Communism is a political ideology about physical goods. Applying the word to those who think that copyrights and patents are the wrong answer to how to compensate artists and inventors is a nasty bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
Uh huh. So companies should be free to steal from the public domain and sell it back to you? I suppose you support going into the rainforest and beating up the natives until they pay the patent fees on the plants they've been using for generations too. Same thing really.
I could leave it at that, but RMS is so condescending it makes me retch:
"I have no opinion 'intellectual property rights,' and if you are thoughtful you will have none either."
Just because he's against them doesn't mean he has to presume that we'd agree with that position. And to frame our disagreement in the language of thoughtfulness/thoughtlessness insults the hours of philosophical and moral debate we have invested in arriving at our own conclusions, be they contrary to his or not.
This is a misreading of what he said. He did not say he was against them. He said he had no opinion at all on them because the whole term is too encompassing for one opinion to cover all the things the term covers. He's right beyond a shadow of a doubt here.
I would say this one attempt to misread what he said casts a great deal of doubt on your ability to make even the vaguest stab at objectively judging his opinions.
I will agree with you that he trotted out the whole 'Open Source' vs. 'Free Software' thing again, and it wasn't particularily relevant in this case. A few of the things he said are relevant though.
That's interesting to know. The Linux trade press talks up embedded applications like they were the hottest thing in Linux since sliced bread.
It's amusing to watch embedded systems people's reaction though. It'll be fun to see where it all falls out. If Wind River really is worth the money people pay for it, it'll survive, even GPLed I think.
There is the critical systems portion of the embedded world. From what I know of the current state of Linux, despite its stability, I wouldn't trust it there yet. If I were a developer, I would actually pay some company a whole pile of money to comb Linux for me, fix bugs, and give me systems that they felt were bug free.
But, there is also the consumer device portion. I would guess Linux would be ideal there. Stability requirements are significantly less stringent, and cost is an important factor.
I'm not an embedded systems developer, so you are correct in having a low assessment of my knowledge. I partly posted out of troll like motivations. You learn interesting things when you stir people up.:-)
American spies get killed in other countries for what they do, and we don't raise a diplomatic stink about it. The risks and rewards are well known on either side of the equation. It's not like those other countries don't believe the exact same way about their own country and their own way of life.
Now that is true, there always is BSD. I have a suspicion it won't do well in this market. Strangely enough, I think it'll be because of it's license. I suspect that people wanting to use it will get better warm fuzzies from the GPL because then they know that if the OS is improved, they get the improvements, regardless of whatever ridiculous maze of 'strategic alliances' is in place today.
I also suspect that cutting a year off of your time to market in this space is much more important than making sure your competitor can't figure out what you did, which also argues in favor of a GPL-like license. If your competitor ported to a 4004, (haha), you're can now make 4004 devices of your own if you need to. Of course, your competitor can do the same thing for your port to the 6809 or whatever. Shortens everybody's time to market. Makes product ideas and concepts more important than implementation details.
Strangely enough, Linux seems very popular in the embedded world, and is sparking a revolution that probably couldn't have happened without it. Pretty amazing for something that has supposedly vastly superior competitors, dontcha think?
If the embedded OS vendors had something that was reasonably priced instead of wanting to make money hand-over-fist, maybe they wouldn't be having the problems they're having now. I'd say the hubris was on their part for feeling they could extract exorbitant prices forever.
*shrug* We'll see. You can't predict what will happen, only experience it. If I were building a company around Open Source, I know exactly how I'd structure it, and it would make money. A lot of it.
Re:A flaw in the book? Or the review?
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If you're terribly worried that someone else might make money from selling binaries derived in part from some work you've done, then by all means use the GPL, but please don't pretend it's part of some holy crusade to prevent a return to the days of the UNIX wars. One of the few uniting elements in those days was BSD, without which UNIX would have just been another niche OS.
I actually believe the GPL is a _little_ too restrictive, and plan to use the LGPL for most stuff I do. I want improvements made to my stuff to be available to me so I can learn, and available to the world so it can benefit.
I agree with you about the role of BSD actually.:-) I have a lot of respect for BSD, but I won't use it until I see the anti-Linux and anti-GPL zealotry in that community die down. Feels icky to me, seems too much like a 'kill the other guy' competition. Perhaps I seem a bit of a GPL zealot to you, but I'm more of an anti-anti-GPL zealot zealot. *grin*
When I get some money to invest, I'll probably put some into SuSe, Redhat, or maybe Va Linux. I think they are much better buys than Microsoft is right now.
Re:A flaw in the book? Or the review?
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The same goes for the idea that software isn't free unless there are onerous conditions attached to its use.
I'm sorry, those restrictions are necessary to prevent my code from being stolen for commercial gain. If they want to use it, they have to give back. It keeps the whole thing from degenerating into the horrible scarcity based system it was in the 80s and early 90s.
Re:Helped end the Microsoft era?
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This may be 'offtopic' but there is some truth in it. Microsoft has played very creatively with how they account for options, and used various other financial tricks to enhance their apparent profitability and consistently beat analysts expectations by a very consistent amount.
Re:Oops, should've used preview. *sigh*
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Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
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Someone mentioned that you were using the mistaken 'communist == Soviet Union' equivalence. If you want a very interesting take on the differences between communism and capitalism and how they might apply in a world of nanofacturing, read "" by Ken MacLeod. Excellent book with a very European slant on politics.
When the company writes about an invention, they really mean something you can patent or something you have patented. Invention specifically does not mean any idea that came into your pretty little head. Just because you created a program to manage a linked list doesn't qualify it as an invention unless your implementation was sufficiently novel that you could patent it (and then demand license fees from others to use it).
This runs counter to just about everything I've haerd about patents and software. Yes, they do mean any idea that comes into your pretty little head. Just read the reports of what companies sue over.
Ideas are reinvented by people in the IT industry countless times. I bet there are maybe 20 or 30 (probably less) significant, patented ideas in sotware that 50 other people didn't have at the same time, or even long before they were patented.
I use Mozilla as my primary browser, and have for months. It's quite stable. Not quite as stable as NS 4.76, but good enough. I can run it for days without it crashing.
You should try a recent Mozilla. Perhaps you wouldn't be so venemous.
Writers were paid to write the books that eventually ended up in libraries, CD sales would have been significanly higher were it not for mp3's, jpegs are a far cry from video.
And musicians were paid to play the music that's distributed over Napster. And I think you're completely wrong about CD sales. I think they would've been lower. Why's your opinion on this better than mine? Also, what about mpg's, or any of a number of other video formats? Stil doesn't look like porn is dying to me.
I won't flame you, and I do have ideas on viable schemes for artists to make money from their work, but I won't expound upon them here...
What I will say is that I hope nobody stops using Napster because of these arrests. I hope every single user is found, arrested and put in jail. It would be amusing to watch the government try to deal with a few hundered thousand new inmates who also happen to be from a value producing segment of society.
I would like to start building a P2P system based on the ideas here and The StreamModule System. I expect that it can be built fully decentralized and completely scalable. I also want a lot of careful protocol documentation along the way so people can easily see how to works so holes can be poked before it gets too big.
What if a subtree has a parent that isn't connected to anything with greater bandwidth? Would the subtree never join the spanning tree? Oh wait, it's the internet, everything can connect to everything.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The bandwidth constraint would only be a guideline on deciding on a parent, not a straightjacket. That guideline, consistently applied, will tend to push high bandwidth nodes towards the top of the tree. I'm considering connections here to be pretty fluid. Almost as fluid as current Gnutella connections.
The expected depth of a random spanning tree is around sqrt(n) for an n node graph. It would be good to balance the tree.
The fact the connections and made and broken reasonably frequently will tend to cause the tree to become bushy.
What if the root goes down without performing any protocol? Are all children inaccessible when a branch node goes down until the spanning tree has been renegotiated?
I've thought about this. One solution would be to have the root's children hold an election as to the new root. Another would be to have the root designate an emergency root.
I consider this problem not too hard to solve. The much more interesting problem is when you have two nodes who think they're the root.
Are you still sending all requests to all leaves? If you are, you've cut the bandwidth down from n! to n. Napster does logn, beating this handily.
That was my intention initially. A later version of the protocol could use information about the spanning tree to designate caches that had all the information for either a subtree or the whole tree.
You also have to admit the going from n! to n is a huge improvement.:-)
I really want to build this with my StreamModule system, but nobody is helping me with it, and I don't have the time to hack it out, especially since I'm so ridiculously methodical when it comes to code.
You build something that uses a distributed algorithm to build a spanning tree. The nodes near the top of the spanning tree become the servers. You build the algorithm so that parents in your spanning tree will naturally have more bandwidth than you do.
I've been thinking about this for a long while.
Building the spanning tree isn't hard. Every node just selects one and only one parent node. They tell the parent that they're a child of that parent. You prevent cycles having a parent refuse to be a parent unless it also has a parent. If it loses its connection to its parent, it tells all the children that it no longer is a parent. One node 'seeds' the network as a root by saying it can be a parent without being a parent and not looking for a parent. Eventually it can delegate roothood to a child that has proven high bandwidth. It cannot cease being a root without doing this delegation.
You can have connections to nodes that are neither parents nor children, but search requests should not be propogated to those nodes unless you have no parent. Eventually a search request will make it onto the spanning tree and be efficiently distributed.
You can eventually elect servers who are near the top of the spanning tree. Nodes should, in general, elect parents that have more bandwidth than they do. This means that nodes near the top of the spanning tree should have the most bandwidth.
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Communism is a political ideology about physical goods. Applying the word to those who think that copyrights and patents are the wrong answer to how to compensate artists and inventors is a nasty bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
Uh huh. So companies should be free to steal from the public domain and sell it back to you? I suppose you support going into the rainforest and beating up the natives until they pay the patent fees on the plants they've been using for generations too. Same thing really.
And in what way is it worse? As far as I can tell, it is in all ways much more permissive than the Microsoft EULA.
This is a misreading of what he said. He did not say he was against them. He said he had no opinion at all on them because the whole term is too encompassing for one opinion to cover all the things the term covers. He's right beyond a shadow of a doubt here.
I would say this one attempt to misread what he said casts a great deal of doubt on your ability to make even the vaguest stab at objectively judging his opinions.
I will agree with you that he trotted out the whole 'Open Source' vs. 'Free Software' thing again, and it wasn't particularily relevant in this case. A few of the things he said are relevant though.
That's interesting to know. The Linux trade press talks up embedded applications like they were the hottest thing in Linux since sliced bread.
It's amusing to watch embedded systems people's reaction though. It'll be fun to see where it all falls out. If Wind River really is worth the money people pay for it, it'll survive, even GPLed I think.
There is the critical systems portion of the embedded world. From what I know of the current state of Linux, despite its stability, I wouldn't trust it there yet. If I were a developer, I would actually pay some company a whole pile of money to comb Linux for me, fix bugs, and give me systems that they felt were bug free.
But, there is also the consumer device portion. I would guess Linux would be ideal there. Stability requirements are significantly less stringent, and cost is an important factor.
I'm not an embedded systems developer, so you are correct in having a low assessment of my knowledge. I partly posted out of troll like motivations. You learn interesting things when you stir people up. :-)
American spies get killed in other countries for what they do, and we don't raise a diplomatic stink about it. The risks and rewards are well known on either side of the equation. It's not like those other countries don't believe the exact same way about their own country and their own way of life.
Now that is true, there always is BSD. I have a suspicion it won't do well in this market. Strangely enough, I think it'll be because of it's license. I suspect that people wanting to use it will get better warm fuzzies from the GPL because then they know that if the OS is improved, they get the improvements, regardless of whatever ridiculous maze of 'strategic alliances' is in place today.
I also suspect that cutting a year off of your time to market in this space is much more important than making sure your competitor can't figure out what you did, which also argues in favor of a GPL-like license. If your competitor ported to a 4004, (haha), you're can now make 4004 devices of your own if you need to. Of course, your competitor can do the same thing for your port to the 6809 or whatever. Shortens everybody's time to market. Makes product ideas and concepts more important than implementation details.
But, this is mere speculation. Time will tell.
Strangely enough, Linux seems very popular in the embedded world, and is sparking a revolution that probably couldn't have happened without it. Pretty amazing for something that has supposedly vastly superior competitors, dontcha think?
If the embedded OS vendors had something that was reasonably priced instead of wanting to make money hand-over-fist, maybe they wouldn't be having the problems they're having now. I'd say the hubris was on their part for feeling they could extract exorbitant prices forever.
Well then, they can use something other than Linux and see where that gets them.
*shrug* We'll see. You can't predict what will happen, only experience it. If I were building a company around Open Source, I know exactly how I'd structure it, and it would make money. A lot of it.
I actually believe the GPL is a _little_ too restrictive, and plan to use the LGPL for most stuff I do. I want improvements made to my stuff to be available to me so I can learn, and available to the world so it can benefit.
I agree with you about the role of BSD actually. :-) I have a lot of respect for BSD, but I won't use it until I see the anti-Linux and anti-GPL zealotry in that community die down. Feels icky to me, seems too much like a 'kill the other guy' competition. Perhaps I seem a bit of a GPL zealot to you, but I'm more of an anti-anti-GPL zealot zealot. *grin*
When I get some money to invest, I'll probably put some into SuSe, Redhat, or maybe Va Linux. I think they are much better buys than Microsoft is right now.
I'm sorry, those restrictions are necessary to prevent my code from being stolen for commercial gain. If they want to use it, they have to give back. It keeps the whole thing from degenerating into the horrible scarcity based system it was in the 80s and early 90s.
This may be 'offtopic' but there is some truth in it. Microsoft has played very creatively with how they account for options, and used various other financial tricks to enhance their apparent profitability and consistently beat analysts expectations by a very consistent amount.
The correct link is "The Cassini Division".
Someone mentioned that you were using the mistaken 'communist == Soviet Union' equivalence. If you want a very interesting take on the differences between communism and capitalism and how they might apply in a world of nanofacturing, read "" by Ken MacLeod. Excellent book with a very European slant on politics.
This runs counter to just about everything I've haerd about patents and software. Yes, they do mean any idea that comes into your pretty little head. Just read the reports of what companies sue over.
Ideas are reinvented by people in the IT industry countless times. I bet there are maybe 20 or 30 (probably less) significant, patented ideas in sotware that 50 other people didn't have at the same time, or even long before they were patented.
I use Mozilla as my primary browser, and have for months. It's quite stable. Not quite as stable as NS 4.76, but good enough. I can run it for days without it crashing.
You should try a recent Mozilla. Perhaps you wouldn't be so venemous.
And musicians were paid to play the music that's distributed over Napster. And I think you're completely wrong about CD sales. I think they would've been lower. Why's your opinion on this better than mine? Also, what about mpg's, or any of a number of other video formats? Stil doesn't look like porn is dying to me.
Really now. And where is your evidence of this?
I won't flame you, and I do have ideas on viable schemes for artists to make money from their work, but I won't expound upon them here...
What I will say is that I hope nobody stops using Napster because of these arrests. I hope every single user is found, arrested and put in jail. It would be amusing to watch the government try to deal with a few hundered thousand new inmates who also happen to be from a value producing segment of society.
I would like to start building a P2P system based on the ideas here and The StreamModule System. I expect that it can be built fully decentralized and completely scalable. I also want a lot of careful protocol documentation along the way so people can easily see how to works so holes can be poked before it gets too big.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The bandwidth constraint would only be a guideline on deciding on a parent, not a straightjacket. That guideline, consistently applied, will tend to push high bandwidth nodes towards the top of the tree. I'm considering connections here to be pretty fluid. Almost as fluid as current Gnutella connections.
The fact the connections and made and broken reasonably frequently will tend to cause the tree to become bushy.
What if the root goes down without performing any protocol? Are all children inaccessible when a branch node goes down until the spanning tree has been renegotiated?
I've thought about this. One solution would be to have the root's children hold an election as to the new root. Another would be to have the root designate an emergency root.
I consider this problem not too hard to solve. The much more interesting problem is when you have two nodes who think they're the root.
That was my intention initially. A later version of the protocol could use information about the spanning tree to designate caches that had all the information for either a subtree or the whole tree.
You also have to admit the going from n! to n is a huge improvement. :-)
I really want to build this with my StreamModule system, but nobody is helping me with it, and I don't have the time to hack it out, especially since I'm so ridiculously methodical when it comes to code.
You build something that uses a distributed algorithm to build a spanning tree. The nodes near the top of the spanning tree become the servers. You build the algorithm so that parents in your spanning tree will naturally have more bandwidth than you do.
I've been thinking about this for a long while.
Building the spanning tree isn't hard. Every node just selects one and only one parent node. They tell the parent that they're a child of that parent. You prevent cycles having a parent refuse to be a parent unless it also has a parent. If it loses its connection to its parent, it tells all the children that it no longer is a parent. One node 'seeds' the network as a root by saying it can be a parent without being a parent and not looking for a parent. Eventually it can delegate roothood to a child that has proven high bandwidth. It cannot cease being a root without doing this delegation.
You can have connections to nodes that are neither parents nor children, but search requests should not be propogated to those nodes unless you have no parent. Eventually a search request will make it onto the spanning tree and be efficiently distributed.
You can eventually elect servers who are near the top of the spanning tree. Nodes should, in general, elect parents that have more bandwidth than they do. This means that nodes near the top of the spanning tree should have the most bandwidth.