I can't really think of any way to tell (absolutely) if your code has been stolen
In fact, it's easy to tell whether Linux contains code written by Microsoft!! The "strings" command outputs "printable" strings it finds in a stream of (binary) data; "/proc/kcore" is, in most GNU/Linux systems, a file that represents the current state of the kernel's "core", or RAM; and "grep" outputs lines containing the string on the command line that it finds in its input.
If you try the command below under Linux, you are asking for a printout of all strings containing "Copyright 2000 Microsoft" found in the your computer's RAM -- which includes the Linux kernel itself!
And, on my computer, which runs Red Hat Linux 6.1, it prints out plenty of lines before I interrupt it with Control-C!! Try it!! Doesn't it show that Linux contains W2K code?
I wholeheartedly disagree with Mr RMS and all like him, it is thouroughly fair to charge money for a product in which many hours and dollars have been spent to develop.
Then you don't disagree with "Mr RMS and all like him" since "they" have no problem with charging money for (software) products.
(Perhaps if you did a better job researching, and thinking through, what people like RMS actually say, you wouldn't have to post anonymously? Heck, I'm amazed someone wasted a moderation point of "Insightful" on your post, but at least that helped it catch my eye.)
Of course, RMS and others (like myself) have written and then given away software, but we've also gotten paid $$ to write Open Source Software as well. (RMS gets paid much better than I do, though.) No moral/ethical/legal problem with that. I don't know what percentage of the source code in GCC was paid for (to get written), but it's probably well over 50%.
Does that throw your assumptions about what "Mr RMS" says completely out of the water, or what?
I for one am very glad that VA chose Alex Brown, rather than the less fun experience I heard was had in Red Hat's share program.
Having been through both RHAT's and LNUX's IPO invitations, I certainly agree.
I'm sure RHAT, and those (LNUX et al) who would follow, learned a lot from that RHAT IPO. I hope E*Trade learned how to better, and more consistently, do things like manage their web site, answer questions, etc.
Dealing with Deutsche Bank (during the LNUX IPO) was delightful, and, IIRC, we always got consistent and correct information.
Why wasn't this adopted? Because the corporations were afraid of something they could not charge for. They saw BIG bucks in metered power. Having feild generators and house boosters would be impossible to meter. They could only charge a flat rate for the equipment loans at best.
Assuming your story is true, does it suggest that an Open Source(TM) Power Delivery System would be possible?
Not easy or cheap, I figure.
But, if the AC@60Hz and similar systems are more expensive to run and more dangerous, and have, as their only fundamental advantage over some higher-frequency AC system, the ability to be more easily and reliably metered so as to charge for their use...
...then, isn't that kind of like the differences between closed source and Open Source(TM) software?
The other advantages of AC@60Hz (and AC@50Hz) are that there's a huge installed base of power generation, transmission, measuring, and consumption equipment (e.g. desktop computers). But those aren't fundamental advantages -- they might outweigh the appropriateness of changing now, not of having chosen the higher-frequency system in the first place.
So, would a higher-frequency-AC system be worth researching, designing, engineering, etc. within the OSS framework, with deployment initially targeted for areas with little or no installed base (such as third-world countries)?
(And, dontcha just love how I use all those cute TM's?;-)
By the way, has anyone other than me observed the inherent contradiction between the following two RMS quotes: "An unambiguously correct term would be better" and "To stop using the word ``free'' now would be a mistake"
Hmm, let's see just how much of an "inherent contradiction" these two quotes are, by substituting for "free" something else:
"A fire extinguisher would be better"
versus
"To stop people evacuating the building now would be a mistake"
The point being, just because something might be "better" in the abstract does not necessarily mean it's wise to switch to that thing at any given moment during a campaign where the thing proposed as to be discarded is still serving a critical role.
(No, I don't know whether RMS himself would agree that the statements are not contradictory as he meant them. I'm just pointing out that they aren't inherently contradictory. It's best to ask RMS himself, if you want to know how he wishes those statements to be interpreted.)
A lot of people forget than [sic] a large number of programmers were promised stock by Red Hat and never received any.
That quote comes from the 5 Jan 2000 10:01:22 -0800 email Robert Philips wrote to Derek.
Being a recipient of the famous email Red Hat sent out to contributors to invite them to participate in the RHAT IPO, I don't recall any promise made that we would actually receive stock.
Can anyone provide actual evidence of such a promise, or is this just a case of Mr. Philips inflating his rhetoric to make Red Hat look bad (and, therefore, LinuxOne look better by comparison)?
Note that this could be considered "splitting hairs" by some -- I'm distinguishing Red Hat offering contributors the opportunity to purchase shares from an actual promise that they would receive shares. There's no need to accuse Red Hat of the latter, which is what Mr. Philips appears to have done, if all they did was the former. (It's like the distinction between right to free speech and the right to be heard -- the former is not equivalent to the latter.)
Just for reference, I have seen VAXen crash. But that was at a shop that stressed 'em pretty hard.
Recently, I saw a VAX shut down "for the last time" at an IT shop -- several hours before Y2K. I think they intended to keep the one next to it running for awhile longer, but can't recall. I posted something about this on/. circa Y2K though; it's possible my memory was clearer and well-represented in that post.
Dunno if you're still watching for responses to your posts on such an "old" item (I'm playing catch-up on this 3-part series), but wanted to suggest that, while it's true readers can't know your gender unless you tell them, many readers tend to think they know when they're really just guessing. It's happened to me on occasion, and sometimes I've had to kick my higher brain functions (relatively speaking;-) into gear to remind other parts of my brain to not continue making knee-jerk assumptions about another Internet person's gender, race, politics, status (.edu does not imply student/teacher), etc. And I've certainly been the target of such assumptions. (I used to have a.edu address, and be told I was some pointy-headed academic, which is about as far from the truth as is possible.)
The other thing I wanted to say is that I loved your story about the guy on the BBS, and many of your other excellent points. If only more people in society -- not just on the Internet -- heard from people like you, instead of the wishy-washy, I-feel-your-pain types who dominate the media most people seem to worship.
Oh, and finally: I've known people with the last name of Patti (mainly, a teacher at my high school) and men with names pronounced Jackie (including Jackie(sp?) Smith, who famously dropped a potential touchdown pass from Roger Staubach in a Dallas Cowboys' losing effort against the Pittsburgh Steelers in one of the two Super Bowl games they played in the '70s). Even so, I might well make the mistake of assuming your nick suggested femalinity.;-)
Re:A very different potential hole in the GPL...
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Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 2
I agree with this, which is why I specifically posited a situation whereby the "key" is NOT written down, but merely stored in someone's head. Since it is not part of a file anywhere, and is never generated (it's merely typed in on the command line), it's harder to call it part of the source.
Ah, indeed, that strikes me as a different case than I thought you were talking about.
Actually doing this is likely to be very difficult in practice, and it's entirely possible that it wouldn't hold up (being a clear attempt to get around something with very obvious meaning), but I wouldn't put it entirely past someone to try it...
I wonder if, in a way, we already have this going on? Think of building the Linux kernel, with all the combinations of configuration options. Which combination produces the "best" result for a given machine? Well, the "owner" of that machine has his opinion, and might or might not write it down, in the form of a command line to do the build.
I could imagine a joe-cool-ultra-hacker type distributing GPL'ed software with all sorts of "special" patches that are, by default, disabled, who then "consults" with companies for a fee. The consultation consists of going on-site (wet or electronically), making sure nobody is looking, typing a magical invocation of the build of that software, and thus producing a very special version that runs fast, leaps tall buildings, whatever.
Could the owner of the GPL'ed software win a court case trying to force the hacker to divulge the magic build sequence? I'd like to think not, on general principle, but it is not crystal-clear to me that the courts would refuse to force such divulgence under, say, contempt-of-court charges.
It's also not clear to me that it would be sufficiently difficult to reverse-engineer this sort of tactic to make it worthwhile in anything more than a very short time-frame!
it is not about writing software "for free" ... but it is about releasing all rights you might have to the software you've written.
False. You still have some rights. You've given up the right to restrict other people copying it, though, which is indeed a big restriction.
it is not about not being paid a lot of money for writing it ... although it is about having abuse heaped upon you, your company and your product if you don't give into the demands of the mob.
Huh? Sounds like an emotion-laden argument to me. So you're saying Bill Gates would get more abuse heaped on him if MS released all its software under the GPL? Hmm.
it is not about giving your competitors the ability to put you out of business ... unless, of course, your business is writing software.
False. More correctly: "unless, of course, your business model assumes the ability to charge a lot of money for a substantial percentage of the copies of the software that actually get distributed."
Sigh. Same old, same old... There are any number of extremely convincing arguments for using and supporting open source; to spout the useless and emotionally-charged rhetoric you did contributes little or nothing to the discussion at hand.
First, I didn't pretend to offer a comprehensive explanation for why to use open source. In fact, I strongly suggested the poster take the time to research the issues.
Second, I didn't "spout" anything "useless" and especially nothing "emotionally-charged". All I posted was simple fact, into which you read (not having particularly good comprehension skills, I would guess) your own agenda.
Note that I didn't say there weren't challenges to be addressed when writing software for open-source distribution. But the poster had essentially claimed things about such an approach that were incorrect, and I was offering some simple, direct statements to illustrate that, and suggesting he follow up with some actual research.
It does not answer the questions raised by the original poster:
Of course not, since the poster asked basically no questions, he just spouted some emotion-laden rhetoric (e.g. about having to pay bills) that I explained was false on several counts. So, speak for yourself, if you have questions to ask.
Once we invested time, effort and money to write this software, how can we avoid having someone larger than us profit from our labors at our expense?
There are many ways to consider, none of them perhaps quite as easy as resorting to the proprietary model. Ask dress designers (fashion) how they do it -- for all intents and purposes, that field is inherently Open Source, yet they make billions (and, yes, their products are functional as well as artistic). There are other fields that don't allow the equivalent of proprietary software distribution as well. Study them, if you would like to consider whether OSS is worthwhile (before your potential customers require it, of course, at which point you have no choice).
What is the economic model that allows me to profit from my knowledge and skills, since you insist I am to give away the fruits of my labor for free?
I insisted on no such thing. Scratch the above "First", i.e. here's item Zero for you: learn to read.
As far as answering your question, why don't you investigate the various models already in use throughout various industries, not just computing? (And if you think the source code for your product necessarily constitutes 100% of the "fruit of your labors", you need to do some reading up on the OSS industry, and learn why all of its maintenance problems are not 100% solved due to availability of source code, for example.)
Who would write this highly-specialized software if we didn't, and why would we do it if there was no incentive for us to do so?
People with incentive. Say, the potential customers, who, if they insist on OSS only, will find a way to fund its development themselves. Then you can accept the funding, develop the software, and make $$ maintaining it. That's just one model, but it works.
These are serious questions, from someone who is at least willing to listen to an explanation... and instead of trying to answer his questions, or explain to him why you believe what you do, you deride him for not being a believer. I'd say that I'm staggered and shocked by your arrogance, but unfortunately, it appears to be all too common among open source advocates in general, and/. trolls in particular.
Excuse me, but it was the poster who arrogantly made unsupported, unsubstantiated claims about what OSS development implies. All I did was say "wrong; wrong; wrong" and point him in a better direction. And I didn't deride him for not being a believer -- just for making false assertions in stating why he holds his beliefs. E.g. I don't deride someone for saying they believe in Santa Claus, but if they claim he lives at the North Pole and satellites have verified that, I might take issue with that claim.
If people want answers to questions, they ought to ask questions, rather than state falsehoods. The latter can work, but, in a public forum, it's a sure way to showcase one's ignorance and/or arrogance.
(For example, if you weren't so interested in trashing OSS advocates like myself, you'd have just asked the questions, instead of ranting about the content of my post.)
So here's a question I have for you. You have a great idea for a new software application, believe it'd be worth $2B in the next five years, and would take only two years to develop via the proprietary model (up-front funding, hire programmers, closed development, etc.).
Problem 1: you can't find good programmers, because they are unwilling to work for such low pay on software they can't maintain themselves after they leave your employ.
Problem 2: during market research, you discover your potential customers are no longer willing to pay much of anything for a copy of non-GPL'ed software, due to having been burnt by lock-in software so often in the past.
How do you make your idea happen using the proprietary model, when you can't hire decent programmers and won't be able to sell the final product anyway?
Now, this isn't likely the case today, but might be for your product's market within a few years. The problems are a bit overstated, but all that has to happen is a) programmers worldwide decide they deserve vastly more $$ to work on proprietary software, due to their not having a long-term relationship with it vis-a-vis OSS and b) while a) drives your costs up, customers are less and less willing to pay lots of $$ for each copy of proprietary software, figuring if they would pay lots of $$ for a copy, it must be an important to them, and therefore it should be OSS so they don't get locked in to it, which drives your potential revenue stream down.
Next question: besides the problems described above, do you see any opportunities in this scenario?
Re:A very different potential hole in the GPL...
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Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 3
It'd probably be hell to maintain anyways.
And there you hit on the reason tactics like this won't stand up in court.
If you can write and maintain code that uses such an "encryption", then so can lots of other people. I.e. it's "source code". (If you're so brilliant nobody else can maintain your source, you might as well write breakthrough apps in clean Java, or Ada, or whatever, rather than resort to such time-and-energy-wasting tactics as shrouding the source via makefiles.)
If you can't do it yourself, that means you're getting some software help. At which point the so-called "source" isn't source code as the GPL defines it.
In that case, what the GPL calls "source" includes either the makefile with the keys, or the source from which those makefiles are automatically (or semi-automatically) derived.
The most important thing to remember about the GPL, and about legal instruments in general, if you're a technical type, is:
The law does not pertain to mechanism.
I.e. don't get caught up in trying to out-fox the GPL, or other areas of law, by complicating or substituting components in the relevant mechanisms. The law, and judges, generally see right through that.
And tactics like "well, the makefiles aren't part of the source code, so what if we put..." are nothing more than cases of nerds thinking they can get away with changing the law simply by changing the mechanism.
Study the GPL carefully. You'll note it hardly ever references the components of what the software community considers the mechanism of program distribution, especially key components like:
Executables (.EXE)
Source files (.c,.pl,.f, etc.)
Libraries (.a,.o)
Compilers (gcc)
Makefiles
Scripts
The reason references to these are essentially absent in the GPL, and in other (meaningful and enforceable) legal instrumentals, is that these terms identify little more than a file format. They certainly don't identify anything legally enforceable in terms of concepts the GPL cares about.
E.g. anything you can write in C, you can write in Perl, or in a makefile, or in a shell script, at least in theory. Add a (proprietary) interpreter, and theory can become practice.
So the GPL defines, and talks about, source code, not just source files versus other sorts of files that might or might not contain source code.
Don't waste time speculating on how to move and transform the source code for a project such that it magically becomes something that doesn't "count" as source code under the GPL, because the law, and a judge, will see that for what it is -- a mere, and rather foolish, subterfuge.
The upshot? The day somebody ships so-called "source code" that is missing a key makefile needed to build it, such that the "code" is GPL'ed (and, say, copyrighted by the FSF, due to signovers and such), is the day they can expect a polite-but-firm letter from the FSF essentially ordering distribution of said makefile since it's part of the real source code. (Or of whatever goes into making it, if it's automatically generated.)
(Of course, all these issues, clever tricks, legal inanities, and so on were hashed out on gnu.misc.discuss years ago, but maybe those archives aren't so easy to research, or maybe people would just spout off their theories about how the law works rather than do the research of previous discussions. Note that, of course, you can find lawyers here or there that'll disagree with my assessment above, but it represents the arguments the FSF has actually made to convince real lawyers in real circumstances to agree to the FSF's terms rather than try to "get around" the GPL. The most telling aspect of my research into these issues is the fact that nobody's trashed the GPL when the underlying software is copyrighted by the FSF in all these years, despite several attempts to do so, and plenty of incentive.)
So name a bunch of OSS projects that don't rely on people working for free.
Irrelevant to the discussion at hand, in which it was asserted that Open Source means writing software for free.
For a more pertinent reworking of your question:
Name a bunch of non-OSS projects that enjoy the advantages of people working (coding, debugging) on them for free.
The point being that OSS projects tend to attract lots of free help because there's lots of people out there willing to offer it. Help that closed-source projects typically refuse at the front door.
That being said, I'd guess there are one or two significant open-source projects that are planned to achieve success without relying on free coding help.
But, I can't say what they are. (Best guess offhand: IBM Jikes compiler.) Maybe there aren't any.
Even if there aren't any, that certainly doesn't mean nobody doing OSS development gets paid quite well for doing it, which is what was, in effect, asserted in the original post to which I replied.
(BTW, even Microsoft relies on lots of free help, in the form of beta testing, etc. I doubt MS could release a quality OS without relying on such free help. The question is, can it do so without relying on free coding help, the sort of help Linux and the BSD's leverage so successfully?)
how much more freedom we have to change jobs and still take our expertise, even our code,
I should probably clarify my "even our code" statement.
It refers to the fact that, of the various products whose source code I've been an "expert" in maintaining during my career, I can be hired to maintain that code by a large percentage of its users only when the code was distributed Open Source (more specifically, GPL'ed).
Put another way, closed-source development isn't just about locking in customers -- it's about locking in the vendor's programmers as well, by making it harder than it would otherwise be for them to get good jobs maintaining the same code elsewhere.
So if you're still using PRIMOS, or Numerix machines, or you use Cadence's NC-Verilog on Suns, it really won't help you much that I've got some expertise maintaining portions of those systems, unless you've paid lots of extra $$ for the source. The $$ I was paid by the respective companies (Pr1me, Numerix, Cadence) to work on that code was, indeed, decent, but is about all I can expect to ever earn for that particular expertise.
But if you're using GCC, g77, etc., you can hire me to work on them. (In theory, anyway; I'm not exactly looking for work these days.)
That makes OSS development more valuable to me as a programmer than closed-source software development, and in fact it gives me incentive to favor long-term viability of OSS products over the sort of short-term focus that has so characterized closed-source products over the past 20 years.
I.e. if I can profit from closed-source development for only the duration of my employment at, say, BigSoftwareCo, then it behooves me to maximize my salary & benefits during that duration, leaving it essentially up to BigSoftwareCo to decide how it will maximize its long-term viability. Since I can profit from OSS development for the duration of the practical life of that software, I have more incentive to make it live a long, healthy life, even if that means making less $$ in the short run (not necessarily always the trade-off I have to make, but one I've willingly made a few times already).
So, as an OSS developer, I'm more interested in making sure the software is, and remains, useful for a long, long time (ideally, with as few changes made by others to my own code as necessary, so I have maximum expertise in it).
Though I've personally applied similar incentives when writing closed-source software, it hasn't been due to financial or most other incentives, because there really aren't any. In fact, one of the reasons I was attracted (back) to OSS development is that I could continue to apply my own sense of ethical software development while being able to gain some potential for financial reward for it (for a change), or at least while not being punished (say, by management) for doing things such as taking extra time to make sure the software works correctly and as documented.
(Not that there aren't all sorts of similarly bone-headed people in the OSS movement pushing for "gimme what I want now, you worry about making it work right later" from time to time. But I don't report to them. Besides, it's usually easier for the general public to see these sorts of discussions going on in OSS development than in closed-source development. That allows people to come to more informed conclusions regarding, e.g. the long-term viability of proposed extensions.)
However, I do not think that all software is suited for open source. The last company I worked with developed database marketing software. Nobody is going to work on that kind of software for free. If we'd open the source then our already established (and far bigger) competitors would have been able to leverage our work in putting us out of business. I don't work for free, I have to pay bills. Infact, I'm quite happy to be paid a lot of money for what I do.
Maybe someday you will understand what Open Source Software (OSS) is about well enough to not make such strange statements.
Here are some clues: it is not about writing software "for free"; it is not about not being paid a lot of money for writing it; it is not about giving your competitors the ability to put you out of business.
And here's the biggest clue the market has yet to particularly appreciate: once customers of software come to appreciate the benefits of insisting on Open Source, and assuming they therefore do insist on it in greater numbers, you won't be able to get paid well for writing software that isn't Open Source.
Keep in mind the fact that the huge valuations of RHAT and LNUX on NASDAQ; the success of GNU/Linux, Apache, etc.; and so on have all taken place with nearly 0% of the end user of software insisting on Open Source per se. All those end users have cared about so far is faster, better, "cooler", more reliable, etc., all of which Open Source can deliver, more or less.
Once it becomes clear that Open Source per se delivers advantages closed source cannot -- advantages that can trump all the disadvantages (slower, fewer features, etc.) in any given instance -- how will you make money writing closed-source software?
Really, do take the time to investigate just how much money people are making writing OSS, how much more freedom we have to change jobs and still take our expertise, even our code, with us to the next job, and so on, before you make public statements about whether OSS is "suited" for certain kinds of software development.
As far as speed goes, big deal... give me a fix that works.
Didja read the article? I know it was/.'ed -- I waited a longish time for it -- but it addressed the quality-of-fix issue pretty well.
BTW, while I don't know for sure whether you're right that many OSS projects don't regression-test such fixes first, I do know the ones I've worked on could stand some improvement...and also that it's a bit easier to regression-test a fix to a small component than a large one, and that OSS thrives on collections of small components in a way Closed Source $$$-making development doesn't (the latter favors the development of monoliths, since they represent a harder-to-reverse-engineer, and therefore steeper, wall for competitors to climb).
Also, the article made mention of various Microsoft-issued "fixes" that, themselves, had to be fixed. Didn't mention that happening with GCC, though it has happened there (not security fixes AFAIK, but the same principle applies), but the implication was that the most heavily-funded closed-source-development organization in the world doesn't seem to do to well producing correct fixes in the first place.
I'm not sure we can apply this to the whole Linux vs Microsoft thing, other than to say that a new modality changes the whole landscape. But I guess that's what Open Source is all about. In this case, we're the bee.
More precisely, Open Source software is the bee, we're the wings, and our efforts testing, debugging, and improving software constitute the turbulence that Closed Source development tries hard to exclude but Open Source development, ideally, welcomes with open arms.
Be the bee, be the wing, be more Open with your sting!
Okay, I just made it up and maybe it's a bit lame, but it could inspire somebody to come up with an improved version.;-)
How many times has Steve Case had to go on his own online service to apologize for delays and problems brought about by a company that prized growth well ahead of honesty and service ?
This brilliant observation by JonKatz highlights the true danger of the AOL/TW merger, and why it should be stopped, by the (comparatively small, obscure, non-pervasive organization known as the) US Government.
The AOL/TW plan is clear. First they'll offer the huge flock of sheep known as "American consumers" cheap access to all that TW content. Next they'll make that exclusive access, so nobody who doesn't use the AOL/TW ISP can see TW content.
Then they'll deliver the final blow: make AOL/TW access so unreliable, so frustrating, that, for most Americans, it'll not be worth even logging on.
By then, we'll be so mass-hypnotized that we'll believe the only real entertainment comes from AOL/TW, so that when The System doesn't work, it'll never occur to us to:
Turn on the TV (besides, AOL/TW will make sure it works only via their Internet access)
Turn on the radio (ditto)
Use another ISP (AOL/TW will make all other ISPs disappear, or at least appear to from the American consciousness)
Read a newspaper
The end result is that Americans will be completely in the dark about what is going on in their own country, at which point Steve Case et al will use a crack team of hand-picked cyber-terrorists to overthrow the government.
All Americans will be shown is that, apparently, our new President is a certain well-known rabbit, and, by then, we'll think that's great, for pretty much the same reasons that people like Donald Trump and Warren Beatty are taken seriously as presidential candidates today: because the media has convinced too many of us they're "cool", which we somehow believe == "intelligent", "capable of leadership", etc.
AOL/TW. The End Is Near. And, by the time it comes, there won't be an NRA-type organization ready to defend your freedom -- the only guns available will be "secured" by high-tech devices that, not coincidentally, get owner-fingerprint-updates from AOL/TW's online database, which'll allow them to disable all guns instantly when The Moment arrives.
(Yes, this is sarcasm. Fearing AOL/TW on the basis of AOL's "service" is like fearing McDonald's replacing all other restaurants on the basis that McBurgers often have insufficient ketchup.)
Re:Here's a question I have
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AOL Nation
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· Score: 2
Does Steve Case lean toward liberal or conservative, and will that affect Time Warner?
I don't know; I tend to doubt it.
There are cases of ownership directly affecting the political representations of media outlets, of course, and I don't really know the %, but most owners of large-scale media outlets are focused on profits, not personal preaching.
In the case of national-media outlets, the owners, regardless of political view, must hire reporters, journalists, etc. who, in turn, must either want to be paid lots of $$ or at least want to be on the national stage.
Generally, the best way to ensure people watch national-media programs is to ensure that those programs promote national-scale solutions to the national-scale problems that they constantly present. And those problems must be presented in an hysterical manner. That's why that national media, through the '92 elections, went along with the Clinton-spin-cycle presentation of all these so-called "crises" (including an economic crisis, which had, before the election, been shown to have subsided), all of which required (according to pundits) the very sort of federal intrusiveness Clinton's team was advocating. It's also why/.'s editors choose to get hysterical over intrusions on our "cyber rights", however that's defined. If these shapers of public opinion (journalists, commentators, whatever) didn't passionately care about the audience they were targeting, why would they pick a vehicle that targets that audience? So we end up seeing biases that tend to result from such people just going with their instincts, since their own audience favors that over coolly gathering the facts.
Hence, regardless of ownership, national media outlets will tend to favor more intrusive federal government, and so be correctly described as "more liberal" (in the US, not necessarily European, sense).
I've seen this root tendency in the national media for decades, regardless of whether it leads to liberal, conservative, or other outcomes, though as I say, these days US liberal == favors bigger government, and wants-to-be-a-national-reporter == wants to expose problems that likely will be "best solved" using national/federal-government solutions.
For example, national-media proponents of "diversity" are often the first to ridicule a local community's standards towards sexual activity (let's say it's a Southern Baptist stronghold). What they actually value isn't diversity so much as their own views gaining greater credibility nation-wide.
I'll never forget tuning into the now-defunct Phil Donaghue show and hearing a discussion of some hot sociopolitical topic (not sure, maybe teaching abstinence vs. teaching sex-ed). Phil's liberal (NY-based?) audience naturally joined with him in supporting the liberal solution-de-jour (in this case, it'd have been forcing sex-ed on kids against parent's explicit wishes, and treating teaching abstinence as a likely cause, not preventative, of teen pregnancy).
The glowing moment of discovery for me was hearing a caller explain her contrary view (which happened to coincide with mine), hearing Phil increduously ask (as if "how can you hold such a stupid opinion?") "Caller, where are you from?", hearing her say "Atlanta, Georgia", and then hearing the entire audience issue a knowing "Oooohh!", indicating that the mere fact the caller was "from the South" explained her blinkered views on their current pet issue.
Here was a host and studio audience full of people who undoubtedly prided themselves on their tolerance, their absence of bigotry, their progressiveness, etc. blatantly showing their true colors -- their prejudice that people from the American South are likely to be sexually repressed (or repressive), so their opinions on how to deal with raising teenagers correspondingly suspect.
That kind of arrogance does not come solely from US liberalism. It is the result of, for example, city folk believing they know more than country folk, but moreso of people seeking the national spotlight tending to do so precisely because they believe they know better than locals do about their own localities.
But, I believe this kind of arrogance constitutes most of the foundation of today's US liberalism.
That's why I don't expect new mergers, even newcomers like Fox News, to make a big dent.
After all, if people like me believe we know enough to manage our local affairs, and want Washington to get out of the way (speaking of which, people who complain about the AOL-TW merger as "too big" but not about the federal government as way too big are, IMO, probably self-delusional), why would we spend nearly as much time watching an outlet even as good as Fox News reportedly is, compared to the amount of time the average US citizen slavishly watches ABC, CBS, NBC, or CNN to validate their fears about Republicans, health care, Social Security, and share their hopes about the next White Knight (post-Clinton, of course -- wish I could show y'all some of the letters my wife and I got from academia-friends hailing his 92 election;-) coming along and solving everything by making the federal government even bigger and more intrusive? We're probably too busy doing local work and reading local papers to make great customers for Fox-News-type outlets. And that's probably just as well.
No, the reason to be hopeful is not the arrival of new players on the national-media stage (though that can help). It's the slow erosion of national-media outlets as sources from which America gets its news, as well as the emergence of the Internet, which partly replaces that.
The more choice in news outlets -- not just different brand names (is there really any difference in the political positions taken by ABC, CBS,.*NBC, and CNN?), but in their scope and audience (local outlets like San Jose Mercury News; international outlets the Christian Science Monitor; targeted outlets like/.) -- the more opportunities we all have to get at the truth, and think critically about what our choice outlets are telling us (and what they're withholding from our consideration).
Further, the Internet offers an opportunity to review the past that is far superior to what we've had on TV or even in the papers. We can search past USENET archives, quickly pull up "User Info" profiles on/., etc., to discover how prescient today's predictors of tomorrow were in the past. (How many of the major media outlets have called attention to their own hysteria-mongering about, say, the supposed millions of homeless Americans, and especially to their sudden dropping of the topic like a hot potato once Clinton took office? How much time and energy have they put into showing the complete Rodney King beating tape and discussing the probability that their purposeful showing of just the most one-sided portion of it contributed to the LA riots and the deaths of 51 innocent people, compared to the time and energy put into criticizing LAPD, cops, White America, whatever? How often have they interviewed someone whose mom wanted to abort them as a fetus, as a showcase for the importance of anti-abortion stands by the church, by friends and family, and even by pre-Roe-v-Wade laws, compared to the amount of time/energy they spend celebrating "choice" as a "Constitutional Right" and vilifying the "extreme Right"? But we all have the ability to express our views about such things on the Internet.)
For that, and for my increasing ability to think critically (and review experiences like that Phil Donaghue episode), I should thank people like Rush Limbaugh, who, interestingly, calls my theory into question somewhat by the mere fact that he, despite advocating little in the way of federal oversight over anything (besides national defense) on a regular basis, continues to draw the biggest national radio audience (or thereabouts).
...as a country whose citizens wouldn't put up a fight against this sort of thing.
For that matter, this sort of thing is probably inevitable in any country whose citizens have allowed their government to disarm them.
Besides, the road system is, most everywhere, basically a shared "bus" in computer lingo, designed to be cheap to plug into, compared to other systems such as rail and airways. I.e. cars are more affordable to obtain and require less expertise to drive than many other methods of automated transportation.
The big problem with cars is basically that anyone is allowed to drive them, in nearly any fashion they like, with little consistency in regulating violations that don't result in severe accidents, therefore providing insufficient feedback regarding poor, but not-yet-deadly, driving. (Kinda like operating systems that "allow" null pointer dereferences making it less likely programmers will discover such errors until they "simply" port their code to a less forgiving system.)
So, the long-term trend, especially in any country whose citizens have already allowed themselves to be disarmed (read: the citizens have accepted the notion that the current government will always do an acceptable job, and never give in to tyrranical assertions of power), will be to use technology to reduce the costs of providing safer roads.
Some of this might be well-designed, some not. I don't like the proposed system, especially in isolation, for a variety of reasons, but as part of a comprehensive system offering individually-controlled, as well as collectively-offered, information-gathering, advice-giving, and vehicle-guidance capabilities, with plenty of opt-out potential and with both criminal and civil issues carefully worked out in advance, it isn't necessarily a bad component to offer.
The huge number of variables involved in this "problem", including preserving individual safety and liberty, preserving the environment (both long-term -- e.g. reducing emissions -- and short-term -- such as reducing noise), optimizing overall road usage, reducing traffic jams, and so on, require a highly flexible, sophisticated system for proper management.
Such a system is highly unlikely to derive from a government and consist of massive central servers telling blindly obedient cars what to do. Though some people might, for various reasons, prefer to drive such cars and let "the system" take care of everything for them, a more optimal solution requires decision-making participation among far more people than the few individuals who'll be invited to set the paramaters for, and control, the various central servers.
So it'll end up being a mix of central offerings (of information, advice, and control) combined with localized determination (based on factors the local operator might wish not to share with the central system for various reasons).
The day citizens are capable of reliably (and democratically) electing a government that would consistently get this sort of thing "right" is the day citizens can eliminate all coercive elements of their own government -- i.e. implement unilateral disarmement of the government against themselves, and truly live in peace with their neighbors. For they will have proven their ability to govern themselves individually sufficient to no longer need violence, or the threat of violence, to keep each other in check. I'm not sure that will ever actually happen, which is the whole point of my post -- people shouldn't trust a government elected by people who can't govern themselves, because, in too many people, the desire to control the acts of others greatly exceeds the desire to control one's own behavior.
I didn't mean to say it was in fact better, since I know proprietary drivers can be written, and distributed, for both systems.
I was getting at the mind-set of users and distributors. There are Linux distributions of significance that will not, AFAIK, incorporate proprietary drivers, period. (Debian, for example?)
Are there similarly popular BSD distributions?
As far as your other comments, I think that not only did you contradict yourself, you actually ended up saying basically the same thing I was at least trying to say -- that the Linux community is more openly hostile to proprietary drivers being the only way to use hardware. It isn't so much a licensing issue, per se, whether it's possible to go that route, but it is likely to be the licensing that drives what kind of people, and corresponding mind-sets, occupy the noisy corner of enthusiastic early adopters.
My own experience is simply that *BSD enthusiasts often claim that the ability for people to distribute proprietary, feature-rich versions of the OS is a feature, and rarely claim that taking advantage of that ability is a bug, whereas Linux enthusiasts tend to treat both as bugs. While device drivers (loadable modules) represent a special case of that, which many Linux developers likely do consider a special feature (vs. the stance they might assume RMS would take), there's still the question of how much no-source-allowed hardware the community will embrace compared to the *BSD community.
My perceptions may be out of date. Perhaps the *BSD community is now very vociferous about the unacceptability of no-source-allowed hardware, and I just don't see it since I don't bother keeping track of these flamewars anymore.
But if my perception is reasonably accurate still, then it's likely to be the same perception a hardware vendor, new to the community, would arrive at (perhaps piecemeal, depending on which OS they think they're being asked to target).
Note that I'm not trying to put any value judgements on these perceptions as expressed by the respective communities. After all, *BSD users have the "freedom" to buy proprietary versions of that OS that support hardware, or especially unique features or performance enhancements, Linux users can't get at until someone makes a compatible, open-source version available to them (again, excepting stuff done as proprietary loadable modules, which some Linux users might turn their noses up at anyway). Linux users, by dint of their selection of that OS (and its license) have their own "freedom" as well.
But, while the jury is still out, so to speak, on whether the lesson being learned throughout the industry is that Linux itself is superior overall to *BSD systems or that GPL'ed software is superior, the fact remains that, for a variety of possible reasons, Linux is on top, and if that wasn't the case -- if the media hysteria was over, say, FreeBSD instead of Linux -- the perceptions would likely be that it's more acceptable for hardware vendors to keep their stuff closed, more acceptable for the community of advocates, and that the smaller Linux communuty was smaller precisely because they foolishly insisted on the inferior approach of everything being open-sourced.
(Note carefully that I use "superior", "inferior", and "foolishly" to indicate apparent market and business valuations, not objective fact.)
So it is not yet clear (to me anyway), but it might be the case that the reason Linux "won" these free-Unix battles is precisely that its advocates do strongly resist closed-source solutions for hardware.
Which gets back to what I think at least some people mean when they say "I want Linux support for your hardware" -- that they want not just for it to work under some version of Linux, but they want the support itself to become part of the Linux universe, which means it's open-source.
Anyway, regardless of the validity of my speculations, it's nice to hear the *BSD advocate base is so resistant to hardware disallowing open-source drivers and such...well, assuming that's what you're saying, which you do appear to contradict elsewhere in your writing, though TC was more consistently emphatic in suggesting resistance to such things.
As long as the software needed to properly use a chunk of hardware is open-source somewhere, generally that means it can be safely/legally ported to the other source-available OSes out there, *BSD, Linux, etc.
In the meantime, if *BSD enthusiasts want the industry to pay attention to them, it wouldn't hurt to come up with One True BSD, make it much better than Linux, promote it heavily, etc. Not that any of these things are easy, but somehow Linux, which came along so long after BSD (as you and others frequently point out), caught up with and ran right past BSD in pretty much all these areas. Put the mismanagement at the top, the AT&T lawsuit, and whatever other excuses BSD enthusiasts have made for this in the past. It's 2000. Make a fresh start. You've got all that GNU/Linux source code to examine to reduce the need to do real reverse-engineering of a popular OS. There's nothing stopping you now -- unless it turns out the choice of GPL over BSDL is what makes Linux substantially more successful overall, of course.
By not fighting against closed, proprietary drivers
Sorry, I must not have been clear: I personally do fight against them.
And what I was trying to say was that I believe many people who ask for "Linux drivers" at least think they're asking for open drivers.
Still, if we're not going to get an open driver from a vendor initially, convincing them to at least support Linux exposes their product to probably the largest audience willing to reverse-engineer it to create an open driver, which pries open the door for everyone...or, at least, that's my impression, which could well be overly based on the pro-Linux propaganda, e.g. here on/. and in ESR's recent email.
In short, what I neglected to mention in wrapping up my earlier post was that I believe it's not unreasonable to consider requests to support Linux to be a sort of "code" to open up the interface, without necessarily having to say (or even insist) on that outright. I.e. vendors are more likely to get excited about (somehow) reaching all those supposed Linux users out there than simply opening up their interface by publishing an Open SourceTM driver, right?
I think Linux is just the carrot de jure for convincing vendors to Open SourceTM their hardware, just as GCC was (and still is, perhaps) playing that role for new CPU architectures. (I.e. "we'll consider using your new architecture if GCC supports it" => "we'll consider using your new architecture if it's open", for all intents and purposes, but the former has been, AFAICT, more effective.)
Lemme ask this, though: is this actually working? Surely it did for GCC for many years, and I know personally how effective it was for g77 (there were third-party Fortran-code vendors who said "if g77 doesn't support your proposed extensions, we aren't going to code to them", or something along those lines, which convinced a major Fortran vendor to fund g77 supporting them, not just its own Fortran compilers).
How many hardware vendors have been convinced to open up their interfaces to reach the Linux community, vs. the communities of other open OSes, vs. to do it simply because opening up is a Good Thing, especially in the past couple of years? Does anyone keep track of this sort of thing, e.g. at a web site?
It would be nice to see us all supporting open systems again instead of just jumping on the Linux cheerleading bandwagon.
I see what you mean, but I don't attribute such a simplistic attitude to requests to support Linux.
If people used a more strictly correct phrase, like "please make sure your hardware is supported under other systems, such as Linux, OpenBSD, VMS, MVS, etc.", the reaction is likely to be "There's no way we can afford to write drivers for so many systems", and the response therefore likely to be "no".
If people say "please make sure your hardware is supported under *BSD", the reaction is likely to be "okay, let's see how many proprietary copies of that OS we can sell and compare that to the cost of writing a proprietary driver for it", and the response is therefore likely to be either "no" or "okay, here's your proprietary, non-Open-SourceTM version of *BSD that supports our hardware -- oh, on Intel Pentiums only, by the way".
If people say "please open your hardware so people can write their own device drivers for other OSes", the response is likely to be "we don't want to give our competitors that advantage".
So, instead, people say "please make sure you hardware is supported under Linux". The hardware vendor has probably the best opportunity here to realize the advantages (to all of us) hinted at above, due to the rabid publicity Linux has gotten for the past couple of years.
I.e. the vendor first thinks "hey, that is the cutting-edge OS, so supporting it makes our hardware seem cutting-edge". Then maybe "hey, they say Linux is written by volunteers, maybe we can get volunteers to write the drivers for us by sending some freebies out, and maybe that'll scare up some more early adopters for our product". Maybe "well, might as well open our specs then, since that's the upshot of any device driver this Linux community apparently cares about -- if we provide a proprietary module, they'll probably reverse-engineer it anyway, but that doesn't seem so bad given the size of the Linux community, and once we're in, our competitors will have to play catch-up anyway".
In the end, I tend to think that if a driver gets written for any single OS other than an MS or Apple one, Linux would be the best choice, because it'd offer the best opportunity for all users of off-beaten-path OSes.
For example, the *BSD community already accepts, enthusiastically, the prospect of binary-only proprietary versions of their OSes being shipped, so I assume convincing a vendor to do a driver for a *BSD OS would be much less likely to help Linux programmers "bring it over" than vice-versa.
However, a big caveat here is that I'm basing my speculation on my observations of OS and licensing discussions over the past N years here and on USENET, not on actually participating in driver-writing activities on any recent OS of note. If I've got my pertinent facts wrong, please consider my speculations withdrawn, and simply point them out for everyone to see.
"Me too". I've simply ignored the whole DVD craze from the outset due to the intentional crippling of the technology (which goes way beyond what they did to CD-audio), though frankly I got bored riding the leading edge, crest, or even the back end of the technology wave years ago. (I have yet to own either a cell phone or a pager. Or, for that matter, a Palm Pilot. I do have a Voice It solid-state recorder, which has been quite handy for a few years now.)
It's too bad for the DVD marketers, since there have to be lots more people like myself making similar decisions, and I bought the very first consumer CD home, portable, and car players available in the USA back when they came out (I still own the portable), and currently own so many CD players of various kinds I can't count them offhand (probably 15 to 20). I also still own, and sometimes use, the first portable MiniDisc recorder.
The upshot? All those friends of mine who are accustomed to asking me about new technologies are getting a big yawn from me when they ask about, or tell me they just purchased, anything DVD-related.
Not that I expect my approach to change anything -- other than the amount of $$ with which I part to get the latest crippled toys, of course.
(And, I'm not really thinking I'll ever move to another DVD "zone". I simply don't want to buy a technology that requires me to have to even think about such gratuitous restrictions anymore, just as I don't want to own a cell-phone mainly because I don't want to waste time memorizing the "dead" zones in the area like my wife has had to. I've decided technology will serve me, not I it, and am redirecting my life's efforts accordingly. Don't even think about asking me whether I favor "click-through licenses" in stand-alone software, for example.;-)
the last thing I want to see right now is Eric Raymond getting praise for comments that people here on Slashdot made.
Football analogy: I was watching the Dallas Cowboys game earlier today. Occasionally, someone like Deion Sanders would make a great play, like a tackle (which for him is big news), and the producer would change the shot to show Michael Irvin, on the sideline, cheering like mad, not dressed for play (due to his neck injury months ago, which put him out for the season, and might have signaled the end of his career).
Why do they show Irvin? Because he's one of the most colorful, well-known, (and sometimes nearly felonious!) member of the Cowboys team that won three Super Bowls.
The producers figure the viewers who don't exactly know the ins and outs of football, or the Cowboys roster, might include plenty of people who recognize Irvin getting excited as meaning something really Big.
I tend to agree. I don't need to see Irvin cheering to know a play was big, or funny, or whatever, but I've been watching the Cowboys pretty passionately for, oh, nearly 30 years now (longer than I've been involved with Open SourceTM software anyway;-).
Point being, is it really wise to complain that viewers might think that Irvin's sideline cheering being shown on national TV will convince some people that he, not his teammates, made the big plays?
I don't think so.
Still, I do wish ESR would get the facts nailed down a bit more before sending such an email -- though, perhaps what I really should say is, I do wish/. wouldn't post an article referencing somebody's archived email without checking with them, and checking the facts, first. (Based on other comments, I gather the article wasn't totally accurate in terms of what kind of hackers cracked the algorithm in question, but don't take my, or/.'s, word on that, either.)
Also, remember that/. is surely not the only forum on which lots of people have held forth in expressing their opinions on the subject. While it might be nice for ESR to credit forae he's read to come up with his boiled-down-to-the-essence opinion, that might be impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, it's easy to tell whether Linux contains code written by Microsoft!! The "strings" command outputs "printable" strings it finds in a stream of (binary) data; "/proc/kcore" is, in most GNU/Linux systems, a file that represents the current state of the kernel's "core", or RAM; and "grep" outputs lines containing the string on the command line that it finds in its input.
If you try the command below under Linux, you are asking for a printout of all strings containing "Copyright 2000 Microsoft" found in the your computer's RAM -- which includes the Linux kernel itself!
And, on my computer, which runs Red Hat Linux 6.1, it prints out plenty of lines before I interrupt it with Control-C!! Try it!! Doesn't it show that Linux contains W2K code?
(Yes, this is an old trick. ;-)
Then you don't disagree with "Mr RMS and all like him" since "they" have no problem with charging money for (software) products.
(Perhaps if you did a better job researching, and thinking through, what people like RMS actually say, you wouldn't have to post anonymously? Heck, I'm amazed someone wasted a moderation point of "Insightful" on your post, but at least that helped it catch my eye.)
Of course, RMS and others (like myself) have written and then given away software, but we've also gotten paid $$ to write Open Source Software as well. (RMS gets paid much better than I do, though.) No moral/ethical/legal problem with that. I don't know what percentage of the source code in GCC was paid for (to get written), but it's probably well over 50%.
Does that throw your assumptions about what "Mr RMS" says completely out of the water, or what?
Having been through both RHAT's and LNUX's IPO invitations, I certainly agree.
I'm sure RHAT, and those (LNUX et al) who would follow, learned a lot from that RHAT IPO. I hope E*Trade learned how to better, and more consistently, do things like manage their web site, answer questions, etc.
Dealing with Deutsche Bank (during the LNUX IPO) was delightful, and, IIRC, we always got consistent and correct information.
Assuming your story is true, does it suggest that an Open Source(TM) Power Delivery System would be possible?
Not easy or cheap, I figure.
But, if the AC@60Hz and similar systems are more expensive to run and more dangerous, and have, as their only fundamental advantage over some higher-frequency AC system, the ability to be more easily and reliably metered so as to charge for their use...
The other advantages of AC@60Hz (and AC@50Hz) are that there's a huge installed base of power generation, transmission, measuring, and consumption equipment (e.g. desktop computers). But those aren't fundamental advantages -- they might outweigh the appropriateness of changing now, not of having chosen the higher-frequency system in the first place.
So, would a higher-frequency-AC system be worth researching, designing, engineering, etc. within the OSS framework, with deployment initially targeted for areas with little or no installed base (such as third-world countries)?
(And, dontcha just love how I use all those cute TM's? ;-)
Hmm, let's see just how much of an "inherent contradiction" these two quotes are, by substituting for "free" something else:
versus
The point being, just because something might be "better" in the abstract does not necessarily mean it's wise to switch to that thing at any given moment during a campaign where the thing proposed as to be discarded is still serving a critical role.
(No, I don't know whether RMS himself would agree that the statements are not contradictory as he meant them. I'm just pointing out that they aren't inherently contradictory. It's best to ask RMS himself, if you want to know how he wishes those statements to be interpreted.)
That quote comes from the 5 Jan 2000 10:01:22 -0800 email Robert Philips wrote to Derek.
Being a recipient of the famous email Red Hat sent out to contributors to invite them to participate in the RHAT IPO, I don't recall any promise made that we would actually receive stock.
Can anyone provide actual evidence of such a promise, or is this just a case of Mr. Philips inflating his rhetoric to make Red Hat look bad (and, therefore, LinuxOne look better by comparison)?
Note that this could be considered "splitting hairs" by some -- I'm distinguishing Red Hat offering contributors the opportunity to purchase shares from an actual promise that they would receive shares. There's no need to accuse Red Hat of the latter, which is what Mr. Philips appears to have done, if all they did was the former. (It's like the distinction between right to free speech and the right to be heard -- the former is not equivalent to the latter.)
Recently, I saw a VAX shut down "for the last time" at an IT shop -- several hours before Y2K. I think they intended to keep the one next to it running for awhile longer, but can't recall. I posted something about this on /. circa Y2K though; it's possible my memory was clearer and well-represented in that post.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I loved your story about the guy on the BBS, and many of your other excellent points. If only more people in society -- not just on the Internet -- heard from people like you, instead of the wishy-washy, I-feel-your-pain types who dominate the media most people seem to worship.
Oh, and finally: I've known people with the last name of Patti (mainly, a teacher at my high school) and men with names pronounced Jackie (including Jackie(sp?) Smith, who famously dropped a potential touchdown pass from Roger Staubach in a Dallas Cowboys' losing effort against the Pittsburgh Steelers in one of the two Super Bowl games they played in the '70s). Even so, I might well make the mistake of assuming your nick suggested femalinity. ;-)
Ah, indeed, that strikes me as a different case than I thought you were talking about.
I wonder if, in a way, we already have this going on? Think of building the Linux kernel, with all the combinations of configuration options. Which combination produces the "best" result for a given machine? Well, the "owner" of that machine has his opinion, and might or might not write it down, in the form of a command line to do the build.
I could imagine a joe-cool-ultra-hacker type distributing GPL'ed software with all sorts of "special" patches that are, by default, disabled, who then "consults" with companies for a fee. The consultation consists of going on-site (wet or electronically), making sure nobody is looking, typing a magical invocation of the build of that software, and thus producing a very special version that runs fast, leaps tall buildings, whatever.
Could the owner of the GPL'ed software win a court case trying to force the hacker to divulge the magic build sequence? I'd like to think not, on general principle, but it is not crystal-clear to me that the courts would refuse to force such divulgence under, say, contempt-of-court charges.
It's also not clear to me that it would be sufficiently difficult to reverse-engineer this sort of tactic to make it worthwhile in anything more than a very short time-frame!
Still, it's fun to think about.
False. You still have some rights. You've given up the right to restrict other people copying it, though, which is indeed a big restriction.
Huh? Sounds like an emotion-laden argument to me. So you're saying Bill Gates would get more abuse heaped on him if MS released all its software under the GPL? Hmm.
False. More correctly: "unless, of course, your business model assumes the ability to charge a lot of money for a substantial percentage of the copies of the software that actually get distributed."
First, I didn't pretend to offer a comprehensive explanation for why to use open source. In fact, I strongly suggested the poster take the time to research the issues.
Second, I didn't "spout" anything "useless" and especially nothing "emotionally-charged". All I posted was simple fact, into which you read (not having particularly good comprehension skills, I would guess) your own agenda.
Note that I didn't say there weren't challenges to be addressed when writing software for open-source distribution. But the poster had essentially claimed things about such an approach that were incorrect, and I was offering some simple, direct statements to illustrate that, and suggesting he follow up with some actual research.
Of course not, since the poster asked basically no questions, he just spouted some emotion-laden rhetoric (e.g. about having to pay bills) that I explained was false on several counts. So, speak for yourself, if you have questions to ask.
There are many ways to consider, none of them perhaps quite as easy as resorting to the proprietary model. Ask dress designers (fashion) how they do it -- for all intents and purposes, that field is inherently Open Source, yet they make billions (and, yes, their products are functional as well as artistic). There are other fields that don't allow the equivalent of proprietary software distribution as well. Study them, if you would like to consider whether OSS is worthwhile (before your potential customers require it, of course, at which point you have no choice).
I insisted on no such thing. Scratch the above "First", i.e. here's item Zero for you: learn to read.
As far as answering your question, why don't you investigate the various models already in use throughout various industries, not just computing? (And if you think the source code for your product necessarily constitutes 100% of the "fruit of your labors", you need to do some reading up on the OSS industry, and learn why all of its maintenance problems are not 100% solved due to availability of source code, for example.)
People with incentive. Say, the potential customers, who, if they insist on OSS only, will find a way to fund its development themselves. Then you can accept the funding, develop the software, and make $$ maintaining it. That's just one model, but it works.
Excuse me, but it was the poster who arrogantly made unsupported, unsubstantiated claims about what OSS development implies. All I did was say "wrong; wrong; wrong" and point him in a better direction. And I didn't deride him for not being a believer -- just for making false assertions in stating why he holds his beliefs. E.g. I don't deride someone for saying they believe in Santa Claus, but if they claim he lives at the North Pole and satellites have verified that, I might take issue with that claim.
If people want answers to questions, they ought to ask questions, rather than state falsehoods. The latter can work, but, in a public forum, it's a sure way to showcase one's ignorance and/or arrogance.
(For example, if you weren't so interested in trashing OSS advocates like myself, you'd have just asked the questions, instead of ranting about the content of my post.)
So here's a question I have for you. You have a great idea for a new software application, believe it'd be worth $2B in the next five years, and would take only two years to develop via the proprietary model (up-front funding, hire programmers, closed development, etc.).
Problem 1: you can't find good programmers, because they are unwilling to work for such low pay on software they can't maintain themselves after they leave your employ.
Problem 2: during market research, you discover your potential customers are no longer willing to pay much of anything for a copy of non-GPL'ed software, due to having been burnt by lock-in software so often in the past.
How do you make your idea happen using the proprietary model, when you can't hire decent programmers and won't be able to sell the final product anyway?
Now, this isn't likely the case today, but might be for your product's market within a few years. The problems are a bit overstated, but all that has to happen is a) programmers worldwide decide they deserve vastly more $$ to work on proprietary software, due to their not having a long-term relationship with it vis-a-vis OSS and b) while a) drives your costs up, customers are less and less willing to pay lots of $$ for each copy of proprietary software, figuring if they would pay lots of $$ for a copy, it must be an important to them, and therefore it should be OSS so they don't get locked in to it, which drives your potential revenue stream down.
Next question: besides the problems described above, do you see any opportunities in this scenario?
And there you hit on the reason tactics like this won't stand up in court.
If you can write and maintain code that uses such an "encryption", then so can lots of other people. I.e. it's "source code". (If you're so brilliant nobody else can maintain your source, you might as well write breakthrough apps in clean Java, or Ada, or whatever, rather than resort to such time-and-energy-wasting tactics as shrouding the source via makefiles.)
If you can't do it yourself, that means you're getting some software help. At which point the so-called "source" isn't source code as the GPL defines it.
In that case, what the GPL calls "source" includes either the makefile with the keys, or the source from which those makefiles are automatically (or semi-automatically) derived.
The most important thing to remember about the GPL, and about legal instruments in general, if you're a technical type, is:
I.e. don't get caught up in trying to out-fox the GPL, or other areas of law, by complicating or substituting components in the relevant mechanisms. The law, and judges, generally see right through that.
And tactics like "well, the makefiles aren't part of the source code, so what if we put..." are nothing more than cases of nerds thinking they can get away with changing the law simply by changing the mechanism.
Study the GPL carefully. You'll note it hardly ever references the components of what the software community considers the mechanism of program distribution, especially key components like:
- Executables (.EXE)
- Source files (.c,
.pl, .f, etc.) - Libraries (.a,
.o) - Compilers (gcc)
- Makefiles
- Scripts
The reason references to these are essentially absent in the GPL, and in other (meaningful and enforceable) legal instrumentals, is that these terms identify little more than a file format. They certainly don't identify anything legally enforceable in terms of concepts the GPL cares about.E.g. anything you can write in C, you can write in Perl, or in a makefile, or in a shell script, at least in theory. Add a (proprietary) interpreter, and theory can become practice.
So the GPL defines, and talks about, source code, not just source files versus other sorts of files that might or might not contain source code.
Don't waste time speculating on how to move and transform the source code for a project such that it magically becomes something that doesn't "count" as source code under the GPL, because the law, and a judge, will see that for what it is -- a mere, and rather foolish, subterfuge.
The upshot? The day somebody ships so-called "source code" that is missing a key makefile needed to build it, such that the "code" is GPL'ed (and, say, copyrighted by the FSF, due to signovers and such), is the day they can expect a polite-but-firm letter from the FSF essentially ordering distribution of said makefile since it's part of the real source code. (Or of whatever goes into making it, if it's automatically generated.)
(Of course, all these issues, clever tricks, legal inanities, and so on were hashed out on gnu.misc.discuss years ago, but maybe those archives aren't so easy to research, or maybe people would just spout off their theories about how the law works rather than do the research of previous discussions. Note that, of course, you can find lawyers here or there that'll disagree with my assessment above, but it represents the arguments the FSF has actually made to convince real lawyers in real circumstances to agree to the FSF's terms rather than try to "get around" the GPL. The most telling aspect of my research into these issues is the fact that nobody's trashed the GPL when the underlying software is copyrighted by the FSF in all these years, despite several attempts to do so, and plenty of incentive.)
Irrelevant to the discussion at hand, in which it was asserted that Open Source means writing software for free.
For a more pertinent reworking of your question:
The point being that OSS projects tend to attract lots of free help because there's lots of people out there willing to offer it. Help that closed-source projects typically refuse at the front door.
That being said, I'd guess there are one or two significant open-source projects that are planned to achieve success without relying on free coding help.
But, I can't say what they are. (Best guess offhand: IBM Jikes compiler.) Maybe there aren't any.
Even if there aren't any, that certainly doesn't mean nobody doing OSS development gets paid quite well for doing it, which is what was, in effect, asserted in the original post to which I replied.
(BTW, even Microsoft relies on lots of free help, in the form of beta testing, etc. I doubt MS could release a quality OS without relying on such free help. The question is, can it do so without relying on free coding help, the sort of help Linux and the BSD's leverage so successfully?)
I should probably clarify my "even our code" statement.
It refers to the fact that, of the various products whose source code I've been an "expert" in maintaining during my career, I can be hired to maintain that code by a large percentage of its users only when the code was distributed Open Source (more specifically, GPL'ed).
Put another way, closed-source development isn't just about locking in customers -- it's about locking in the vendor's programmers as well, by making it harder than it would otherwise be for them to get good jobs maintaining the same code elsewhere.
So if you're still using PRIMOS, or Numerix machines, or you use Cadence's NC-Verilog on Suns, it really won't help you much that I've got some expertise maintaining portions of those systems, unless you've paid lots of extra $$ for the source. The $$ I was paid by the respective companies (Pr1me, Numerix, Cadence) to work on that code was, indeed, decent, but is about all I can expect to ever earn for that particular expertise.
But if you're using GCC, g77, etc., you can hire me to work on them. (In theory, anyway; I'm not exactly looking for work these days.)
That makes OSS development more valuable to me as a programmer than closed-source software development, and in fact it gives me incentive to favor long-term viability of OSS products over the sort of short-term focus that has so characterized closed-source products over the past 20 years.
I.e. if I can profit from closed-source development for only the duration of my employment at, say, BigSoftwareCo, then it behooves me to maximize my salary & benefits during that duration, leaving it essentially up to BigSoftwareCo to decide how it will maximize its long-term viability. Since I can profit from OSS development for the duration of the practical life of that software, I have more incentive to make it live a long, healthy life, even if that means making less $$ in the short run (not necessarily always the trade-off I have to make, but one I've willingly made a few times already).
So, as an OSS developer, I'm more interested in making sure the software is, and remains, useful for a long, long time (ideally, with as few changes made by others to my own code as necessary, so I have maximum expertise in it).
Though I've personally applied similar incentives when writing closed-source software, it hasn't been due to financial or most other incentives, because there really aren't any. In fact, one of the reasons I was attracted (back) to OSS development is that I could continue to apply my own sense of ethical software development while being able to gain some potential for financial reward for it (for a change), or at least while not being punished (say, by management) for doing things such as taking extra time to make sure the software works correctly and as documented.
(Not that there aren't all sorts of similarly bone-headed people in the OSS movement pushing for "gimme what I want now, you worry about making it work right later" from time to time. But I don't report to them. Besides, it's usually easier for the general public to see these sorts of discussions going on in OSS development than in closed-source development. That allows people to come to more informed conclusions regarding, e.g. the long-term viability of proposed extensions.)
Maybe someday you will understand what Open Source Software (OSS) is about well enough to not make such strange statements.
Here are some clues: it is not about writing software "for free"; it is not about not being paid a lot of money for writing it; it is not about giving your competitors the ability to put you out of business.
And here's the biggest clue the market has yet to particularly appreciate: once customers of software come to appreciate the benefits of insisting on Open Source, and assuming they therefore do insist on it in greater numbers, you won't be able to get paid well for writing software that isn't Open Source.
Keep in mind the fact that the huge valuations of RHAT and LNUX on NASDAQ; the success of GNU/Linux, Apache, etc.; and so on have all taken place with nearly 0% of the end user of software insisting on Open Source per se. All those end users have cared about so far is faster, better, "cooler", more reliable, etc., all of which Open Source can deliver, more or less.
Once it becomes clear that Open Source per se delivers advantages closed source cannot -- advantages that can trump all the disadvantages (slower, fewer features, etc.) in any given instance -- how will you make money writing closed-source software?
Really, do take the time to investigate just how much money people are making writing OSS, how much more freedom we have to change jobs and still take our expertise, even our code, with us to the next job, and so on, before you make public statements about whether OSS is "suited" for certain kinds of software development.
Didja read the article? I know it was /.'ed -- I waited a longish time for it -- but it addressed the quality-of-fix issue pretty well.
BTW, while I don't know for sure whether you're right that many OSS projects don't regression-test such fixes first, I do know the ones I've worked on could stand some improvement...and also that it's a bit easier to regression-test a fix to a small component than a large one, and that OSS thrives on collections of small components in a way Closed Source $$$-making development doesn't (the latter favors the development of monoliths, since they represent a harder-to-reverse-engineer, and therefore steeper, wall for competitors to climb).
Also, the article made mention of various Microsoft-issued "fixes" that, themselves, had to be fixed. Didn't mention that happening with GCC, though it has happened there (not security fixes AFAIK, but the same principle applies), but the implication was that the most heavily-funded closed-source-development organization in the world doesn't seem to do to well producing correct fixes in the first place.
More precisely, Open Source software is the bee, we're the wings, and our efforts testing, debugging, and improving software constitute the turbulence that Closed Source development tries hard to exclude but Open Source development, ideally, welcomes with open arms.
Okay, I just made it up and maybe it's a bit lame, but it could inspire somebody to come up with an improved version. ;-)
This brilliant observation by JonKatz highlights the true danger of the AOL/TW merger, and why it should be stopped, by the (comparatively small, obscure, non-pervasive organization known as the) US Government.
The AOL/TW plan is clear. First they'll offer the huge flock of sheep known as "American consumers" cheap access to all that TW content. Next they'll make that exclusive access, so nobody who doesn't use the AOL/TW ISP can see TW content.
Then they'll deliver the final blow: make AOL/TW access so unreliable, so frustrating, that, for most Americans, it'll not be worth even logging on.
By then, we'll be so mass-hypnotized that we'll believe the only real entertainment comes from AOL/TW, so that when The System doesn't work, it'll never occur to us to:
- Turn on the TV (besides, AOL/TW will make sure it works only via their Internet access)
- Turn on the radio (ditto)
- Use another ISP (AOL/TW will make all other ISPs disappear, or at least appear to from the American consciousness)
- Read a newspaper
The end result is that Americans will be completely in the dark about what is going on in their own country, at which point Steve Case et al will use a crack team of hand-picked cyber-terrorists to overthrow the government.All Americans will be shown is that, apparently, our new President is a certain well-known rabbit, and, by then, we'll think that's great, for pretty much the same reasons that people like Donald Trump and Warren Beatty are taken seriously as presidential candidates today: because the media has convinced too many of us they're "cool", which we somehow believe == "intelligent", "capable of leadership", etc.
AOL/TW. The End Is Near. And, by the time it comes, there won't be an NRA-type organization ready to defend your freedom -- the only guns available will be "secured" by high-tech devices that, not coincidentally, get owner-fingerprint-updates from AOL/TW's online database, which'll allow them to disable all guns instantly when The Moment arrives.
(Yes, this is sarcasm. Fearing AOL/TW on the basis of AOL's "service" is like fearing McDonald's replacing all other restaurants on the basis that McBurgers often have insufficient ketchup.)
I don't know; I tend to doubt it.
There are cases of ownership directly affecting the political representations of media outlets, of course, and I don't really know the %, but most owners of large-scale media outlets are focused on profits, not personal preaching.
In the case of national-media outlets, the owners, regardless of political view, must hire reporters, journalists, etc. who, in turn, must either want to be paid lots of $$ or at least want to be on the national stage.
Generally, the best way to ensure people watch national-media programs is to ensure that those programs promote national-scale solutions to the national-scale problems that they constantly present. And those problems must be presented in an hysterical manner. That's why that national media, through the '92 elections, went along with the Clinton-spin-cycle presentation of all these so-called "crises" (including an economic crisis, which had, before the election, been shown to have subsided), all of which required (according to pundits) the very sort of federal intrusiveness Clinton's team was advocating. It's also why /.'s editors choose to get hysterical over intrusions on our "cyber rights", however that's defined. If these shapers of public opinion (journalists, commentators, whatever) didn't passionately care about the audience they were targeting, why would they pick a vehicle that targets that audience? So we end up seeing biases that tend to result from such people just going with their instincts, since their own audience favors that over coolly gathering the facts.
Hence, regardless of ownership, national media outlets will tend to favor more intrusive federal government, and so be correctly described as "more liberal" (in the US, not necessarily European, sense).
I've seen this root tendency in the national media for decades, regardless of whether it leads to liberal, conservative, or other outcomes, though as I say, these days US liberal == favors bigger government, and wants-to-be-a-national-reporter == wants to expose problems that likely will be "best solved" using national/federal-government solutions.
For example, national-media proponents of "diversity" are often the first to ridicule a local community's standards towards sexual activity (let's say it's a Southern Baptist stronghold). What they actually value isn't diversity so much as their own views gaining greater credibility nation-wide.
I'll never forget tuning into the now-defunct Phil Donaghue show and hearing a discussion of some hot sociopolitical topic (not sure, maybe teaching abstinence vs. teaching sex-ed). Phil's liberal (NY-based?) audience naturally joined with him in supporting the liberal solution-de-jour (in this case, it'd have been forcing sex-ed on kids against parent's explicit wishes, and treating teaching abstinence as a likely cause, not preventative, of teen pregnancy).
The glowing moment of discovery for me was hearing a caller explain her contrary view (which happened to coincide with mine), hearing Phil increduously ask (as if "how can you hold such a stupid opinion?") "Caller, where are you from?", hearing her say "Atlanta, Georgia", and then hearing the entire audience issue a knowing "Oooohh!", indicating that the mere fact the caller was "from the South" explained her blinkered views on their current pet issue.
Here was a host and studio audience full of people who undoubtedly prided themselves on their tolerance, their absence of bigotry, their progressiveness, etc. blatantly showing their true colors -- their prejudice that people from the American South are likely to be sexually repressed (or repressive), so their opinions on how to deal with raising teenagers correspondingly suspect.
That kind of arrogance does not come solely from US liberalism. It is the result of, for example, city folk believing they know more than country folk, but moreso of people seeking the national spotlight tending to do so precisely because they believe they know better than locals do about their own localities.
But, I believe this kind of arrogance constitutes most of the foundation of today's US liberalism.
That's why I don't expect new mergers, even newcomers like Fox News, to make a big dent.
After all, if people like me believe we know enough to manage our local affairs, and want Washington to get out of the way (speaking of which, people who complain about the AOL-TW merger as "too big" but not about the federal government as way too big are, IMO, probably self-delusional), why would we spend nearly as much time watching an outlet even as good as Fox News reportedly is, compared to the amount of time the average US citizen slavishly watches ABC, CBS, NBC, or CNN to validate their fears about Republicans, health care, Social Security, and share their hopes about the next White Knight (post-Clinton, of course -- wish I could show y'all some of the letters my wife and I got from academia-friends hailing his 92 election ;-) coming along and solving everything by making the federal government even bigger and more intrusive? We're probably too busy doing local work and reading local papers to make great customers for Fox-News-type outlets. And that's probably just as well.
No, the reason to be hopeful is not the arrival of new players on the national-media stage (though that can help). It's the slow erosion of national-media outlets as sources from which America gets its news, as well as the emergence of the Internet, which partly replaces that.
The more choice in news outlets -- not just different brand names (is there really any difference in the political positions taken by ABC, CBS, .*NBC, and CNN?), but in their scope and audience (local outlets like San Jose Mercury News; international outlets the Christian Science Monitor; targeted outlets like /.) -- the more opportunities we all have to get at the truth, and think critically about what our choice outlets are telling us (and what they're withholding from our consideration).
Further, the Internet offers an opportunity to review the past that is far superior to what we've had on TV or even in the papers. We can search past USENET archives, quickly pull up "User Info" profiles on /., etc., to discover how prescient today's predictors of tomorrow were in the past. (How many of the major media outlets have called attention to their own hysteria-mongering about, say, the supposed millions of homeless Americans, and especially to their sudden dropping of the topic like a hot potato once Clinton took office? How much time and energy have they put into showing the complete Rodney King beating tape and discussing the probability that their purposeful showing of just the most one-sided portion of it contributed to the LA riots and the deaths of 51 innocent people, compared to the time and energy put into criticizing LAPD, cops, White America, whatever? How often have they interviewed someone whose mom wanted to abort them as a fetus, as a showcase for the importance of anti-abortion stands by the church, by friends and family, and even by pre-Roe-v-Wade laws, compared to the amount of time/energy they spend celebrating "choice" as a "Constitutional Right" and vilifying the "extreme Right"? But we all have the ability to express our views about such things on the Internet.)
For that, and for my increasing ability to think critically (and review experiences like that Phil Donaghue episode), I should thank people like Rush Limbaugh, who, interestingly, calls my theory into question somewhat by the mere fact that he, despite advocating little in the way of federal oversight over anything (besides national defense) on a regular basis, continues to draw the biggest national radio audience (or thereabouts).
For that matter, this sort of thing is probably inevitable in any country whose citizens have allowed their government to disarm them.
Besides, the road system is, most everywhere, basically a shared "bus" in computer lingo, designed to be cheap to plug into, compared to other systems such as rail and airways. I.e. cars are more affordable to obtain and require less expertise to drive than many other methods of automated transportation.
The big problem with cars is basically that anyone is allowed to drive them, in nearly any fashion they like, with little consistency in regulating violations that don't result in severe accidents, therefore providing insufficient feedback regarding poor, but not-yet-deadly, driving. (Kinda like operating systems that "allow" null pointer dereferences making it less likely programmers will discover such errors until they "simply" port their code to a less forgiving system.)
So, the long-term trend, especially in any country whose citizens have already allowed themselves to be disarmed (read: the citizens have accepted the notion that the current government will always do an acceptable job, and never give in to tyrranical assertions of power), will be to use technology to reduce the costs of providing safer roads.
Some of this might be well-designed, some not. I don't like the proposed system, especially in isolation, for a variety of reasons, but as part of a comprehensive system offering individually-controlled, as well as collectively-offered, information-gathering, advice-giving, and vehicle-guidance capabilities, with plenty of opt-out potential and with both criminal and civil issues carefully worked out in advance, it isn't necessarily a bad component to offer.
The huge number of variables involved in this "problem", including preserving individual safety and liberty, preserving the environment (both long-term -- e.g. reducing emissions -- and short-term -- such as reducing noise), optimizing overall road usage, reducing traffic jams, and so on, require a highly flexible, sophisticated system for proper management.
Such a system is highly unlikely to derive from a government and consist of massive central servers telling blindly obedient cars what to do. Though some people might, for various reasons, prefer to drive such cars and let "the system" take care of everything for them, a more optimal solution requires decision-making participation among far more people than the few individuals who'll be invited to set the paramaters for, and control, the various central servers.
So it'll end up being a mix of central offerings (of information, advice, and control) combined with localized determination (based on factors the local operator might wish not to share with the central system for various reasons).
The day citizens are capable of reliably (and democratically) electing a government that would consistently get this sort of thing "right" is the day citizens can eliminate all coercive elements of their own government -- i.e. implement unilateral disarmement of the government against themselves, and truly live in peace with their neighbors. For they will have proven their ability to govern themselves individually sufficient to no longer need violence, or the threat of violence, to keep each other in check. I'm not sure that will ever actually happen, which is the whole point of my post -- people shouldn't trust a government elected by people who can't govern themselves, because, in too many people, the desire to control the acts of others greatly exceeds the desire to control one's own behavior.
I didn't mean to say it was in fact better, since I know proprietary drivers can be written, and distributed, for both systems.
I was getting at the mind-set of users and distributors. There are Linux distributions of significance that will not, AFAIK, incorporate proprietary drivers, period. (Debian, for example?)
Are there similarly popular BSD distributions?
As far as your other comments, I think that not only did you contradict yourself, you actually ended up saying basically the same thing I was at least trying to say -- that the Linux community is more openly hostile to proprietary drivers being the only way to use hardware. It isn't so much a licensing issue, per se, whether it's possible to go that route, but it is likely to be the licensing that drives what kind of people, and corresponding mind-sets, occupy the noisy corner of enthusiastic early adopters.
My own experience is simply that *BSD enthusiasts often claim that the ability for people to distribute proprietary, feature-rich versions of the OS is a feature, and rarely claim that taking advantage of that ability is a bug, whereas Linux enthusiasts tend to treat both as bugs. While device drivers (loadable modules) represent a special case of that, which many Linux developers likely do consider a special feature (vs. the stance they might assume RMS would take), there's still the question of how much no-source-allowed hardware the community will embrace compared to the *BSD community.
My perceptions may be out of date. Perhaps the *BSD community is now very vociferous about the unacceptability of no-source-allowed hardware, and I just don't see it since I don't bother keeping track of these flamewars anymore.
But if my perception is reasonably accurate still, then it's likely to be the same perception a hardware vendor, new to the community, would arrive at (perhaps piecemeal, depending on which OS they think they're being asked to target).
Note that I'm not trying to put any value judgements on these perceptions as expressed by the respective communities. After all, *BSD users have the "freedom" to buy proprietary versions of that OS that support hardware, or especially unique features or performance enhancements, Linux users can't get at until someone makes a compatible, open-source version available to them (again, excepting stuff done as proprietary loadable modules, which some Linux users might turn their noses up at anyway). Linux users, by dint of their selection of that OS (and its license) have their own "freedom" as well.
But, while the jury is still out, so to speak, on whether the lesson being learned throughout the industry is that Linux itself is superior overall to *BSD systems or that GPL'ed software is superior, the fact remains that, for a variety of possible reasons, Linux is on top, and if that wasn't the case -- if the media hysteria was over, say, FreeBSD instead of Linux -- the perceptions would likely be that it's more acceptable for hardware vendors to keep their stuff closed, more acceptable for the community of advocates, and that the smaller Linux communuty was smaller precisely because they foolishly insisted on the inferior approach of everything being open-sourced.
(Note carefully that I use "superior", "inferior", and "foolishly" to indicate apparent market and business valuations, not objective fact.)
So it is not yet clear (to me anyway), but it might be the case that the reason Linux "won" these free-Unix battles is precisely that its advocates do strongly resist closed-source solutions for hardware.
Which gets back to what I think at least some people mean when they say "I want Linux support for your hardware" -- that they want not just for it to work under some version of Linux, but they want the support itself to become part of the Linux universe, which means it's open-source.
Anyway, regardless of the validity of my speculations, it's nice to hear the *BSD advocate base is so resistant to hardware disallowing open-source drivers and such...well, assuming that's what you're saying, which you do appear to contradict elsewhere in your writing, though TC was more consistently emphatic in suggesting resistance to such things.
As long as the software needed to properly use a chunk of hardware is open-source somewhere, generally that means it can be safely/legally ported to the other source-available OSes out there, *BSD, Linux, etc.
In the meantime, if *BSD enthusiasts want the industry to pay attention to them, it wouldn't hurt to come up with One True BSD, make it much better than Linux, promote it heavily, etc. Not that any of these things are easy, but somehow Linux, which came along so long after BSD (as you and others frequently point out), caught up with and ran right past BSD in pretty much all these areas. Put the mismanagement at the top, the AT&T lawsuit, and whatever other excuses BSD enthusiasts have made for this in the past. It's 2000. Make a fresh start. You've got all that GNU/Linux source code to examine to reduce the need to do real reverse-engineering of a popular OS. There's nothing stopping you now -- unless it turns out the choice of GPL over BSDL is what makes Linux substantially more successful overall, of course.
Sorry, I must not have been clear: I personally do fight against them.
And what I was trying to say was that I believe many people who ask for "Linux drivers" at least think they're asking for open drivers.
Still, if we're not going to get an open driver from a vendor initially, convincing them to at least support Linux exposes their product to probably the largest audience willing to reverse-engineer it to create an open driver, which pries open the door for everyone...or, at least, that's my impression, which could well be overly based on the pro-Linux propaganda, e.g. here on /. and in ESR's recent email.
In short, what I neglected to mention in wrapping up my earlier post was that I believe it's not unreasonable to consider requests to support Linux to be a sort of "code" to open up the interface, without necessarily having to say (or even insist) on that outright. I.e. vendors are more likely to get excited about (somehow) reaching all those supposed Linux users out there than simply opening up their interface by publishing an Open SourceTM driver, right?
I think Linux is just the carrot de jure for convincing vendors to Open SourceTM their hardware, just as GCC was (and still is, perhaps) playing that role for new CPU architectures. (I.e. "we'll consider using your new architecture if GCC supports it" => "we'll consider using your new architecture if it's open", for all intents and purposes, but the former has been, AFAICT, more effective.)
Lemme ask this, though: is this actually working? Surely it did for GCC for many years, and I know personally how effective it was for g77 (there were third-party Fortran-code vendors who said "if g77 doesn't support your proposed extensions, we aren't going to code to them", or something along those lines, which convinced a major Fortran vendor to fund g77 supporting them, not just its own Fortran compilers).
How many hardware vendors have been convinced to open up their interfaces to reach the Linux community, vs. the communities of other open OSes, vs. to do it simply because opening up is a Good Thing, especially in the past couple of years? Does anyone keep track of this sort of thing, e.g. at a web site?
I see what you mean, but I don't attribute such a simplistic attitude to requests to support Linux.
If people used a more strictly correct phrase, like "please make sure your hardware is supported under other systems, such as Linux, OpenBSD, VMS, MVS, etc.", the reaction is likely to be "There's no way we can afford to write drivers for so many systems", and the response therefore likely to be "no".
If people say "please make sure your hardware is supported under *BSD", the reaction is likely to be "okay, let's see how many proprietary copies of that OS we can sell and compare that to the cost of writing a proprietary driver for it", and the response is therefore likely to be either "no" or "okay, here's your proprietary, non-Open-SourceTM version of *BSD that supports our hardware -- oh, on Intel Pentiums only, by the way".
If people say "please open your hardware so people can write their own device drivers for other OSes", the response is likely to be "we don't want to give our competitors that advantage".
So, instead, people say "please make sure you hardware is supported under Linux". The hardware vendor has probably the best opportunity here to realize the advantages (to all of us) hinted at above, due to the rabid publicity Linux has gotten for the past couple of years.
I.e. the vendor first thinks "hey, that is the cutting-edge OS, so supporting it makes our hardware seem cutting-edge". Then maybe "hey, they say Linux is written by volunteers, maybe we can get volunteers to write the drivers for us by sending some freebies out, and maybe that'll scare up some more early adopters for our product". Maybe "well, might as well open our specs then, since that's the upshot of any device driver this Linux community apparently cares about -- if we provide a proprietary module, they'll probably reverse-engineer it anyway, but that doesn't seem so bad given the size of the Linux community, and once we're in, our competitors will have to play catch-up anyway".
In the end, I tend to think that if a driver gets written for any single OS other than an MS or Apple one, Linux would be the best choice, because it'd offer the best opportunity for all users of off-beaten-path OSes.
For example, the *BSD community already accepts, enthusiastically, the prospect of binary-only proprietary versions of their OSes being shipped, so I assume convincing a vendor to do a driver for a *BSD OS would be much less likely to help Linux programmers "bring it over" than vice-versa.
However, a big caveat here is that I'm basing my speculation on my observations of OS and licensing discussions over the past N years here and on USENET, not on actually participating in driver-writing activities on any recent OS of note. If I've got my pertinent facts wrong, please consider my speculations withdrawn, and simply point them out for everyone to see.
It's too bad for the DVD marketers, since there have to be lots more people like myself making similar decisions, and I bought the very first consumer CD home, portable, and car players available in the USA back when they came out (I still own the portable), and currently own so many CD players of various kinds I can't count them offhand (probably 15 to 20). I also still own, and sometimes use, the first portable MiniDisc recorder.
The upshot? All those friends of mine who are accustomed to asking me about new technologies are getting a big yawn from me when they ask about, or tell me they just purchased, anything DVD-related.
Not that I expect my approach to change anything -- other than the amount of $$ with which I part to get the latest crippled toys, of course.
(And, I'm not really thinking I'll ever move to another DVD "zone". I simply don't want to buy a technology that requires me to have to even think about such gratuitous restrictions anymore, just as I don't want to own a cell-phone mainly because I don't want to waste time memorizing the "dead" zones in the area like my wife has had to. I've decided technology will serve me, not I it, and am redirecting my life's efforts accordingly. Don't even think about asking me whether I favor "click-through licenses" in stand-alone software, for example. ;-)
Football analogy: I was watching the Dallas Cowboys game earlier today. Occasionally, someone like Deion Sanders would make a great play, like a tackle (which for him is big news), and the producer would change the shot to show Michael Irvin, on the sideline, cheering like mad, not dressed for play (due to his neck injury months ago, which put him out for the season, and might have signaled the end of his career).
Why do they show Irvin? Because he's one of the most colorful, well-known, (and sometimes nearly felonious!) member of the Cowboys team that won three Super Bowls.
The producers figure the viewers who don't exactly know the ins and outs of football, or the Cowboys roster, might include plenty of people who recognize Irvin getting excited as meaning something really Big.
I tend to agree. I don't need to see Irvin cheering to know a play was big, or funny, or whatever, but I've been watching the Cowboys pretty passionately for, oh, nearly 30 years now (longer than I've been involved with Open SourceTM software anyway ;-).
Point being, is it really wise to complain that viewers might think that Irvin's sideline cheering being shown on national TV will convince some people that he, not his teammates, made the big plays?
I don't think so.
Still, I do wish ESR would get the facts nailed down a bit more before sending such an email -- though, perhaps what I really should say is, I do wish /. wouldn't post an article referencing somebody's archived email without checking with them, and checking the facts, first. (Based on other comments, I gather the article wasn't totally accurate in terms of what kind of hackers cracked the algorithm in question, but don't take my, or /.'s, word on that, either.)
Also, remember that /. is surely not the only forum on which lots of people have held forth in expressing their opinions on the subject. While it might be nice for ESR to credit forae he's read to come up with his boiled-down-to-the-essence opinion, that might be impractical.