The term "Open-Source" was specifically coined to promote open development as a sound business decision. That is the difference between Free software and Open-Source software - there is no "software should be libre" ideal, only "open development can make you more money".
I have to agree, though when put that way it sounds more cynical than I feel about it. It always seemed a little contradictory to claim that hackers are motivated by altruism (or status or whatever), while also promoting the money-making opportunities of openly developed and distributed software.
And in response to the altruism argument and the idea that hackers contribute to open software out of a need to "scratch an itch", as mentioned in "The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development" and elsewhere, it seems more likely to me that people contribute to projects in order to add features (or whatever) which are helpful to that individual. Sure, it might be helpful to others, but how many device drivers were written by people who wanted to get their damn ethernet card working? Granted, developers do implement requested features that may not directly benefit themselves, but chalking it all up to altruism and the need to scratch an itch seems a little unrealistic.
Hell, didn't Linus start what would become Linux because he needed a text terminal to read usenet or something like that?
Capitalism: economic system... in which capital goods, i. e. the means of production such as factories or tractors are owned by those who controll [sic] them, i. e. factory owners.
Forgive me for nitpicking, but aren't you essentially saying here that the people who own factories are factory owners? While I won't (and can't) argue that, isn't that, well, a little obvious? That doesn't seem to be a feature unique to capitalism. The owners of anything are the owners, regardless of the economic system under which they operate.
In other words, this is a poor definition of capitalism. It's not even a definition. It seems like a syllogism. It'd be like saying that one who exploits is an exploiter. Certainly true, but it doesn't say anything.
Excellent reference. In respect to the conversation at hand (in which very few are apparently interested in, but oh well...) the relevant quotes from a sub-page of your link are:
The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole).
This line of reasoning is fallacious because the mere fact that individuals have certain characteristics does not, in itself, guarantee that the class (taken as a whole) has those characteristics
Like you said, it is interesting to note how many people accept such fallacious inferences as outright evidence (or whatever passes as entertainment on television).
Off the top of my head, he said that all of a person's body parts have a purpose (an ear hears, an eye sees, an nose smells, you get the idea) thus a person must have a purpose.
I wish I could remember where he said it, but I don't.
They're claiming that what's good for the parts is not good for the whole. How can that be so?
Er, sorry. That's a classic fallacy right there, buddy. I want to say it's the fallacy of composition. That's ok, though, Aristotle made the same mistake.
Two things. One, the box wasn't shrinkwrapped. It seems most PC games aren't. Two, it's ridiculous that I should have to resort to deception to do something which ought to be fully within my rights anyway.
I hope this kind of policy pisses enough people off that retailers voluntarily change it.
Something like this happened to me recently... I bought Neverwinter Nights at Best Buy.
My video card didn't jive with it. Crashed upon load. So I tried to take it back. They actually told me that it was against the law to return copyrighted material, regardless of the fact that my computer simply wouldn't run it.
I nearly lost it. (how the hell do libraries stay legal...) I've never heard such BS in my life. They refused to even swap the game for a cheaper one.
Long story short... they won. I bought a video card. Now I can run the game. Yay. I'm not sure it's worth the $170 total I've spent. Don't get me wrong, I like the game. I just remember why I bought a PS2.
But I sent BB a nasty snail mail. Maybe it'll get their attention. I doubt it, though.
That's funny. I always thought it was ECA. I'm thinking of the spash screen for Bard's Tale II in particular. On my C-128.
Well, now I know.
This brings up many angry anti-capitalist anti-corporate feelings suddenly. I really liked the Bard's Tale series. Oh well, I'll calm down now. Was Interplay the original publisher? Yet another company swallowed up by a larger one.
I've noticed this kind of post several times in response to stories about Mozilla.
I don't get why they are modded so high.
Granted, I haven't tried phoenix for maybe a month. But these sort of comments seem a little trivial to me. Phoenix has not yet (correct me if I'm wrong) fully achieved the lightweight status it aspires to. In fact, the build of Phoenix I tried actually felt like just a crippled Mozilla. Is there really *that* big of a performance increase (or any other benefit, really) over, say, installing Mozilla w/o the extra features (that is, "Browser Only" install)?
That said, I'm sure that Phoenix will become a fine lightweight browser. I'll stick with Mozilla for now, though.
Interesting that this was mentioned... I actually remember talking about this in a philosophy class a year and a half ago. I don't remember what the discussion was about, exactly, but I remember bringing up the earthquake. I basically pointed out how most of us saw it on tv or read about it, said "Gee, that sucks" and forgot about it. I asked if anyone in the class had given it any more thought than that, or had shed a single tear for the 13,000 dead (I wasn't preaching - I hadn't had much of a reaction either).
Anyway, no one really said anything, except one girl who said that she had cried for them. I found it pretty moving that even one person had that reaction.
I know a lot of people responded to your post about natural disasters blah blah blah. And there's some merit in that, in that there's less anger. Both types of disasters share the reaction of shock, horror and sadness, though, and today I feel that more than anger when thinking about 9/11.
There's a lot of talk about UIs being analogous to real-life tasks. People make arguments about different UI's advatages based on such analogies.
I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but aren't computers supposed to replace and improve on these analogies? Why do we bother with them anyway, if not to replace things?
Sorry, maybe this is an obvious point. It just blows me away when people want things on their computer to be as clunky and dumb as real-life.
Oh, come on. Obviously, people (yourself included) will generalize other peoples' attitudes, but at least admit that you're doing it. When I think of people in, say, France, I have no problem admitting that the qualities that come to mind, negative or positive, most likely do not apply to the vast majority of the population. Do you really think really think that Americans in general really want to nuke the world or own guns? What, do you think that all arabs really want to wipe America off the face of the earth? Give me a break.
As far as cultural invasion goes, well, what do you expect? We aren't the first (and certainly not the last) culture to do such a thing, whether it's intentional or not. Do you really think that the average American citizen cares whether or not people in Zimbabwe eat mcdonalds and wear levis?
It just irritates me when people commit the (very common, an tempting) fallacy of division. Just because nations may behave in utterly insane fashions (as a previous poster noted), their citizens are not necessarily insane.
So sure, go ahead and hate Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, George Bush and Dick Cheney. But don't make the ridiculous mistake of hating some random secretary at Microsoft or an average American citizen. That's just stupid. Aren't you doing the same thing as Bush and his silly "axis of evil" thing when you polarize the issue like this?
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I have to agree, though when put that way it sounds more cynical than I feel about it. It always seemed a little contradictory to claim that hackers are motivated by altruism (or status or whatever), while also promoting the money-making opportunities of openly developed and distributed software.
And in response to the altruism argument and the idea that hackers contribute to open software out of a need to "scratch an itch", as mentioned in "The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development" and elsewhere, it seems more likely to me that people contribute to projects in order to add features (or whatever) which are helpful to that individual. Sure, it might be helpful to others, but how many device drivers were written by people who wanted to get their damn ethernet card working? Granted, developers do implement requested features that may not directly benefit themselves, but chalking it all up to altruism and the need to scratch an itch seems a little unrealistic.
Hell, didn't Linus start what would become Linux because he needed a text terminal to read usenet or something like that?
Ack, you're right. That's the word I was looking for.
Forgive me for nitpicking, but aren't you essentially saying here that the people who own factories are factory owners? While I won't (and can't) argue that, isn't that, well, a little obvious? That doesn't seem to be a feature unique to capitalism. The owners of anything are the owners, regardless of the economic system under which they operate.
In other words, this is a poor definition of capitalism. It's not even a definition. It seems like a syllogism. It'd be like saying that one who exploits is an exploiter. Certainly true, but it doesn't say anything.
Excellent reference. In respect to the conversation at hand (in which very few are apparently interested in, but oh well...) the relevant quotes from a sub-page of your link are:
Like you said, it is interesting to note how many people accept such fallacious inferences as outright evidence (or whatever passes as entertainment on television).
Off the top of my head, he said that all of a person's body parts have a purpose (an ear hears, an eye sees, an nose smells, you get the idea) thus a person must have a purpose.
I wish I could remember where he said it, but I don't.
Er, sorry. That's a classic fallacy right there, buddy. I want to say it's the fallacy of composition. That's ok, though, Aristotle made the same mistake.
Do you mean super-phallus images? Neat. Nice to see someone found a way to filter those out.
Heh.
Two things. One, the box wasn't shrinkwrapped. It seems most PC games aren't. Two, it's ridiculous that I should have to resort to deception to do something which ought to be fully within my rights anyway.
I hope this kind of policy pisses enough people off that retailers voluntarily change it.
Wait a minute. I recently bought a game which said it would work with OpenGL-compliant video cards, and it didn't.
Don't get me wrong, I find the idea of purchasing a game, copying it, then returning it to be quite despicable.
I didn't do that, but I still got screwed.
Something like this happened to me recently... I bought Neverwinter Nights at Best Buy.
My video card didn't jive with it. Crashed upon load. So I tried to take it back. They actually told me that it was against the law to return copyrighted material, regardless of the fact that my computer simply wouldn't run it.
I nearly lost it. (how the hell do libraries stay legal...) I've never heard such BS in my life. They refused to even swap the game for a cheaper one.
Long story short... they won. I bought a video card. Now I can run the game. Yay. I'm not sure it's worth the $170 total I've spent. Don't get me wrong, I like the game. I just remember why I bought a PS2.
But I sent BB a nasty snail mail. Maybe it'll get their attention. I doubt it, though.
That's funny. I always thought it was ECA. I'm thinking of the spash screen for Bard's Tale II in particular. On my C-128.
Well, now I know.
This brings up many angry anti-capitalist anti-corporate feelings suddenly. I really liked the Bard's Tale series. Oh well, I'll calm down now. Was Interplay the original publisher? Yet another company swallowed up by a larger one.
Bleh.
I've noticed this kind of post several times in response to stories about Mozilla.
I don't get why they are modded so high.
Granted, I haven't tried phoenix for maybe a month. But these sort of comments seem a little trivial to me. Phoenix has not yet (correct me if I'm wrong) fully achieved the lightweight status it aspires to. In fact, the build of Phoenix I tried actually felt like just a crippled Mozilla. Is there really *that* big of a performance increase (or any other benefit, really) over, say, installing Mozilla w/o the extra features (that is, "Browser Only" install)?
That said, I'm sure that Phoenix will become a fine lightweight browser. I'll stick with Mozilla for now, though.
Interesting that this was mentioned... I actually remember talking about this in a philosophy class a year and a half ago. I don't remember what the discussion was about, exactly, but I remember bringing up the earthquake. I basically pointed out how most of us saw it on tv or read about it, said "Gee, that sucks" and forgot about it. I asked if anyone in the class had given it any more thought than that, or had shed a single tear for the 13,000 dead (I wasn't preaching - I hadn't had much of a reaction either).
Anyway, no one really said anything, except one girl who said that she had cried for them. I found it pretty moving that even one person had that reaction.
I know a lot of people responded to your post about natural disasters blah blah blah. And there's some merit in that, in that there's less anger. Both types of disasters share the reaction of shock, horror and sadness, though, and today I feel that more than anger when thinking about 9/11.
There's a lot of talk about UIs being analogous to real-life tasks. People make arguments about different UI's advatages based on such analogies.
I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but aren't computers supposed to replace and improve on these analogies? Why do we bother with them anyway, if not to replace things?
Sorry, maybe this is an obvious point. It just blows me away when people want things on their computer to be as clunky and dumb as real-life.
Oh, come on. Obviously, people (yourself included) will generalize other peoples' attitudes, but at least admit that you're doing it. When I think of people in, say, France, I have no problem admitting that the qualities that come to mind, negative or positive, most likely do not apply to the vast majority of the population. Do you really think really think that Americans in general really want to nuke the world or own guns? What, do you think that all arabs really want to wipe America off the face of the earth? Give me a break.
As far as cultural invasion goes, well, what do you expect? We aren't the first (and certainly not the last) culture to do such a thing, whether it's intentional or not. Do you really think that the average American citizen cares whether or not people in Zimbabwe eat mcdonalds and wear levis?
It just irritates me when people commit the (very common, an tempting) fallacy of division. Just because nations may behave in utterly insane fashions (as a previous poster noted), their citizens are not necessarily insane.
So sure, go ahead and hate Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, George Bush and Dick Cheney. But don't make the ridiculous mistake of hating some random secretary at Microsoft or an average American citizen. That's just stupid. Aren't you doing the same thing as Bush and his silly "axis of evil" thing when you polarize the issue like this?
Sorry, guess I just needed to rant.