There is no such thing as the rights of the "public", just the aggregate of everyone's individual rights.
If someone builds a house that he plans to rent to tennants for the rest of his life and then eventually pass along to his kids, why shouldn't a person build software and plan to sell it to customers and eventually pass the business along to his kids?
If I want a great piece of software but can't write code then it's a good thing I can pay someone money I earn for doing X to buy software that he/she wrote. If software weren't protected, it would cost me more to obtain the first copy of it because I'd be effectively buying it for everyone.
This comment really doesn't make sense. The only people who don't favor free trade are people who stand to benefit from unfree trade, which is when a government prevents its citizens from purchasing goods at the lowest price and instead insists that they pay an inflated price to a domestic company.
Someone's opinion on free trade (when it's based on self-interest rather than on ideals) often has mostly to do with what industry they are a part of and whether trade protectionism would benefit them in the short term.
Copyright exists to protect the hard work of people who build things that are not physically tangible. You may not respect their hard work, but copyright law allows them to own and sell their creations in order to put food on the table.
Convenient explanation. The people who sit there all day coding software so that they can earn a paycheck consider it work, and they expect to be paid. I don't consider it greedy to want to feed one's family and build a better life through hard work!
It's not fair to change the rules after the game is started. The relationship between business owners and employees is one of agreeable mutual exploitation. Nobody is forcing the company to hire anyone, and nobody is forcing the employee to go to work.
How is the guy who got a CS degree so that he could earn a living writing commercial software going to feel about $3 or even $1 per gallon gas when his conmpany goes out of business because everyone stole their product?
You want to exploit that person for your own personal gain, and you pretend that it is for society's gain, but what does society consist of? It consists of the janitor who swept the floor in the office of that out of business company, the secretaries, the project managers, the artists, etc. Now they are all out of work and gas isn't free.
So now when these unemployed people get home someone gives them a free copy of Windows XP or MS Office or some closed source graphics driver. I'm sure that is going to be a great consolation.
There will always be a short term benefit to some associated with a redistribution of wealth. You could take everyone with a net worth over $1M and divide up the money to the poorest 5% of the population. They would be better off in the short term, but after long society would be worse off. Want evidence? Look at N. Korea or Cuba or any modern communist nation.
People work because someone is willing to pay them. People are willing to pay for things they want. It's called an economy. Supply and demand is a law of the universe just like gravity. Making everything "free" won't change that.
You are partially right and partially wrong. The GPL does not advocate the ideas of the FSF whatsoever. The GPL advocates a system of software distribution that anyone can freely engage in or not engage in, and the GPL relies on existing copyright laws for its enforcement.
The FSF is about the idea that copyright is wrong and shouldn't exist at all... think of if the GPL were only a suggestion but not a legal document.
I've read an essay in which he thinks that the laws that protect copyright holders are wrong and that we have no obligation to follow such laws. He's in what is known as the "anti-property tradition"... as is Lessig.
Free Software / OSS should be a licensing model, not a philosophy. As a licensing model it has clear advantages and disadvantages over other licensing models.
As a philosophy it is fraught with problems, the most significant problem being the utter destruction of much of the financial incentives that exist today for people to sit down and build software. It is hypocritical to enjoy the fruits of someone's capitalist labor and then attempt to take those fruits (a form of looting) and claim some philosophical justification.
Maybe laptop RAID would make sense w/ some kind of solid state storage device, but not with laptop HDs. Wouldn't it make more sense just to use a 10K RPM 3.5" hard drive?
Sun's pricing is per CPU hour so the more machines you use the more it costs. There would be no price improvement to be had by adding more machines to the cluster. If anything, the value would be slightly worse due to the additional communications overhead introduced by MPI having to talk to the additional machines.
You are correct that a company who needs a 1000+ node cluster a few times a year is a perfect client for the service. I don't know how many such companies there are.
Sun has some fairly substantial profit margins built in at the $1/CPU/hour price.
Consider that if you have a moderately large data set that you need to crunch it's not at all uncommon for it to take 3 hours on a 300 node cluster. That's $1800 if each machine is a dual proc machine.
So suppose Sun has a 300 node cluster, for example, where each machine cost $1800. Ever 3 hours one of the machines is paid for. In other words, a 300 node cluster is paid for in 38 days. Well, the hardware is, anyway.
I really don't know who the main clients would be of this kind of service, however. I'm guessing that if your company can't afford a 10-20 node cluster (fairly cheap) and still needs to do large scale computing, renting CPU cycles from Sun would make sense, though it would very quickly cost more than the 10-20 node cluster would have. So it's really going to benefit customers who need large scale number crunching results more quickly than they can obtain them simply by building a smaller cluster and waiting for the results, or customers whose problems involve data sets that are large enough that they need to be distributed over 100+ machines in order to be solved.
Who has large data sets like that and no cluster access? Not university researchers, not government agencies, and probably not most firms doing significant number crunching.
So I see the niche as firms with large data sets and someone who can write the MPI code, but who lack the willingness or finances to invest in a cluster of their own.
In a year or two when the same service is selling for $0.25 per cpu hour it will be a much more compelling proposition.
My post misattribued more control to the LGPL, then, but I think the gist is true that showing the boss the variety of OSS licenses and explaining the differences would make him/her feel empowered.
You may be right about this... but showing the boss the "top 5" varieties of licenses with the various nuances highlighted would create the impression of more control over the terms, and make the boss feel comfortable that a variety of terms are embraced by the OSS community, and this would make the boss more likely to comply.
The LGPL still requires permission for others to sell derivative works. But since it allows for some closed source arrangements, it may be preferable to some bosses.
No suggestion was made that others weree more competent, just that the combined effort of many would be more productive than one person alone.
If it provides advantages to the competition, then the president should probably not go along with it if he wants to keep his job. QED.
I don't know what you mean by "the kind of people"... This guy clearly wants to GPL the software but the decision isn't in his hands. He's trying to persuade someone else, hence the need for an argument.
The variety of licenses will certainly make the president feel empowered. On one end of the spectrum is a Microsoft style EULA, and on the other end is the GPL. Every niche in between is possible, and depending on the specific business circumstances, the boss may be inclined to go with a license that is somewhere in the middle.
GPLing the code may have the effect of creating a community of people to enhance and debug the code.
If it's not a product that provides significant competitive advantage to your company, there is no harm in spreading it around in exchange for the benefit in the first bullet point.
There may be some positive PR associated with the company "founding" an open source project. Who knows, there may even be some way to consider it a charitable donation and write it off of the company's taxes.
Most importantly, there are a variety of Open Source licenses, so if your president balks at the GPL, consider the LGPL or one of the variety of others. They provide many of the benefits of the GPL but allow the boss to feel a bit more in control. You can always move to full GPL next year once his/her comfort level has increased.
Why don't you look at the reference before you judge it only based on the title. It took me a while to find it due to the slightly misleading title, but once I found it I was glad I had.
I thought the asker of the question would save time by just contacting the company I linked to. I left it up to the moderators to determine whether I answered the question, and it looks like I did.
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There is no such thing as the rights of the "public", just the aggregate of everyone's individual rights.
If someone builds a house that he plans to rent to tennants for the rest of his life and then eventually pass along to his kids, why shouldn't a person build software and plan to sell it to customers and eventually pass the business along to his kids?
If I want a great piece of software but can't write code then it's a good thing I can pay someone money I earn for doing X to buy software that he/she wrote. If software weren't protected, it would cost me more to obtain the first copy of it because I'd be effectively buying it for everyone.
This comment really doesn't make sense. The only people who don't favor free trade are people who stand to benefit from unfree trade, which is when a government prevents its citizens from purchasing goods at the lowest price and instead insists that they pay an inflated price to a domestic company.
Someone's opinion on free trade (when it's based on self-interest rather than on ideals) often has mostly to do with what industry they are a part of and whether trade protectionism would benefit them in the short term.
Copyright exists to protect the hard work of people who build things that are not physically tangible. You may not respect their hard work, but copyright law allows them to own and sell their creations in order to put food on the table.
Convenient explanation. The people who sit there all day coding software so that they can earn a paycheck consider it work, and they expect to be paid. I don't consider it greedy to want to feed one's family and build a better life through hard work!
It's not fair to change the rules after the game is started. The relationship between business owners and employees is one of agreeable mutual exploitation. Nobody is forcing the company to hire anyone, and nobody is forcing the employee to go to work.
How is the guy who got a CS degree so that he could earn a living writing commercial software going to feel about $3 or even $1 per gallon gas when his conmpany goes out of business because everyone stole their product?
You want to exploit that person for your own personal gain, and you pretend that it is for society's gain, but what does society consist of? It consists of the janitor who swept the floor in the office of that out of business company, the secretaries, the project managers, the artists, etc. Now they are all out of work and gas isn't free.
So now when these unemployed people get home someone gives them a free copy of Windows XP or MS Office or some closed source graphics driver. I'm sure that is going to be a great consolation.
There will always be a short term benefit to some associated with a redistribution of wealth. You could take everyone with a net worth over $1M and divide up the money to the poorest 5% of the population. They would be better off in the short term, but after long society would be worse off. Want evidence? Look at N. Korea or Cuba or any modern communist nation.
People work because someone is willing to pay them. People are willing to pay for things they want. It's called an economy. Supply and demand is a law of the universe just like gravity. Making everything "free" won't change that.
You are partially right and partially wrong. The GPL does not advocate the ideas of the FSF whatsoever. The GPL advocates a system of software distribution that anyone can freely engage in or not engage in, and the GPL relies on existing copyright laws for its enforcement.
The FSF is about the idea that copyright is wrong and shouldn't exist at all... think of if the GPL were only a suggestion but not a legal document.
I've read an essay in which he thinks that the laws that protect copyright holders are wrong and that we have no obligation to follow such laws. He's in what is known as the "anti-property tradition"... as is Lessig.
Open source is fully capitalistic, but so-called "Free Software" as in the FSF, is not.
Free Software / OSS should be a licensing model, not a philosophy. As a licensing model it has clear advantages and disadvantages over other licensing models.
As a philosophy it is fraught with problems, the most significant problem being the utter destruction of much of the financial incentives that exist today for people to sit down and build software. It is hypocritical to enjoy the fruits of someone's capitalist labor and then attempt to take those fruits (a form of looting) and claim some philosophical justification.
Maybe laptop RAID would make sense w/ some kind of solid state storage device, but not with laptop HDs. Wouldn't it make more sense just to use a 10K RPM 3.5" hard drive?
Sun's pricing is per CPU hour so the more machines you use the more it costs. There would be no price improvement to be had by adding more machines to the cluster. If anything, the value would be slightly worse due to the additional communications overhead introduced by MPI having to talk to the additional machines.
You are correct that a company who needs a 1000+ node cluster a few times a year is a perfect client for the service. I don't know how many such companies there are.
Sun has some fairly substantial profit margins built in at the $1/CPU/hour price.
Consider that if you have a moderately large data set that you need to crunch it's not at all uncommon for it to take 3 hours on a 300 node cluster. That's $1800 if each machine is a dual proc machine.
So suppose Sun has a 300 node cluster, for example, where each machine cost $1800. Ever 3 hours one of the machines is paid for. In other words, a 300 node cluster is paid for in 38 days. Well, the hardware is, anyway.
I really don't know who the main clients would be of this kind of service, however. I'm guessing that if your company can't afford a 10-20 node cluster (fairly cheap) and still needs to do large scale computing, renting CPU cycles from Sun would make sense, though it would very quickly cost more than the 10-20 node cluster would have. So it's really going to benefit customers who need large scale number crunching results more quickly than they can obtain them simply by building a smaller cluster and waiting for the results, or customers whose problems involve data sets that are large enough that they need to be distributed over 100+ machines in order to be solved.
Who has large data sets like that and no cluster access? Not university researchers, not government agencies, and probably not most firms doing significant number crunching.
So I see the niche as firms with large data sets and someone who can write the MPI code, but who lack the willingness or finances to invest in a cluster of their own.
In a year or two when the same service is selling for $0.25 per cpu hour it will be a much more compelling proposition.
that may be true, but it's not boss speak and would thus not likely be very persuasive.
My post misattribued more control to the LGPL, then, but I think the gist is true that showing the boss the variety of OSS licenses and explaining the differences would make him/her feel empowered.
Well, in some instances the boss might want to reserve the right to sell the code to another company for a closed source product.
No argument here.
You may be right about this... but showing the boss the "top 5" varieties of licenses with the various nuances highlighted would create the impression of more control over the terms, and make the boss feel comfortable that a variety of terms are embraced by the OSS community, and this would make the boss more likely to comply.
The LGPL still requires permission for others to sell derivative works. But since it allows for some closed source arrangements, it may be preferable to some bosses.
wrong:
No suggestion was made that others weree more competent, just that the combined effort of many would be more productive than one person alone.
If it provides advantages to the competition, then the president should probably not go along with it if he wants to keep his job. QED.
I don't know what you mean by "the kind of people"... This guy clearly wants to GPL the software but the decision isn't in his hands. He's trying to persuade someone else, hence the need for an argument.
The variety of licenses will certainly make the president feel empowered. On one end of the spectrum is a Microsoft style EULA, and on the other end is the GPL. Every niche in between is possible, and depending on the specific business circumstances, the boss may be inclined to go with a license that is somewhere in the middle.
Why don't you look at the reference before you judge it only based on the title. It took me a while to find it due to the slightly misleading title, but once I found it I was glad I had.
in inline stylesheets the css information is contained as attributes of tags.
this is a great reference, and it shows which features are IE only vs which are standard.
I thought the asker of the question would save time by just contacting the company I linked to. I left it up to the moderators to determine whether I answered the question, and it looks like I did.
this is a great solution...