My guess is rather that genres other than scifi/fantasy will invade the MMO market, and markets like the twitch shooters etc are so much larger than the MMO market that it'll probably just be engulfed. I'm also thinking that the (awful darn big) RPG crowd is probably going to generate some competition in the MMORPG space, fueled by more modern graphics and the lessons learned from the relative successes of EverQuest and WarCrack. Between the two, the ~60% market share of warcraft is probably going to be diluted down to the point where maintaining market leadership will just be a matter of semantics.
My point was that just because you like the game doesn't mean that everybody else in the world thinks it's the greatest thing since Catherine the Great's horse. WoW is without a doubt a finely crafted game, but is by no means the be-all-end-all of the MMORPG market, let alone the MMO market, given how many of the major gaming audiences dislike its style of gameplay. In other words, unless you have a better reason than "I love teh game lololol" to claim that a game that is no more popular than Gran Turismo is going to dominate one of the fastest growing segments of the gaming industry "for the foreseeable future", I don't buy your argument.
I'm talking about the dragonlance books, actually, but either way, there are people who *do* like those games, and again, the fact that you don't like them really means less than nothing.
Not to burst your bubble, but just because you don't like a game, doesn't mean nobody likes a game. There are an awful lot of people who do long for a game more like EQ1 than WoW- or maybe more aptly, more like DragonLance than Munchkin.
Synchronizing them can, though- if all your dependencies' timelines meet up you don't have to worry as much about staged upgrades, which increases the stability of your software, reduces development time, and allows you to focus more on how to provide additional functionality than on how to degrade functionality around the absence of a required version of a given package.
Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?
...into alien-ese, of course. Not sure what we're supposed to do once its transliterated, since this is clearly supposed to be Rosetta-esque, but since the second 'stanza' provides a hex table, we get symbols at least.
Notice the offsets on the first stanza. The absence of a character is strongly denoted, probably contributing to either a vertical or linear understanding of the text, or to an alternate base.
if you believe the person who wrote it, the CDDL was designed *to be GPL incompatible*. It isn't the other way around, and it wasn't their intention to make some big statement about how awesome software freedom is. They intended to screw another open source project out of open code, and for exactly the same reasons that I presume both of us condemn some GPL zealots for refusing to dual license code derived from BSD projects, I condemn Sun for its brazen abuse of the community-driven model.
Let's not kid each other. There's another argument going on here, and we might as well stop dancing around it: the BSD-GPL argument, played out with the CDDL as a proxy warrior against the perceived injustices of the most popular open source license in the world.
You come at it from one side: you see BSD as truly free, and choose to call the relative paucity of protection offered by the BSD license 'freedom'. There's merit in that argument and I won't denigrate it except to say that you get what you ask for in licensing. You should not be surprised when somebody does not back propagate code if you don't put it in your license terms.
I come at it from a different side, choosing to emphasize the openness of open source, rooted in the virtues of fair play, generosity, and common action for common good. I believe that the primary value of free software is not in the freedom to abuse it but rather in its ability to free information from the screw-you, zero-sum world of traditional property. The GPL's goal is to expand the free software ecosystem while protecting existing open-source code against predatory code borrowing. In so doing, it provides exactly the same protections you seem to feel BSD code needs against the GPL, but did not write down for reasons that are terribly unclear to me.
You intelligently point out that other open source projects use CDDL'd code, and that this leaves Linux somewhat in the cold, a situation again not too dissimilar from the one faced by BSD. The solution here seems to me as simple and as elegant as the solution there: do the Right Thing, and sign a dual-licensing agreement for all code derived from that originally shared, thus protecting both the GPL and BSD or CDDL camps' interests in the code.
The point about flexibility vs. protection is well taken in the case of BSD and GPL but very questionable in the case of the CDDL, which does not provide freedom in excess of other more popular and more compatible licenses. Given the intent of its design and what seems to me to be an insufficiently distinct set of terms, my read is that Sun is simply playing a predator- they want to use the Open Source buzzwords to slash their development costs while simultaneously denying competitive advantage to an entity they perceive as a dangerous rival. Our reads of 'open source', its goals, and its intentions, vary- but to me that seems profoundly contrary to the goals of an open community.
The primary drafter of the CDDL (Danese Cooper) has repeatedly stated either that it was "specifically designed to be GPL incompatible" or was "not compatible with the GPL by design". It seems clear to me that Sun regards Linux as a competitor and, while willing to abuse buzzwords, is not ready to embrace open source. Maybe you see things differently (heck, maybe even Sun does now), but at least at that time there is very little doubt that Sun was quite hostile to community driven software in general and Linux in particular.
Largely because the CDDL was designed to be incompatible with the GPL. When it looks like a GPL'd ZFS implementation is 95% complete, Sun will make noises about GPLing it, just like they do with Java. Until then, they will do everything they can to boost the competitiveness of Solaris relative to Linux. It's their right as a business and entirely contrary to the spirit of open source, which should give us some idea as to what the mood over at Sun HQ is at the moment.
I hear this a lot, and don't get it. Sun spends the better part of every day changing its mind on whether open source is the wave of the future or needs to be bludgeoned with giant rocks. Now its the Linux guys, without whom there would probably not be an open source movement to argue about, who are sticking it to the open source community? Get real. The CDDL contains almost exactly the same relicensing provisions as the GPL does except it contains an exemption for binaries, and if you're worried about code lockout, you're no fan of BSD-style licenses and their penchant for turning open source software into closed source products. The bottom line is that Sun decided that they wanted to use their license on their code *specifically to stop it from being used in Linux*, which they view as a competing product.
As for BSD/GPL conflicts, the truth is that the BSD guys probably have the moral high ground and the GPL guys probably have the legal high ground. Code derived from projects dual licensed under BDS and GPL should probably be released as BSD as a courtesy, but there is no obligation to do so, a fact frequently (and hypocritically) cited as an *advantage* by BSD advocates. If you want your license to mean something, the dumbest law school dropout will tell you that it needs to *say it*.
It's not better to spend longer doing the same thing. It *can* be better to get something out the door quickly. It *can* be better to spend a bajillion hours optimizing it. It depends on the situation- but it is much easier to go from writing highly optimized code to pushing poorly performing code out the door in ten minutes than vice versa, and I'm not convinced most newer programmers can do it.
As far as the compiled vs hand-optimized argument, you make a cogent point. As newer tools make it easier to write code (good and bad), the tradeoffs we make become less obvious, hidden by layer upon layer of abstraction, and ultimately blinding us to what our programs are actually doing. That makes it essential that we understand very clearly how our tools work, and what the alternatives are, when making design decisions. And that's my problem with a lot of modern developers: its not that they write code quickly- its that they don't know when there's a better way to accomplish the same goal.
My big fear is that they have opened the specs and retained the right to sue gnash out of existence for using them. That's some dangerous stuff right there, and would certainly rank Adobe in the Power 5 for legal assholery.
Its all about developer time vs CPU time. Nobody's going to spend two thousand developer hours taking something from O(nlogn) to O(n) anymore except in very special circumstances, and this is one of those cases where *nobody cares*. Not the developers, not the consumers, not even the sites hosting them. And the few old-school (read: good) programmers are left throwing their hands up in disgust and inching that much closer to the 'get offa my lawn' guy.
People who depend on software, pay for support.
People who want usable desktop Linux, get Ubuntu.
Sounds like a solid business model- and Canonical has managed to build a solid business off of the fact that Ubuntu is usable desktop Linux. You would have to be very dense to ignore the changes that Ubuntu has made in the desktop Linux space- both in terms of code and in terms of demographics. What will be interesting going forward is how many people in the business community notice that shift.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is rather that genres other than scifi/fantasy will invade the MMO market, and markets like the twitch shooters etc are so much larger than the MMO market that it'll probably just be engulfed. I'm also thinking that the (awful darn big) RPG crowd is probably going to generate some competition in the MMORPG space, fueled by more modern graphics and the lessons learned from the relative successes of EverQuest and WarCrack. Between the two, the ~60% market share of warcraft is probably going to be diluted down to the point where maintaining market leadership will just be a matter of semantics.
My point was that just because you like the game doesn't mean that everybody else in the world thinks it's the greatest thing since Catherine the Great's horse. WoW is without a doubt a finely crafted game, but is by no means the be-all-end-all of the MMORPG market, let alone the MMO market, given how many of the major gaming audiences dislike its style of gameplay. In other words, unless you have a better reason than "I love teh game lololol" to claim that a game that is no more popular than Gran Turismo is going to dominate one of the fastest growing segments of the gaming industry "for the foreseeable future", I don't buy your argument.
I'm talking about the dragonlance books, actually, but either way, there are people who *do* like those games, and again, the fact that you don't like them really means less than nothing.
Although I think that by and large the 'grind' is a technical limitation rather than an unfixable problem, I wish I had mod points to hand you.
Not to burst your bubble, but just because you don't like a game, doesn't mean nobody likes a game. There are an awful lot of people who do long for a game more like EQ1 than WoW- or maybe more aptly, more like DragonLance than Munchkin.
Trust me, the grind in EQ was way, WAY worse. Having said that, I'm really not a fan of it in either game.
They don't answer because they don't know.
Synchronizing them can, though- if all your dependencies' timelines meet up you don't have to worry as much about staged upgrades, which increases the stability of your software, reduces development time, and allows you to focus more on how to provide additional functionality than on how to degrade functionality around the absence of a required version of a given package.
Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?
I'll be using this in the future.
...into alien-ese, of course. Not sure what we're supposed to do once its transliterated, since this is clearly supposed to be Rosetta-esque, but since the second 'stanza' provides a hex table, we get symbols at least.
Notice the offsets on the first stanza. The absence of a character is strongly denoted, probably contributing to either a vertical or linear understanding of the text, or to an alternate base.
Ok- mind representing one hundred duotrigintillion * 2^32,582,657-1 for me real quick? Thanks ;)
My hat's off to you. Thank you for such an amazing project, and the success it's seen so far.
if you believe the person who wrote it, the CDDL was designed *to be GPL incompatible*. It isn't the other way around, and it wasn't their intention to make some big statement about how awesome software freedom is. They intended to screw another open source project out of open code, and for exactly the same reasons that I presume both of us condemn some GPL zealots for refusing to dual license code derived from BSD projects, I condemn Sun for its brazen abuse of the community-driven model.
Let's not kid each other. There's another argument going on here, and we might as well stop dancing around it: the BSD-GPL argument, played out with the CDDL as a proxy warrior against the perceived injustices of the most popular open source license in the world.
You come at it from one side: you see BSD as truly free, and choose to call the relative paucity of protection offered by the BSD license 'freedom'. There's merit in that argument and I won't denigrate it except to say that you get what you ask for in licensing. You should not be surprised when somebody does not back propagate code if you don't put it in your license terms.
I come at it from a different side, choosing to emphasize the openness of open source, rooted in the virtues of fair play, generosity, and common action for common good. I believe that the primary value of free software is not in the freedom to abuse it but rather in its ability to free information from the screw-you, zero-sum world of traditional property. The GPL's goal is to expand the free software ecosystem while protecting existing open-source code against predatory code borrowing. In so doing, it provides exactly the same protections you seem to feel BSD code needs against the GPL, but did not write down for reasons that are terribly unclear to me.
You intelligently point out that other open source projects use CDDL'd code, and that this leaves Linux somewhat in the cold, a situation again not too dissimilar from the one faced by BSD. The solution here seems to me as simple and as elegant as the solution there: do the Right Thing, and sign a dual-licensing agreement for all code derived from that originally shared, thus protecting both the GPL and BSD or CDDL camps' interests in the code.
The point about flexibility vs. protection is well taken in the case of BSD and GPL but very questionable in the case of the CDDL, which does not provide freedom in excess of other more popular and more compatible licenses. Given the intent of its design and what seems to me to be an insufficiently distinct set of terms, my read is that Sun is simply playing a predator- they want to use the Open Source buzzwords to slash their development costs while simultaneously denying competitive advantage to an entity they perceive as a dangerous rival. Our reads of 'open source', its goals, and its intentions, vary- but to me that seems profoundly contrary to the goals of an open community.
AIEEEE! I've been trolled!
The primary drafter of the CDDL (Danese Cooper) has repeatedly stated either that it was "specifically designed to be GPL incompatible" or was "not compatible with the GPL by design". It seems clear to me that Sun regards Linux as a competitor and, while willing to abuse buzzwords, is not ready to embrace open source. Maybe you see things differently (heck, maybe even Sun does now), but at least at that time there is very little doubt that Sun was quite hostile to community driven software in general and Linux in particular.
Largely because the CDDL was designed to be incompatible with the GPL. When it looks like a GPL'd ZFS implementation is 95% complete, Sun will make noises about GPLing it, just like they do with Java. Until then, they will do everything they can to boost the competitiveness of Solaris relative to Linux. It's their right as a business and entirely contrary to the spirit of open source, which should give us some idea as to what the mood over at Sun HQ is at the moment.
I hear this a lot, and don't get it. Sun spends the better part of every day changing its mind on whether open source is the wave of the future or needs to be bludgeoned with giant rocks. Now its the Linux guys, without whom there would probably not be an open source movement to argue about, who are sticking it to the open source community? Get real. The CDDL contains almost exactly the same relicensing provisions as the GPL does except it contains an exemption for binaries, and if you're worried about code lockout, you're no fan of BSD-style licenses and their penchant for turning open source software into closed source products. The bottom line is that Sun decided that they wanted to use their license on their code *specifically to stop it from being used in Linux*, which they view as a competing product.
As for BSD/GPL conflicts, the truth is that the BSD guys probably have the moral high ground and the GPL guys probably have the legal high ground. Code derived from projects dual licensed under BDS and GPL should probably be released as BSD as a courtesy, but there is no obligation to do so, a fact frequently (and hypocritically) cited as an *advantage* by BSD advocates. If you want your license to mean something, the dumbest law school dropout will tell you that it needs to *say it*.
To alcohol! The cause of- and solution to- Nazism!
It's not better to spend longer doing the same thing. It *can* be better to get something out the door quickly. It *can* be better to spend a bajillion hours optimizing it. It depends on the situation- but it is much easier to go from writing highly optimized code to pushing poorly performing code out the door in ten minutes than vice versa, and I'm not convinced most newer programmers can do it.
As far as the compiled vs hand-optimized argument, you make a cogent point. As newer tools make it easier to write code (good and bad), the tradeoffs we make become less obvious, hidden by layer upon layer of abstraction, and ultimately blinding us to what our programs are actually doing. That makes it essential that we understand very clearly how our tools work, and what the alternatives are, when making design decisions. And that's my problem with a lot of modern developers: its not that they write code quickly- its that they don't know when there's a better way to accomplish the same goal.
My big fear is that they have opened the specs and retained the right to sue gnash out of existence for using them. That's some dangerous stuff right there, and would certainly rank Adobe in the Power 5 for legal assholery.
Its all about developer time vs CPU time. Nobody's going to spend two thousand developer hours taking something from O(nlogn) to O(n) anymore except in very special circumstances, and this is one of those cases where *nobody cares*. Not the developers, not the consumers, not even the sites hosting them. And the few old-school (read: good) programmers are left throwing their hands up in disgust and inching that much closer to the 'get offa my lawn' guy.
People who depend on software, pay for support.
People who want usable desktop Linux, get Ubuntu.
Sounds like a solid business model- and Canonical has managed to build a solid business off of the fact that Ubuntu is usable desktop Linux. You would have to be very dense to ignore the changes that Ubuntu has made in the desktop Linux space- both in terms of code and in terms of demographics. What will be interesting going forward is how many people in the business community notice that shift.