> IANAL, but why don't OSS developers offer a GPL-free version of their software for some really high price.
Actually, it is a common business model for developing free software. Cygnus did it with Cygwin, at least until they were bought by Red Hat. Alladin did it with GhostScript. TrollTech does it with Qt. I believe MySQL is developed under a similar model.
It mostly works for libraries, because the GPL is not limited by library boundaries. This is also why Alladin later switched to a more restrictive license, as GhostScript was usually called as a stand alone binary, rather than as a library.
Probably because you got your social foundation in an US high school.
It is one of the most annoying things about working with young Americans, they (or some of them) tend to translate their conceptions of the dysfunctions of the US high schools to every social organization they encounter. "It is just a popularity contest". "They want to be part of the in crowd".
These phrases resonate well with you because of bad experiences during the most vulnerable time of your life, but they are meaningless to those of us who never experienced life in a US high school first hand (which you will never understand, because you see everything in those terms).
> What's this "viral GPL myth"? I thought the GPL was viral (and proud of it). Is there some > confusion out there?
"GPL is viral" is an analogy. As any analogy, it is neither wrong nor right, but work on some level, and break down if taken too far.
The GPL provides programmers with an incitement to put their own code under the GPL, by rewarding the programmer with access to the existing body of GPL'ed code. In that sense you can say that it propagates like life in general, and viruses in particular. However, unlike life, it does not self-propagate. It propagates when the programmer decides that the reward (access to GPL'ed code) is greater than the cost (has to release his own code under a GPL compatible license).
The "myth" would be where the analogy breaks down, e.g. when people mistakenly believe they can "accidentally" make their code GPL'ed, like you can accidentally be infected with a biological or computer virus.
The analogy also has strong negative connotations, and it was specifically invented for those connotation (I was there). This is why viruses, associated with diseases, was chosen, rather than a more positive expression of life.
I have noticed that lately some people who aren't enemies of the GPL have begun using the analogy. I suggest they stop doing that, it brings more darkness than light, and the negative connotations from both biology and computer programs are too strong to overcome.
I prefer to believe that the license Sun bought was, as they later claimed, in preparation to making Solaris free software. They even hinted at it at the time.
It makes perfectly sense for the government to standardize when practical on some formats for its own documents, so citizens won't have to have converters for zillions of different formats, just in order to talk to the government. In this regard, the government is like any other big organization, and should have the free choice you seem to advocate against.
Where the free choice of the government should be limited is that they should not be allowed standardize on formats that are entangled with legal limitations.
Apart from that, we can argue on technical merits on what formats to standardize on.
I guess that is an accurate description if "comfortable but not excessive" means that you stop sms'ing somewhere in the interval after your fingers start to bleed, but before you hit the bone.
I work at an agricultural university, and we have many students from third world countries. But we tend to lose contact with them when they get home. A better IT infrastructure would do wonders for agriculture in many of those countries, and a generation of children who grow up with laptops would do wonders for the IT infrastructure.
> According to the article I read, Microsoft has been dumping Windows+Office at $3 into these > markets to stunt the OPLC market share. That's dumping by any definition.
US$ 3 is well above marginal cost for the software, so it is not dumping by that definition (selling below marginal cost).
It is interaction with a sufficiently complex that cause the wave function to collapse. Otherwise, the other system just gets entangled.
The question is how complex is complex enough? The only criteria we know is enough, is interaction with an intelligent observer, a.k.a. observation. Because observation is the only way we can determine the outcome.
What happens to a system when it is not observed is anyway philosophy, not physics.
... when the kids who grew up with the second trilogy are in their early twenties, and realize they don't have to listen to the old generation any more. For them, the second trilogy will seem great through the eyes of their childhood, while the first trilogy will just seem camp.
When using Wikipedia as a source of facts, it is a good idea to browse the talk and history pages. In this case, most of the discussion points out that all the external references go against the conclusions in the page.
Basically, it looks like some personal opinion piece, that nobody has got around to cleanup yet.
> Does it actually cut down on bad law suits, or does it encourage a larger spending in the > hopes of winning the case anyway?
We have much fewer lawsuits, but it has probably more to do with tradition. We have many other institutions for conflict resolution. For example, if you buy a vacation and it doesn't live up to your expectation, you complain to "rejse-ankenævnet", which will come to a decision based on information from you and the travel agent. They are not a court, but it is all around cheaper for both parties to abide with the decision of these bodies, than go to court. So that is almost always what happens. "Rejse-ankenævnet" consist of representatives from both consumer organizations and the travel agents organization, and has some formal blessing of the minister for consumer affairs.
> What I would like to see is for the court expenses be limited to what the less wealthy > side can afford, and if the wealthier side wants to spend more, require them to cover the > difference whether they win or lose. With the Judge in the case ruling whether the sums of > money involved are reasonable.
The judge always award what it considers "reasonable" spending, independently of what the actual spending is. "Reasonable spending" is much less the actual spending for those cases that do go to court.
Congratulation John Backus, you have just reinvented the first programming language.
Dynamic memory became an official feature of Fortran 90, although it was a common extension much earlier than that.
Older programs, also written in languages other than FORTRAN, tend to prefer static arrays over dynamically allocated arrays. As a result, older software tend to be ridden with fixed limits like max line length or max identifier length. In fact, the prime advantage (besides being free) of the GNU utilities over their Unix predecessors, was that the GNU utilities relied on dynamically allocated memory much more, and as a result got rid of most of the arbitrary limits. This was especially noticeable as the Unix utilities had static limits that made sense for applications running in the 64KiB memory space of the PDP-11.
> If you look at the aftermath of the various EU terrorists attacks, then the response has > been basically,"oh you naughty kids, don't do this again or I will have to scold you a > second time". That doesn't exactly seem to work.
The terrorist attacks has been treated like criminal cases, the ones directly involved has been brought to justice. Nobody has been "scolded".
> Posing for propaganda pictures at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft site? How can anybody > defend that?
She was one of the great American heroes that helped convince the youth of the world that Americans wasn't all genocidal maniacs bend on bombing children with napalm, it was just their government that was crazy.
Without people like her, the world wide dislike of the various US governments would evolve (even more than it has) into a dislike of America and everything American.
As it was, the young people of the world could protest the US war and still wear US cloth and listen to US music, without being hypocrites.
A great thing with democracy is that it leads to accountability. If we disagree with the decisions of the democratically elected representatives, we can vote them out of office at the next election.
However, when they keep stuff secret, we have no such option. Is it important to keep us unaware that part of a prison is not accessible to the people whose job it is to ensure that the prisoners are treated according to relevant laws and conventions? Maybe, maybe not. But when a politician decide to keep it secret, we have no way - apart from leaks - to hold them accountable for it.
Can democracy without accountability work? I don't think so. Democracy requires a transparent system to work. Which might hurt security. So it is back to freedom versus security, which is most important, and how much freedom can you sacrifice before your security is lost as well?
They are not easy questions to answer, and they certainly cannot be answered simply by a dichotomy between "publicly elected officials" and "anonymous self-appointed individuals"....
A whole other issue is that sometimes the "publicly elected officials" aren't going to see the secrets, part of the government keep stuff secret from the people who are supposed to overlook them. In these cases, the leaks are essential to uncover the faults in the system.
It is what I do. It has never given me any problems.
Basically, just accepting the modified contract with no questions is what is least trouble for your immediate supervisor, so that is what they will do. Same reason most employees will sign the contract without questions.
Of course, if your supervisor are already looking for an excuse to fire you, the situation is different. But in that case, finding another job is preferable anyway.
Parents should stay involved in the life of their kids, but this doesn't mean that they should watch every minute of their kids video games. That kind of "supervision" only prepares the for a live in a fascist society.
A kid need both rules and freedom to develop. Not "constant monitoring an correction".
The piece of technology in question seems perfect for this, you can agree on a rule, set the box, and avoid having it become an area of further conflict.
What Google has right now is just a press release. It might or might not evolve into a threat to WinCE (aka "Windows Mobile").
But the fun thing is that this is traditional Microsoft strategy. Microsoft has crushed many companies with press releases stating that they will "soon" release something, which will obviously become the strategy, and investing anything in the existing solutions will be a waste of time. So rather than buy a solution now, companies wait for "the standard" to come from Microsoft. Which come late, and is horrible broken for the first few releases, but that doesn't matter, for meanwhile the competition has folded.
Hopefully lots of customers will treat Microsoft the same way, skip WinCE and wait for "Google Mobile" instead. That would serve them right.
We still see pre-prints occasionally. And we do sometimes read journals. But the vast majority of the articles we read are results from online search queries.
It is probably more extreme here than elsewhere, because we make models that integrate many different disciplines, but I suggest that the trend is universal. There are simply too many papers published in too many journals for you to even skim, so you rely on search.
Open Access journals obviously score high this way, as we are not dependent on our institution having a (online) subscription to the journal.
Slashdot Mirror
> IANAL, but why don't OSS developers offer a GPL-free version of their software for some really high price.
Actually, it is a common business model for developing free software. Cygnus did it with Cygwin, at least until they were bought by Red Hat. Alladin did it with GhostScript. TrollTech does it with Qt. I believe MySQL is developed under a similar model.
It mostly works for libraries, because the GPL is not limited by library boundaries. This is also why Alladin later switched to a more restrictive license, as GhostScript was usually called as a stand alone binary, rather than as a library.
Probably because you got your social foundation in an US high school.
It is one of the most annoying things about working with young Americans, they (or some of them) tend to translate their conceptions of the dysfunctions of the US high schools to every social organization they encounter. "It is just a popularity contest". "They want to be part of the in crowd".
These phrases resonate well with you because of bad experiences during the most vulnerable time of your life, but they are meaningless to those of us who never experienced life in a US high school first hand (which you will never understand, because you see everything in those terms).
One is fun and annoys people who lack a sense of humor, the other is not and does not.
Go read some boring news site like cnn for the fake objectivity you treasure so much.
> What's this "viral GPL myth"? I thought the GPL was viral (and proud of it). Is there some
> confusion out there?
"GPL is viral" is an analogy. As any analogy, it is neither wrong nor right, but work on some level, and break down if taken too far.
The GPL provides programmers with an incitement to put their own code under the GPL, by rewarding the programmer with access to the existing body of GPL'ed code. In that sense you can say that it propagates like life in general, and viruses in particular. However, unlike life, it does not self-propagate. It propagates when the programmer decides that the reward (access to GPL'ed code) is greater than the cost (has to release his own code under a GPL compatible license).
The "myth" would be where the analogy breaks down, e.g. when people mistakenly believe they can "accidentally" make their code GPL'ed, like you can accidentally be infected with a biological or computer virus.
The analogy also has strong negative connotations, and it was specifically invented for those connotation (I was there). This is why viruses, associated with diseases, was chosen, rather than a more positive expression of life.
I have noticed that lately some people who aren't enemies of the GPL have begun using the analogy. I suggest they stop doing that, it brings more darkness than light, and the negative connotations from both biology and computer programs are too strong to overcome.
I prefer to believe that the license Sun bought was, as they later claimed, in preparation to making Solaris free software. They even hinted at it at the time.
and presumably MS Windows Live offers pop access as well these days.
It makes perfectly sense for the government to standardize when practical on some formats for its own documents, so citizens won't have to have converters for zillions of different formats, just in order to talk to the government. In this regard, the government is like any other big organization, and should have the free choice you seem to advocate against.
Where the free choice of the government should be limited is that they should not be allowed standardize on formats that are entangled with legal limitations.
Apart from that, we can argue on technical merits on what formats to standardize on.
I guess that is an accurate description if "comfortable but not excessive" means that you stop sms'ing somewhere in the interval after your fingers start to bleed, but before you hit the bone.
But I'd say pre-teens sms even more than teens.
I work at an agricultural university, and we have many students from third world countries. But we tend to lose contact with them when they get home. A better IT infrastructure would do wonders for agriculture in many of those countries, and a generation of children who grow up with laptops would do wonders for the IT infrastructure.
> According to the article I read, Microsoft has been dumping Windows+Office at $3 into these
> markets to stunt the OPLC market share. That's dumping by any definition.
US$ 3 is well above marginal cost for the software, so it is not dumping by that definition (selling below marginal cost).
It is interaction with a sufficiently complex that cause the wave function to collapse. Otherwise, the other system just gets entangled.
The question is how complex is complex enough? The only criteria we know is enough, is interaction with an intelligent observer, a.k.a. observation. Because observation is the only way we can determine the outcome.
What happens to a system when it is not observed is anyway philosophy, not physics.
... when the kids who grew up with the second trilogy are in their early twenties, and realize they don't have to listen to the old generation any more. For them, the second trilogy will seem great through the eyes of their childhood, while the first trilogy will just seem camp.
When using Wikipedia as a source of facts, it is a good idea to browse the talk and history pages. In this case, most of the discussion points out that all the external references go against the conclusions in the page.
Basically, it looks like some personal opinion piece, that nobody has got around to cleanup yet.
> Does it actually cut down on bad law suits, or does it encourage a larger spending in the
> hopes of winning the case anyway?
We have much fewer lawsuits, but it has probably more to do with tradition. We have many other institutions for conflict resolution. For example, if you buy a vacation and it doesn't live up to your expectation, you complain to "rejse-ankenævnet", which will come to a decision based on information from you and the travel agent. They are not a court, but it is all around cheaper for both parties to abide with the decision of these bodies, than go to court. So that is almost always what happens. "Rejse-ankenævnet" consist of representatives from both consumer organizations and the travel agents organization, and has some formal blessing of the minister for consumer affairs.
> What I would like to see is for the court expenses be limited to what the less wealthy
> side can afford, and if the wealthier side wants to spend more, require them to cover the
> difference whether they win or lose. With the Judge in the case ruling whether the sums of
> money involved are reasonable.
The judge always award what it considers "reasonable" spending, independently of what the actual spending is. "Reasonable spending" is much less the actual spending for those cases that do go to court.
> Works for whom? and in what sense?
The Chinese system is clearly producing wealth, which is the usual capitalist definition of a "working" system.
The old East European / Soviet communist systems wasn't working in that sense, at least since the 70's.
North Korea is a prime example of a country with an economic system that doesn't work today.
You are a high school kid trying to scare other high school kids about work?
My boss use IM to keep connected with his secretary when traveling. And we are a rather backward organization with regard to it use.
Nobody uses facebook here I know of, but LinkedIn is finally getting inroads.
E-mail is the backbone of the communication system, yes, but nobody gets fired for using other channels.
Congratulation John Backus, you have just reinvented the first programming language.
Dynamic memory became an official feature of Fortran 90, although it was a common extension much earlier than that.
Older programs, also written in languages other than FORTRAN, tend to prefer static arrays over dynamically allocated arrays. As a result, older software tend to be ridden with fixed limits like max line length or max identifier length. In fact, the prime advantage (besides being free) of the GNU utilities over their Unix predecessors, was that the GNU utilities relied on dynamically allocated memory much more, and as a result got rid of most of the arbitrary limits. This was especially noticeable as the Unix utilities had static limits that made sense for applications running in the 64KiB memory space of the PDP-11.
> If you look at the aftermath of the various EU terrorists attacks, then the response has
> been basically,"oh you naughty kids, don't do this again or I will have to scold you a
> second time". That doesn't exactly seem to work.
The terrorist attacks has been treated like criminal cases, the ones directly involved has been brought to justice. Nobody has been "scolded".
> Posing for propaganda pictures at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft site? How can anybody
> defend that?
She was one of the great American heroes that helped convince the youth of the world that Americans wasn't all genocidal maniacs bend on bombing children with napalm, it was just their government that was crazy.
Without people like her, the world wide dislike of the various US governments would evolve (even more than it has) into a dislike of America and everything American.
As it was, the young people of the world could protest the US war and still wear US cloth and listen to US music, without being hypocrites.
> Fact-checking and verification is a pretty complex problem that, in the end, will always
> break down to faith in one party or another.
Faith in an anonymous party is rarely warranted.
Faith in pseudonyms, however, can make sense.
A great thing with democracy is that it leads to accountability. If we disagree with the decisions of the democratically elected representatives, we can vote them out of office at the next election.
...
However, when they keep stuff secret, we have no such option. Is it important to keep us unaware that part of a prison is not accessible to the people whose job it is to ensure that the prisoners are treated according to relevant laws and conventions? Maybe, maybe not. But when a politician decide to keep it secret, we have no way - apart from leaks - to hold them accountable for it.
Can democracy without accountability work? I don't think so. Democracy requires a transparent system to work. Which might hurt security. So it is back to freedom versus security, which is most important, and how much freedom can you sacrifice before your security is lost as well?
They are not easy questions to answer, and they certainly cannot be answered simply by a dichotomy between "publicly elected officials" and "anonymous self-appointed individuals".
A whole other issue is that sometimes the "publicly elected officials" aren't going to see the secrets, part of the government keep stuff secret from the people who are supposed to overlook them. In these cases, the leaks are essential to uncover the faults in the system.
It is what I do. It has never given me any problems.
Basically, just accepting the modified contract with no questions is what is least trouble for your immediate supervisor, so that is what they will do. Same reason most employees will sign the contract without questions.
Of course, if your supervisor are already looking for an excuse to fire you, the situation is different. But in that case, finding another job is preferable anyway.
Parents should stay involved in the life of their kids, but this doesn't mean that they should watch every minute of their kids video games. That kind of "supervision" only prepares the for a live in a fascist society.
A kid need both rules and freedom to develop. Not "constant monitoring an correction".
The piece of technology in question seems perfect for this, you can agree on a rule, set the box, and avoid having it become an area of further conflict.
What Google has right now is just a press release. It might or might not evolve into a threat to WinCE (aka "Windows Mobile").
But the fun thing is that this is traditional Microsoft strategy. Microsoft has crushed many companies with press releases stating that they will "soon" release something, which will obviously become the strategy, and investing anything in the existing solutions will be a waste of time. So rather than buy a solution now, companies wait for "the standard" to come from Microsoft. Which come late, and is horrible broken for the first few releases, but that doesn't matter, for meanwhile the competition has folded.
Hopefully lots of customers will treat Microsoft the same way, skip WinCE and wait for "Google Mobile" instead. That would serve them right.
We still see pre-prints occasionally. And we do sometimes read journals. But the vast majority of the articles we read are results from online search queries.
It is probably more extreme here than elsewhere, because we make models that integrate many different disciplines, but I suggest that the trend is universal. There are simply too many papers published in too many journals for you to even skim, so you rely on search.
Open Access journals obviously score high this way, as we are not dependent on our institution having a (online) subscription to the journal.