The history of Java is very instructive for any aspiring professional coder.
Management: Damn these irreplaceable "programmers"! Look at their goddamn salaries. We need to standardize technology, remove the sharp edges, and train people who understand! Sun has got the thing.
Programmers: Heh. We're going to be spinning out gotta-haveit ETLA frameworks faster than your Indian developers can say 'Yes sir! Right away sir!". Good luck with that. Now bend over and take another load of XML. *cracks-knuckles*
Live by the marketing hype, die by the marketing hype, Sun Java.
Flash Player ships on the OS X install disk, so Apple has to send out updates for it. Maybe they need a smarter installer that doesn't re-enable disabled plugins, especially ones that tend to be disabled for security reasons.
FWIW, Microsoft used to do the same thing with Windows and Windows Update.
The licencing on GIF was extremely forgiving. There were no restrictions on writing a decoder, and an encoder required a one time fee that was trivial for any real software company. (IIRC it was $20K.)
This was the main reason that GIF as a de facto standard was no issue for most users. It only really affected small timers and free software types who were writing image processing libraries.
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
Endymion's argument (which I agree with) is that it's too late. H.264 is already an established de facto standard, completely aside from whatever format people use for HTML5 video. The "mistake" (as you call it) has already been made, support for H.264 is already baked into a zillion software packages and hardware devices. At this point you guys seem like you're pissing into the wind.
It also seems like you haven't thought through what it means to be a "de facto standard" - the point of the term is such standards arise from a collective process, there is no single entity that can stop them. Bitching about H.264 being a de facto standard accomplishes nothing. The only course of action at this point is the PNG route - the hard work of establishing Theora or something else as an alternate "de facto standard".
What people might care about is a way to build up a "friend list" across websites. That could serve as both a filter-out-the-trolls convenience, and eventually an actual trust network.
You might addressing a different matter entirely. The popularity of social networks relies on the fact you are in contact with real, identifiable people with whom you are social with. Facebook provides identity, not trust.
The problem is that geeks have always treated this like some cypherpunk/l33t haXor problem where the goal is to establish credibility points for their anonymous "NinjaPenguin69" online alter-ego. Facebook took the much simplier route and just put a picture next to your name and makes the "trust" issues your personal problem.
And while we're discussing this, it should be noted that browsers have a X.509 client certificate infrastructure built-in. If someone wanted to establish an "Open" mechanism for establishing real-world identity without going through a particular site, the technology exists.
Sounds like they failed at evaluation. They picked these shackles when they used VBA, sounds like piss poor planning.
No IT department ever planned to based business processes off spreadsheet macros, its more like "Hey did you know this guy in accounting wrote a big nasty spreadsheet with 25,000 lines of VBA code?"
One of the the things mentioned in the article was that their IT support structure was decentralized and non-standardized, which would make for a difficult project even if they were doing a Microsoft-to-Microsoft migration. You could argue they bit off more than anyone could chew, which is why this is taking so long.
Disagree. The root hatred of Microsoft is that they kicked everyone's ass with arguably inferior products like DOS/Windows3, VisualBasic, MS-Access and so on.
(Keep in mind all these oldschool computer guys who bet on Novell, OS/2, etc were essentially fucked when the PC world switched to Microsoft.)
Computer geeks have never really cared about the business/marketing stuff and have always sucked up to their hegemonic corporate overlords. But with Microsoft, they are fundamentally convinced the products would never have won on their own merits, so everyone cries that "they cheated!"
(Not that MS didn't cheat, but throwing a DR-DOS error message into a beta version of Windows, for example, didn't exactly change computing history. Yet the people who bet on the losers are still whining about it..)
Without endlessly arguing an analogy, I don't think that quite holds up. From a content delivery perspective, Apple and Google are the 'middle men' more so than Adobe.
That's exactly what I mean, Google can't even make it work well when they themselves control the browser environment. That indicates we're still away from mass-adoption.
I wasn't particularly impressed with the Youtube HTML5 beta (using Chrome) and ended up opting out. Playback wasn't very smooth, the video controls are slightly buggy, and HD videos seemed to take more time buffering. As of right now, the Flash player provides a far better experience.
(And Youtube's player controls are probably far better than anything the average developer could come up with.)
Internet nerds are predicting that HTML5 will be the death of Flash Video, but IMO it still looks like it has a long way to go.
Actually I don't think Vellmont missed that point at all. He is emphasizing that businesses will have certain expectations, and there needs to be an understanding of exactly what rights are being bought-and-sold, which everyone needs to be comfortable with it. The conventional way to do this is to negotiate a software licence.
Most of the people in this thread seem to be implying they don't need any stinkin' licenses, and they would waltz in waving a printout of copyright law and demanding their "rights". (And there is one post from a guy who got fired for doing just that.) While that might be abstractly true, in reality suing your own clients is not how one manages business relationships. Different clients will have different needs/expectations, and as a "IP" producer, contract programmers need to work within that framework and hash out the legal details in a mutually acceptable manner.
--- Also it is an entertaining discussion because most software is uninteresting and un-resaleable "system glue" type stuff. Other than some specific library functionality, I wouldn't even want to personally own most of the code I've developed -- and even if I did, I don't have the ability/desire to market it anyway.
I've had clients who think that they own the code simply because they paid for a website that uses one of our libraries. They buy the right to use the code.
And I've had developers who think they can keep the code despite the fact I've paid for it as a work-for-hire.
Point being if you want to license your libraries to clients, you need an actual software license and not just assumptions.
In my experience, the final situation is common enough that you could call it a third "model". In that case the customer pays for the code according to their own specifications, but is only receiving an "unlimited perpetual licence" in return. Which effectively means both companies own the code.
One company I worked for had 'productized' their (buggy spaghetti) library code and had customers license it. So even when the client owned rights to the application, developers could just drop any reusable pieces into a separate file/directory to retain ownership.
But the moral of the story is that if you're in the software business, you need to deal with licenses. You shouldn't just assume it will work a certain way.
> there are plenty of places where you can live in places that look generally like farm land but are still within 10-20 minutes of large cities
And those places generally don't last very long before everyone else gets the same idea and within 5-10 years your "farm" will be surrounded by walmarts and formula developments and your 20 minute commute is 45 minutes.
There's a certain type of person who likes to ride the outer-edge of suburban development while still loudly proclaiming the value of "rural" living. Exurban living is a attempt of trying to have your cake while eating it too.
Mass-produced living is the whole point of these places, they are for people whose entire goal is to be just like everyone else. They treat the house itself like a Toyota Camry, to be bought, used for a few years, and then sold before it gets dogeared and loses its resale value.
The hilarious part is that these kinds of people are so fixed on their property value, but then the housing crisis comes along and a couple foreclosures makes their entire subdivision worthless. You would think people concerned with "value" would buy something other than an infinitely replaceable unit.
And serial ports don't have a separate driver for each OS?:)
[I recall reading that Windows 95 supported more than 100 different variants of the PC serial chip, and I imagine Linux also has lots of workarounds for various semi-broken hardware.]
I also don't see them switching so much as adding a USB port due to users complaints that their netbook/phone/whatever doesn't have a serial port.
MS-DOS ruled the world for 15 years, so what you see is that the PC legacy application stuff that banged on the hardware is hanging around, but the later stuff was abstracted well enough that it could be obsoleted quickly. If even 1% of Intel's customer base is embedded or legacy OS it makes sense for them to keep the support around.
The other factor is that Windows XP/Server 2003 still requires a floppy disk for some installation scenarios, and those are both still in wide use.
Take a look at a pile of resumes, and its clear there is no firm definition of "web developer". Almost every different "webdev" will have a different skillset ranging from purely front-end HTML designers/coders, to database developers with zero HTML knowledge. (And you will get some Flash guys in there as well.)
Workflow also differs quite a bit from shop to shop. Some places have a firm division between "designers" and "coders", while in others the design people are also responsible for implementation.
The crux of what I'm saying is that the legal definition of derivative work isn't the point, what the copyright holder wishes to allow is. The GPL is about giving you rights you otherwise don't have if the copyright holder approves. The GPL (v2 especially) might have flubbed on that, and I really don't care, that's just a "bug" to be fixed by releasing a new license with better legalese.
Except GPLv2 was advertised as a "Copyleft" license that relied entirely on copyright law for enforcement and had zero EULA conditions.
Any defects in that approach wasn't simply a "flub" it was the whole "point" of the exercise.
Plus, even if you believe it was just an oversight on the FSF's part, at this point there are many free software developers (like Linus Torvolds) that don't want a license that extends beyond copyright law.
Absolutely not what he said. Unless you are claiming that MySQL intended to violate the GPL. IMO they honestly believed in their unconventional interpretation.
Sorry, but you boys can't turn this into the typical internet strawman argument when a database vendor is pointing a legal gun at your head. MySQL had a particular interpretation and the financial means to enforce it, this went beyond the "below your threshold" GPL debating society here. You can't just dismiss a major GPL company as wingnuts......
And as a second point, the GPL (v2) is a thing of beautiful simplicity and balance especially down to the letter. IMO the real issue has always been the endless amounts of useless wankery and FUD from those who claim to understand the "true spirit of the GPL", or whatever idea wandered through their brain. And that all starts with the fat hairy guy at the top.
There is not a single letter in the GPLv2 which indicates it covers network communication protocols. That all comes from people who have huffed too many "spirits of the GPL"
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The history of Java is very instructive for any aspiring professional coder.
Management: Damn these irreplaceable "programmers"! Look at their goddamn salaries. We need to standardize technology, remove the sharp edges, and train people who understand! Sun has got the thing.
Programmers: Heh. We're going to be spinning out gotta-haveit ETLA frameworks faster than your Indian developers can say 'Yes sir! Right away sir!". Good luck with that. Now bend over and take another load of XML. *cracks-knuckles*
Live by the marketing hype, die by the marketing hype, Sun Java.
Flash Player ships on the OS X install disk, so Apple has to send out updates for it. Maybe they need a smarter installer that doesn't re-enable disabled plugins, especially ones that tend to be disabled for security reasons.
FWIW, Microsoft used to do the same thing with Windows and Windows Update.
The licencing on GIF was extremely forgiving. There were no restrictions on writing a decoder, and an encoder required a one time fee that was trivial for any real software company. (IIRC it was $20K.)
This was the main reason that GIF as a de facto standard was no issue for most users. It only really affected small timers and free software types who were writing image processing libraries.
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
Endymion's argument (which I agree with) is that it's too late. H.264 is already an established de facto standard, completely aside from whatever format people use for HTML5 video. The "mistake" (as you call it) has already been made, support for H.264 is already baked into a zillion software packages and hardware devices. At this point you guys seem like you're pissing into the wind.
It also seems like you haven't thought through what it means to be a "de facto standard" - the point of the term is such standards arise from a collective process, there is no single entity that can stop them. Bitching about H.264 being a de facto standard accomplishes nothing. The only course of action at this point is the PNG route - the hard work of establishing Theora or something else as an alternate "de facto standard".
Advertiser or not, it's quite trivial to block analytics scripts using ABP.
(Net Applications appears to run from the hitslink.com domain if someone is interested in actually doing this.)
What people might care about is a way to build up a "friend list" across websites. That could serve as both a filter-out-the-trolls convenience, and eventually an actual trust network.
You might addressing a different matter entirely. The popularity of social networks relies on the fact you are in contact with real, identifiable people with whom you are social with. Facebook provides identity, not trust.
The problem is that geeks have always treated this like some cypherpunk/l33t haXor problem where the goal is to establish credibility points for their anonymous "NinjaPenguin69" online alter-ego. Facebook took the much simplier route and just put a picture next to your name and makes the "trust" issues your personal problem.
And while we're discussing this, it should be noted that browsers have a X.509 client certificate infrastructure built-in. If someone wanted to establish an "Open" mechanism for establishing real-world identity without going through a particular site, the technology exists.
Sounds like they failed at evaluation. They picked these shackles when they used VBA, sounds like piss poor planning.
No IT department ever planned to based business processes off spreadsheet macros, its more like "Hey did you know this guy in accounting wrote a big nasty spreadsheet with 25,000 lines of VBA code?"
One of the the things mentioned in the article was that their IT support structure was decentralized and non-standardized, which would make for a difficult project even if they were doing a Microsoft-to-Microsoft migration. You could argue they bit off more than anyone could chew, which is why this is taking so long.
Why are you telling me something everyone knows?
Disagree. The root hatred of Microsoft is that they kicked everyone's ass with arguably inferior products like DOS/Windows3, VisualBasic, MS-Access and so on.
(Keep in mind all these oldschool computer guys who bet on Novell, OS/2, etc were essentially fucked when the PC world switched to Microsoft.)
Computer geeks have never really cared about the business/marketing stuff and have always sucked up to their hegemonic corporate overlords. But with Microsoft, they are fundamentally convinced the products would never have won on their own merits, so everyone cries that "they cheated!"
(Not that MS didn't cheat, but throwing a DR-DOS error message into a beta version of Windows, for example, didn't exactly change computing history. Yet the people who bet on the losers are still whining about it..)
Without endlessly arguing an analogy, I don't think that quite holds up. From a content delivery perspective, Apple and Google are the 'middle men' more so than Adobe.
That's exactly what I mean, Google can't even make it work well when they themselves control the browser environment. That indicates we're still away from mass-adoption.
I wasn't particularly impressed with the Youtube HTML5 beta (using Chrome) and ended up opting out. Playback wasn't very smooth, the video controls are slightly buggy, and HD videos seemed to take more time buffering. As of right now, the Flash player provides a far better experience.
(And Youtube's player controls are probably far better than anything the average developer could come up with.)
Internet nerds are predicting that HTML5 will be the death of Flash Video, but IMO it still looks like it has a long way to go.
Actually I don't think Vellmont missed that point at all. He is emphasizing that businesses will have certain expectations, and there needs to be an understanding of exactly what rights are being bought-and-sold, which everyone needs to be comfortable with it. The conventional way to do this is to negotiate a software licence.
Most of the people in this thread seem to be implying they don't need any stinkin' licenses, and they would waltz in waving a printout of copyright law and demanding their "rights". (And there is one post from a guy who got fired for doing just that.) While that might be abstractly true, in reality suing your own clients is not how one manages business relationships. Different clients will have different needs/expectations, and as a "IP" producer, contract programmers need to work within that framework and hash out the legal details in a mutually acceptable manner.
---
Also it is an entertaining discussion because most software is uninteresting and un-resaleable "system glue" type stuff. Other than some specific library functionality, I wouldn't even want to personally own most of the code I've developed -- and even if I did, I don't have the ability/desire to market it anyway.
I've had clients who think that they own the code simply because they paid for a website that uses one of our libraries. They buy the right to use the code.
And I've had developers who think they can keep the code despite the fact I've paid for it as a work-for-hire.
Point being if you want to license your libraries to clients, you need an actual software license and not just assumptions.
In my experience, the final situation is common enough that you could call it a third "model". In that case the customer pays for the code according to their own specifications, but is only receiving an "unlimited perpetual licence" in return. Which effectively means both companies own the code.
One company I worked for had 'productized' their (buggy spaghetti) library code and had customers license it. So even when the client owned rights to the application, developers could just drop any reusable pieces into a separate file/directory to retain ownership.
But the moral of the story is that if you're in the software business, you need to deal with licenses. You shouldn't just assume it will work a certain way.
> there are plenty of places where you can live in places that look generally like farm land but are still within 10-20 minutes of large cities
And those places generally don't last very long before everyone else gets the same idea and within 5-10 years your "farm" will be surrounded by walmarts and formula developments and your 20 minute commute is 45 minutes.
There's a certain type of person who likes to ride the outer-edge of suburban development while still loudly proclaiming the value of "rural" living. Exurban living is a attempt of trying to have your cake while eating it too.
Mass-produced living is the whole point of these places, they are for people whose entire goal is to be just like everyone else. They treat the house itself like a Toyota Camry, to be bought, used for a few years, and then sold before it gets dogeared and loses its resale value.
The hilarious part is that these kinds of people are so fixed on their property value, but then the housing crisis comes along and a couple foreclosures makes their entire subdivision worthless. You would think people concerned with "value" would buy something other than an infinitely replaceable unit.
There's nothing about these regulations that are even slightly unique to California. This is generic American Suburbia in a nutshell.
And serial ports don't have a separate driver for each OS? :)
[I recall reading that Windows 95 supported more than 100 different variants of the PC serial chip, and I imagine Linux also has lots of workarounds for various semi-broken hardware.]
I also don't see them switching so much as adding a USB port due to users complaints that their netbook/phone/whatever doesn't have a serial port.
I'm not as optimistic as you. RS232 will be around forever, but I'd bet the server/router/switch stuff standardizes on USB within 5 years.
MS-DOS ruled the world for 15 years, so what you see is that the PC legacy application stuff that banged on the hardware is hanging around, but the later stuff was abstracted well enough that it could be obsoleted quickly. If even 1% of Intel's customer base is embedded or legacy OS it makes sense for them to keep the support around.
The other factor is that Windows XP/Server 2003 still requires a floppy disk for some installation scenarios, and those are both still in wide use.
Take a look at a pile of resumes, and its clear there is no firm definition of "web developer". Almost every different "webdev" will have a different skillset ranging from purely front-end HTML designers/coders, to database developers with zero HTML knowledge. (And you will get some Flash guys in there as well.)
Workflow also differs quite a bit from shop to shop. Some places have a firm division between "designers" and "coders", while in others the design people are also responsible for implementation.
The crux of what I'm saying is that the legal definition of derivative work isn't the point, what the copyright holder wishes to allow is. The GPL is about giving you rights you otherwise don't have if the copyright holder approves. The GPL (v2 especially) might have flubbed on that, and I really don't care, that's just a "bug" to be fixed by releasing a new license with better legalese.
Except GPLv2 was advertised as a "Copyleft" license that relied entirely on copyright law for enforcement and had zero EULA conditions.
Any defects in that approach wasn't simply a "flub" it was the whole "point" of the exercise.
Plus, even if you believe it was just an oversight on the FSF's part, at this point there are many free software developers (like Linus Torvolds) that don't want a license that extends beyond copyright law.
Absolutely not what he said. Unless you are claiming that MySQL intended to violate the GPL. IMO they honestly believed in their unconventional interpretation.
Sorry, but you boys can't turn this into the typical internet strawman argument when a database vendor is pointing a legal gun at your head. MySQL had a particular interpretation and the financial means to enforce it, this went beyond the "below your threshold" GPL debating society here. You can't just dismiss a major GPL company as wingnuts. .....
And as a second point, the GPL (v2) is a thing of beautiful simplicity and balance especially down to the letter. IMO the real issue has always been the endless amounts of useless wankery and FUD from those who claim to understand the "true spirit of the GPL", or whatever idea wandered through their brain. And that all starts with the fat hairy guy at the top.
There is not a single letter in the GPLv2 which indicates it covers network communication protocols. That all comes from people who have huffed too many "spirits of the GPL"
The only time the question of it's "complexity" come up is when people want to either bash it or violate it.
You may have noticed that we're discussing a situation where a GPL vendor pushed a significantly more complex interpretation.