Decisive? no. But still influential. The combination of the ability to raise their penetration in the search market, acquire a large number of email accounts, and extinguish a competitor to one of their most profitable offerings all at once must be very attractive.
If you count Google's offerings, you've got to count Zimbra. It is one of very few options that at least provide the same range of features among OSS. Google doesn't even come close.
Zimbra is really designed to be an Exchange killer more than an Outlook killer- which, IMHO, is probably a lot of the motive for Microsoft to do this deal. Exchange is the one part of Microsoft's lineup for which no F/OSS solution exists, and thus remains a powerful argument for maintaining or expanding your Microsoft infrastructure.
I have never been employed by Microsoft, let alone been a part of the NT dev team. That precludes me from being able to view the source, and so I can't definitively tell you that not a single line of code has been taken from BSD or Linux and put into the NT kernel. I can tell you that the terms of neither the BSD license nor the GPL are met with regards to the distribution of NT, and that the interfaces we are able to view bear very little resemblance to UNIX. Given the level of scrutiny Linux was subjected to by the SCO lawsuit, the fierce hatred of Microsoft by many skilled reverse engineers, and the uncommonly long life of the NT kernel, it seems a dubious proposition that Microsoft could have avoided public scrutiny, let alone a lawsuit, if significant portions of any F/OSS project were actually in NT without permission. Taken together, it seems highly unlikely (although admittedly not impossible) that major elements of UNIX or UNIX-like code from an existing project were distributed without permission, and since no prior consent was given for legitimate distribution, the most reasonable conclusion is that NT was, in fact, exactly what it claimed to be: a different kernel, written from scratch at Microsoft.
I'm posting this all over this thread. If you like curly braces, this might be what you're looking for. It's called curlyPy, and it allows you to just use k&r or java style curly braces to delimit blocks, and to hell with whitespace.
Let me preface this by saying that I just downloaded and built KDE 4. I didn't get a prepackaged one, so, your milage may vary.
Having said that- is it just me or does KDE 4 look cartoonish? I mean, I love the K apps- Ktorrent, Konversation, and K3B, which is probably the best burner software anywhere, and now looks great to boot, but KDE itself looks like mickey mouse and mario got together over a few powerups and decided to bang out some code. I can't really recommend it to clients anyway- even the KDE team says its not ready for prime time- but I think I'd feel a little weird doing so even if it had all the kinks worked out. Am I way off base here?
If it helps, I can whip up a script that would do that and you could just add a make macro that would handle it. That way you'd be able to use the tools you're used to.
Just the same way that I can write C++ without using any curly braces or semicolons.
Since the two use BNF form, just write your code with curly braces then write a script to indent on
a { and de-indent on a } and strip those characters. Pretty trivial really.
Or you could just learn to write Python instead of whining about how it isn't C++.
I do agree with your comment about wealthy patrons and the tailoring of works. It is a serious problem, and while its trajectory is somewhat self-limiting (in order to be discovered, you must be broadly likable, in order to be sponsored, you must be narrowly loved, and so on), that isn't as true in, say, movies as it is in software. Having said that, I think that the potential biasing of media is probably as significant an issue now as it would be then- meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
As far as small print runs, I think thats a maybe. On the one hand, we've all paid for books that are free from IP restrictions (like Shakespeare) and those are printed in huge volume for large profit, but on the other hand it could also encourage a market for specialized, one-of-a-kind books and printings of books. I'm not sure if the latter is good or bad, but I suspect that one way or another its what we're going to get.
The big thing here is that while the questions of who gets how much money will get shifted around, there are ways to protect the interests of the general public in its collective works and still allow quite a bit of money to be made while doing it- but anymore I find myself thinking that if we aren't careful we could wind up going down a long and painful route before winding up at that point anyway.
I think you should be able to remix and resell 'my' song, but you should only sell the one copy and destroy the original after you make the sell. At the risk of sounding flippant, and I'm not, its one of the more reasonable things I've heard today, enforcing PAYGO rules on imaginary property is every bit as silly as trying to run 'cp' on my truck.
As far as CD's being ones and zeros, its presence on physical media is easily controlled, but that is not the defining standard of its existence, since the original point of a song is to be listened to by humans and humans can't readily perceive it in that format. Once you say that both the track on the CD and the.mp3 are the same thing, then we're talking intellectual property. I don't have a problem with people controlling the flow of CDs- if you produce it and somebody walks out of a store without paying for it, that's theft. But if you try to say that playing a CD for fifty people without getting prior consent is an equivalent theft, I just don't see how. I bought the CD, it's mine, just like I bought my car- and by the way, if I give rides to 50 people in the course of a day in my car, Ford doesn't sue me for it, even if I am enabling those wretched leechers to get the benefits of a car without buying one.
As far as copyright being put into place to prevent easy copies from being made, you're right- and for the same reason that the Wars on Drugs, Poverty, and Illegal Immigration will fail, so will the War on Copying Easily Copied Things. We're doing battle with the tide and acting all surprised when the water's lapping at our ears. We need to cut our losses, get out of the way of the market, and let it handle this issue- if the people want your music, theyll wind up paying for it one way or another. If the people don't want your music, why is the government propping the industry up?
Listen, we're not going to agree here, so let's be civil at least. I am not going to agree that anybody has the right to tell me how when or for whom I play the music I buy, and you're not going to agree that John Q. Public should be born with the right to the entire canon of literature, but I hope that we can at least agree that the current legal and moral structures in place do not provide adequate guidance on this new and important set of issues. I hope we can both see that the current situation is unnecessarily burdensome on both the artists and the public, and that it does not provide sufficient protection for the interests of either- and it is my fervent hope that a compromise can be found outside of the rules of zero-sum economics. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I don't see why J.K. Rowlings would be unable to make a comfortable living off of her books in a patronage-style environment. I believe it was Radiohead that tried a donation-based experiment that turned out pretty well, and of course the Harry Potter series was popular enough that I can virtually guarantee that somebody would be willing to pay up to make sure the next book got made. Hell, if I could have gotten the last book a few days earlier I would've paid three times what I did for it (granted that I would have subsequently regretted it three times as much, but thats another story) and I'm sure there are others out there that would have done a LOT more. Then there's the fact that people still love books- literal, physical books- and of course only she can supply the first printing, which has got to be worth something. I guess what I'm getting at is that while it would be a very different environment for artists and writers, it would by no means be an impossible one. We would probably not see the superstars of today as much without advertising machines churning out promos, but pretty clearly theres a diverse market, and especially if you can cultivate an ethic of contribution I think it could work well.
I'd also like to point out that its good to have a civil discussion about this issue. I appreciate the tone of interest rather than hostility, and honestly wish that more such conversations could be carried out as part of our civic discourse, so, thank you for that.
I'm a software developer and F/OSS consultant. I make my living off of writing code that's available for free, because I am the person best able to implement it in a given environment, add features, and fix it if something goes wrong. I also sell support services for other projects (here, if anybody is interested) and give we're starting a program to give back between 10 and 20 percent of the value of any bid to the project that generated it.
Long story short: paying for people gets you what you want when you want it. Paying for imaginary property gets your ropes made of sand.
My beliefs are perfectly well founded- it is obvious enough that intellectual property and physical property must be treated differently. What we disagree on is not *that* it should be treated differently, but *how* it should be treated differently. I say that works of thought should be recognized as essentially uncontrollable, and that rather than trying to fight the tide the law should treat them as fundamentally belonging to the public, which is the clear intent of Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This ends the strange divergence of ownership and possession that characterizes imaginary property, something that the RIAA and MPAA are desperately avoiding.
You on the other hand are effectively arguing that IP should be treated differently because possession of physical property involves certain rights over it; rights like transference (and dictating the terms thereof) and unlimited use, as well as responsibility for any subsequent changes in value. Just as an example, you probably don't think I should be able to remix and resell 'your' song, but repainting and reselling 'my' Ford is probably ok.
I think that's just a nice line of BS. I think that in the rush to buy senators, certain groups have overlooked the long-standing protections granted to the consumer in Constitutional and common law, and honestly, I think its a fool's game to pretend that its the file sharers who are somehow trying to renegotiate the deal. Bottom line is, everybody's trying to change the terms, and until its decided- see you in court.
But no matter how evil they are, copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. Why don't you write a song or book or create a painting, and I'll copy it. Lets see how quick you change your tune. I'll do you one better- my source code is 100% F/OSS.
Call me tone deaf, but my song's the same it ever was.
Well if you had agreed to pay him to sing in the first place, then you deserve to be forced to pay him. Well, that's the issue isn't it? I don't agree that you have a right to the profits of the past based on a concept of property that no longer applies.
Except saying 'write an email to my mother' comes pretty close to working on the actual computer. I open my email client, type 'mother' in the to: box, then type my subject and message. In a speech recognition scenario I would say 'open... email... client... to... mother... subject...apple...pie..." etc. And the computer would then faithfully reply "I'm sorry, I didn't understand anything you just said. Could you please repeat it, growing steadily louder and angrier, until the end of time?"
Honestly, I would love it if it could be viably used in conjunction with text input, but the technology just isn't there yet. It doesn't help that most people aren't trained for dictation (it really isn't as easy as you'd think!) but the major hurdle is that even under ideal conditions the accuracy of the technology is poor. Of course, the more rigidly defined applications (voice activated phones, etc) are more effective than their free-form cousins, and have achieved some degree of reliability even in acoustically less-than-ideal settings, but then their usefulness is also more limited, and the above mentioned issues with input speed still apply. I think that the bottom line is that unless you're in an environment that A) attaches a very high penalty to requiring manual input, B) attaches no/a low penalty for speed of input, and C) does not require a wide range of behaviors, speech recognition, and particularly speech-to-text, are more feature creep and marketing fluff than serious technologies.
I maintain great skepticism about speech recognition as an interface. It just isn't much faster than typing, even on a cell phone- and its not that it takes so much longer to get an ideal rendering, its that even a minor error in translation results in about five seconds of prompting followed by reentry. Until they can get that figured out, or get accuracy up to a point where someone unused to giving dictation can use it, its just not that great a technology.
Sure, it'd take either a huge breakthrough in how we make memory work or a lot of progress on how we manufacture CPUs, but that's why I'm asking what makes him think that, rather than simply discounting it as hogwash. I'd love to see some evidence that this could be viable.
Slashdot Mirror
Decisive? no. But still influential. The combination of the ability to raise their penetration in the search market, acquire a large number of email accounts, and extinguish a competitor to one of their most profitable offerings all at once must be very attractive.
If you count Google's offerings, you've got to count Zimbra. It is one of very few options that at least provide the same range of features among OSS. Google doesn't even come close.
You owe me a keyboard, a cup of coffee, and half a gallon of windex for that joke.
Bravo, sir.
Zimbra is really designed to be an Exchange killer more than an Outlook killer- which, IMHO, is probably a lot of the motive for Microsoft to do this deal. Exchange is the one part of Microsoft's lineup for which no F/OSS solution exists, and thus remains a powerful argument for maintaining or expanding your Microsoft infrastructure.
Being an American, not
I have never been employed by Microsoft, let alone been a part of the NT dev team. That precludes me from being able to view the source, and so I can't definitively tell you that not a single line of code has been taken from BSD or Linux and put into the NT kernel. I can tell you that the terms of neither the BSD license nor the GPL are met with regards to the distribution of NT, and that the interfaces we are able to view bear very little resemblance to UNIX. Given the level of scrutiny Linux was subjected to by the SCO lawsuit, the fierce hatred of Microsoft by many skilled reverse engineers, and the uncommonly long life of the NT kernel, it seems a dubious proposition that Microsoft could have avoided public scrutiny, let alone a lawsuit, if significant portions of any F/OSS project were actually in NT without permission. Taken together, it seems highly unlikely (although admittedly not impossible) that major elements of UNIX or UNIX-like code from an existing project were distributed without permission, and since no prior consent was given for legitimate distribution, the most reasonable conclusion is that NT was, in fact, exactly what it claimed to be: a different kernel, written from scratch at Microsoft.
let me go for succinct: you're wrong ;)
NT is a kernel, but it is neither UNIX nor POSIX compliant.
I'm posting this all over this thread. If you like curly braces, this might be what you're looking for. It's called curlyPy, and it allows you to just use k&r or java style curly braces to delimit blocks, and to hell with whitespace.
Let me preface this by saying that I just downloaded and built KDE 4. I didn't get a prepackaged one, so, your milage may vary.
Having said that- is it just me or does KDE 4 look cartoonish? I mean, I love the K apps- Ktorrent, Konversation, and K3B, which is probably the best burner software anywhere, and now looks great to boot, but KDE itself looks like mickey mouse and mario got together over a few powerups and decided to bang out some code. I can't really recommend it to clients anyway- even the KDE team says its not ready for prime time- but I think I'd feel a little weird doing so even if it had all the kinks worked out. Am I way off base here?
this script is available here. Sorry for the earlier busted link.
This script is currently available here. It's called curlyPy. Let me know how it works for you.
If it helps, I can whip up a script that would do that and you could just add a make macro that would handle it. That way you'd be able to use the tools you're used to.
Just the same way that I can write C++ without using any curly braces or semicolons.
Since the two use BNF form, just write your code with curly braces then write a script to indent on a { and de-indent on a } and strip those characters. Pretty trivial really.
Or you could just learn to write Python instead of whining about how it isn't C++.
Make it a $100 deposit refundable in 6 months.
I do agree with your comment about wealthy patrons and the tailoring of works. It is a serious problem, and while its trajectory is somewhat self-limiting (in order to be discovered, you must be broadly likable, in order to be sponsored, you must be narrowly loved, and so on), that isn't as true in, say, movies as it is in software. Having said that, I think that the potential biasing of media is probably as significant an issue now as it would be then- meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
As far as small print runs, I think thats a maybe. On the one hand, we've all paid for books that are free from IP restrictions (like Shakespeare) and those are printed in huge volume for large profit, but on the other hand it could also encourage a market for specialized, one-of-a-kind books and printings of books. I'm not sure if the latter is good or bad, but I suspect that one way or another its what we're going to get.
The big thing here is that while the questions of who gets how much money will get shifted around, there are ways to protect the interests of the general public in its collective works and still allow quite a bit of money to be made while doing it- but anymore I find myself thinking that if we aren't careful we could wind up going down a long and painful route before winding up at that point anyway.
As far as CD's being ones and zeros, its presence on physical media is easily controlled, but that is not the defining standard of its existence, since the original point of a song is to be listened to by humans and humans can't readily perceive it in that format. Once you say that both the track on the CD and the
As far as copyright being put into place to prevent easy copies from being made, you're right- and for the same reason that the Wars on Drugs, Poverty, and Illegal Immigration will fail, so will the War on Copying Easily Copied Things. We're doing battle with the tide and acting all surprised when the water's lapping at our ears. We need to cut our losses, get out of the way of the market, and let it handle this issue- if the people want your music, theyll wind up paying for it one way or another. If the people don't want your music, why is the government propping the industry up?
Listen, we're not going to agree here, so let's be civil at least. I am not going to agree that anybody has the right to tell me how when or for whom I play the music I buy, and you're not going to agree that John Q. Public should be born with the right to the entire canon of literature, but I hope that we can at least agree that the current legal and moral structures in place do not provide adequate guidance on this new and important set of issues. I hope we can both see that the current situation is unnecessarily burdensome on both the artists and the public, and that it does not provide sufficient protection for the interests of either- and it is my fervent hope that a compromise can be found outside of the rules of zero-sum economics. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I don't see why J.K. Rowlings would be unable to make a comfortable living off of her books in a patronage-style environment. I believe it was Radiohead that tried a donation-based experiment that turned out pretty well, and of course the Harry Potter series was popular enough that I can virtually guarantee that somebody would be willing to pay up to make sure the next book got made. Hell, if I could have gotten the last book a few days earlier I would've paid three times what I did for it (granted that I would have subsequently regretted it three times as much, but thats another story) and I'm sure there are others out there that would have done a LOT more. Then there's the fact that people still love books- literal, physical books- and of course only she can supply the first printing, which has got to be worth something. I guess what I'm getting at is that while it would be a very different environment for artists and writers, it would by no means be an impossible one. We would probably not see the superstars of today as much without advertising machines churning out promos, but pretty clearly theres a diverse market, and especially if you can cultivate an ethic of contribution I think it could work well.
I'd also like to point out that its good to have a civil discussion about this issue. I appreciate the tone of interest rather than hostility, and honestly wish that more such conversations could be carried out as part of our civic discourse, so, thank you for that.
I'm a software developer and F/OSS consultant. I make my living off of writing code that's available for free, because I am the person best able to implement it in a given environment, add features, and fix it if something goes wrong. I also sell support services for other projects (here, if anybody is interested) and give we're starting a program to give back between 10 and 20 percent of the value of any bid to the project that generated it.
Long story short: paying for people gets you what you want when you want it. Paying for imaginary property gets your ropes made of sand.
My beliefs are perfectly well founded- it is obvious enough that intellectual property and physical property must be treated differently. What we disagree on is not *that* it should be treated differently, but *how* it should be treated differently. I say that works of thought should be recognized as essentially uncontrollable, and that rather than trying to fight the tide the law should treat them as fundamentally belonging to the public, which is the clear intent of Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This ends the strange divergence of ownership and possession that characterizes imaginary property, something that the RIAA and MPAA are desperately avoiding.
You on the other hand are effectively arguing that IP should be treated differently because possession of physical property involves certain rights over it; rights like transference (and dictating the terms thereof) and unlimited use, as well as responsibility for any subsequent changes in value. Just as an example, you probably don't think I should be able to remix and resell 'your' song, but repainting and reselling 'my' Ford is probably ok.
I think that's just a nice line of BS. I think that in the rush to buy senators, certain groups have overlooked the long-standing protections granted to the consumer in Constitutional and common law, and honestly, I think its a fool's game to pretend that its the file sharers who are somehow trying to renegotiate the deal. Bottom line is, everybody's trying to change the terms, and until its decided- see you in court.
Except saying 'write an email to my mother' comes pretty close to working on the actual computer. I open my email client, type 'mother' in the to: box, then type my subject and message. In a speech recognition scenario I would say 'open... email... client... to... mother... subject...apple...pie..." etc. And the computer would then faithfully reply "I'm sorry, I didn't understand anything you just said. Could you please repeat it, growing steadily louder and angrier, until the end of time?"
Honestly, I would love it if it could be viably used in conjunction with text input, but the technology just isn't there yet. It doesn't help that most people aren't trained for dictation (it really isn't as easy as you'd think!) but the major hurdle is that even under ideal conditions the accuracy of the technology is poor. Of course, the more rigidly defined applications (voice activated phones, etc) are more effective than their free-form cousins, and have achieved some degree of reliability even in acoustically less-than-ideal settings, but then their usefulness is also more limited, and the above mentioned issues with input speed still apply. I think that the bottom line is that unless you're in an environment that A) attaches a very high penalty to requiring manual input, B) attaches no/a low penalty for speed of input, and C) does not require a wide range of behaviors, speech recognition, and particularly speech-to-text, are more feature creep and marketing fluff than serious technologies.
I maintain great skepticism about speech recognition as an interface. It just isn't much faster than typing, even on a cell phone- and its not that it takes so much longer to get an ideal rendering, its that even a minor error in translation results in about five seconds of prompting followed by reentry. Until they can get that figured out, or get accuracy up to a point where someone unused to giving dictation can use it, its just not that great a technology.
Sure, it'd take either a huge breakthrough in how we make memory work or a lot of progress on how we manufacture CPUs, but that's why I'm asking what makes him think that, rather than simply discounting it as hogwash. I'd love to see some evidence that this could be viable.