I saw this 5 years ago, and it was extremely cool. They played a variant of Pong where the ball went in and out from the plane of the screen to a plane that appeared to be more or less level with the back of the monitor. They also used a cool 3D mouse so you could move your bat. It was totally realistic stereoscopic 3d without any goggles or anything.
What you're describing sounds like you could render both the bats easily but you couldn't render the ball because it would be in-between the planes of the two LCDs. The autostereo system handles all intermediate distances just fine.
There are only two cues the human brain has to perceive 3 dimensions. One is the relative size of an object, assuming you have some idea how big it should appear at a given distance--focusing your vision is a part of this aspect as well.
The other is the slight difference in image perceived by each eye--called retinal disparity.
Uh, no. There's (at least) one other:
The way the view you're seeing changes as you move your head from side to side and/or up and down.
I'm guessing, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the reason why most basketball players seem to deliberately bend at the knee (moving their head up and down) before shooting a free throw. Stereoscopic vision doesn't help you perceive how far away a horizontal line is.
For people blind in one eye, I imagine that moving the head becomes much more important as a depth cue. And this system provides that, where stereo images don't.
Not quite. The tabs bug doesn't involve any XBL, but that's also not the bug that caused it to be yanked. There's a patch for the tabs bug, but it's not done the Right Way, so it's not ready for check in.
What caused it to be yanked was a performance issue: the toolbar causes a 3% slowdown in window-open and startup time, even when it's turned off. This is the bug that requires rewriting in XBL. Bug 102992 has the details of the partial work I've already done to this end (and I'm certainly not Hyatt, the guy who wrote the language!) but there's a long way still to go. The things that I'm too busy with are my real life job and the fact that I have a baby due in a month - I don't work for Netscape.
The feature has only been "yoinked" so far for 1.0, not 1.1; if I or somebody else can finish the XBL rewrite in that timeframe, it'll go back in. Hopefully by then someone will work on the bug that blocks doing the tabs problem the right way, too.
When used properly, it's a complement to hyperlinks. Most sites already provide links to next, previous, up and top somewhere, but they're in different places on different sites, and sometimes not obvious. Other times you have to scroll to find them - for example on mailing list archives where the "next" link is usually at the very bottom.
Having this in a toolbar makes it available in a consistent place that's always available regardless of how you scroll. It would be stupid to use this instead of proper navigation hyperlinks, but using it as well greatly enhances the usability of your site to people with it enabled.
Try reading a mailing list archive such as the mono mailing lists (linked from go-mono.com) with it enabled.
It's really nice to be able to click "next" and "previous" in a toolbar rather than hunting around for the "next in thread" link buried at the bottom of the message. Especially if you want to skip a message entirely and don't want to scroll all the way to the bottom.
That's the one. "linktoolbar" is the developer's name for it. It wasn't much use to most people anyway since it was off by default, but of course this is a step backwards instead of forwards (the forwards step would have been checking in the patch that fixed it with tabs and then enabling it by default - maybe for 1.1...)
Yes I do. And Open Source. That's kind of my point - if I agree with both movements, why am I only allowed to identify myself with one of them?
Because Free Software supports both of these goals. "Open Source" was created as a rebranding attempt to distance the movement from the word "free".
Which I recognize as a useful tool to promote Free/OpenSource software to amoral corporations who aren't going to be convinced by ethical arguments, however compelling. I don't think changing the emphasis to suit your target audience is an immoral thing to do.
Since then the Open Source Movement evolved to support only the more business-friendly pragramic side of software.
Again, I don't think that's a problem. The examples you cited of Qt is interesting because we aren't using non-free Qt anymore - we're still using Qt, but it's Free. Clearly the Open Source movement hasn't hurt us too badly here...
Interestingly, I feel the opposite on that point. I see most users using 100% open source software (possibly in "branded" forms with small bundled extra features, such as Netscape 6.x and StarOffice) in ten years time.
Two years ago, open source systems could barely do what Windows 3.1 didn't break a sweat at. Today they're easily at the point of replacing most of windows 98, including the applications that were most used at the time (such as Office 97). Windows and Office XP haven't been around for long enough to know what their "killer app" will be, but whatever it is (multimedia?) I bet you'll be able to do it just as well in open source within a year.
So what's left for proprietary software to do? And do you really think that if proprietary software tried to do it, an open source alternative wouldn't be around within a year? How is that supposed 50% of proprietary software possibly going to compete once free software has finished overcoming proprietary's 20 year head start?
Games seem to me to be pretty much the only exception to this rule. If you make a good and innovative game, a free version a year later is going to be too late to be relevant. But even then I'm not too sure - many games are just level design based on a core engine, and open source can play in the "engine" space pretty easily. The open issue is whether it can also do high-quality level design, and that's something I'm not sure of.
Incidentally, I have no problem paying for software either, but if you expect me to pay money, you'd damn well better be giving me more value. And taking away the source and my rights to it is actually giving me less value. If I used Mandrake, for example, I'd pay to join their "club" because I'd be getting a lot of value from their software. But I chose not to take a proprietary web browser for no money, even when the only alternative was Mozilla M18 which was demonstrably inferior, because the proprietariness wasn't worth the price.
I think I'm a little more to the ideological side than you, perhaps, but not too much.
For me, the open source / free nature of something trumps being technically better because it is somewhat of a guarantee that future versions will be technically better, and because if one particular feature is crippling me, I can fix it myself. For example, I've used Mozilla since M18 despite the fact that at the time, even Netscape 4 was substantially better in most ways. On the other hand, I do still use Netscape 4 mail at work because the potential hurt from losing my email is just too great in a work environment.
In fact, now that I think about it, for the most part the only non-free software I use is stuff that is necessary for work (Oracle, Netscape, Windows on a separate machine via rdesktop for viewing Word docs and things). I even use Mozilla for mail at home, where I can live with or work around the bugs:)
There are only two exceptions; one is Java, which I still use a non-free implementation of for private hacking. The free implementations aren't quite up to the standard where I can rely on stuff "just working" yet, but the existence of the free implementations is what I use to justify letting my pragmatism override my desire to only use free software. I believe that in a matter of months, or a year or so at worst, the existing free implementations will be able to run everything I've written.
The other exception is gaming - here the downsides of proprietary software don't really apply, because if they bite me in any way, the worst that can happen is that I just don't play that game any more. Which isn't too big a deal. So I really don't care too badly that it's proprietary, even if I would rather it were free.
(I'm aware that I'm not completely ideologically consistent here, and I rationalize it by treating my choices as utilitarian, with a very large but not infinite negative utility value for the problems of proprietary software. The cases where I allow non-free software are then situations where the positive utility (eg of keeping my job) is even higher, or some other factor mitigates the negative aspects of proprietariness)
Stuart.
Re:What I found most interesting...
on
The Stallman Factor
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This is one of the most intelligent comments on the issue I've seen in a long while. Nobody's ever asked me my position on "Free Software versus Open Source", but the answer I've had prepared for a long time in case anyone ever did was along these lines:
Free software advocates claim that this kind of software is morally superior. Open source advocates claim that this kind of software will likely (in fact, inevitably) end up better quality and provide more benefits to both the user and the developer. I say that both of these are true, and therefore I support both. I don't feel a need to identify with one of these exclusively or even to prioritize one over the other, since both ends are achieved by the same means. My position is just to be happy that there are two important benefits from this kind of software!
Now, if the goal of getting the most benefits from my software contradicted the goal of taking the moral high ground, I honestly can't say which I would choose. But I had a hard time even phrasing that last sentence, because it's almost inherently contradictory - the moral goal of freedom is inherently what produces the benefits that I consider important. So it's impossible to separate the two and even more impossible for them to ever contradict each other.
There's a BIG difference between "open the box void the warranty" and "open the box get arrested".
I'd have no problem if the MPAA said "well, if you distribute DeCSS, you'll void the warranty on any DVDs played using it". Or if the RIAA said that they wouldn't give any warranty to a CD if it's used to access my.mp3.com (hey, wouldn't it be nice if someone actually *offered* a warranty on CDs?). Or even if the MPAA said that bypassing the region coding on DVD players would void the warranty.
The problem is that in fact these groups are doing no such thing. They actually want it to be IMPOSSIBLE to do these things. The equivalent would be an EULA on a Gateway computer that said that you waive your right to use any other manufacturer for repairs or service. And then they sent the police after you if you tried it.
Going from Perl to XSL is like going from Water to Potatoes.
They solve different problems.
As a programmer, your toolset should include more than one tool. Perl simply cannot be beaten for text processing. XSL is probably the best out there for processing XML into other XML, but this space is immature so be on the lookout for better solutions. Java (and C#) is great for building large enterprise applications or applications that benefit from a lot of object-orientation. C is good for programming close to the metal. Python is excellent for development speed, prototyping, and general-purpose code. Fortran is still among the best out there for heavy-duty numerical programming. Prolog rules for AI. Functional languages are great for solving complex algorithmic problems. Basic is good for, well, nothing;)
Learn as many different languages as you can find. Then use the right tool for the job. If you find yourself worrying that a particular thing you need to do is hard in the language you're using, you're either taking the wrong approach to the problem (I believe XSLT allows some kinds of problems to be solved *without* looping even where they'd require looping in Perl) or you're using the wrong tool.
Note: I can't say I've met all these requirements myself. My own programming experience is conspicuously missing Lisp, Scheme, Fortran and XSLT, and I only learnt one semester's worth of Prolog and never used it since; ditto ML which is the only functional language I know. And I haven't gotten as far into Python as I'd like.
But I do know enough of each to know when I'm faced with a problem that one of them might be best for.
If you really did give zero value to human rights, then I would gladly give you all those things on condition that you promised to become my slave and obey my every command.
Ah, but then you're assuming that he values honesty and trustworthiness enough to keep his own promises even at great personal cost. Otherwise he'll gladly make the promise, take your keys and bank account, and run.
Okay, then we've got to the core of our difference, which is that you consider Java "open enough", and I don't. I think that both of our positions are entirely self-consistent given that core disagreement. If I was happy with the openness of Java, I'd probably feel about the same as you do - that Mono is a waste of time.
I don't think I'd ever actively advocate that people stop working on it, though. If people working on something they want to work on poses such a great threat to my position, whatever that position is, then I'd probably consider that my position isn't as strong as it should be, and re-evaluate it. To be fair, I don't think you've actively advocated that people stop working on it, but rather advocated that people embrace Java instead, which is different.
With regard to SWT, it doesn't matter why IBM developed it. You argued that developing Windows.Forms was bad because SWT existed. By that logic, developing SWT was bad because Swing existed. You need to present another reason why you think that developing Windows.Forms is bad. Your "inconsistency" argument doesn't work either because SWT is "inconsistent" with existing and working Swing apps.
I think you're still missing one of my major points, which is that Java is just as proprietary as.NET. You can't argue that Open Source developers should embrace one and reject the other for that reason. See the bit about the JCP in my previous comment.
By my logic, if I'm running JUnit on Sun's JDK, I'm benefitting a proprietary platform. If I run NUnit on Mono, I'm not. If I run NUnit on MS's CLR, I am; if I run JUnit on Kaffe, I'm not. I'm not saying that's the only way to think, but it's not internally inconsistent - honest:) And since most people probably run JUnit on the JDK, that means it's already benefitting a proprietary platform.
I don't believe Mono gives anything to.NET. I also don't believe Kaffe gives anything to Java, as evidenced by the way that Sun consistently refuses to acknowledge its existence. The reason for developing Mono (and Kaffe - which btw is my example free java implementation just because it's the easiest to type) is because we (Open Source developers) get a benefit from it: The ability to lure developers from windows, the ability to run.NET applications from windows, another option of programming language to use (and it does add some useful features over Java, even if they are minor. One of them might be extremely useful for a particular project). And since existing Open Source Javas are still so immature (after 5 years or more!) it's hard to argue convincingly that they'll be mature before Mono is.
Unless you're claiming that Java is open (which it isn't in my book, although I accept your right to disagree), the only argument left for why Java should be embraced and.NET should be eschewed is that Java was here first. And that isn't a good enough reason for me.
Granted, there's not much value from a purely technical standpoint in having two different solutions to essentially the same problem. But there's an argument to be made that this can be useful even where the essentials are very similar (there actually are a few things from C# that I'd like to see Java pick up, like foreach, auto-boxing, and property support that's are more than a naming convention).
If a programmer from windows a year or two down the line from now is familiar with programming in C#, it'd be nicer for him to be able to simply carry over that knowledge than to have to say "well, Java is exactly the same as C# except that all the keywords have different names, and these few other differences".
Similarly, if some open source software is written to the JVM (like the Java JUnit test framework, for example) it'd be nice for it to be available directly from C# rather than having to port it (and end up with a forked project like NUnit - there are a bunch of projects like this which are straight ports of Java projects to C# which seems silly to me).
The problem of libraries is probably unavoidable but I don't think it's so awful to have two runtime libraries loaded at once. Many people already keep multiple windowing toolkits loaded - a theoretical disadvantage in exchange for the real practical advantage of being able to use applications written by someone who disagreed about which toolkit was better.
I'm arguing for diversity in programmer choice, but that doesn't mean I think that consistency is worthless: I'd rather that the various toolkit makers could get together and make their toolkits able to use each other's themes, for example, and do so automatically as needed. In the same way, having a runtime environment that could pick up the libraries native to the other language would be nice. And of course the user should never be able to detect any difference between a Java app and a C# one.
(Your argument about Windows.Forms is internally inconsistent, btw, because it would suggest that IBM should never have written SWT in the first place because Swing was there first. Obviously they thought writing a new toolkit was worthwhile for some reason. Obviously the Mono people feel the same way about writing a Windows.Forms port. You can argue the legitimacy of the reasons, but you can't base your argument on the premise that if a toolkit already exists then writing a new one is pointless. And a point about getting sued doesn't belong in that argument either.)
You may have misinterpreted my position. I program in Java every day. It's my favorite language out there. I do write open source software in java.
But it's unfair to say that Java on an open source platform is mature. Sun's 1.4 JVM is not open source, and although they have made encouraging baby steps in the past couple of weeks, it still seems unlikely that it will ever be.
The JCP is a nice gesture but you can tell that Sun still really call the shots when they were able to shut down a JSR Leader when he wanted to make the reference implementation open source. The person who enforces the rules can do anything, regardless of what the rules actually say (the same reason that the US government can often blatantly violate the Constitution, despite being theoretically bound by it).
So that leaves the Open Source java implementations. Anyone claiming that Kaffe, ORP, Classpath or gcj are mature needs to try them for real work. Last I tried, NONE of them could even run Tomcat, which is one of the premier open source java applications. None are even close to beginning to think about having Swing, and even AWT is iffy for most of them.
So if you're concerned about Open Source or Free Software from an ideological standpoint, you probably shouldn't write in Java, unless you're willing to live within the limitations of the current implementations. Same goes for writing C# software for Mono or P.NET.
As Nat quoted ESR as saying, when faced with a problem, the Open Source community by its very nature pursues all ways of solving it at once. Thus we have three open source Java implementations, two open source.NET implementations, and Parrot. This is a good thing, because whichever one turns out superior in the long run will survive. None of us can predict what that might be.
I personally hope that all three do well, and that we eventually end up with a runtime that can run code written for all three, and integrate them together. There are already signs of this, like the jilc project which translates Java bytecode to.NET IL, and various (mostly commercial, I think) projects that do the opposite.
I'm not bashing Java. But I see no reason to bash.NET either. Or GNOME. Or KDE. Or vi. Or Emacs. The beauty of Open Source is the availability of choices. Please don't try to take those choices away, even if they aren't the choices you'd make.
They are both closed, proprietary platforms that nevertheless have significant technical merit. Both are for all practical purposes under the exclusive control of large companies. Both have almost identical advantages (technical elegance) and disadvantages (performance). There are minor differences (slightly better multi-language support versus slightly better multi-platform support) and major similarities (the bytecode definitions can be matched up almost opcode-for-opcode).
Both have active Free Software projects attempting to clone them. In fact, both have multiple competing active Free Software projects attempting to clone them (Mono vs Portable.NET, Kaffe versus gcj versus ORP/Classpath (although Classpath and gcj cooperate a lot)).
What was your point again?
(The rest of your article is pretty much pure FUD so I'll ignore it. The only platform that's currently open (let alone "remaining" open) is Parrot, and that doesn't really work yet)
I patched GNUJSP to add support for parameters with multiple values. This was necessary for a production project which has been the major thing I've worked on for 2 years. Since GNUJSP was essentially unmaintained even back then, that bug was never going to get fixed unless I did it. I would have submitted the patch to the upstream maintainers if there were any...
Long term, of course, I'll move to another, maintained project. But at the time I made the fix, none of the alternatives were mature and the rest of my code was tested with GNUJSP only. I saved days of work porting to a new JSP engine (and probably dollars as well, because the alternative free ones at the time didn't meet my needs) just because I could fix the code myself.
That's the one that I trot out for corporate arguments. For personal use I could also mention that I patched abcde to be able to handle my mp3 directory layout, and added autohide support to Mozilla's Site Navigation Bar because I didn't want it wasting space on my screen when it was empty. I submitted both of these changes to the maintainers and in both cases they were accepted. I didn't have to in either case, but I didn't want to have to keep manually patching every new version that got released.
Unfortunately, you snipped the parts of my post that were most relevant to your argument (or cautionary tale, or whatever).
My point is that the "extra responsibilities" of the GPL are only "extra" by comparison to other, more liberal kinds of Open Source software. Since the poster was talking about having achieved victory in getting any Open Source accepted in his corporation, I think it's probably a safe assumption that the alternatives were proprietary applications. (There is, admittedly, another possibility which I'll discuss in a minute).
If you're in a situation where a proprietary application is a viable alternative, that means that you only need to do things which are permitted by a proprietary application. That is, you aren't distributing it outside your organization. If that's the case, the GPL places NO restrictions on you. The "double edged sword" only starts applying if you start doing things that you couldn't do at all with proprietary software, and there's no indication that the poster's company is doing those things.
I didn't get the impression that the original poster was a GPL advocate. His post never mentioned the GPL, and his position makes perfect sense independent of which Open Source license applies. And regardless of the license, as I said above, it's highly unlikely that his company is doing something that would cause the limitations of the license to come into play.
I'm certainly the last person to hide the responsibilities that come with Free Software (and I've known about Readline for years, and disagree with that licensing choice - but usually avoid using Readline in my projects for that reason). But knowing what the responsibilities aren't is as important as knowing what they are. There's no need to emphasize the GPL's requirement to give away source with all binaries if the person you're talking to had no plans to give away binaries at all. It just confuses the issue.
Now, the other possibility I mentioned above is that the alternative to Open Source was custom-developed applications, built in-house. In that situation it is plausible that the applications would be distributed, and the GPL requirement would apply. My arguments are based on the assumption that that is not the case; if it is, then I agree that it was dishonest to advocate GPL software without mentioning that restriction.
But that's a pretty big set of "if"s: IF the alternative was software developed in-house, AND IF said software is distributed outside the organization, AND IF the open source software in question is distributed under the GPL, AND IF the poster didn't think to mention any of these facts in his post, AND IF it didn't occur to the poster that "you're required to by law" was a valid answer to his Ask Slashdot. Add to that a dollop of giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt, and I'll stand by my assumption that the restrictions imposed by the GPL don't apply to this poster's situation.
Slashdot Mirror
There's better than that...
Autostereo displays
I saw this 5 years ago, and it was extremely cool. They played a variant of Pong where the ball went in and out from the plane of the screen to a plane that appeared to be more or less level with the back of the monitor. They also used a cool 3D mouse so you could move your bat. It was totally realistic stereoscopic 3d without any goggles or anything.
What you're describing sounds like you could render both the bats easily but you couldn't render the ball because it would be in-between the planes of the two LCDs. The autostereo system handles all intermediate distances just fine.
There are only two cues the human brain has to perceive 3 dimensions. One is the relative size of an object, assuming you have some idea how big it should appear at a given distance--focusing your vision is a part of this aspect as well.
The other is the slight difference in image perceived by each eye--called retinal disparity.
Uh, no. There's (at least) one other:
The way the view you're seeing changes as you move your head from side to side and/or up and down.
I'm guessing, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the reason why most basketball players seem to deliberately bend at the knee (moving their head up and down) before shooting a free throw. Stereoscopic vision doesn't help you perceive how far away a horizontal line is.
For people blind in one eye, I imagine that moving the head becomes much more important as a depth cue. And this system provides that, where stereo images don't.
Not quite. The tabs bug doesn't involve any XBL, but that's also not the bug that caused it to be yanked. There's a patch for the tabs bug, but it's not done the Right Way, so it's not ready for check in.
What caused it to be yanked was a performance issue: the toolbar causes a 3% slowdown in window-open and startup time, even when it's turned off. This is the bug that requires rewriting in XBL. Bug 102992 has the details of the partial work I've already done to this end (and I'm certainly not Hyatt, the guy who wrote the language!) but there's a long way still to go. The things that I'm too busy with are my real life job and the fact that I have a baby due in a month - I don't work for Netscape.
The feature has only been "yoinked" so far for 1.0, not 1.1; if I or somebody else can finish the XBL rewrite in that timeframe, it'll go back in. Hopefully by then someone will work on the bug that blocks doing the tabs problem the right way, too.
heh, I know what happened because I filed the bug to remove it after discussing it with you guys (drivers) :)
I don't dispute the decision, although it's not the one that I would have made. I just think it's a shame, that's all.
When used properly, it's a complement to hyperlinks. Most sites already provide links to next, previous, up and top somewhere, but they're in different places on different sites, and sometimes not obvious. Other times you have to scroll to find them - for example on mailing list archives where the "next" link is usually at the very bottom.
Having this in a toolbar makes it available in a consistent place that's always available regardless of how you scroll. It would be stupid to use this instead of proper navigation hyperlinks, but using it as well greatly enhances the usability of your site to people with it enabled.
Try reading a mailing list archive such as the mono mailing lists (linked from go-mono.com) with it enabled.
It's really nice to be able to click "next" and "previous" in a toolbar rather than hunting around for the "next in thread" link buried at the bottom of the message. Especially if you want to skip a message entirely and don't want to scroll all the way to the bottom.
My guess would be in the menus:
View->Show/Hide->Site Navigation Bar
That's the one. "linktoolbar" is the developer's name for it. It wasn't much use to most people anyway since it was off by default, but of course this is a step backwards instead of forwards (the forwards step would have been checking in the patch that fixed it with tabs and then enabling it by default - maybe for 1.1...)
We hardly knew you. [http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13849 6 - not linkified in hopes of not /.ing bugzilla again]
Back for 1.1, hopefully...
Ya know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people here in the trailer park...
Interestingly, these are all from 2001, and several of them refer to expecting to hit significant milestones "by the end of the year" or "next year".
Anyone know if any of these milestones were achieved? Or if not, what armadillo's latest estimates are for the same things?
Then you believe in Free Software.
Yes I do. And Open Source. That's kind of my point - if I agree with both movements, why am I only allowed to identify myself with one of them?
Because Free Software supports both of these goals. "Open Source" was created as a rebranding attempt to distance the movement from the word "free".
Which I recognize as a useful tool to promote Free/OpenSource software to amoral corporations who aren't going to be convinced by ethical arguments, however compelling. I don't think changing the emphasis to suit your target audience is an immoral thing to do.
Since then the Open Source Movement evolved to support only the more business-friendly pragramic side of software.
Again, I don't think that's a problem. The examples you cited of Qt is interesting because we aren't using non-free Qt anymore - we're still using Qt, but it's Free. Clearly the Open Source movement hasn't hurt us too badly here...
Interestingly, I feel the opposite on that point. I see most users using 100% open source software (possibly in "branded" forms with small bundled extra features, such as Netscape 6.x and StarOffice) in ten years time.
Two years ago, open source systems could barely do what Windows 3.1 didn't break a sweat at. Today they're easily at the point of replacing most of windows 98, including the applications that were most used at the time (such as Office 97). Windows and Office XP haven't been around for long enough to know what their "killer app" will be, but whatever it is (multimedia?) I bet you'll be able to do it just as well in open source within a year.
So what's left for proprietary software to do? And do you really think that if proprietary software tried to do it, an open source alternative wouldn't be around within a year? How is that supposed 50% of proprietary software possibly going to compete once free software has finished overcoming proprietary's 20 year head start?
Games seem to me to be pretty much the only exception to this rule. If you make a good and innovative game, a free version a year later is going to be too late to be relevant. But even then I'm not too sure - many games are just level design based on a core engine, and open source can play in the "engine" space pretty easily. The open issue is whether it can also do high-quality level design, and that's something I'm not sure of.
Incidentally, I have no problem paying for software either, but if you expect me to pay money, you'd damn well better be giving me more value. And taking away the source and my rights to it is actually giving me less value. If I used Mandrake, for example, I'd pay to join their "club" because I'd be getting a lot of value from their software. But I chose not to take a proprietary web browser for no money, even when the only alternative was Mozilla M18 which was demonstrably inferior, because the proprietariness wasn't worth the price.
I think I'm a little more to the ideological side than you, perhaps, but not too much.
:)
For me, the open source / free nature of something trumps being technically better because it is somewhat of a guarantee that future versions will be technically better, and because if one particular feature is crippling me, I can fix it myself. For example, I've used Mozilla since M18 despite the fact that at the time, even Netscape 4 was substantially better in most ways. On the other hand, I do still use Netscape 4 mail at work because the potential hurt from losing my email is just too great in a work environment.
In fact, now that I think about it, for the most part the only non-free software I use is stuff that is necessary for work (Oracle, Netscape, Windows on a separate machine via rdesktop for viewing Word docs and things). I even use Mozilla for mail at home, where I can live with or work around the bugs
There are only two exceptions; one is Java, which I still use a non-free implementation of for private hacking. The free implementations aren't quite up to the standard where I can rely on stuff "just working" yet, but the existence of the free implementations is what I use to justify letting my pragmatism override my desire to only use free software. I believe that in a matter of months, or a year or so at worst, the existing free implementations will be able to run everything I've written.
The other exception is gaming - here the downsides of proprietary software don't really apply, because if they bite me in any way, the worst that can happen is that I just don't play that game any more. Which isn't too big a deal. So I really don't care too badly that it's proprietary, even if I would rather it were free.
(I'm aware that I'm not completely ideologically consistent here, and I rationalize it by treating my choices as utilitarian, with a very large but not infinite negative utility value for the problems of proprietary software. The cases where I allow non-free software are then situations where the positive utility (eg of keeping my job) is even higher, or some other factor mitigates the negative aspects of proprietariness)
Stuart.
This is one of the most intelligent comments on the issue I've seen in a long while. Nobody's ever asked me my position on "Free Software versus Open Source", but the answer I've had prepared for a long time in case anyone ever did was along these lines:
Free software advocates claim that this kind of software is morally superior. Open source advocates claim that this kind of software will likely (in fact, inevitably) end up better quality and provide more benefits to both the user and the developer. I say that both of these are true, and therefore I support both. I don't feel a need to identify with one of these exclusively or even to prioritize one over the other, since both ends are achieved by the same means. My position is just to be happy that there are two important benefits from this kind of software!
Now, if the goal of getting the most benefits from my software contradicted the goal of taking the moral high ground, I honestly can't say which I would choose. But I had a hard time even phrasing that last sentence, because it's almost inherently contradictory - the moral goal of freedom is inherently what produces the benefits that I consider important. So it's impossible to separate the two and even more impossible for them to ever contradict each other.
There's a BIG difference between "open the box void the warranty" and "open the box get arrested".
I'd have no problem if the MPAA said "well, if you distribute DeCSS, you'll void the warranty on any DVDs played using it". Or if the RIAA said that they wouldn't give any warranty to a CD if it's used to access my.mp3.com (hey, wouldn't it be nice if someone actually *offered* a warranty on CDs?). Or even if the MPAA said that bypassing the region coding on DVD players would void the warranty.
The problem is that in fact these groups are doing no such thing. They actually want it to be IMPOSSIBLE to do these things. The equivalent would be an EULA on a Gateway computer that said that you waive your right to use any other manufacturer for repairs or service. And then they sent the police after you if you tried it.
Going from Perl to XSL is like going from Water to Potatoes.
;)
They solve different problems.
As a programmer, your toolset should include more than one tool. Perl simply cannot be beaten for text processing. XSL is probably the best out there for processing XML into other XML, but this space is immature so be on the lookout for better solutions. Java (and C#) is great for building large enterprise applications or applications that benefit from a lot of object-orientation. C is good for programming close to the metal. Python is excellent for development speed, prototyping, and general-purpose code. Fortran is still among the best out there for heavy-duty numerical programming. Prolog rules for AI. Functional languages are great for solving complex algorithmic problems. Basic is good for, well, nothing
Learn as many different languages as you can find. Then use the right tool for the job. If you find yourself worrying that a particular thing you need to do is hard in the language you're using, you're either taking the wrong approach to the problem (I believe XSLT allows some kinds of problems to be solved *without* looping even where they'd require looping in Perl) or you're using the wrong tool.
Note: I can't say I've met all these requirements myself. My own programming experience is conspicuously missing Lisp, Scheme, Fortran and XSLT, and I only learnt one semester's worth of Prolog and never used it since; ditto ML which is the only functional language I know. And I haven't gotten as far into Python as I'd like.
But I do know enough of each to know when I'm faced with a problem that one of them might be best for.
Canada is not a state. Just so that you know.
;)
So what does the term "nation state" mean?
And Canada's provinces are not states either. A lot of people don't seem to know this, if we are to judge from web submission forms...
Tell me about it! And neither are the UK's counties.
And a postal code does NOT have to be a 5-digit number.
And "colour" contains a U. As does "favourite". And "realise" doesn't contain a 'z', which by the way is pronounced "zed", not "zee". And...
Wait, I live in America now. Sorry. Take all those statements and reverse them
If you really did give zero value to human rights, then I would gladly give you all those things on condition that you promised to become my slave and obey my every command.
Ah, but then you're assuming that he values honesty and trustworthiness enough to keep his own promises even at great personal cost. Otherwise he'll gladly make the promise, take your keys and bank account, and run.
Okay, then we've got to the core of our difference, which is that you consider Java "open enough", and I don't. I think that both of our positions are entirely self-consistent given that core disagreement. If I was happy with the openness of Java, I'd probably feel about the same as you do - that Mono is a waste of time.
I don't think I'd ever actively advocate that people stop working on it, though. If people working on something they want to work on poses such a great threat to my position, whatever that position is, then I'd probably consider that my position isn't as strong as it should be, and re-evaluate it. To be fair, I don't think you've actively advocated that people stop working on it, but rather advocated that people embrace Java instead, which is different.
With regard to SWT, it doesn't matter why IBM developed it. You argued that developing Windows.Forms was bad because SWT existed. By that logic, developing SWT was bad because Swing existed. You need to present another reason why you think that developing Windows.Forms is bad. Your "inconsistency" argument doesn't work either because SWT is "inconsistent" with existing and working Swing apps.
.NET. You can't argue that Open Source developers should embrace one and reject the other for that reason. See the bit about the JCP in my previous comment.
:) And since most people probably run JUnit on the JDK, that means it's already benefitting a proprietary platform.
.NET. I also don't believe Kaffe gives anything to Java, as evidenced by the way that Sun consistently refuses to acknowledge its existence. The reason for developing Mono (and Kaffe - which btw is my example free java implementation just because it's the easiest to type) is because we (Open Source developers) get a benefit from it: The ability to lure developers from windows, the ability to run .NET applications from windows, another option of programming language to use (and it does add some useful features over Java, even if they are minor. One of them might be extremely useful for a particular project). And since existing Open Source Javas are still so immature (after 5 years or more!) it's hard to argue convincingly that they'll be mature before Mono is.
.NET should be eschewed is that Java was here first. And that isn't a good enough reason for me.
I think you're still missing one of my major points, which is that Java is just as proprietary as
By my logic, if I'm running JUnit on Sun's JDK, I'm benefitting a proprietary platform. If I run NUnit on Mono, I'm not. If I run NUnit on MS's CLR, I am; if I run JUnit on Kaffe, I'm not. I'm not saying that's the only way to think, but it's not internally inconsistent - honest
I don't believe Mono gives anything to
Unless you're claiming that Java is open (which it isn't in my book, although I accept your right to disagree), the only argument left for why Java should be embraced and
Granted, there's not much value from a purely technical standpoint in having two different solutions to essentially the same problem. But there's an argument to be made that this can be useful even where the essentials are very similar (there actually are a few things from C# that I'd like to see Java pick up, like foreach, auto-boxing, and property support that's are more than a naming convention).
If a programmer from windows a year or two down the line from now is familiar with programming in C#, it'd be nicer for him to be able to simply carry over that knowledge than to have to say "well, Java is exactly the same as C# except that all the keywords have different names, and these few other differences".
Similarly, if some open source software is written to the JVM (like the Java JUnit test framework, for example) it'd be nice for it to be available directly from C# rather than having to port it (and end up with a forked project like NUnit - there are a bunch of projects like this which are straight ports of Java projects to C# which seems silly to me).
The problem of libraries is probably unavoidable but I don't think it's so awful to have two runtime libraries loaded at once. Many people already keep multiple windowing toolkits loaded - a theoretical disadvantage in exchange for the real practical advantage of being able to use applications written by someone who disagreed about which toolkit was better.
I'm arguing for diversity in programmer choice, but that doesn't mean I think that consistency is worthless: I'd rather that the various toolkit makers could get together and make their toolkits able to use each other's themes, for example, and do so automatically as needed. In the same way, having a runtime environment that could pick up the libraries native to the other language would be nice. And of course the user should never be able to detect any difference between a Java app and a C# one.
(Your argument about Windows.Forms is internally inconsistent, btw, because it would suggest that IBM should never have written SWT in the first place because Swing was there first. Obviously they thought writing a new toolkit was worthwhile for some reason. Obviously the Mono people feel the same way about writing a Windows.Forms port. You can argue the legitimacy of the reasons, but you can't base your argument on the premise that if a toolkit already exists then writing a new one is pointless. And a point about getting sued doesn't belong in that argument either.)
You may have misinterpreted my position. I program in Java every day. It's my favorite language out there. I do write open source software in java.
.NET implementations, and Parrot. This is a good thing, because whichever one turns out superior in the long run will survive. None of us can predict what that might be.
.NET IL, and various (mostly commercial, I think) projects that do the opposite.
.NET either. Or GNOME. Or KDE. Or vi. Or Emacs. The beauty of Open Source is the availability of choices. Please don't try to take those choices away, even if they aren't the choices you'd make.
But it's unfair to say that Java on an open source platform is mature. Sun's 1.4 JVM is not open source, and although they have made encouraging baby steps in the past couple of weeks, it still seems unlikely that it will ever be.
The JCP is a nice gesture but you can tell that Sun still really call the shots when they were able to shut down a JSR Leader when he wanted to make the reference implementation open source. The person who enforces the rules can do anything, regardless of what the rules actually say (the same reason that the US government can often blatantly violate the Constitution, despite being theoretically bound by it).
So that leaves the Open Source java implementations. Anyone claiming that Kaffe, ORP, Classpath or gcj are mature needs to try them for real work. Last I tried, NONE of them could even run Tomcat, which is one of the premier open source java applications. None are even close to beginning to think about having Swing, and even AWT is iffy for most of them.
So if you're concerned about Open Source or Free Software from an ideological standpoint, you probably shouldn't write in Java, unless you're willing to live within the limitations of the current implementations. Same goes for writing C# software for Mono or P.NET.
As Nat quoted ESR as saying, when faced with a problem, the Open Source community by its very nature pursues all ways of solving it at once. Thus we have three open source Java implementations, two open source
I personally hope that all three do well, and that we eventually end up with a runtime that can run code written for all three, and integrate them together. There are already signs of this, like the jilc project which translates Java bytecode to
I'm not bashing Java. But I see no reason to bash
More important than Java? If so, why?
No. Equally important as Java.
They are both closed, proprietary platforms that nevertheless have significant technical merit. Both are for all practical purposes under the exclusive control of large companies. Both have almost identical advantages (technical elegance) and disadvantages (performance). There are minor differences (slightly better multi-language support versus slightly better multi-platform support) and major similarities (the bytecode definitions can be matched up almost opcode-for-opcode).
Both have active Free Software projects attempting to clone them. In fact, both have multiple competing active Free Software projects attempting to clone them (Mono vs Portable.NET, Kaffe versus gcj versus ORP/Classpath (although Classpath and gcj cooperate a lot)).
What was your point again?
(The rest of your article is pretty much pure FUD so I'll ignore it. The only platform that's currently open (let alone "remaining" open) is Parrot, and that doesn't really work yet)
I patched GNUJSP to add support for parameters with multiple values. This was necessary for a production project which has been the major thing I've worked on for 2 years. Since GNUJSP was essentially unmaintained even back then, that bug was never going to get fixed unless I did it. I would have submitted the patch to the upstream maintainers if there were any...
Long term, of course, I'll move to another, maintained project. But at the time I made the fix, none of the alternatives were mature and the rest of my code was tested with GNUJSP only. I saved days of work porting to a new JSP engine (and probably dollars as well, because the alternative free ones at the time didn't meet my needs) just because I could fix the code myself.
That's the one that I trot out for corporate arguments. For personal use I could also mention that I patched abcde to be able to handle my mp3 directory layout, and added autohide support to Mozilla's Site Navigation Bar because I didn't want it wasting space on my screen when it was empty. I submitted both of these changes to the maintainers and in both cases they were accepted. I didn't have to in either case, but I didn't want to have to keep manually patching every new version that got released.
Unfortunately, you snipped the parts of my post that were most relevant to your argument (or cautionary tale, or whatever).
My point is that the "extra responsibilities" of the GPL are only "extra" by comparison to other, more liberal kinds of Open Source software. Since the poster was talking about having achieved victory in getting any Open Source accepted in his corporation, I think it's probably a safe assumption that the alternatives were proprietary applications. (There is, admittedly, another possibility which I'll discuss in a minute).
If you're in a situation where a proprietary application is a viable alternative, that means that you only need to do things which are permitted by a proprietary application. That is, you aren't distributing it outside your organization. If that's the case, the GPL places NO restrictions on you. The "double edged sword" only starts applying if you start doing things that you couldn't do at all with proprietary software, and there's no indication that the poster's company is doing those things.
I didn't get the impression that the original poster was a GPL advocate. His post never mentioned the GPL, and his position makes perfect sense independent of which Open Source license applies. And regardless of the license, as I said above, it's highly unlikely that his company is doing something that would cause the limitations of the license to come into play.
I'm certainly the last person to hide the responsibilities that come with Free Software (and I've known about Readline for years, and disagree with that licensing choice - but usually avoid using Readline in my projects for that reason). But knowing what the responsibilities aren't is as important as knowing what they are. There's no need to emphasize the GPL's requirement to give away source with all binaries if the person you're talking to had no plans to give away binaries at all. It just confuses the issue.
Now, the other possibility I mentioned above is that the alternative to Open Source was custom-developed applications, built in-house. In that situation it is plausible that the applications would be distributed, and the GPL requirement would apply. My arguments are based on the assumption that that is not the case; if it is, then I agree that it was dishonest to advocate GPL software without mentioning that restriction.
But that's a pretty big set of "if"s: IF the alternative was software developed in-house, AND IF said software is distributed outside the organization, AND IF the open source software in question is distributed under the GPL, AND IF the poster didn't think to mention any of these facts in his post, AND IF it didn't occur to the poster that "you're required to by law" was a valid answer to his Ask Slashdot. Add to that a dollop of giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt, and I'll stand by my assumption that the restrictions imposed by the GPL don't apply to this poster's situation.