When I see one of those letters starting with "Dear sir" on a free software development mailing list, I know it is someone outside the cumminity writing (or someone being ironic). People working professionaly on free software tend to learn that an informal attitude goes better with the community.
So an informal forum like/. is a fine place to learn how potential employees for free software projects work in such a setting. And no, this does not mean you should look for people who act with this weird "workplace professionalism" at/., such people will not fit in here, and they will not fit in in a most free software projects. Just be the nice guy you are here, as you will hopfully be in other informal settings.
No, programmers are programmers, whether they program proprietary or free software. However, when they code free software, you can actually see both their code, and how they intercat with other programmers on a project. This way, you can avoid the primadonas.
Getting programmers with both good coding and people skills are what this article is about. And given how widely different the skills of programmers are, it is hard to see how any trouble in the hiring process to get the best is too much.
You seem to miss the point of the article. The point was not to "bribe" programmers to work for the company by offering them to work on free software. The idea was that if the company wanted to contribute to some free software projects fpr strategic reasons, like HP does with various Linux related technologies, how to get the people who can ensure that the contributions are accepted. These people you find in the free software communities.
Personal opinions on unrelated matters may if you are trying to build a company culture. And you probably don't want to hire a blatant racist to a mixed race workplace. But more important than the opnions themselves, are how they chose to express their opinions. And how they reacts to people with different opinions.
The author seem to have most experience with Linux, and generalize a bit too much from that. Most larger open source projects do not have single all powerful maintainer, but are oriented around a central CVS repository where multiple people have write access.
Also, the "count the hops to the manager" does not make sense for many projects aside from Linux. Usually there is at most a single hop to someone with CVS write permission. If the person is a regular contributor, he will most likely have CVS write permission himself.
The Linux bitkeeper inspired hierarchical structure is rare.
The Buffy movie has a very different feel than the series, which Joss claim is because the director had a different vision than Joss did.
Alien 4 feel a lot more like City of Lost Children than an Alien movie. Again, the directors influence. One other write with a Usenet presense (I believe it wa Peter A. David) claimed he got into Buffy by wathing Alien 4, and seeing a good script being burried behind a misunderstood direction, and got currios about the writer.
Titan AE was actually pretty good, but I don't know how much of Joss writting was involved. There was a couple of places that were clearly Joss though. The intelligent guard, and Planet Bob were Joss trademark humor.
This time Joss gets to both write and direct the movie according to the Variety article, so we will be able to judge directly his abilities as a movie maker. From the few Buffy episodes he has written and directed himself (like Hush and Once More With Feeling), I believe we are in for a treat.
"need to make a living off their work". Proff: The vast majority of musicians do not make a living off their work. A significant fraction make some money from live performances. These will actually be helped from a more liberal copyright law, as they can more freely borrow from each other. A much smaller minority earn money from royalities. And a very small fraction of *those* are able to make a living of royalities.
The question is how much personal freedom we want to give up to serve the later very small group, and whether we maybe can find a more efficient and less problematic way than the current content distribution monopoly to serve them.
PS: The "surprise finding" is that more and more lawyers and economist supports amore liberal copyright regime. Among ordinary people, the idea of copyleft is not even known.
I certainly don't believe in the implication of the first example, that ideas should be "owned" rather than shared freely.
And ideas aren't copyrightable currently, so I don't see how copyright law would affect them. Patent law mayby, even though ideas in abstract forms wasn't patentable until recently.
The second example is even easier, if [large corp] spend billions developing a widget, they obviously do that in full knowledge of the law, and have an idea how to regain the money within the existing laws. They hardly have any right to complain afterwards.
Of course, any copyright and patent law reform need to take into consideration how widgets that costs billions of dollars to develop, and needs to be developed, will be financed after the reform.
I believe a fair compromise protecting both the rights of the consumers and provoding an initiative for the producers would be to make copyright a monopoly on commercial distributions, rather than a monopoly on all distribution.
This shows that the old professional content providers view of the Internet, namely that the internet is a bunch of pipes which transfer content from a few central providers to the masses, is insufficient. Almost half the Internet users are themselves content providers, in a small scale.
The other view of the Internet, as a nautral place where people meet and exhcange ideas and thoughts, has survived from the days it was an academic network.
Some of us have always thought this is what the Internet should be, and what the part of the net that is interesting still is, and it is nice to have numbers that back up this view.
The Internet is not and should not be just another broadcast medium for predigested entertainment like TV.
Seen as a standalone film, it severely lacks both a beginning and a middle. We just get thrown into the endgame.
The film is the third volume of a single, large story, and judging it in any other way does not make sense. At least the "best film" award has to be given for the trilogy, because the trilogy is a single film in three parts.
Maybe a few /.'ers are too old
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 1
Real viruses, at least to this old fart, are DNA based, and does not run on computers at all.
You can combine GPL and BSDL (new version) code and distribute the results.
> But you can do vice versa, because the bsd/mit > licenses tend to be much more 'free'/liberal than > the GPL.
Basically, you can add restrictions to derivative versions of BSDL and APL code, but not to derivatives of GPL code. Whether the ability to add restrictions make something more or less free is a matter of definition.
That a weird word to describe arch. The original implementation consisted of a couple of new general purpose utility to add to the Unix toolbox, and a bunch of shell scripts on top of them. That is as far from monolithic as you get.
There is no discrimination clauses in the GPL. For example, Microsoft are selling GPL'ed software, as is their right. Even if they think it is a cancer.
I have tried to. When I started my first professional C++ project, I bought Sun C++ because at the time it had the reputation for being the best C++ compiler available. Unfortunately, the license key they send me didn't work, so I was unable to actually run the compiler. I spend the first three month of the project simply trying to make Sun send me a working license. And, to be able to do something meanwhile, I downloaded and installed G++ which obviously requires no license to run. After three months I decided g++ was "good enough" and stopped pestering Sun to deliver the goods I had already paid for. In any case g++ was quickly improving, and no new versions of Sun C++ were forthcomming (for years, I later learned).
Morale? Sometimes freedom is more cost efficient than technical quality and professional support. I have certainly since then tried to avoid dependence on single source suppliers of hardware, software or support.
This is comic book physics, not movie physics. In comic books, all the physics and plot holes get explained away in the white space between the drawings.
Slashdot Mirror
When I see one of those letters starting with "Dear sir" on a free software development mailing list, I know it is someone outside the cumminity writing (or someone being ironic). People working professionaly on free software tend to learn that an informal attitude goes better with the community.
/. is a fine place to learn how potential employees for free software projects work in such a setting. And no, this does not mean you should look for people who act with this weird "workplace professionalism" at /., such people will not fit in here, and they will not fit in in a most free software projects. Just be the nice guy you are here, as you will hopfully be in other informal settings.
So an informal forum like
No, programmers are programmers, whether they program proprietary or free software. However, when they code free software, you can actually see both their code, and how they intercat with other programmers on a project. This way, you can avoid the primadonas.
Getting programmers with both good coding and people skills are what this article is about. And given how widely different the skills of programmers are, it is hard to see how any trouble in the hiring process to get the best is too much.
You seem to miss the point of the article. The point was not to "bribe" programmers to work for the company by offering them to work on free software. The idea was that if the company wanted to contribute to some free software projects fpr strategic reasons, like HP does with various Linux related technologies, how to get the people who can ensure that the contributions are accepted. These people you find in the free software communities.
Personal opinions on unrelated matters may if you are trying to build a company culture. And you probably don't want to hire a blatant racist to a mixed race workplace. But more important than the opnions themselves, are how they chose to express their opinions. And how they reacts to people with different opinions.
The author seem to have most experience with Linux, and generalize a bit too much from that. Most larger open source projects do not have single all powerful maintainer, but are oriented around a central CVS repository where multiple people have write access.
Also, the "count the hops to the manager" does not make sense for many projects aside from Linux. Usually there is at most a single hop to someone with CVS write permission. If the person is a regular contributor, he will most likely have CVS write permission himself.
The Linux bitkeeper inspired hierarchical structure is rare.
> Can he/she give examples of contributions that were
> better than his/her own implementations?
Good way to sort out the "programming god in their own minds" geeks.
The Buffy movie has a very different feel than the series, which Joss claim is because the director had a different vision than Joss did.
Alien 4 feel a lot more like City of Lost Children than an Alien movie. Again, the directors influence. One other write with a Usenet presense (I believe it wa Peter A. David) claimed he got into Buffy by wathing Alien 4, and seeing a good script being burried behind a misunderstood direction, and got currios about the writer.
Titan AE was actually pretty good, but I don't know how much of Joss writting was involved. There was a couple of places that were clearly Joss though. The intelligent guard, and Planet Bob were Joss trademark humor.
This time Joss gets to both write and direct the movie according to the Variety article, so we will be able to judge directly his abilities as a movie maker. From the few Buffy episodes he has written and directed himself (like Hush and Once More With Feeling), I believe we are in for a treat.
"need to make a living off their work". Proff: The vast majority of musicians do not make a living off their work. A significant fraction make some money from live performances. These will actually be helped from a more liberal copyright law, as they can more freely borrow from each other. A much smaller minority earn money from royalities. And a very small fraction of *those* are able to make a living of royalities.
The question is how much personal freedom we want to give up to serve the later very small group, and whether we maybe can find a more efficient and less problematic way than the current content distribution monopoly to serve them.
PS: The "surprise finding" is that more and more lawyers and economist supports amore liberal copyright regime. Among ordinary people, the idea of copyleft is not even known.
I certainly don't believe in the implication of the first example, that ideas should be "owned" rather than shared freely.
And ideas aren't copyrightable currently, so I don't see how copyright law would affect them. Patent law mayby, even though ideas in abstract forms wasn't patentable until recently.
The second example is even easier, if [large corp] spend billions developing a widget, they obviously do that in full knowledge of the law, and have an idea how to regain the money within the existing laws. They hardly have any right to complain afterwards.
Of course, any copyright and patent law reform need to take into consideration how widgets that costs billions of dollars to develop, and needs to be developed, will be financed after the reform.
I believe a fair compromise protecting both the rights of the consumers and provoding an initiative for the producers would be to make copyright a monopoly on commercial distributions, rather than a monopoly on all distribution.
This shows that the old professional content providers view of the Internet, namely that the internet is a bunch of pipes which transfer content from a few central providers to the masses, is insufficient. Almost half the Internet users are themselves content providers, in a small scale.
The other view of the Internet, as a nautral place where people meet and exhcange ideas and thoughts, has survived from the days it was an academic network.
Some of us have always thought this is what the Internet should be, and what the part of the net that is interesting still is, and it is nice to have numbers that back up this view.
The Internet is not and should not be just another broadcast medium for predigested entertainment like TV.
Seen as a standalone film, it severely lacks both a beginning and a middle. We just get thrown into the endgame.
The film is the third volume of a single, large story, and judging it in any other way does not make sense. At least the "best film" award has to be given for the trilogy, because the trilogy is a single film in three parts.
Real viruses, at least to this old fart, are DNA based, and does not run on computers at all.
You can combine GPL and BSDL (new version) code and distribute the results.
> But you can do vice versa, because the bsd/mit
> licenses tend to be much more 'free'/liberal than
> the GPL.
Basically, you can add restrictions to derivative versions of BSDL and APL code, but not to derivatives of GPL code. Whether the ability to add restrictions make something more or less free is a matter of definition.
RTFA
That a weird word to describe arch. The original implementation consisted of a couple of new general purpose utility to add to the Unix toolbox, and a bunch of shell scripts on top of them. That is as far from monolithic as you get.
There is no discrimination clauses in the GPL.
For example, Microsoft are selling GPL'ed software, as is their right. Even if they think it is a cancer.
alt.sources is (kind of) part of Usenet, which were initially build upon UUCP, and entirely unrelated to the Internet.
> Have you ever *used* Sun support?
I have tried to. When I started my first professional C++ project, I bought Sun C++ because at the time it had the reputation for being the best C++ compiler available. Unfortunately, the license key they send me didn't work, so I was unable to actually run the compiler. I spend the first three month of the project simply trying to make Sun send me a working license. And, to be able to do something meanwhile, I downloaded and installed G++ which obviously requires no license to run. After three months I decided g++ was "good enough" and stopped pestering Sun to deliver the goods I had already paid for. In any case g++ was quickly improving, and no new versions of Sun C++ were forthcomming (for years, I later learned).
Morale? Sometimes freedom is more cost efficient than technical quality and professional support. I have certainly since then tried to avoid dependence on single source suppliers of hardware, software or support.
For butt-headed magician. Nobody could take offense from that.
Geographically, Europe and Asia *is* one place.
That is probably part o fthe reason they are building their own Java tools, rather than working with Sun on Suns Java tools.
> Why isn't Nicholas Brendon (Xander) a star yet?
Because he is not a good actor.
> Ditto for Amber Benson (Tara).
Because even though she is a good actress, she does not has the boring figure of a Hollywood star.
> Boom, sooner or later... boom.
:-)
And a guest appearence by Claudia Christian
This is comic book physics, not movie physics. In comic books, all the physics and plot holes get explained away in the white space between the drawings.