
Slashdot Mirror
Linux has a public relations momentum that most other alternatives don't. It's Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke
Probably true, but hardly a Linux fault. I guess this is because technical press cannot handle more than one Next Thing per time :-)
Is proprietary software all that bad? I would say no, as long as it is in moderation.
OK for opplications ( while StarOffice would not be my example of useful closed source app ) However, infrastructures (OS & widely used libraries ) should be as free as possible, since they would give too much power to their owner. The playfield would not be level anymore, if proprietary infrastructures are accepted as standards.
Is it possible that the demand for open source code is to strong at times?
I'm afraid that Open Source is not suitable for current big business model. They invest A LOT in their products, and at the moment the only revenue model they have to recover that much money is selling their product. An alternative model would be to make lesser investment in advancing the shared pool of knowledge/software, then profit from it by packaging/support/selling 'verical applications'. Medium-to-small companies enjoy this model. Corporations, I'm not sure they can.
In an interview last year Linus Torvalds said that open source was going to transform more and more software in a commodity (IIRC). If he's right, big software companies should better hurry to change their revenue model. Or fight open source as hard as they can.
Ehm ...
I sort of remember a TV spot advertising SW Episode 1 on DVD. Here in Italy. But I've seen it only once.
DISCLAIMER : My brain has no RAM left and is swapping furiously, like when running Netscape over X, with Gnome, on a 16 MB box.
It's the only way to win this battle. Today middle-men (publishers and sellers ) have everithing to lose with electronic publishing, and will do their best (or worst) to delay/prevent it from happening and/or domesticate it.
Of course, you have to give the authors a working alternative publishing model, where working means that they still make profit of out it ( and possibly more than today ). I don't think there is one already. Open Source would not work, except for specific cases. Shareware model won't, either ( how many people have payed for their copy of WinZip ? ).
YES
----
The job of a company is to generate wealth (i.e. products that others find useful ). As a reward, the company make profits .
Well, ideally at least.
The job of a company IS NOT solve social problems. Donations may be used to cover guilt ( I've heard that the owner of a chain of Casinos and Brothels in hong-kong has been rewarded for his donation by both USA and Catholic Church institutions ).
NO
----
A company SHOULD NOT exploit social problems to make profit. Not always is easy to make the difference ( a misery wage in USA may be a lot of money in some country ), but it is possible and should be done.
A buyer SHOULD be concerned abouth ethical behaviour of the companies. If you believe in the "vote with your dollar" strategy, well, it applies here too.
In Ender's Game ( by Orson Scott Card ), one of the main characters was a kid that, under the fictious name of Locke[or some very similar name], exploited a futuristic version of The Internet to become one of Earth's 'intellectual leaders'. Any relation?
I have a laptop with Pentium 150 MHz MMX, with a NeoMagic video card and 2 MB of video RAM.
Originally, it had 16 MB of RAM. With this configuration Linux was OK, but both KDE and GNOME generated lots of swap and where VERY slow ( about 2 minutes from 'startx' command to fully operational with stardard configs ). The third worst was Netscape, which required 1 minute to come up.
The 'top' command told me that the real 'monster' is probably X itself, which had about 7MB of resident memory ( XFree3.3 with 16bpp and virtual resolution of 1024x768 ).
I looked for alternative window managers. WindowMaker offered the right (for me) balance of performance, usefulness and attractiveness. The only GNOME piece I was still using was gmc. Firing up my graphical desktop in this configuration only required 15 seconds.
Later, I bought 64 MB of additional RAM. Now both
GNOME and KDE start-up in about 20 seconds. WindowMaker only takes three seconds, however, so I still use it for real work, only occasionally firing GNOME ( I do use a few GNOME apps,however ).
Sorry for this lengty post, but I wanted to add info to my opinion.
is that Cisco is now the richest and biggest company - the position that MS was used to have.
That is, the big business is not anymore in stand-alone PC and PC OS, but in the 'Net and everything that is used to build it.
And which will be the next monopolist?
Do you feel that the increasing size and complexity of Open Source software projects can undermine the 'bazaar development method' ?
... ) may reduce the number of such 'external helpers', leaving only the core development team to deal with software bugs.
An assumption of this method is that at least part of the users can directly try and fix buggy sofware. Pushing toward trendy but complex technologies (CORBA/Bonobo etc
For a single-user desktop environment, the less experienced user is the same which goes root to install new exciting packages just downloaded from a not-too-safe site. It would hep, if he could install 'not-safe' binary packages in 'user space'(e..g. a sub-directory of his home directory) and then, once he thrusts them, re-install in 'root space'.
Even if the virus successfully infects a program owned by the user, its task of propagation is made much more difficult by the limited privileges of the user account.
Even if it cannot (easily) spread using programs owned by root, it can damage user's files!
My 40 lire ( hopefully soon 0.2 Euro ) : Virus trives in computer user's ignorance. To fight the viruses, educate the computer users.
Never throw away good code that works!
In my best dreams, the Internet will become the Brain of the World, connecting all the neurons (us) to fire up terrific new ideas.
In my worst nightmares, Internet becomes Just Like TV : few will control its contents and the rest of people will passively absorbe them .
but what about writing an open-source censor-ware ? At least, it will allow parents to view and edit the site blacklist and/or the filter criteria ...
And, yes, the software could open at start-up a big window saying :
THE WEB IS NOT AN ELECTRONIC BABY-SITTER. IT'S REAL LIFE. IF YOU DON'T LET YOUR CHILD WALK ALONE ON THE STREETS AND TALK TO STRANGERS, YOU SHOULD NOT LET HIM SURF ALONE IN THE WEB.
Many models, of different manifacturers, have a very similar design. Yet, no firm (as far as I know) tried to enforce an 'aesthetical copyright' on a car model. Or did it happen?
I may agree that people today would not buy a mainframe ( although I never run any big system myself ). But what if a company has already one of them and does not know how to use it anymore?
... ). And to me the so much vented 'network computer' idea resembles a bit the 'obsolete' mainframe concept ( or it does? ).
Besides, this is a wonderful hack, independently by its pratical usage ( and why people run Linux on Palmtops?).
Oh, and concepts in computer science never dies. Look at how SUN re-cycled the IBM Virtual Machine concept with Java ( ok, it's software instead of hardware, BUT
*WHINE ON*
I posted this story last thursday, but got ignored. This is life. It's OK. Just let me whine and I'll feel better.
*WHINE OFF*
Standards are good for short-term goals, because they allow to reach them without dispersing resources.
But the OSS world cannot operate like a company : it is too wide and too diverse. I like to think that is is operating like a brain, where different clusters of neurons develop different thoughts, often alternative and in competition.
On the long run, it's all for the best (I hope).
Anyway, I read that GNOME and KDE are working on a common Window Manager interface. This is a start. Next thing, a common MIME library (pleeese)?
My own recipe to win the Space:
1 - develop telepresence, i.e. remote control via Virtual Reality and sensorial feedback. With that, we don't have to build expansive life-supporting space infrastructures. And such technology will be greatly useful on Earth, too.
2 - Develop faster-than-light communication. Well, this is the SF part. Without that, telepresence would be limited to the Moon.
Any idea out there?
Well, why in Motif example you did not use the Tab Properties Dialog, as in the GTK+ example? :-) ).
As far as I know (and I do program in Motif), it's because is not a standard Motif widget (yes, you you can buy extra libraries, which maybe are not compatible/supported with your GUI builder tool).
And what about tree widgets to show hierarchies? Toolbars? A file dialog box in which you can
create a new directory on the fly? Text widget with GNU 'line edit' capabilities? ( well, maybe GTK+ has not this either, but it would be a nice idea
GTK+ may have some way to go, but IMHO it IS the future of MMI development( or part of it ).
One of the things I expect from the spreading of Linux is that it will increase the general computer-awareness of the common user. Today, an average computer-user knows about its computer less than it knows about a car (they do not usually put the wrong fuel in the car, but they carelessy upload and run infected software).
This was not possible 10 years ago, when M$oft made his fortune by lowering the standard needed to use a computer.
But soon, with kids first approaching computers when three years old, it will be maybe time for a system less 'shallow' and more powerful. Linux could be it.
As a programmer, but quite mouse-addict, I must say that I found User-Interface of many OS programs less easy, even though often more powerful, of today commercial programs. On the other hand, I discovered that the so-called user-friendlyness of many programs often scares away the computer-ignorants as much as a command line interface. While a computer-aware person easily learn a new program interface.The thing is to teach CONCEPTS, not how to press buttons.
Last thing: I believe the author under-estimates the power of Internet as a tool to convey then hints of average-users to the OSS programmers. The problem could be : would they listen ?( after all they work for fun! ).
My first professional project ( that is a job I was payed for ) was writing a lisp application half matematical, half AI ( namely : find out a collision-free trajectory for a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm in a partially obstructed environment ).
... but this is the time for it : we are at the end of Millenium ( or we are ? ).
I lovingly remember that period. I worked on a machine with a *Lisp processor* and *lisp-oriented OS* ( an Explorer II made by Texas Instruments ). It had common lisp with object oriented extensions. Lisp program could be complied into assembly code.
I also had an high-level, object oriented, AI-oriented, visual programming environment named KEE, by Intellicorp, which made PROLOG and Smalltalk looks as assembler languages. It had a wonderful window-based user-interface toolkit, also.
I just loved programming Lisp ( and KEE, too ).
There is nothing better, if you are doing symbolic programming. It's fine for matemathical applications, too ( but you need a smart interpreted/compiler to avoid the performance drawbacks of functional programming ).
My application ended up mostly matemathical, with a few AI algorithms attempting to save computational efforts. It worked fine, but it accumulated LOTS of memory garbage. So, every time the OS started the garbage collection, my application was kicked off CPU and everithing stopped. I hope today lisp interpreters/compiler handle it better.
Sorry, a bit of memory rummaging here
is that is hard to determine where is the boundary between the idea ( abundand and therefore, hopefully, free ) and the product ( scarce and therefore patentable ).
... not a cheap resource, I would say [ even though the Bazaar model tells us how distribute the effort to make it ligther ].
For instance, programming requires huge amount of man-power from skilled individuals
I DO agree, anyway, that the more free are ideas AND software, the more everybody in the field will benefit, including the idea originator/ software programmer.
I'm just not sure that the bussines world will ever see it in that way.
Read the book many years ago.
Liked most of it. Only the final is a little too much 'mistical' for me [ as I remember it, it ends with a new world wide destruction; during this, there is a sort of 'revelation' : a bit of Holy Mary(?) transpires through a mutant woman hosted at Leibowitz abbey ].
/*** Start Offtopic
Speaking of End of World, I reccomend Terry Pratchett's & Neil Gaiman's novel "Good Omens"
[if there is anyone who didn't read it yet]!
*** end offtopic */
Purchased two weeks ago. Read (almost) everithing in an long intense week.
80% of contents was not new for me (many-years Unix programmer), but I'm happy to find it clearly written somewere, else than in man pages and in my brain (which is not so much reliable anymore ).
The 20% I didn'n know ( device drivers, some of perl, some of GTK+, TCL/TK ) is more than enough for my money.
I read once a short novel of R.A. Lafferty, which was about a genius boy, socially disadapted and a little 'out of focus' ( a nerd? ), which built a robot which resebled him, but was also socially a success ( a robo-geek? ). But then the boy got jaelous of the robot ... ...
... :-} )
Pity I can't remember the title
Anyway, I am latin while 'nerd' and 'geek' and anglo words, so I'm not qualified to speak.
BTW : I am a programmer, and I consider what I do as mindcraft : same as handycraft, but using mind instead of hands ( well, fingers too