The company that is able to forgo these burdonesome preconceptions and recognize good ideas for what they are, no matter what the source, will eventually outshine any company that doesn't. I suggest you try to get your company's culture to change for its own good.
And you can tell by reading the first two paragraphs where the author presents a complete parody of the attitudes of OSS as if it had anything more than a faint resemblence to the truth.
And I don't think OSS software developers are captivated by the idea of a free lunch. I think there is even greater awareness among such of money issues, payment for services rendered, and the value of a professional's time.
Also, deconstructing the three main sections...
This section of the WA statutes, and this section of the MN statutes (the two states I've researched) explicity limit 'work for hire' IP ownership transfer to work done during work hours, and/or using the employer's equipment or resources. So, the IP ownership issue is significantly less fuzzy than the article's author makes it out to be.
As for conceptual integrity, ESR has written an excellent essay entitled "Homesteading the Noosphere which talks about project maintainers and how projects move from maintainer to maintainer, thereby maintaining conceptual integrity. It's my experience, having working in several different software shops, that OSS typically has greater conceptual integrity because the maintainers feel a significantly greater sense of ownership over the software. There is no manager or marketing person with the power to tell them what must, or must not go into the software. It's their personal decision.
As for professionalism, I see no greater boost for overall code quality than for it to be seen by potentially hundreds of other programmers who have every incentive to pick it apart and find problems with it. Sure there are 100s of low quality text editors on Freshmeat, but that isn't actually very important. It quickly becomes known which ones are worth anything.
Lastly, the 'innovation' bugaboo. To anybody who's actually familiar with Open Source projects, the existence of innovative ideas is clear. Small things like Virtual Folders in evolution to big things like Bittorrent. There are valuable new ideas to be found by the hundreds in OSS. And many projects get started because someone has an interesting new idea. They have a lot of incentive to see that idea through.
Innovation isn't churning out stuff that's so brand new everybody has to learn something completely different in order to use it. It's finding some idea that creates a valuable change and integrating it with all the other stuff that already exists. Linux is a spinoff of Unix not because the process is only capable of creating copycat software. It's a spinoff because Unix was something everyone knew, and it was good enough to not bother tossing it all out.
Brand new application categories are few and far between, and OSS has had its fair share of those. Apache was the first webserver around. And Wiki's are another category that has its genesis in OSS.
So, in short, the article is complete bunk by some guy with a preconcieved notion of how things are who can't be bothered to actually look around and figure out whether or not he's right./p.
There are people who toss out their computers because they're infected with spyware. If I were buying from them instead and tried to tell them I wasn't going to take it because it was too low a price and they could easily re-install, they'd just throw it out instead of selling it to me, letting me do the re-install and making a profit.
I don't know if this guy is a fence or not. But I think there needs to be some sort of provision in the law for people who do not habitually deal in stolen stuff.
Actually, I'm a member of that community as well, and I think claim 1 is utterly preposterous. The patent system, at least for computer science, is a huge hinderance. I live in fear that some random thing that I've done will get me sued for a patent violation if it ever gets popular. They most definitely do NOT serve their purpose of 'promoting science and the useful arts'. At least, not for computer science, which is what I have the most personal experience with.
If people here really thought copying things cheaply was so great, then Microsoft would have a lot more respect than it does.
I really hope you get to live in a world where absolutely everything (including ideas) has an owner. It'd probably be the ideal hell for you given a lot of your other comments.
*chuckle* That's what I hate most about the Republican party. They have captured many well-meaning libertarians by seeming to stand for what they believe in while actually being almost diametrically opposed.
Of course, India has managed to produce one of the most oddly brilliant mathematical geniuses of all time Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan.
Being a 1st world country does not give you any monopoly on intelligence. Generally speaking (though the US is a strong counterpoint to this) your educational system is better. But I wouldn't go discounting Indians who've gotten an MS in mathematics in their own country. The books needed to learn it aren't exactly expensive.
WindowsNT is not really a true micro-kernel. And neither is OS X. They both technically use 'Mach' underneath, but they are otherwise largely monolithic OSes. Linux, even though it isn't a microkernel, is actually much less monolithic than either OS X or NT.
And, as Hans pointed out, WinFS is evil not because it's in user space, but because it isn't really a filesystem from the point of view of most programs. It's an add-on API layered over the filesystem, so programs have to do extra special things to use it.
Ahh, now that's interesting. I'm not so annoyed at the kernel developers as I once was.
Well, someone who's eager to split up the patches should just do so whether Hans Reiser wants them to or not. This is GPL software we're talking about here after all. Reiser4 is too nice not to go in. Filesystem technology needs to improve, and ext2 and ext3 are ancient designs.
Yes, but with too much conservativism, you never end up with anything new. As a developer, I'm _very_ annoyed with the face that ReiserFS4 is not in the Linus kernel. I want to use it and play with it. It's people like me who'll find problems or be able to suggest what API might be good for something that will work for all filesystems. But that can't happen til people like me get to play with it.
Personally, I don't have the time or inclination to sit around all day fiddling with various patches to my kernel trying to get the right combo to add it in myself. I rely on distributions to do that for me, and they won't put reiser4 in until it's in the Linus kernel. I've played with experimental patches before. I used to run a kernel with a special patch for CIPE, and for LVM way back before LVM 1 was in there by default. It's annoying, time consuming and isn't worth it.
It hasn't eaten any of my data, and I've run it for years. The worst I've ever had happen was when some null characters got appended to log files on unexpected power outages because the metadata for the filesize got written out before the file data. And that was sometime in 2000 or 2001. I haven't had a problem since then.
I don't abuse my filesystem heavily though. Just personal use. Though personal use for me includes software development and mucking about with source trees in the 10s of megabytes sometimes.
Even with that feature, it would handle small files very poorly. I find it highly amusing that I get moderated flamebait for my comment. I guess some people just don't like reading the truth.
ext2 and ext3 need to be counted among the ranks of pathetic filesystems. IMHO, any 'modern' filesystem that handles a directory containing thousands of small files so incredibly inefficiently is awful, and should be migrated away from.
I'm highly disappointed that I cannot get a Linus kernel with reiser4 in it yet.
I certainly don't feel vulnerable to having my mind clouded. But I do think that it is an impediment to others (not everyone, just people who haven't thought carefully about it before) thinking clearly about the issue.
I call it too slow when I know for certain that I could've rounded up a truck, gotten down there, given out a ton of water and started hauling people back out 2-3 days before the feds started doing the same thing.
And yes, I realize the area was a flooded mess. The government has detailed centimeter resolution satellite photos of the area, and I don't, but I still know I could've done something useful much faster.
2-3 days is the difference between being alive and being dead.
No, it's all intellectual property. We have to use the word property, it's very important. Otherwise, how can we legitimately claim 'piracy' and 'stealing' if it's not property?
Personally, I think the editors should put their money where their mouth is and summararily reject any story that uses the words 'intellectual property' in the article blurb.
I largely agree with your assessment. And you're right about disaster planning being a local responsibility. I will make a stronger statement. I don't think the federal government should actually be involved in disaster relief at all except possibly as a monetary buffer. The way things are currently organized though, people have a reasonable expectation that the Federal government is going to step and and do something material, though that is no excuse for the profound lack of preparedness on the part of the local officials in the case of New Orleans.
And I guess this goes into the category of being poorly organized, but I felt several times like the best answer would've been to go to New Orleans with a few trucks full of water and a small army of well-armed people and reporters, and threaten to start a minor war if we weren't allowed in to help. Not only was the response poorly organized, but it seemed like they were actively working to make sure both that they not doing anything, and that nobody else was allowed to either.
And when resources were mobilized, half the time it seemed that they were being mobilized to solve a PR problem instead of to do anything meaningful. I read a story about bunches of emergency response people (paramedics, firemen and women, etc...) who's time had all been donated by various localities around the nation being stuck in Atlanta handing out FEMA flyers and making sure to accompany dignitaries on photo-ops.
Well, all that may be true. But it seems to me that he definitely backs away from his "The evil jealous humanities people are deliberately and willfully misrepresenting science to the public to further their own agenda." hypothesis. The "The dolts seem to think that ignorance is a virtue." hypothesis isn't that much better, but at least it doesn't make humanities people out to be actively malignant.
*chuckle* Well, it is an experience I, in general, try to avoid.:-) The first part of your post pushed a button because it was sounding very partisan.
Re:Off topic, slightly ranty, but I have a point
on
Controlling Hurricanes?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I sort of agree with you, and sort of don't. I think the most pernicious effect of a welfare state is the increased government power it gives over people's lives.
I can well understand why people dependent on government might come to rabidly hate it and exhibit just the behavior you describe. I blame them about as much as I blame the woman who keeps going back to the abusive boyfriend/husband.
But, the truth here is that given the expectations set and about government responsibilities in a disaster situation, many people's responses were quite reasonable. The government completely failed to live up to those expectations, and needs to be held accountable. I think setting different expectations and dismantling some government agencies is the answer, but I doubt most people will.
Also, given the long-standing corruption of the local police force, and their blatant exhibition of that corruption in the aftermath of the hurricane, I'm not in the least surprised they were shot at.
Ahh, yes, let's make excuses and tow the Republican party line! The mayor of New Orleans was an incompetent boob, and that changes absolutely nothing about how dreadfully slow and stupidly organized the federal response was.
I have no axe to grind here about any particular party, but it's clear that you do. Please shut up until you can see without your red colored glasses.
Slashdot Mirror
The company that is able to forgo these burdonesome preconceptions and recognize good ideas for what they are, no matter what the source, will eventually outshine any company that doesn't. I suggest you try to get your company's culture to change for its own good.
Should've previewed first... :-(
It's this section of the WA statutes.
And you can tell by reading the first two paragraphs where the author presents a complete parody of the attitudes of OSS as if it had anything more than a faint resemblence to the truth.
And I don't think OSS software developers are captivated by the idea of a free lunch. I think there is even greater awareness among such of money issues, payment for services rendered, and the value of a professional's time.
Also, deconstructing the three main sections...
This section of the WA statutes, and this section of the MN statutes (the two states I've researched) explicity limit 'work for hire' IP ownership transfer to work done during work hours, and/or using the employer's equipment or resources. So, the IP ownership issue is significantly less fuzzy than the article's author makes it out to be.
As for conceptual integrity, ESR has written an excellent essay entitled "Homesteading the Noosphere which talks about project maintainers and how projects move from maintainer to maintainer, thereby maintaining conceptual integrity. It's my experience, having working in several different software shops, that OSS typically has greater conceptual integrity because the maintainers feel a significantly greater sense of ownership over the software. There is no manager or marketing person with the power to tell them what must, or must not go into the software. It's their personal decision.
As for professionalism, I see no greater boost for overall code quality than for it to be seen by potentially hundreds of other programmers who have every incentive to pick it apart and find problems with it. Sure there are 100s of low quality text editors on Freshmeat, but that isn't actually very important. It quickly becomes known which ones are worth anything.
Lastly, the 'innovation' bugaboo. To anybody who's actually familiar with Open Source projects, the existence of innovative ideas is clear. Small things like Virtual Folders in evolution to big things like Bittorrent. There are valuable new ideas to be found by the hundreds in OSS. And many projects get started because someone has an interesting new idea. They have a lot of incentive to see that idea through.
Innovation isn't churning out stuff that's so brand new everybody has to learn something completely different in order to use it. It's finding some idea that creates a valuable change and integrating it with all the other stuff that already exists. Linux is a spinoff of Unix not because the process is only capable of creating copycat software. It's a spinoff because Unix was something everyone knew, and it was good enough to not bother tossing it all out.
Brand new application categories are few and far between, and OSS has had its fair share of those. Apache was the first webserver around. And Wiki's are another category that has its genesis in OSS.
So, in short, the article is complete bunk by some guy with a preconcieved notion of how things are who can't be bothered to actually look around and figure out whether or not he's right./p.
There are people who toss out their computers because they're infected with spyware. If I were buying from them instead and tried to tell them I wasn't going to take it because it was too low a price and they could easily re-install, they'd just throw it out instead of selling it to me, letting me do the re-install and making a profit.
I don't know if this guy is a fence or not. But I think there needs to be some sort of provision in the law for people who do not habitually deal in stolen stuff.
Yeah, Otter's comment get's him dropped from my friend's list because it's false and mean spirited beyond all reason.
Actually, I'm a member of that community as well, and I think claim 1 is utterly preposterous. The patent system, at least for computer science, is a huge hinderance. I live in fear that some random thing that I've done will get me sued for a patent violation if it ever gets popular. They most definitely do NOT serve their purpose of 'promoting science and the useful arts'. At least, not for computer science, which is what I have the most personal experience with.
If people here really thought copying things cheaply was so great, then Microsoft would have a lot more respect than it does.
I really hope you get to live in a world where absolutely everything (including ideas) has an owner. It'd probably be the ideal hell for you given a lot of your other comments.
*chuckle* That's what I hate most about the Republican party. They have captured many well-meaning libertarians by seeming to stand for what they believe in while actually being almost diametrically opposed.
You possess a vocabulary that is entirely too large for your own good. :-)
Of course, India has managed to produce one of the most oddly brilliant mathematical geniuses of all time Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan.
Being a 1st world country does not give you any monopoly on intelligence. Generally speaking (though the US is a strong counterpoint to this) your educational system is better. But I wouldn't go discounting Indians who've gotten an MS in mathematics in their own country. The books needed to learn it aren't exactly expensive.
WindowsNT is not really a true micro-kernel. And neither is OS X. They both technically use 'Mach' underneath, but they are otherwise largely monolithic OSes. Linux, even though it isn't a microkernel, is actually much less monolithic than either OS X or NT.
And, as Hans pointed out, WinFS is evil not because it's in user space, but because it isn't really a filesystem from the point of view of most programs. It's an add-on API layered over the filesystem, so programs have to do extra special things to use it.
Ahh, now that's interesting. I'm not so annoyed at the kernel developers as I once was.
Well, someone who's eager to split up the patches should just do so whether Hans Reiser wants them to or not. This is GPL software we're talking about here after all. Reiser4 is too nice not to go in. Filesystem technology needs to improve, and ext2 and ext3 are ancient designs.
Yes, but with too much conservativism, you never end up with anything new. As a developer, I'm _very_ annoyed with the face that ReiserFS4 is not in the Linus kernel. I want to use it and play with it. It's people like me who'll find problems or be able to suggest what API might be good for something that will work for all filesystems. But that can't happen til people like me get to play with it.
Personally, I don't have the time or inclination to sit around all day fiddling with various patches to my kernel trying to get the right combo to add it in myself. I rely on distributions to do that for me, and they won't put reiser4 in until it's in the Linus kernel. I've played with experimental patches before. I used to run a kernel with a special patch for CIPE, and for LVM way back before LVM 1 was in there by default. It's annoying, time consuming and isn't worth it.
It hasn't eaten any of my data, and I've run it for years. The worst I've ever had happen was when some null characters got appended to log files on unexpected power outages because the metadata for the filesize got written out before the file data. And that was sometime in 2000 or 2001. I haven't had a problem since then.
I don't abuse my filesystem heavily though. Just personal use. Though personal use for me includes software development and mucking about with source trees in the 10s of megabytes sometimes.
Even with that feature, it would handle small files very poorly. I find it highly amusing that I get moderated flamebait for my comment. I guess some people just don't like reading the truth.
ext2 and ext3 need to be counted among the ranks of pathetic filesystems. IMHO, any 'modern' filesystem that handles a directory containing thousands of small files so incredibly inefficiently is awful, and should be migrated away from.
I'm highly disappointed that I cannot get a Linus kernel with reiser4 in it yet.
I certainly don't feel vulnerable to having my mind clouded. But I do think that it is an impediment to others (not everyone, just people who haven't thought carefully about it before) thinking clearly about the issue.
I call it too slow when I know for certain that I could've rounded up a truck, gotten down there, given out a ton of water and started hauling people back out 2-3 days before the feds started doing the same thing.
And yes, I realize the area was a flooded mess. The government has detailed centimeter resolution satellite photos of the area, and I don't, but I still know I could've done something useful much faster.
2-3 days is the difference between being alive and being dead.
No, it's all intellectual property. We have to use the word property, it's very important. Otherwise, how can we legitimately claim 'piracy' and 'stealing' if it's not property?
Personally, I think the editors should put their money where their mouth is and summararily reject any story that uses the words 'intellectual property' in the article blurb.
I largely agree with your assessment. And you're right about disaster planning being a local responsibility. I will make a stronger statement. I don't think the federal government should actually be involved in disaster relief at all except possibly as a monetary buffer. The way things are currently organized though, people have a reasonable expectation that the Federal government is going to step and and do something material, though that is no excuse for the profound lack of preparedness on the part of the local officials in the case of New Orleans.
And I guess this goes into the category of being poorly organized, but I felt several times like the best answer would've been to go to New Orleans with a few trucks full of water and a small army of well-armed people and reporters, and threaten to start a minor war if we weren't allowed in to help. Not only was the response poorly organized, but it seemed like they were actively working to make sure both that they not doing anything, and that nobody else was allowed to either.
And when resources were mobilized, half the time it seemed that they were being mobilized to solve a PR problem instead of to do anything meaningful. I read a story about bunches of emergency response people (paramedics, firemen and women, etc...) who's time had all been donated by various localities around the nation being stuck in Atlanta handing out FEMA flyers and making sure to accompany dignitaries on photo-ops.
Well, all that may be true. But it seems to me that he definitely backs away from his "The evil jealous humanities people are deliberately and willfully misrepresenting science to the public to further their own agenda." hypothesis. The "The dolts seem to think that ignorance is a virtue." hypothesis isn't that much better, but at least it doesn't make humanities people out to be actively malignant.
*chuckle* Well, it is an experience I, in general, try to avoid. :-) The first part of your post pushed a button because it was sounding very partisan.
I sort of agree with you, and sort of don't. I think the most pernicious effect of a welfare state is the increased government power it gives over people's lives.
I can well understand why people dependent on government might come to rabidly hate it and exhibit just the behavior you describe. I blame them about as much as I blame the woman who keeps going back to the abusive boyfriend/husband.
But, the truth here is that given the expectations set and about government responsibilities in a disaster situation, many people's responses were quite reasonable. The government completely failed to live up to those expectations, and needs to be held accountable. I think setting different expectations and dismantling some government agencies is the answer, but I doubt most people will.
Also, given the long-standing corruption of the local police force, and their blatant exhibition of that corruption in the aftermath of the hurricane, I'm not in the least surprised they were shot at.
I'm sorry, I spoke before I read everything you had to say. :-(
Ahh, yes, let's make excuses and tow the Republican party line! The mayor of New Orleans was an incompetent boob, and that changes absolutely nothing about how dreadfully slow and stupidly organized the federal response was.
I have no axe to grind here about any particular party, but it's clear that you do. Please shut up until you can see without your red colored glasses.
If you read the article to the end, the author himself debunks his own prejudices.