Yes. That's a good way of putting it. And there's nothing wrong with making money. So the current situation is ideal. But I guess my point is that just because someone does something good doesn't mean that they are oriented towards doing good things.
Or to be more specific, just because IBM is in the business of writing and supporting open source software, does not mean that they are wed to the idea. A good contrast is RedHat whose entire business is built around free software. They have a corporate mandate (or did at one point) not to engage in proprietary software. So they have chosen a side. IBM has not.
On reflection, my choice of nomenclature (i.e., "good") was really poor. I have a friend that constantly warns me of the dangers of bipolarizing the situation (especially using terms like "good" or "evil"). In reality, I believe that IBM has a better business plan than RedHat. Their open source business operates in a way that I think is more likely to succeed. However I agree more with RedHat's stance.
The choices that IBM has made lately are encouraging and I hope at some point that the vast majority of their business is open source (or ideally free) software. In a perfect world, they would share RedHat's stance of being free software only. But they aren't there yet, and that's all I was referring to.
But thanks for calling me out on that statement. It made me think:-)
For some reason, Big Blue seems to have decided to side with the public good rather than fear open-source as most corporations do. I don't fully understand how a monster company like IBM can act like this, while virtually every other huge corporation out there seems to be guided by Dilbert's boss.
Back in the mid nineties, Big Blue was having some extremely big blues. They were laying people off left, right and center and their stock lost more than half it's value. Basically, they were going down the tubes.
At that point they reinvented themselves as a service organization. Now almost everything they do is geared towards service. Even if they sell a product, they are doing it in order to sell a service. That's one of the reasons they got out of the PC business.
IMHO, one of their biggest successes was in their mainframe group. Instead of trying to sell people mainframes, they decided to try to help people save money in their server farms with virtualized linux clients on a mainframe. Yes, they sold mainframes. But the focus was subtly changed -- they were selling solutions to problems, not products.
Other big companies (notably MS) are just now starting to realize that the big money is *not* in retail. The vast amount of software being written is in house development. You think there's money in operating systems? It doesn't even begin to compare to the amount of money being spent on custom development. Not only that, but retail channels are extremely expensive to set up (and keep set up). In fact, you sometimes have to *pay* people to take your product (which you hope you will make back on "upgrades").
IBM realized quite early on that they can make a lot more money selling solutions into enterprise business than they could selling shrink-wrapped software. And this is where open source software comes in. It may appear that open source software hurts your ability to compete (you give your competitors the same software you have). But in reality, the benefits always go to the maintainer -- especially if the maintainer is big and trusted.
An excellent example of this is Rational. These guys work on Eclipse. But they don't have to sell Eclipse, because Rational sells RUP -- a process. They go into your big, top heavy, traditional enterprise company and promise to "fix" your software development process. They get paid absolute crap-loads of money to do this. The marketing spin is that you get a real, honest-to-god, "doin' it right" process *and* a whole bunch of tools that (thanks to their open source nature) comprise the most popular IDE on the planet (even more popular than Visual Studio apparantly).
Compare that to MS and Visual Studio. The only people who actually buy this thing are individuals and small businesses. There is absolutely no way on earth that MS makes *any* money from it. Instead they use it as a tool for vendor lock-in. You become a MS-partner and you get "free" copies of MSDN (which includes visual studio). Very little money changes hands. In exchange for your "free" copies, you agree to do things the way MS wants you to -- so they can maintain their monopoly on the OS.
So on the one hand, IBM makes oodles and oodles of money. And on the other MS entrenches their monopoly position with their OS. Gee... in the long run, who is going to do better I wonder?
Make no mistake -- IBM is not on the side of good here. They are in it to make money. It just so happens that open source development suits their method of making money. I personally believe that almost all software development will eventually go this route. There's just too much money out there. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing.
The one thing I really can't understand is why SAP doesn't jump into the fray. If someone wanted to make oodles and oodles of money, I think that undercutting them with a similar open source product, and again selling it as "process improvement" would work really well. All you would need would be a large accounting firm to front you...
I never understood why people keep complaining about the GIMPs multiple windows. Yes, it's weird if you've only ever used Windows apps (or apps pretending to be Windows apps). But personally I *like* mutliple windows. It means I can squirrel away functionality that I don't care about and bring it back easily. I arrange my windows on the screen the way *I* want and I use the window shade functionality of my window manager extensively. I'm *happy* with mulitple windows and multiple menus.
Well... usually. You see, I had occasion to use the GIMP under Windows the other day. And I couldn't use a damn thing. #$%!ing windows poping up all over the place. Couldn't iconify and uniconfy things the way I wanted to. And to top everything off, I'm clicking to focus every bleeding window every 3 seconds. Talk about frustrating.
Sersiously. I *hate* single window apps with a passion; big bloat-creatures with functionality jumbled all over everywhere. But I can understand why some people positively can not put up with multiple windows. As a developer, I personally think the flaw lies in the window manager (or the fact that you can't choose your window manager). But as a user that needs to get things done, I understand the point.
It would be nice to be able to have 2 modes for the GIMP. One for each kind of user.
BTW, I'm thinking of moving over to a tiling window manager... I expect I'll want something even different then.
I really don't care what you do with Computer Science. There is a lot of research that requires math, as others have pointed out. And a lot of it is really valuable. Equally there is a lot of research bundled under "computer science" (because it uses computers I guess) that requires no math. Whatever.
What I'd like is an arts program that concentrates on programming. I'd like something that stresses *reading* and *writing*. I want people to learn how to *communicate* in these programming languages; not just with the computer, but also with their fellow programmers. I'd like people to do research in language design where they ask the question, "How can I allow the programmer to be more expressive about their intent?" I'd like classes on collaborative design. I could go on forever.
I was at the art gallery the other day and wandered into the modern art section. They had a display of a particular type of performance art where someone would write out a description of an artwork on 3x5 index cards. A bunch of other artists would take the description and make the art. Along with the index cards and pictures of the finished work, there were a couple of letters. The letters were describing the disappointment the original artists had in the finished work. They even went so far as to accuse the artists following the instructions as being "incompetent".
I described this to a programmer colleague of mine. His response was, "Wow... I didn't know I was a performance artist". I can count the number of times in the last 20 years that I've had to do hard math in my job as a programmer on my fingers. But questions like, "How the hell did you think *that* was readable", "How can I turn a bunch of requirements into something that isn't crap", "How do I get 10 guys working on a project and have a single vision", etc, etc, etc; those questions I ask every day.
Sure computer science is important and personally I think math is a part of that. But, someday I hope someone will realize that programming is an *artistic* endeavor and we need to do a crap load of research in that area.
896 mg assuming each shot is similar to the 1 fl oz reference espresso in the USDA Nutrient database.
I'd be a bit careful. Depending on the speed with which you drink your coffee, you might be getting close to the toxicity level of caffeine. Unfortunately, there is very little information on what that is and how it relates to clinical effects. I found this paper interesting, though.
I don't know. I've been working in Ottawa for the last 12 years. Many of my coworkers are originally from China or India. They seem to get paid similar salaries to the people originally from Canada (some more, some less). Senior Developers are getting $90K Plus, Intermediate $70-$90, Junior $55-70. Maybe it's less than in Redmond, but I don't think that's "next to nothing".
My take on it is that it is what they say it is. Yes, there is no shortage of US programmers. But what's missing are *good* programmers willing to relocate to the Redmond area without a huge incentive. I would imagine that Vancouver is a great place to pick up new talent.
And having a variety of ethnic backgrounds working on a product is extremely valuable. The US is not the only market MS is going after. Their software needs to reflect the cultures its moving into. I will give a relevant example.
I once worked on a word processor that the marketing and sales team were trying to sell to the Japanese market. This word processor claimed (on the box) to support Japanese scripts. Well, one of them anyway. Katakana to be precise. Katakana is used in Japan almost exclusively for foreign loan words and signs. A word processor that only supports katakana is completely useless.
We had a Japanese programmer on the team. He explained this to management. Some talk went back and forth about what to do. In the end, the decision was made to remove it from Japanese shelves. Seriously, before this fellow clued in Management, they thought the word processor must be massively pirated in Japan. Otherwise how come no sales?
You want a diverse culture in your development teams. Having lived both in Canada and the US, Canada values diverse culture more. The US is the "melting pot" (your uniqueness will be added to our own). Canada has "multiculturalism" (which admittedly has its own problems). It makes sense to move some development to a place like Canada (as long as management is moving with it). There are lots of other places that would be good too. But Vancouver is quite close to Redmond.
Ha ha!!! Thanks! I knew it was spelled wrong, but I couldn't figure out how to spell it. There was another word in there too that I thought I spelled wrong, but I can't remember what it was.
Free advice from a non-lawyer. Not only that, but I only have time to scan the document quickly, however here are some points that I think might be relevant:
1. The word "piracy" is repeatedly used. I don't believe this is a standard legal term (outside of naval encounters). The word is not defined in the document. I think the intent is to equate the term "piracy" with "copyright infringement", but to spin it imply other things. One could probably attack this term successfully.
2. Point 8 is a logical fallacy. Whether or not record companies authorize P2P distribution of music is completely unrelated to the conclusion that P2P networks are used primarily for copyright infringement. One would first have to show that the vast majority of content falls under the record companies' copyrights.
3. "Distribution" has a specific legal definition in copyright law (or it does in my country, anyway). P2P copying may or may not fall under that definition. This is extremely important. They are trying to imply that P2P copying is a more serious offense than copying in other ways.
4. Points 9 an 10 bother me slightly, but I can't put my finger on why. They are implying that the P2P users are anonymous and thus can escape lawsuits from copyright holders. This is probably an important point in their case. I suspect they are trying to show that P2P users are intentionally hiding because they are doing something they know is wrong. This is why it is OK to remove that anonymity. It is important to stress that whatever the motives of the defendant, it is the plaintif's job to show that an infringement occurred *and* that the defendant was involved before an injunction is granted. The anonymity of the defendant is immaterial to that point.
5. Point 11 states that Media Sentry can identify files being offered. It can not. It can only identify the *names* of the files being offered. The name of a file does not constitute anything more than circumstantial evidence that the file contains what they think it contains.
6. As has been stated numerous times before Point 12 is just false. An IP address identifies a machine, not a user. Any number of users may access that machine. Other machines may route through that machine and masquerade as it. The owner of the machine may not even be aware that someone else is using it for this purpose.
7. Point 13 doesn't make any sense at all. They indicate no mechanism for Media Sentry to identify copyrighted works. Or even if one assumes that all the works available through the P2P network are copyrighted, there is no mechanism for determining who the owner of that copyright is. The document seems to imply that all users of the P2P network can do this and since Media Sentry uses the same mechanisms, it can do it too. But users can not generally do this. They would have to provide some explanation for the mechanism they are using.
8. Point 16 states that the IP address can identify where the infringement occurred. This is incorrect. It merely shows one step of the way. In order to identify where the infringement occurred, they would also have to show that the packets were not then transferred to a third party. This information is not actually stored anywhere on the computer, so it might be impossible in practice to say for sure where the infringement occurred.
9. Point 17: How is Verizon's concession in any way relevant to a judges decision? Does Verizon get to make precedent?
10. In point 18, they use the terms "distribute" and "make available". Again, these have very specific legal meanings. They have not described how the alleged actions of the defendants are equivalent to these legal terms. Even if they have documented copying, this is different than the above terms (at least in my country).
11. Again point 18, they have stated that the Defendant made illegal copies available. They have no way of determining this. They merely suspect that the Defendant's computer was used to *relay* copies (or pa
TFA makes reference to the possibility that a certain author may have tipped off his company that he was hosting an "anti-Microsoft" website. I think this is unlikely. As he mentions himself, his website garnered a lot of attention not least of all on Slashdot. I think it is much more likely that Microsoft themselves contacted his employer. They must have known what was going on and this would be a relatively simple way to shut down the site. As his employer was a Microsoft partner, the result was predictable.
Which leads me to some advice. Aligning your profession with personal ideals is generally a good idea. But if you are planning on being any kind of activist at all, it's imperative. You can pretend all you want that it shouldn't matter what you do in your spare time. But when push comes to shove, your livelihood is a powerful piece of leverage in a political spat.
After 20 years in the proprietary software industry I'm finally waking up and smelling the coffee. As of Friday I'm retiring and going to work on something unrelated to computers. This will leave me unfettered to do the things I believe in in my spare time. It's funny, I've always valued freedom, but I've spent the majority of my career voluntarily chained to something I fundamentally disagree with. Life is strange...
I had a TDI for the last 4 years in Ottawa. Started just fine at -30 without a block heater. The only thing I had to do was warm the glow plugs twice. I don't know anything about cars, but I gather fuel injection for diesel really helps in the cold weather scenarios.
However, I've traded in myTDI for a chauffeur driven 20 foot long orange van. And because I'm magnanimous I let all my neighbours car pool with me. Only costs me $80 per month (including gas). It's been 5 months now without a car and I've only missed having it once. The money I save on owning a car means that I can easily order a taxi for the one time in 5 months that I miss a car. And to boot I have plenty of time for reading, playing video games and studying Japanese. In fact if my boss has a "sudden emergency" that they've known about for a month but spring at me at 6:00 PM on a Friday, I legitimately say, "Sorry, my last bus leaves in 30 minutes".
OK. Many, many people can't live in their suburban utopia without a car. But if you want to do something to help the rest of us, why not just take the bus to work *1 time per week*. Take a break from the grind and surrender to the arbitrary schedules of the bureaucrats. Buy a portable video game machine and say, "I leave at 8:00, play Mario cart for an hour, get to work at 9:00, work 'til 5:00, read my book 'til 6:00". No fuss no muss. Just one day a week. The rest of us will thank you!
Maybe this is the "extinguish" part. AFAIK, the companies who have signed the agreements could no longer include updated versions of code that has gone to GPL3. So... either they go out of business or they fork their code. (Hmmm, the latter actually does seem like "divide and conquer" after all.)
These companies can't fork if a sizeable portion of currently GPLed code goes V3. There's just too much code. Especially companies like Xandros and Linspire. Xandros only has a handful of programmers (I'm not sure, but almost certainly less than 10). Linspire is likely in the same position. Novell could potentially start forking code, but only if they devote their whole business to it. Right now, though, their target is selling Netware on Linux. And I don't think they are going to change.
No, V3 will eventually mean the end of these distros. But not for a few years. It will take quite a while for anyone to care whether or not the software is at the leading edge.
But if this is MS's strategy, then it's flawed. *Anyone* can start a distro. I doesn't even take much capital. If there's a shakeup in the distro market leaving a vacuum, someone will fill it very quickly. Free software is a hydra. If you kill a free software company, another will just take the code and take over. The only way they can actually stop free software is to make it illegal to write it. I suspect that's their goal, but I'm still unsure of their tactics.
There are lots of good answers for the questions you asked. So I won't bother repeating them.
However, let me at least make a token effort to raise some questions that you didn't ask.
Why closed source? You mention that you just want to do your job and make a living? Personally, I think that is admirable. But is closed source the best way to go for this goal. I am making the assumption that if you are closing the source, this means that you believe that you will have an "asset" worth "protecting". And this probably means that you are going to write the code before you get paid.
From a business perspective, my advice is that this raises an unacceptable level of risk. There are two reasons: What if you spend all that time and effort but discover that there is no market for your product? What if you spend all that time and effort and discover that there is a market, but you have gotten the requirements wrong?
A much less risky business plan (*especially* if you are planning to sell hardware, which costs real capital to create) is to find your customers first. Sales is the #1 important thing. Get a customer with a specific, defined problem and get them to pay you to fix it. Then fix it. Rinse and repeat.
You say that you just want to do your job and get paid. If that is true, free/open source software is a considerably better approach. With "closed source" you have to speculatively invest your time (and money) building something that might not provide you a return and then hope you can sell enough to make back your investment with some profit. You do a whole bunch of work without getting paid and then you get paid without doing any work.
With F/OSS you get paid for your work directly. Your unpaid work is in sales. But this is where opening the source helps you. It is free advertising for work. Since you aren't trying to get paid for the "software product", but rather for adding features to the software your reputation is what will bring in work.
Anyway, it's something to consider. Remember that VC companies want a 20:1 ROI in proprietary software companies. That's because this is the only way they make a profit (since only 1 in 20 make money). The proprietary software business is unbelievably risky.
I'm personally familiar with the people who are running the show at Xandros. This move doesn't surprise me at all. When they were part of Corel their goal was to leverage free software in order to sell proprietary software. The same is true of Xandros. Whether or not MS has offered them money they are drinking from the same koolaid. It's a good fit for them.
As for how Xandros has stayed in business... They almost went under a couple of times. But rumour around Ottawa has it that they wrote the first version of Linspire under contract. This probably supplied enough money to keep the VCs interested.
You're right on with this one. In fact, even if the documentation was under GPL it doesn't matter at all who receives it first (this should be a no-brainer guys...). The only thing the GPL says is that once it is distributed you can't put restrictions on the receiver distributing it further.
Which leads me to my point. Your characterization of this is a bit unclear. You say, "The idea was that noone can steal _your_ code and put it in a closed source program. Ok, so the GPL 1 and 2 went a bit further and demanded the source and rights to whatever code _they_ contributed to that program too, but I figure it's a fair trade." This isn't exactly right.
The point of the GPL is to ensure that the person receiving the software has certain freedoms.
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
(This came from the GNU website: www.gnu.org)
For this discussion, the last two are relevant. The idea is not to prevent people from "stealing" you code (a license could never do that). The idea is to ensure that the receiver be able to redistribute it with or without modifications. *And* (this is the important part), that all downstream recipients also have that freedom.
That's it. There's no requirement to *ever* directly give source back to the original author. There's no requirement *ever* to assign ownership of the copyright to anyone. So if I make a change and never distribute it, then nobody will ever see it. If I make a change and give it to my friend Joe, but Joe doesn't distribute it, then only Joe and I will ever see it. That's OK (and encouraged in the GPL). The only thing I can't do is give a copy to Joe with the proviso that he not give it to someone else. That would remove one of the freedoms that the GPL is designed to protect.
Parts of GPLV3 which some people don't like are geared towards ensuring that freedom 0 (the freedom to run the software) is maintained for downstream recipients. So if I write some GPL software, someone can't take it and modify it so that only their customers can run it. If they distribute it to their customers, then their customers must be able distribute a runnable copy to someone else. Furthermore, the customer must be able to modify their copy and still run it. Personally, this seems straight forward and I don't understand why some people don't like it. But to each their own.
Sigh... There is a bit of a misrepresentation of what was said. The MS lawyer actually said, "'Most people who are familiar with patents know it's not standard operating procedure to list the patents,' Markwith said. 'The response of that would be administratively impossible to keep up with.'"
This is significantly different than "it would be 'administratively impossible to keep up' with the list."
I agree with the lawyer that the response to revealing the patents would be enormous and probably too difficult to keep up with. There would be all kinds of questions like "*How* does it infringe?", "Will this change help?", "What about this prior art?", etc, etc. There are thousands of Linux/GNU/whatever developers who are implicitly implicated by their accusations. Many of these are associated with large organizations which have teams of lawyers themselves. There are probably only a few lawyers dealing with this issue at MS. Thus, it *would* be administratively impossible to handle the response.
My feeling is that if you don't want to deal with the response, then shut up. But I guess they don't agree. But it is an interesting comment none-the-less.
BTW, I'm not being sarcastic in this post, but it's pretty difficult to tell given the absurdity of the issue.
I was about to call BS on this post until I thought about it for a bit. You are right. To "do what you love", that is to pick something arbitrary and "make it happen", you've got to be a whore. You don't necessarily need money (it depends on what you "love"). But you have to sacrifice until you achieve your goal. The ends (hopefully) justifies the means.
Personally, I've decided to abandon that lifestyle. I spent too many days dreaming of what it will be like "someday when I finally get there". I'm sick of "arriving" only to be greeted with an anti-climax to congratulate me for my efforts. I'm going to stop picking the "next level" that I "need to achieve to be happy".
Instead of "doing what I love" I'm going to "love what I'm doing". Seriously, in the countries I've worked in, you can be totally happy with the most trivial jobs. Working at McDonald's will feed me, clothe me and shelter me. You don't have to work at McDonald's either. You can work in any number of jobs -- those that require lots of skills and those that don't. Whatever you want.
Instead of spending effort climbing the proverbial ladder, I'm going to spend effort learning how to be happy with simple things. I'm going to learn to be happier with less. I've been rich and I've been poor and you know what? Happiness wise, I've never really been able to tell the difference. When I was rich, I was busy working for others. When I was poor I was busy working for myself. I think I prefer the latter.
Just a side note: I've never been *truly* poor. Like poor where I might die the next day because I don't have enough money for something important (food, shelter, medicine, etc...). In many western countries this kind of poverty is rare. Definitely people fall through the cracks and poverty/homelessness is still a serious problem.
Strangely enough, when I'm stressed out I enjoy fishing in WoW. I challenge you to find a game more boring than this.
But the problem is that I eventually level out and I have to go find the next book to keep getting better. But the book cost money. So I have to go find money. And then I need to up my real level to read the book... So off I go on a quest to level up.
Just kidding. I have my own view of this quote. I personally believe that the key to this strategy is the "then they fight you" part. In the case of Gandhi, you had a bunch of well armed British soldiers brutally killing poor Indian people for very nebulous reasons.
He correctly surmised that the easiest way to fight this battle was simply to make people aware of it. Generally speaking, people consider themselves good. They won't allow that kind of injustice to continue if they are not able to turn away from it.
But understand that in order to win this war, people had to die. They didn't just sit around say "Ha ha! We're going to win because you fight us". To Gandhi, the people who peacefully refused to accept British rule were soldiers. And soldiers die.
To bring this back to Free software, can we use this tactic? First, if we do, we become soldiers. And soldiers die. Do we believe in our cause enough to die (at least an economic death)? Second, if we are slaughtered by the likes of Microsoft, will anyone care -- even if they are forced to watch? And how will we force/entice them to watch? 200 poor people getting gunned down by well armed soldiers is newsworthy. Joe Blow getting sued out of existence for patent infringement may not be quite so interesting to the average person.
I truly believe that the best and only way to win this battle is to make it matter to the average person. And to do this we must write software. Good software. Software that people *want* to use. If 200 million people are denied the ability to use their favorite programs, then something will break. Then it will be news that the average person will want to read about.
Then they will join us.
Then we will win.
Re:Google has screwed itself with this then
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Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You may be right and you may be wrong. It is actually immaterial. The very fact that you signed it means that it will go to court. Having an issue like this go to court (especially over an NDA) can make you completely unemployable for the duration of the court case. Court cases can be drawn out over years. A non-enforceable NDA that you signed can make your life hell.
This is not fun. Don't do it. If you don't like a contract, don't sign it!!!! Or modify it (as someone discussed above) and then sign it. After having been sued by a previous employer, I am now *extremely* careful about what I sign. I got lucky in that my next employer actually agreed to pick up the cost of my lawsuit. It was over a non-compete "agreement" that I didn't agree to or sign -- even that got drawn out for a year. I think that if I had signed the document I would have been completely SOL.
Let me repeat: Don't sign anything you don't agree to!!!!!!!!!!
And this is why the use of the word "open" is difficult and misleading. Potential users of this software can easily misunderstand the point behind using open source software just because of the name. I think we need a name change. We need a name that suggests the liberty and freedom you get from using open source software.
I suggest that we call it "free" software!/me hides
the movie studios were open to "a technology summit" featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved.
Here's how such a summit would go:
MPAA: What we want is a secure system that will allow people to exercise all their fair use rights, but will stop them from doing anything that we think of as "piracy".
Programmer from IT company: I don't think that's possible. Either we trust the consumer with the content, or we will have to block them from seeing it at all. Besides, I don't even understand
what you mean by "piracy" and "fair use".
Academic: I agreee. One can show mathematically that the system can't work and still be secure.
It doesn't matter what you want to do. It's just impossible.
Sales guy from IT company: Don't worry. If you hire us, we'll build the perfect system for you. All of these obstacles the other people have mentioned are just hurdles for us to overcome. Our company is full of smart people that have solved all sorts of problems before.
MPAA: Great! IT company, you have the contract to build the system!
Actually, for several purposes the major benefit of Wikipedia is not the fact that it's constantly updated, but rather the fact that it's licensed under a Creative Commons license. So I can definitely see a use for getting the disc and using a portion of it for other purposes (after spending some time verifying the information first, of course). It's handy to have the info on a CD before you start to repurpose it.
Actually, R&D investments can be quite large. It takes a lot of money to do medical trials. And with the way research is going at the Universities these days, it doesn't seem like we're going to be getting a lot of trials done there. The standard approach (as far as I can tell -- my father works in this area, but I'm not an expert) seems to be that Universities do the upfront research. That is they find a drug that is promising (who knows how -- seems to be mostly random from what I can tell). Then they license (or sell, or give away) the patent to an external company for "development". This generally means guessing how the drug works, patenting everything that might possibly work as well, and then going into a series of trials. These trials take years. Sometimes more than 10 years. They involve large numbers of both highly and not-so-highly paid people. My father tells me that $10 million dollars is a reasonable amount to put into a drug before it can be sold.
But here's the kicker. After putting a few million into the drug, usually you find out it doesn't work. Or it works, but not as well as something already on the market. Remember that they don't really understand *how* these drugs work in totality. It's not like they observe something and then think "Hey, let's make a drug to fix that". It's usually the other way around. They notice a drug doing something and they go "I wonder how it does that". So the bottom line is that R&D is relatively expensive and risky. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that each commercially successful drug cost up to $100 million to develop when you take into account all the failures.
With the up front expenditure and the risk, investors (well the drug companies actually) want a "good" return on investment. 10-20x is probably what they are looking for. So that means they want $1-2 Billion. As mentioned, most of that money is spent trying to lock in a market. Since they have spent so much money upfront, they are now trying to reduce their risk. Since many drugs might have similar effects, they have to advertise the hell out of it in order to lock in their return.
Anyway... The gist of all this is, you can't just get rid of patents and expect the drug companies to survive. They won't. And like it or not, we're dependent upon them. In order to actually make something like this work, you need to substantially increase research spending in Universities. Drugs have to get *all the way through trials* before they are handed over to the manufacturers. In the end, this is a good idea because it will be waaaaay cheaper (probably up to 10x). But people are going to have to agree to pony up some significant tax increases to get it to work. And that's politically difficult to achieve.
Lately, I've been thinking that a better way to go would be to leave the drug patent system alone. Simply increase spending in drug research and trials in the Universities. And also mandate that any research funded substantially by public money be ineligible for patent protection. That way you allow private companies to do their own research and to charge ridiculous amounts of money. But you create a system where *if you are funding correctly* the cheap generics will win out in the end. The advantage is that if you get the funding wrong, you still get the drugs being produced.
I've been thinking about this. Throwing the evilness of Google aside for a moment, why should someone be able to copyright a listing of the phonetic pronunciation of an alphabet?
Let's just imagine how I might create this list. I would have to hire people who spoke the Chinese. Then I would ask them to record the pronunciation of each character that they know. This is pretty easy because in Chinese each character has only one pronunciation (per dialect, anyway). There are about 3500 characters that you need to know in order to be literate. And all of these people would have learned these at school.
But how did they learn them? Well, they had a textbook and they memorized the list from the textbook.
Wait. I can't just memorize a list from one book and put it in another book. That's copyright infringement. In order for it not to be copyright infringement, I need to make sure that my sources all memorized the pronunciations from different sources. That's going to be difficult.
But let's say I do that. Now I have a list of the 3500 most common characters. And with that, I've probably got 99% of everything that's in a newspaper. But that's probably not good enough. I probably want a list of say 60,000 characters. Otherwise it's pretty useless in a general sense. Uncommon characters are uncommon, but you *will* bump into the words over time.
So where do I find these characters? Can I hire some guy that knows them all? It would be very difficult. The best place to look is in a book. But wait... what am I going to do? Every time I find a character my people don't know, look it up in a book? Why don't I just copy it from the book in the first place? That's just copyright infringement again.
Really, the task of creating this list authoritatively without infringing copyright is monumental. Probably the *only* way to do it is with a community project where people just submit the pronunciations they know.
But if I'm going to have a community project like this, what the heck do I need copyright for? What am I protecting? If everyone is going to contribute, everyone should benefit.
So, personally, I don't think one should have copyright on this kind of material (same thing for spelling). It's just not in the public interest. This goes doubly so now that we have the internet and creating these kinds of projects is very inexpensive.
OK, I've gone on long enough... But one more rant. What's with this "do no evil" thing? Isn't that setting the bar a little low. If I told my parents that I'd work hard not to be evil, I think they'd be somewhat disappointed in me. If Google wanted to actually "do some good" rather than "do no evil", they could start a community project to collect this data and share it with the world.
Sigh... I guess we'll have to wait for some guy in his garage (but here's betting that someone has already started something).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. That's a good way of putting it. And there's nothing wrong with making money. So the current situation is ideal. But I guess my point is that just because someone does something good doesn't mean that they are oriented towards doing good things.
:-)
Or to be more specific, just because IBM is in the business of writing and supporting open source software, does not mean that they are wed to the idea. A good contrast is RedHat whose entire business is built around free software. They have a corporate mandate (or did at one point) not to engage in proprietary software. So they have chosen a side. IBM has not.
On reflection, my choice of nomenclature (i.e., "good") was really poor. I have a friend that constantly warns me of the dangers of bipolarizing the situation (especially using terms like "good" or "evil"). In reality, I believe that IBM has a better business plan than RedHat. Their open source business operates in a way that I think is more likely to succeed. However I agree more with RedHat's stance.
The choices that IBM has made lately are encouraging and I hope at some point that the vast majority of their business is open source (or ideally free) software. In a perfect world, they would share RedHat's stance of being free software only. But they aren't there yet, and that's all I was referring to.
But thanks for calling me out on that statement. It made me think
Back in the mid nineties, Big Blue was having some extremely big blues. They were laying people off left, right and center and their stock lost more than half it's value. Basically, they were going down the tubes.
At that point they reinvented themselves as a service organization. Now almost everything they do is geared towards service. Even if they sell a product, they are doing it in order to sell a service. That's one of the reasons they got out of the PC business.
IMHO, one of their biggest successes was in their mainframe group. Instead of trying to sell people mainframes, they decided to try to help people save money in their server farms with virtualized linux clients on a mainframe. Yes, they sold mainframes. But the focus was subtly changed -- they were selling solutions to problems, not products.
Other big companies (notably MS) are just now starting to realize that the big money is *not* in retail. The vast amount of software being written is in house development. You think there's money in operating systems? It doesn't even begin to compare to the amount of money being spent on custom development. Not only that, but retail channels are extremely expensive to set up (and keep set up). In fact, you sometimes have to *pay* people to take your product (which you hope you will make back on "upgrades").
IBM realized quite early on that they can make a lot more money selling solutions into enterprise business than they could selling shrink-wrapped software. And this is where open source software comes in. It may appear that open source software hurts your ability to compete (you give your competitors the same software you have). But in reality, the benefits always go to the maintainer -- especially if the maintainer is big and trusted.
An excellent example of this is Rational. These guys work on Eclipse. But they don't have to sell Eclipse, because Rational sells RUP -- a process. They go into your big, top heavy, traditional enterprise company and promise to "fix" your software development process. They get paid absolute crap-loads of money to do this. The marketing spin is that you get a real, honest-to-god, "doin' it right" process *and* a whole bunch of tools that (thanks to their open source nature) comprise the most popular IDE on the planet (even more popular than Visual Studio apparantly).
Compare that to MS and Visual Studio. The only people who actually buy this thing are individuals and small businesses. There is absolutely no way on earth that MS makes *any* money from it. Instead they use it as a tool for vendor lock-in. You become a MS-partner and you get "free" copies of MSDN (which includes visual studio). Very little money changes hands. In exchange for your "free" copies, you agree to do things the way MS wants you to -- so they can maintain their monopoly on the OS.
So on the one hand, IBM makes oodles and oodles of money. And on the other MS entrenches their monopoly position with their OS. Gee... in the long run, who is going to do better I wonder?
Make no mistake -- IBM is not on the side of good here. They are in it to make money. It just so happens that open source development suits their method of making money. I personally believe that almost all software development will eventually go this route. There's just too much money out there. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing.
The one thing I really can't understand is why SAP doesn't jump into the fray. If someone wanted to make oodles and oodles of money, I think that undercutting them with a similar open source product, and again selling it as "process improvement" would work really well. All you would need would be a large accounting firm to front you...
I never understood why people keep complaining about the GIMPs multiple windows. Yes, it's weird if you've only ever used Windows apps (or apps pretending to be Windows apps). But personally I *like* mutliple windows. It means I can squirrel away functionality that I don't care about and bring it back easily. I arrange my windows on the screen the way *I* want and I use the window shade functionality of my window manager extensively. I'm *happy* with mulitple windows and multiple menus.
Well... usually. You see, I had occasion to use the GIMP under Windows the other day. And I couldn't use a damn thing. #$%!ing windows poping up all over the place. Couldn't iconify and uniconfy things the way I wanted to. And to top everything off, I'm clicking to focus every bleeding window every 3 seconds. Talk about frustrating.
Sersiously. I *hate* single window apps with a passion; big bloat-creatures with functionality jumbled all over everywhere. But I can understand why some people positively can not put up with multiple windows. As a developer, I personally think the flaw lies in the window manager (or the fact that you can't choose your window manager). But as a user that needs to get things done, I understand the point.
It would be nice to be able to have 2 modes for the GIMP. One for each kind of user.
BTW, I'm thinking of moving over to a tiling window manager... I expect I'll want something even different then.
I really don't care what you do with Computer Science. There is a lot of research that requires math, as others have pointed out. And a lot of it is really valuable. Equally there is a lot of research bundled under "computer science" (because it uses computers I guess) that requires no math. Whatever.
What I'd like is an arts program that concentrates on programming. I'd like something that stresses *reading* and *writing*. I want people to learn how to *communicate* in these programming languages; not just with the computer, but also with their fellow programmers. I'd like people to do research in language design where they ask the question, "How can I allow the programmer to be more expressive about their intent?" I'd like classes on collaborative design. I could go on forever.
I was at the art gallery the other day and wandered into the modern art section. They had a display of a particular type of performance art where someone would write out a description of an artwork on 3x5 index cards. A bunch of other artists would take the description and make the art. Along with the index cards and pictures of the finished work, there were a couple of letters. The letters were describing the disappointment the original artists had in the finished work. They even went so far as to accuse the artists following the instructions as being "incompetent".
I described this to a programmer colleague of mine. His response was, "Wow... I didn't know I was a performance artist". I can count the number of times in the last 20 years that I've had to do hard math in my job as a programmer on my fingers. But questions like, "How the hell did you think *that* was readable", "How can I turn a bunch of requirements into something that isn't crap", "How do I get 10 guys working on a project and have a single vision", etc, etc, etc; those questions I ask every day.
Sure computer science is important and personally I think math is a part of that. But, someday I hope someone will realize that programming is an *artistic* endeavor and we need to do a crap load of research in that area.
896 mg assuming each shot is similar to the 1 fl oz reference espresso in the USDA Nutrient database.
/ cannon/cannon.html
I'd be a bit careful. Depending on the speed with which you drink your coffee, you might be getting close to the toxicity level of caffeine. Unfortunately, there is very little information on what that is and how it relates to clinical effects. I found this paper interesting, though.
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/174_10_210501
I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on Slashdot.
I don't know. I've been working in Ottawa for the last 12 years. Many of my coworkers are originally from China or India. They seem to get paid similar salaries to the people originally from Canada (some more, some less). Senior Developers are getting $90K Plus, Intermediate $70-$90, Junior $55-70. Maybe it's less than in Redmond, but I don't think that's "next to nothing".
My take on it is that it is what they say it is. Yes, there is no shortage of US programmers. But what's missing are *good* programmers willing to relocate to the Redmond area without a huge incentive. I would imagine that Vancouver is a great place to pick up new talent.
And having a variety of ethnic backgrounds working on a product is extremely valuable. The US is not the only market MS is going after. Their software needs to reflect the cultures its moving into. I will give a relevant example.
I once worked on a word processor that the marketing and sales team were trying to sell to the Japanese market. This word processor claimed (on the box) to support Japanese scripts. Well, one of them anyway. Katakana to be precise. Katakana is used in Japan almost exclusively for foreign loan words and signs. A word processor that only supports katakana is completely useless.
We had a Japanese programmer on the team. He explained this to management. Some talk went back and forth about what to do. In the end, the decision was made to remove it from Japanese shelves. Seriously, before this fellow clued in Management, they thought the word processor must be massively pirated in Japan. Otherwise how come no sales?
You want a diverse culture in your development teams. Having lived both in Canada and the US, Canada values diverse culture more. The US is the "melting pot" (your uniqueness will be added to our own). Canada has "multiculturalism" (which admittedly has its own problems). It makes sense to move some development to a place like Canada (as long as management is moving with it). There are lots of other places that would be good too. But Vancouver is quite close to Redmond.
Ha ha!!! Thanks! I knew it was spelled wrong, but I couldn't figure out how to spell it. There was another word in there too that I thought I spelled wrong, but I can't remember what it was.
Free advice from a non-lawyer. Not only that, but I only have time to scan the document quickly, however here are some points that I think might be relevant:
1. The word "piracy" is repeatedly used. I don't believe this is a standard legal term (outside of naval encounters). The word is not defined in the document. I think the intent is to equate the term "piracy" with "copyright infringement", but to spin it imply other things. One could probably attack this term successfully.
2. Point 8 is a logical fallacy. Whether or not record companies authorize P2P distribution of music is completely unrelated to the conclusion that P2P networks are used primarily for copyright infringement. One would first have to show that the vast majority of content falls under the record companies' copyrights.
3. "Distribution" has a specific legal definition in copyright law (or it does in my country, anyway). P2P copying may or may not fall under that definition. This is extremely important. They are trying to imply that P2P copying is a more serious offense than copying in other ways.
4. Points 9 an 10 bother me slightly, but I can't put my finger on why. They are implying that the P2P users are anonymous and thus can escape lawsuits from copyright holders. This is probably an important point in their case. I suspect they are trying to show that P2P users are intentionally hiding because they are doing something they know is wrong. This is why it is OK to remove that anonymity. It is important to stress that whatever the motives of the defendant, it is the plaintif's job to show that an infringement occurred *and* that the defendant was involved before an injunction is granted. The anonymity of the defendant is immaterial to that point.
5. Point 11 states that Media Sentry can identify files being offered. It can not. It can only identify the *names* of the files being offered. The name of a file does not constitute anything more than circumstantial evidence that the file contains what they think it contains.
6. As has been stated numerous times before Point 12 is just false. An IP address identifies a machine, not a user. Any number of users may access that machine. Other machines may route through that machine and masquerade as it. The owner of the machine may not even be aware that someone else is using it for this purpose.
7. Point 13 doesn't make any sense at all. They indicate no mechanism for Media Sentry to identify copyrighted works. Or even if one assumes that all the works available through the P2P network are copyrighted, there is no mechanism for determining who the owner of that copyright is. The document seems to imply that all users of the P2P network can do this and since Media Sentry uses the same mechanisms, it can do it too. But users can not generally do this. They would have to provide some explanation for the mechanism they are using.
8. Point 16 states that the IP address can identify where the infringement occurred. This is incorrect. It merely shows one step of the way. In order to identify where the infringement occurred, they would also have to show that the packets were not then transferred to a third party. This information is not actually stored anywhere on the computer, so it might be impossible in practice to say for sure where the infringement occurred.
9. Point 17: How is Verizon's concession in any way relevant to a judges decision? Does Verizon get to make precedent?
10. In point 18, they use the terms "distribute" and "make available". Again, these have very specific legal meanings. They have not described how the alleged actions of the defendants are equivalent to these legal terms. Even if they have documented copying, this is different than the above terms (at least in my country).
11. Again point 18, they have stated that the Defendant made illegal copies available. They have no way of determining this. They merely suspect that the Defendant's computer was used to *relay* copies (or pa
TFA makes reference to the possibility that a certain author may have tipped off his company that he was hosting an "anti-Microsoft" website. I think this is unlikely. As he mentions himself, his website garnered a lot of attention not least of all on Slashdot. I think it is much more likely that Microsoft themselves contacted his employer. They must have known what was going on and this would be a relatively simple way to shut down the site. As his employer was a Microsoft partner, the result was predictable.
Which leads me to some advice. Aligning your profession with personal ideals is generally a good idea. But if you are planning on being any kind of activist at all, it's imperative. You can pretend all you want that it shouldn't matter what you do in your spare time. But when push comes to shove, your livelihood is a powerful piece of leverage in a political spat.
After 20 years in the proprietary software industry I'm finally waking up and smelling the coffee. As of Friday I'm retiring and going to work on something unrelated to computers. This will leave me unfettered to do the things I believe in in my spare time. It's funny, I've always valued freedom, but I've spent the majority of my career voluntarily chained to something I fundamentally disagree with. Life is strange...
I had a TDI for the last 4 years in Ottawa. Started just fine at -30 without a block heater. The only thing I had to do was warm the glow plugs twice. I don't know anything about cars, but I gather fuel injection for diesel really helps in the cold weather scenarios.
However, I've traded in myTDI for a chauffeur driven 20 foot long orange van. And because I'm magnanimous I let all my neighbours car pool with me. Only costs me $80 per month (including gas). It's been 5 months now without a car and I've only missed having it once. The money I save on owning a car means that I can easily order a taxi for the one time in 5 months that I miss a car. And to boot I have plenty of time for reading, playing video games and studying Japanese. In fact if my boss has a "sudden emergency" that they've known about for a month but spring at me at 6:00 PM on a Friday, I legitimately say, "Sorry, my last bus leaves in 30 minutes".
OK. Many, many people can't live in their suburban utopia without a car. But if you want to do something to help the rest of us, why not just take the bus to work *1 time per week*. Take a break from the grind and surrender to the arbitrary schedules of the bureaucrats. Buy a portable video game machine and say, "I leave at 8:00, play Mario cart for an hour, get to work at 9:00, work 'til 5:00, read my book 'til 6:00". No fuss no muss. Just one day a week. The rest of us will thank you!
These companies can't fork if a sizeable portion of currently GPLed code goes V3. There's just too much code. Especially companies like Xandros and Linspire. Xandros only has a handful of programmers (I'm not sure, but almost certainly less than 10). Linspire is likely in the same position. Novell could potentially start forking code, but only if they devote their whole business to it. Right now, though, their target is selling Netware on Linux. And I don't think they are going to change.
No, V3 will eventually mean the end of these distros. But not for a few years. It will take quite a while for anyone to care whether or not the software is at the leading edge.
But if this is MS's strategy, then it's flawed. *Anyone* can start a distro. I doesn't even take much capital. If there's a shakeup in the distro market leaving a vacuum, someone will fill it very quickly. Free software is a hydra. If you kill a free software company, another will just take the code and take over. The only way they can actually stop free software is to make it illegal to write it. I suspect that's their goal, but I'm still unsure of their tactics.
There are lots of good answers for the questions you asked. So I won't bother repeating them.
However, let me at least make a token effort to raise some questions that you didn't ask.
Why closed source? You mention that you just want to do your job and make a living? Personally, I think that is admirable. But is closed source the best way to go for this goal. I am making the assumption that if you are closing the source, this means that you believe that you will have an "asset" worth "protecting". And this probably means that you are going to write the code before you get paid.
From a business perspective, my advice is that this raises an unacceptable level of risk. There are two reasons: What if you spend all that time and effort but discover that there is no market for your product? What if you spend all that time and effort and discover that there is a market, but you have gotten the requirements wrong?
A much less risky business plan (*especially* if you are planning to sell hardware, which costs real capital to create) is to find your customers first. Sales is the #1 important thing. Get a customer with a specific, defined problem and get them to pay you to fix it. Then fix it. Rinse and repeat.
You say that you just want to do your job and get paid. If that is true, free/open source software is a considerably better approach. With "closed source" you have to speculatively invest your time (and money) building something that might not provide you a return and then hope you can sell enough to make back your investment with some profit. You do a whole bunch of work without getting paid and then you get paid without doing any work.
With F/OSS you get paid for your work directly. Your unpaid work is in sales. But this is where opening the source helps you. It is free advertising for work. Since you aren't trying to get paid for the "software product", but rather for adding features to the software your reputation is what will bring in work.
Anyway, it's something to consider. Remember that VC companies want a 20:1 ROI in proprietary software companies. That's because this is the only way they make a profit (since only 1 in 20 make money). The proprietary software business is unbelievably risky.
I'm personally familiar with the people who are running the show at Xandros. This move doesn't surprise me at all. When they were part of Corel their goal was to leverage free software in order to sell proprietary software. The same is true of Xandros. Whether or not MS has offered them money they are drinking from the same koolaid. It's a good fit for them.
As for how Xandros has stayed in business... They almost went under a couple of times. But rumour around Ottawa has it that they wrote the first version of Linspire under contract. This probably supplied enough money to keep the VCs interested.
You're right on with this one. In fact, even if the documentation was under GPL it doesn't matter at all who receives it first (this should be a no-brainer guys...). The only thing the GPL says is that once it is distributed you can't put restrictions on the receiver distributing it further.
Which leads me to my point. Your characterization of this is a bit unclear. You say, "The idea was that noone can steal _your_ code and put it in a closed source program. Ok, so the GPL 1 and 2 went a bit further and demanded the source and rights to whatever code _they_ contributed to that program too, but I figure it's a fair trade." This isn't exactly right.
The point of the GPL is to ensure that the person receiving the software has certain freedoms.
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
(This came from the GNU website: www.gnu.org)
For this discussion, the last two are relevant. The idea is not to prevent people from "stealing" you code (a license could never do that). The idea is to ensure that the receiver be able to redistribute it with or without modifications. *And* (this is the important part), that all downstream recipients also have that freedom.
That's it. There's no requirement to *ever* directly give source back to the original author. There's no requirement *ever* to assign ownership of the copyright to anyone. So if I make a change and never distribute it, then nobody will ever see it. If I make a change and give it to my friend Joe, but Joe doesn't distribute it, then only Joe and I will ever see it. That's OK (and encouraged in the GPL). The only thing I can't do is give a copy to Joe with the proviso that he not give it to someone else. That would remove one of the freedoms that the GPL is designed to protect.
Parts of GPLV3 which some people don't like are geared towards ensuring that freedom 0 (the freedom to run the software) is maintained for downstream recipients. So if I write some GPL software, someone can't take it and modify it so that only their customers can run it. If they distribute it to their customers, then their customers must be able distribute a runnable copy to someone else. Furthermore, the customer must be able to modify their copy and still run it. Personally, this seems straight forward and I don't understand why some people don't like it. But to each their own.
Sigh... There is a bit of a misrepresentation of what was said. The MS lawyer actually said, "'Most people who are familiar with patents know it's not standard operating procedure to list the patents,' Markwith said. 'The response of that would be administratively impossible to keep up with.'"
This is significantly different than "it would be 'administratively impossible to keep up' with the list."
I agree with the lawyer that the response to revealing the patents would be enormous and probably too difficult to keep up with. There would be all kinds of questions like "*How* does it infringe?", "Will this change help?", "What about this prior art?", etc, etc. There are thousands of Linux/GNU/whatever developers who are implicitly implicated by their accusations. Many of these are associated with large organizations which have teams of lawyers themselves. There are probably only a few lawyers dealing with this issue at MS. Thus, it *would* be administratively impossible to handle the response.
My feeling is that if you don't want to deal with the response, then shut up. But I guess they don't agree. But it is an interesting comment none-the-less.
BTW, I'm not being sarcastic in this post, but it's pretty difficult to tell given the absurdity of the issue.
Actually, I misread your post and noticed when I was proofing mine. And then I hit the wrong button and submitted it by mistake. Mea culpa!
I was about to call BS on this post until I thought about it for a bit. You are right. To "do what you love", that is to pick something arbitrary and "make it happen", you've got to be a whore. You don't necessarily need money (it depends on what you "love"). But you have to sacrifice until you achieve your goal. The ends (hopefully) justifies the means.
Personally, I've decided to abandon that lifestyle. I spent too many days dreaming of what it will be like "someday when I finally get there". I'm sick of "arriving" only to be greeted with an anti-climax to congratulate me for my efforts. I'm going to stop picking the "next level" that I "need to achieve to be happy".
Instead of "doing what I love" I'm going to "love what I'm doing". Seriously, in the countries I've worked in, you can be totally happy with the most trivial jobs. Working at McDonald's will feed me, clothe me and shelter me. You don't have to work at McDonald's either. You can work in any number of jobs -- those that require lots of skills and those that don't. Whatever you want.
Instead of spending effort climbing the proverbial ladder, I'm going to spend effort learning how to be happy with simple things. I'm going to learn to be happier with less. I've been rich and I've been poor and you know what? Happiness wise, I've never really been able to tell the difference. When I was rich, I was busy working for others. When I was poor I was busy working for myself. I think I prefer the latter.
Just a side note: I've never been *truly* poor. Like poor where I might die the next day because I don't have enough money for something important (food, shelter, medicine, etc...). In many western countries this kind of poverty is rare. Definitely people fall through the cracks and poverty/homelessness is still a serious problem.
Strangely enough, when I'm stressed out I enjoy fishing in WoW. I challenge you to find a game more boring than this.
But the problem is that I eventually level out and I have to go find the next book to keep getting better. But the book cost money. So I have to go find money. And then I need to up my real level to read the book... So off I go on a quest to level up.
Thereby destroying my tranquil, boring game.
then they ridicule you,
then they fight you,
then you win." -
????
then you profit
Just kidding. I have my own view of this quote. I personally believe that the key to this strategy is the "then they fight you" part. In the case of Gandhi, you had a bunch of well armed British soldiers brutally killing poor Indian people for very nebulous reasons.
He correctly surmised that the easiest way to fight this battle was simply to make people aware of it. Generally speaking, people consider themselves good. They won't allow that kind of injustice to continue if they are not able to turn away from it.
But understand that in order to win this war, people had to die. They didn't just sit around say "Ha ha! We're going to win because you fight us". To Gandhi, the people who peacefully refused to accept British rule were soldiers. And soldiers die.
To bring this back to Free software, can we use this tactic? First, if we do, we become soldiers. And soldiers die. Do we believe in our cause enough to die (at least an economic death)? Second, if we are slaughtered by the likes of Microsoft, will anyone care -- even if they are forced to watch? And how will we force/entice them to watch? 200 poor people getting gunned down by well armed soldiers is newsworthy. Joe Blow getting sued out of existence for patent infringement may not be quite so interesting to the average person.
I truly believe that the best and only way to win this battle is to make it matter to the average person. And to do this we must write software. Good software. Software that people *want* to use. If 200 million people are denied the ability to use their favorite programs, then something will break. Then it will be news that the average person will want to read about.
Then they will join us.
Then we will win.
You may be right and you may be wrong. It is actually immaterial. The very fact that you signed it means that it will go to court. Having an issue like this go to court (especially over an NDA) can make you completely unemployable for the duration of the court case. Court cases can be drawn out over years. A non-enforceable NDA that you signed can make your life hell.
This is not fun. Don't do it. If you don't like a contract, don't sign it!!!! Or modify it (as someone discussed above) and then sign it. After having been sued by a previous employer, I am now *extremely* careful about what I sign. I got lucky in that my next employer actually agreed to pick up the cost of my lawsuit. It was over a non-compete "agreement" that I didn't agree to or sign -- even that got drawn out for a year. I think that if I had signed the document I would have been completely SOL.
Let me repeat: Don't sign anything you don't agree to!!!!!!!!!!
And this is why the use of the word "open" is difficult and misleading. Potential users of this software can easily misunderstand the point behind using open source software just because of the name. I think we need a name change. We need a name that suggests the liberty and freedom you get from using open source software.
/me hides
I suggest that we call it "free" software!
Here's how such a summit would go:
MPAA: What we want is a secure system that will allow people to exercise all their fair use rights, but will stop them from doing anything that we think of as "piracy".
Programmer from IT company: I don't think that's possible. Either we trust the consumer with the content, or we will have to block them from seeing it at all. Besides, I don't even understand what you mean by "piracy" and "fair use".
Academic: I agreee. One can show mathematically that the system can't work and still be secure. It doesn't matter what you want to do. It's just impossible.
Sales guy from IT company: Don't worry. If you hire us, we'll build the perfect system for you. All of these obstacles the other people have mentioned are just hurdles for us to overcome. Our company is full of smart people that have solved all sorts of problems before.
MPAA: Great! IT company, you have the contract to build the system!
And the world goes on...
Actually, for several purposes the major benefit of Wikipedia is not the fact that it's constantly updated, but rather the fact that it's licensed under a Creative Commons license. So I can definitely see a use for getting the disc and using a portion of it for other purposes (after spending some time verifying the information first, of course). It's handy to have the info on a CD before you start to repurpose it.
Actually, R&D investments can be quite large. It takes a lot of money to do medical trials. And with the way research is going at the Universities these days, it doesn't seem like we're going to be getting a lot of trials done there. The standard approach (as far as I can tell -- my father works in this area, but I'm not an expert) seems to be that Universities do the upfront research. That is they find a drug that is promising (who knows how -- seems to be mostly random from what I can tell). Then they license (or sell, or give away) the patent to an external company for "development". This generally means guessing how the drug works, patenting everything that might possibly work as well, and then going into a series of trials. These trials take years. Sometimes more than 10 years. They involve large numbers of both highly and not-so-highly paid people. My father tells me that $10 million dollars is a reasonable amount to put into a drug before it can be sold.
But here's the kicker. After putting a few million into the drug, usually you find out it doesn't work. Or it works, but not as well as something already on the market. Remember that they don't really understand *how* these drugs work in totality. It's not like they observe something and then think "Hey, let's make a drug to fix that". It's usually the other way around. They notice a drug doing something and they go "I wonder how it does that". So the bottom line is that R&D is relatively expensive and risky. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that each commercially successful drug cost up to $100 million to develop when you take into account all the failures.
With the up front expenditure and the risk, investors (well the drug companies actually) want a "good" return on investment. 10-20x is probably what they are looking for. So that means they want $1-2 Billion. As mentioned, most of that money is spent trying to lock in a market. Since they have spent so much money upfront, they are now trying to reduce their risk. Since many drugs might have similar effects, they have to advertise the hell out of it in order to lock in their return.
Anyway... The gist of all this is, you can't just get rid of patents and expect the drug companies to survive. They won't. And like it or not, we're dependent upon them. In order to actually make something like this work, you need to substantially increase research spending in Universities. Drugs have to get *all the way through trials* before they are handed over to the manufacturers. In the end, this is a good idea because it will be waaaaay cheaper (probably up to 10x). But people are going to have to agree to pony up some significant tax increases to get it to work. And that's politically difficult to achieve.
Lately, I've been thinking that a better way to go would be to leave the drug patent system alone. Simply increase spending in drug research and trials in the Universities. And also mandate that any research funded substantially by public money be ineligible for patent protection. That way you allow private companies to do their own research and to charge ridiculous amounts of money. But you create a system where *if you are funding correctly* the cheap generics will win out in the end. The advantage is that if you get the funding wrong, you still get the drugs being produced.
I've been thinking about this. Throwing the evilness of Google aside for a moment, why should someone be able to copyright a listing of the phonetic pronunciation of an alphabet?
Let's just imagine how I might create this list. I would have to hire people who spoke the Chinese. Then I would ask them to record the pronunciation of each character that they know. This is pretty easy because in Chinese each character has only one pronunciation (per dialect, anyway). There are about 3500 characters that you need to know in order to be literate. And all of these people would have learned these at school.
But how did they learn them? Well, they had a textbook and they memorized the list from the textbook.
Wait. I can't just memorize a list from one book and put it in another book. That's copyright infringement. In order for it not to be copyright infringement, I need to make sure that my sources all memorized the pronunciations from different sources. That's going to be difficult.
But let's say I do that. Now I have a list of the 3500 most common characters. And with that, I've probably got 99% of everything that's in a newspaper. But that's probably not good enough. I probably want a list
of say 60,000 characters. Otherwise it's pretty useless in a general sense. Uncommon characters are uncommon, but you *will* bump into the words over time.
So where do I find these characters? Can I hire some guy that knows them all? It would be very difficult. The best place to look is in a book. But wait... what am I going to do? Every time I find a character my people don't know, look it up in a book? Why don't I just copy it from the book in the first place? That's just copyright infringement again.
Really, the task of creating this list authoritatively without infringing copyright is monumental. Probably the *only* way to do it is with a community project where people just submit the pronunciations they know.
But if I'm going to have a community project like this, what the heck do I need copyright for? What am I protecting? If everyone is going to contribute, everyone should benefit.
So, personally, I don't think one should have copyright on this kind of material (same thing for spelling). It's just not in the public interest. This goes doubly so now that we have the internet and creating these kinds of projects is very inexpensive.
OK, I've gone on long enough... But one more rant. What's with this "do no evil" thing? Isn't that setting the bar a little low. If I told my parents that I'd work hard not to be evil, I think they'd be somewhat disappointed in me. If Google wanted to actually "do some good" rather than "do no evil", they could start a community project to collect this data and share it with the world.
Sigh... I guess we'll have to wait for some guy in his garage (but here's betting that someone has already started something).