Depends on the software, I think. The consumer software, probably, but what about specialized software within fields that most consumers are not in. Movie editing, enterprise management, groupware, fingerprint recognition software, etc etc.
If a software type doesn't really make an individual software hacker want to scratch, would the software be developed by OS?
And how user-friendly is OS software? The attitude I've read here on Slashdot, seems to indicate people should get a license (or at least be able to hack the kernel) before they are allowed to use a computer. Seems to me, that's another marked that OS is ill-equipped to handle.
Doubt it. Some software, the OS model is great at, some software, I don't think the OS model can cover well. Embedded software, enterprise focused software (think network management -> http://www.dmtf.org, groupware, probably others).
Certain software, you just need the organization of a large company.
Lets see VA Linux and RedHat spend millions of dollar on developing enterprise management software to compete against Dell's hardware and HP's Openview, and the GPL the software. If they are able to do that, AND survive, then I'll be convinced it will work.
Heck, I talked to representatives from VA, RedHat and Caldera during LinuxWorld, and none of them seems to have any plans in the network management area. Didn't even know it existed. So while Linux is trying to get a proper SNMP agent working (and someone has to register a LINUX mib branch, which again cost $$. Are RedHat willing to register it and spend money supervising it, and let Caldera, SUSE, TurboLinux use it?), the industry is looking at CIM and WBEM.
Those of you who are interested, go to any major player (Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP, even the hardware people like DELL, COMPAQ), and look at what they are doing with Network Management.
I think Enlightenment is good for Linux because it gives Linux (or UNIX/X-Server based systems) a distictive look. Look at Mac, you can recognize it from a screenshot. Same with Windows, OS/2, commercial UNIX running CDE, probably BeOS and Job's NeXTStep system.
The problem with most windowmanagers, like WindowMaker, AfterStep, and desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, are that they try too much to *look* like Windows or NextStep or whatever, which is wrong, I think.
Yes, it's important to give the user the choice to make their environment to look like they want it, whether it is WIndows, Mac, OS/2 or NextStep. And yes, if I were to set up a Linux box for my admin, I would probably give her a Windows look for the GUI. But the default Linux GUI look should be distinct from those other boxes.
That said, I haven't been using Enlightenment since 0.14, mostly because all the configuration changed between 0.14 and 0.15, and I just had better things to do than learning how to setup Enlightenment.
That's one of the things that bugs me about OS software, I guess. Weak documentation, and hard to configure (although forgivable for Enlightenment since it's still in alpha, but unforgivable in GNOME since it went 1.0 months ago).
Riiight, and if you had 200 or 2000 servers, the rpm solution would be *sooo* good. That's why the sysadmin gets paid those big money, right? Staying up all night, doing rpm -Uvh *rpm.
nobody puts a new service pack on a production system. They test it out on a single non-exential server first, and then carefully roll it out.
I do think zdnet is wrong, though. Security patches (especially on firewalls, webservers etc... anything that can compromise the internal security of the company), will be applied. Others problems, unless they impact productivety, won't get patched until a service pack comes out and tested.
I don't know. With enterprise, wouldn't you have something like Tivoli or some other enterprise management package installed? Just set up a timer to do the update at 3 am for all the systems that need the update.
Granted Linux, at this point, doesn't have *any* enterprise management packages (although IBM demonstrated TME on Linux at LinuxWorld).
Why would a company code at all? Just wait for your competition to write the program, then undercut them in price, since you don't have to recover development cost.
Why would MS try to push down to the desktop? They already own it. You might argue, and successfully, that they are pushing up to the server, but not the other way, sorry.
Are you aware of how difficult it is to charge for a product that previously was free?
Look at Netscape. Their browser was free, then they tried to charge for it. What happened? People started going over to IE, and Netscape lost marked share.
If Sun gives out StarOffice v.5.00 for free, and then starts charging for v.6.00, then people would just stay with v5.
>>Would anyone be developing any software for this thing, closely held by some companies, under licenses which may someday change radically?
I agree. I mean look at Windows. A closely held OS . Is anyone developing for it? I guess Netscape Communicator, AOL, Eudora Mail, OpenView, UniCenter, Oracle Database and other softwares are just part of my imagination. And to think I thought I saw software at my local Fry's for that platform.
Well, current version of LGPL is nice. Of course, if RMS gets his way, all libraries will be under GPL where they belong, or the next version of LGPL would just make it incompatible with properiatery software (not that most Free (I want to discuss libre, but I really want gratis) people care).
With GPL, you wouldn't be able to have a commercial license.
I really don't see the problem with the current QPL license. If you are only interested in Free software, you get it for free. But if you want to develop commercially and closed, you have that option too.
Check out the Free Software Foundation website. RMS goal is to get rid of IP. GPL is a stepping stone towards that goal (heck, he even recommends that libraries be licensed under GPL now).
Meaning, you create something. Debian can sell it without giving you a dime.
Oh, wait, but it's not the same, right? They're grabbing your IP (lets disregard the fact OS people really don't believe in IP, well other people's IP. This thread shows that they do care about their own IP).
The majority of the OS applications out there have a license that says something like: "This application is covered under the GPL/LGPL v2 or later". Meaning RMS could release a new version of GPL stipulating that all applications using this license would belong to FSF.
>> YAHOO could, for example, take music off a struggling band's site and sell it to a record label. Take your book and sell it to a publisher. Take your photographs, cut them up, and use them on their own pages. Sell them to a clip-art gallery. >So that they could use it but nobody else. >How would you like it if YOUR ISP decided to revise its terms of service without telling you
Wouldn't be stupid enough to sign an agreement where the terms could be changed withour prior warning.
Why would you want a lawyer? Isn't this GPL-fanatics wet dream? You create something, some else can make a profit of it without giving you royalties...
Next year won't cut it. Ever heard of internet time?
Linux is missing some really important software. Industrial strength RDBM, system- and network administration tools (i.e. CA's TNG, Tivoli TME, HP's OV), ERP, good office suite. All these have been announced, but you don't make get anything done on announced software.
And no, Applixware and StarOffice won't cut it until they get bigger. The risk of them disappearing (ever heard of Describe?) are too big, and there are compatible issues with MS Office (no matter how much everybody else seems to hate the idea, the latest MS docs are the standard).
Seems to me the Open Source movement failed miserably. According to the Bazaar and the Cathedral paper, Open Source would produce better products, at a shorter time. Netscape Communicator is not a good example of this.
Wonder what people would say about IE if they didn't know M$ was the one who wrote it.
Neither company A nor company B would bother do the R&D to start the product under a GPL license. There just wouldn't be an economic incentive to do so.
Lets see. Open Source/Free Software is supposed to be better than propriatory software, right?
Show me a GPL'd wordprocessor that even start to compare to their commercial brethren, and I'll switch.
Can't, eh?
And if free software is so important, where the hell is the free (GPL) browser? Didn't bother writing one as long as Netscape provided one for free (beerwise)? And no, Netscape doesn't count because it didn't *start* out as GPL product.
The key is open standards (open fileformat etc, open protocols etc). GPL is not a viable to alternative to companies. You, as a user, may choose to only use it, but you won't get the latest greatest.
>>A hell of a shorter period of time that if they sold shoddy software to the unsuspecting masses. And that is a good thing? (and are you saying that proprietary software is automatically "shoddy" by definition?)
Why should a company do R&D when they know, under the GPL, they would have to turn over that research over to the competition? Why would any company do it? So that they can sell support? Another company that didn't spend money on R&D could easily undercut them in price.
Do GPL fanatics believe money grows on trees? Yeah, I know. Free speech, not free beer, but it comes down to the same thing. Why buy the software when you can legally d/l for *free* on the internet, and under the GPL you will be able to for *free* (as in free beer).
And your analogy don't hold water. It would be more like this. A writer write the next great classic. Other people comes in (after he/she has spent years doing research, thinking, spending money on equipment), rewrites the novel, sell t-shirts, publish it... the original author doesn't see one dime. In the GPL world, this is the great new order. Bye, bye, intellectual property.
And how long do you expect them to be in business if they start giving out software they spent money on development?
Oh, yeah, I forgot. GPL will give them the provision to sell support, right? And what's from stopping a company like RedHat from undercutting their prices, since RedHat doesn't have to recuperate the development cost?
GPL is the best way to stop all commercial software development. RMS is a genious.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the software, I think. The consumer software, probably, but what about specialized software within fields that most consumers are not in. Movie editing, enterprise management, groupware, fingerprint recognition software, etc etc.
If a software type doesn't really make an individual software hacker want to scratch, would the software be developed by OS?
And how user-friendly is OS software? The attitude I've read here on Slashdot, seems to indicate people should get a license (or at least be able to hack the kernel) before they are allowed to use a computer. Seems to me, that's another marked that OS is ill-equipped to handle.
Maybe I'm wrong....
Doubt it. Some software, the OS model is great at, some software, I don't think the OS model can cover well. Embedded software, enterprise focused software (think network management -> http://www.dmtf.org, groupware, probably others).
Certain software, you just need the organization of a large company.
Lets see VA Linux and RedHat spend millions of dollar on developing enterprise management software to compete against Dell's hardware and HP's Openview, and the GPL the software. If they are able to do that, AND survive, then I'll be convinced it will work.
Heck, I talked to representatives from VA, RedHat and Caldera during LinuxWorld, and none of them seems to have any plans in the network management area. Didn't even know it existed. So while Linux is trying to get a proper SNMP agent working (and someone has to register a LINUX mib branch, which again cost $$. Are RedHat willing to register it and spend money supervising it, and let Caldera, SUSE, TurboLinux use it?), the industry is looking at CIM and WBEM.
Those of you who are interested, go to any major player (Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP, even the hardware people like DELL, COMPAQ), and look at what they are doing with Network Management.
I think Enlightenment is good for Linux because it gives Linux (or UNIX/X-Server based systems) a distictive look. Look at Mac, you can recognize it from a screenshot. Same with Windows, OS/2, commercial UNIX running CDE, probably BeOS and Job's NeXTStep system.
The problem with most windowmanagers, like WindowMaker, AfterStep, and desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, are that they try too much to *look* like Windows or NextStep or whatever, which is wrong, I think.
Yes, it's important to give the user the choice to make their environment to look like they want it, whether it is WIndows, Mac, OS/2 or NextStep.
And yes, if I were to set up a Linux box for my admin, I would probably give her a Windows look for the GUI. But the default Linux GUI look should be distinct from those other boxes.
That said, I haven't been using Enlightenment since 0.14, mostly because all the configuration changed between 0.14 and 0.15, and I just had better things to do than learning how to setup Enlightenment.
That's one of the things that bugs me about OS software, I guess. Weak documentation, and hard to configure (although forgivable for Enlightenment since it's still in alpha, but unforgivable in GNOME since it went 1.0 months ago).
Well, enough of my rants...
Riiight, and if you had 200 or 2000 servers, the rpm solution would be *sooo* good. That's why the sysadmin gets paid those big money, right? Staying up all night, doing rpm -Uvh *rpm.
nobody puts a new service pack on a production system. They test it out on a single non-exential server first, and then carefully roll it out.
I do think zdnet is wrong, though. Security patches (especially on firewalls, webservers etc... anything that can compromise the internal security of the company), will be applied. Others problems, unless they impact productivety, won't get patched until a service pack comes out and tested.
I don't know. With enterprise, wouldn't you have something like Tivoli or some other enterprise management package installed? Just set up a timer to do the update at 3 am for all the systems that need the update.
Granted Linux, at this point, doesn't have *any* enterprise management packages (although IBM demonstrated TME on Linux at LinuxWorld).
Why would a company code at all? Just wait for your competition to write the program, then undercut them in price, since you don't have to recover development cost.
Why would MS try to push down to the desktop? They already own it. You might argue, and successfully, that they are pushing up to the server, but not the other way, sorry.
I'm surprised that not more people sees the storm as just another ploy from RedHat to become the next M$;-)
I'm sorry, but that's just silly.
Sun will not starts charging (if they ever do) until *after* MS-Word no longer matters.
Are you aware of how difficult it is to charge for a product that previously was free?
Look at Netscape. Their browser was free, then they tried to charge for it. What happened? People started going over to IE, and Netscape lost marked share.
If Sun gives out StarOffice v.5.00 for free, and then starts charging for v.6.00, then people would just stay with v5.
>>Would anyone be developing any software for this
thing, closely held by some companies, under licenses which may someday change radically?
I agree. I mean look at Windows. A closely held OS . Is anyone developing for it? I guess Netscape Communicator, AOL, Eudora Mail, OpenView, UniCenter, Oracle Database and other softwares are just part of my imagination. And to think I thought I saw software at my local Fry's for that platform.
Check out http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
Well, current version of LGPL is nice. Of course, if RMS gets his way, all libraries will be under GPL where they belong, or the next version of LGPL would just make it incompatible with properiatery software (not that most Free (I want to discuss libre, but I really want gratis) people care).
With GPL, you wouldn't be able to have a commercial license.
I really don't see the problem with the current QPL license. If you are only interested in Free software, you get it for free. But if you want to develop commercially and closed, you have that option too.
With GPL,the second option is *not* there.
I guess this is as good a time as any to ask this question:
Are the patches cummulative? If I upgrade from 2.2.5 to 2.2.15 (or whatever the latest is), will I get all the fixes in-between?
In a related question, if they are not commulative, do I need to install all the patches in-between if I want a fix in 2.2.15 and I'm running 2.2.5?
Check out the Free Software Foundation website.
RMS goal is to get rid of IP. GPL is a stepping stone towards that goal (heck, he even recommends that libraries be licensed under GPL now).
Meaning, you create something. Debian can sell it without giving you a dime.
Oh, wait, but it's not the same, right? They're grabbing your IP (lets disregard the fact OS people really don't believe in IP, well other people's IP. This thread shows that they do care about their own IP).
The majority of the OS applications out there have a license that says something like: "This application is covered under the GPL/LGPL v2 or later". Meaning RMS could release a new version of GPL stipulating that all applications using this license would belong to FSF.
>> YAHOO could, for example, take
music off a struggling band's site and sell it to a record label. Take your book and sell it to a publisher. Take your photographs,
cut them up, and use them on their own pages. Sell them to a clip-art gallery. >So that they could use it but nobody else. >How would you like it if YOUR ISP decided to revise its terms of service without telling you
Wouldn't be stupid enough to sign an agreement where the terms could be changed withour prior warning.
Dionysus
bromius@usa.net
Why would you want a lawyer? Isn't this GPL-fanatics wet dream? You create something, some else can make a profit of it without giving you royalties...
Really don't see the problem here.
Dionysus
bromius@usa.net
Next year won't cut it. Ever heard of internet time?
Linux is missing some really important software. Industrial strength RDBM, system- and network administration tools (i.e. CA's TNG, Tivoli TME, HP's OV), ERP, good office suite. All these have been announced, but you don't make get anything done on announced software.
And no, Applixware and StarOffice won't cut it until they get bigger. The risk of them disappearing (ever heard of Describe?) are too big, and there are compatible issues with MS Office (no matter how much everybody else seems to hate the idea, the latest MS docs are the standard).
Would you care if he did? I mean as long as you had free (beer) access to the kernel, do you really give a shit?
Seems to me the Open Source movement failed miserably. According to the Bazaar and the Cathedral paper, Open Source would produce better products, at a shorter time. Netscape Communicator is not a good example of this.
Wonder what people would say about IE if they didn't know M$ was the one who wrote it.
You forgot something.
Neither company A nor company B would bother do the R&D to start the product under a GPL license. There just wouldn't be an economic incentive to do so.
Oh, here I thought Cygnus was *selling* a proprietary extension to their compiler.
And is IBM's open source project their *primary* source of income? Is Netscape's?
Lets see. Open Source/Free Software is supposed to be better than propriatory software, right?
Show me a GPL'd wordprocessor that even start to compare to their commercial brethren, and I'll switch.
Can't, eh?
And if free software is so important, where the hell is the free (GPL) browser? Didn't bother writing one as long as Netscape provided one for free (beerwise)? And no, Netscape doesn't count because it didn't *start* out as GPL product.
The key is open standards (open fileformat etc, open protocols etc). GPL is not a viable to alternative to companies. You, as a user, may choose to only use it, but you won't get the latest greatest.
>>A hell of a shorter period of time that if they sold shoddy software to the unsuspecting masses.
And that is a good thing? (and are you saying that proprietary software is automatically "shoddy" by definition?)
Why should a company do R&D when they know, under the GPL, they would have to turn over that research over to the competition? Why would any company do it? So that they can sell support? Another company that didn't spend money on R&D could easily undercut them in price.
Do GPL fanatics believe money grows on trees? Yeah, I know. Free speech, not free beer, but it comes down to the same thing. Why buy the software when you can legally d/l for *free* on the internet, and under the GPL you will be able to for *free* (as in free beer).
And your analogy don't hold water. It would be more like this. A writer write the next great classic. Other people comes in (after he/she has spent years doing research, thinking, spending money on equipment), rewrites the novel, sell t-shirts, publish it... the original author doesn't see one dime. In the GPL world, this is the great new order. Bye, bye, intellectual property.
And how long do you expect them to be in business if they start giving out software they spent money on development?
Oh, yeah, I forgot. GPL will give them the provision to sell support, right? And what's from stopping a company like RedHat from undercutting their prices, since RedHat doesn't have to recuperate the development cost?
GPL is the best way to stop all commercial software development. RMS is a genious.