It's hard for someone brought up in the western world to believe, but the "Free Market" is not the answer to everything. OSS is producing benefits that capitalism has failed to produce.
The fact that it works so effectively is related to the fact that information can now be copied for free if you let it. The principles of free duplication of information go more naturally with the physical realities of the medium than the notions of Intellectual Property and copyright (not that I'm vehmently opposed to either).
Calling it communism is either deliberate or involuntary stupidity, but OSS DOES have more in common with the ideals of communism than captialism.
I believe the original proposal has some merit, but I think it could cause more grief than it solves. Assume it was successful and lots of people/organisations started to donate money. This would attract LOTS of undesirables who try to abuse the system. People would start announcing vapor-gpl-ware in an effort to gain donations. The OSS community would be infected with many of the ills that plague commerical software organisations. The few deserving individuals/projects could get drowned out in a sea of wannabes and fakes.
Personally I would rather fund OSS by taxing those who insist on using proprietary software. That is, one releases software with a license with "same rights and restrictions as GPL, but only on non-proprietary OS, all rights reserved on proprietary platforms". Companies would have an incentive to release software on Linux/FreeBSD first, and gain benefits of bug-fixes and people finding new applications for the software, but they can still make money charging people who insist on using winXX. Of course, this license would be incompatable with GPL (I checked with RMS, who didn't really like the idea).
Get 21", celeron, + $3000 put option on MS
on
XP1000 Workstation
·
· Score: 1
Buying a $5000 computer is daft. 21" monitor and overclocked celeron is better than an O2K with cheap monitor, and it depreciates a LOT slower.
Spend the remainder (c.$3000) on 1 year put option on MS. You'll then have at least $5000 left to spend on a computer next year.
10-20 years for Linux to become a competitor ? What a load of crap. I seriously doubt that microsoft's lawyers believe their arguments, but they are correct this time all the same.
Whether Linux takes 2 or 5 years to overtake MS is a worthwhile question. The process is 80% complete already http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm
There will be a dip in rate of increase as early adaptor market reaches saturation, but Linux is nicely into the bowling alley (read "Inside the tornado"). I doubt whether even Linux will make sense on the computers we have 20 years from now (how do you write a kernel for a quantum computer ?).
Is it a public key algorithm ? if not then comparing the speed to RSA is ridiculous. I've got some code that can add two large matrices faster than the best commerical implementations can invert one....
"She's proved..." wow, I'm impressed. I thought proof of encryption security was impossible except for one-time keypad, the best you can do is expose it to the experts, and if after several years nobody has broken it then its pretty secure.
Anyway, good luck to her. Especially if she goes public with it.
Eckel's book was very good, and you can download it for free;-) Comprehensive and well informed. I can't compare it to "Just java" since I haven't read that. My only complaint were his somewhat misleading and out of date comparisons of C++ to java (I'm a C++ bigot, but when I complain about Java, I complain about 1.2, not 1.0).
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It's hard for someone brought up in the western world to believe, but the "Free Market" is not the answer to everything. OSS is producing benefits that capitalism has failed to produce.
The fact that it works so effectively is related to the fact that information can now be copied for free if you let it. The principles of free duplication of information go more naturally with the physical realities of the medium than the notions of Intellectual Property and copyright (not that I'm vehmently opposed to either).
Calling it communism is either deliberate or involuntary stupidity, but OSS DOES have more in common with the ideals of communism than captialism.
I believe the original proposal has some merit, but I think it could cause more grief than it solves. Assume it was successful and lots of people/organisations started to donate money. This would attract LOTS of undesirables who try to abuse the system. People would start announcing vapor-gpl-ware in an effort to gain donations. The OSS community would be infected with many of the ills that plague commerical software organisations. The few deserving individuals/projects could get drowned out in a sea of wannabes and fakes.
Personally I would rather fund OSS by taxing those who insist on using proprietary software. That is, one releases software with a license with "same rights and restrictions as GPL, but only on non-proprietary OS, all rights reserved on proprietary platforms". Companies would have an incentive to release software on Linux/FreeBSD first, and gain benefits of bug-fixes and people finding new applications for the software, but they can still make money charging people who insist on using winXX. Of course, this license would be incompatable with GPL (I checked with RMS, who didn't really like the idea).
Buying a $5000 computer is daft.
21" monitor and overclocked celeron is better than an O2K with cheap monitor, and it depreciates a LOT slower.
Spend the remainder (c.$3000) on 1 year put option on MS. You'll then have at least $5000 left to spend on a computer next year.
10-20 years for Linux to become a competitor ?
What a load of crap. I seriously doubt that microsoft's lawyers believe their arguments, but they are correct this time all the same.
Whether Linux takes 2 or 5 years to overtake MS is a worthwhile question. The process is 80% complete already http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm
There will be a dip in rate of increase as early adaptor market reaches saturation, but Linux is nicely into the bowling alley (read "Inside the tornado"). I doubt whether even Linux will make sense on the computers we have 20 years from now (how do you write a kernel for a quantum computer ?).
Is it a public key algorithm ? if not then comparing the speed to RSA is ridiculous.
I've got some code that can add two large matrices
faster than the best commerical implementations can invert one....
"She's proved..." wow, I'm impressed. I thought proof of encryption security was impossible except for one-time keypad, the best you can do is expose it to the experts, and if after several years nobody has broken it then its pretty secure.
Anyway, good luck to her. Especially if she goes public with it.
Eckel's book was very good, and you can download it for free ;-) Comprehensive and well informed. I can't compare it to "Just java" since I haven't read that. My only complaint were his somewhat misleading and out of date comparisons of C++ to java (I'm a C++ bigot, but when I complain about Java, I complain about 1.2, not 1.0).