First of all, I think it's only logical that people make money from Linux. Money isn't the great corruptor, greed is.
Second, even huge commercial interests standardize Linux into something of their own, they can't actually force the community behind it to walk along. Which is what people don't get - if you try to restrict it, all the people who have worked so hard to make it so great will walk away, move onto other projects, & it'll basically end up like Windows. Something that was once great, groundbreaking and innovative, but dies a long and painful death.
No matter how corporate or business minded the big boys are (IBM, Compaq, Oracle, whatever) they know they'll be shooting themselves in the foot if they alienate the Linux programming community that way. Anyhow, even if they create a set, commercial distribution, they'll never be able to reverse the "freeness" of the original Linux kernels and the various Open Source software that's already out there. People will continue to work on those and leave the propietary crap to the ones who created it. At least, that's my opinion.
I second that motion!!! How are you going to find out about a song, look for it on the Net if someone hasn't told you about it already?
Besides, radio is more than about just music, it's about community contact (by definition, radio is local). It's about hearing the DJ shoot the shit and give useless triva about the songs beig played.:-)
Most importantly: radio is portable and cheap ($500 Rios aren't exactly of mass appeal, IF you know what I'm saying).
Katz's post, like almost all others in Slashdot, seem to forget about the real barriers to information in this world. Factoid, off the bat of my head: more than 75% of the world's population hasn't even seen a telephone.
True, the Net runs the serious danger of getting privatized, but please realize that what wonderfully free information there is or may be, not many people have access to it in the first place. I'm a recent Linux convertee cuz of that (6 months! Painless transition! All I need now is for Adobe to port and a sweet little text editor like NoteTab and I'll never boot Win98 again!)
OSS is one step in creating the information revolution, but one little step that depends on a lot of other more pressing issues. It's funny how often discussions of the Net and WWW - supposedly world wide networkds - always float around a certain sector of the US population: the people who already have access to PCs and the Net (either from home, work or public institutions).
Government regulation, no matter what pseudo-libertarian net heads may say, is not necessarily a bad thing; how many people in North America and Europe would have access to the basic utilities if it wasn't considered a duty of the government to, if not directly provide access, at least to make sure such things aren't completely left to market variables?
Yo, Commander Taco sir, how 'bout a poll on race and nationality? Would be cool, no, to see.
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First of all, I think it's only logical that people make money from Linux. Money isn't the great corruptor, greed is.
Second, even huge commercial interests standardize Linux into something of their own, they can't actually force the community behind it to walk along. Which is what people don't get - if you try to restrict it, all the people who have worked so hard to make it so great will walk away, move onto other projects, & it'll basically end up like Windows. Something that was once great, groundbreaking and innovative, but dies a long and painful death.
No matter how corporate or business minded the big boys are (IBM, Compaq, Oracle, whatever) they know they'll be shooting themselves in the foot if they alienate the Linux programming community that way. Anyhow, even if they create a set, commercial distribution, they'll never be able to reverse the "freeness" of the original Linux kernels and the various Open Source software that's already out there. People will continue to work on those and leave the propietary crap to the ones who created it. At least, that's my opinion.
I second that motion!!! How are you going to find out about a song, look for it on the Net if someone hasn't told you about it already?
Besides, radio is more than about just music, it's about community contact (by definition, radio is local). It's about hearing the DJ shoot the shit and give useless triva about the songs beig played. :-)
Most importantly: radio is portable and cheap ($500 Rios aren't exactly of mass appeal, IF you know what I'm saying).True, the Net runs the serious danger of getting privatized, but please realize that what wonderfully free information there is or may be, not many people have access to it in the first place. I'm a recent Linux convertee cuz of that (6 months! Painless transition! All I need now is for Adobe to port and a sweet little text editor like NoteTab and I'll never boot Win98 again!)
OSS is one step in creating the information revolution, but one little step that depends on a lot of other more pressing issues. It's funny how often discussions of the Net and WWW - supposedly world wide networkds - always float around a certain sector of the US population: the people who already have access to PCs and the Net (either from home, work or public institutions).
Government regulation, no matter what pseudo-libertarian net heads may say, is not necessarily a bad thing; how many people in North America and Europe would have access to the basic utilities if it wasn't considered a duty of the government to, if not directly provide access, at least to make sure such things aren't completely left to market variables?
Yo, Commander Taco sir, how 'bout a poll on race and nationality? Would be cool, no, to see.