Microsoft will not be "defeated" in the sense of vanishing from the field as a software company. Ever. They have achieved what is probably the most pervasive and addictive vendor lock-in situation in all of human history. An incredible amount of the information critical to maintaining our society at its current level is stored on, written for, and run by Windows computers.
Remember, users will now INSIST on Windows, because they want it/know it/are used to it. This is even better than making it a legal requirement to use Windows or threatening people (by whatever means) to use Windows or else. A vast number of addicts (the situation is surprisingly analogous) to Windows will DEMAND it in spite of anything else, becasue for them it makes life easier.
What might happen is Microsoft will lower their prices and improve their quality to prevent the beginnings of a migration to another product - if they make their customers unhappy (i.e. take away what they're plugged in to) something might happen. But Microsoft will never do this. Their tendancy towards not changing anything is actually a bonus for most people, who want to learn a computer once and never have it do anything unexpected for the rest of their lives. (Please note that although I find this frustrating, it is neither surprising or blameworthy - I don't want to relearn how to drive or perform basic car maintainance every few years.) Competition does not produce products like that, since change is integral to competition. And if by some chance real innovation becomes a requirement, Microsoft may in fact be able to achieve this. We don't know - they haven't had to try. But Microsoft R&D has some good people, and it may be that if Microsoft's survival suddenly depends on an innovate product rather than an essentially-unchanging-but-incrementally-improving one they will be able to do it.
Microsoft is here to stay, in all cases where users choose stability/familiarity over performance. There are, of course, areas of society where the choice will go the other way, where people are willing to put in the extra time and effort to learn something out of the ordinary. But those will always be the exceptions, and they will only serve as a minor annoyance for Microsoft. Linux only gets so much press because of the novelty of it's pricetag and philosophy. There is no such thing as an "up and coming" Microsoft competitor. Apple produces an infinitely better product, and their market share is fairly fixed. Linux is decimating commercial Unix, but Unix users are both more familiar with the basic principles of the system and (of sheer necessity) more adaptable.
Linux will have successes - it will displace Windows in some cases, maybe even a lot of them. But most of the market share is businesses, and businesses will avoid risks that are not integral to their core business if they can. Microsoft is The Standard (de facto) and that fact is unlikely to change for the forseeable future.
There is a rather vocal individual in the comp.lang.lisp group that makes the argument free software is evil, because it makes it impossible to charge enough for software to make a living. To be fair, he feels this way about ANYTHING for free, so while I strongly disagree with him he is consistent. I'd dearly love to hear him and Stallman have an hour long debate, but I doubt it will ever happen.
People seem to think they have some kind of entitlement to profits. People, the world doesn't owe you ANYTHING. Generally speaking, if you can't convince people to pay you money for your work, it's your problem. If part time hobbiest developers can create free tools that are better for the price than your commercial ones, I'd say you need to work harder.
In a true capitalistic system, profits are VERY hard to come by. This is a good thing, because people work hard without sucking in a huge amount of resources, to the betterment of society. Competition sucks, because you never get to rest on your laurels. You have to keep running to stay in place, and frankly that's BY DESIGN. It is very nearly the whole POINT. You have to really produce something people want to get a profit, and you have to keep innovating to keep it. If volunteer efforts can produce a free tool which is good enough, that means you need to step it up a notch to produce something people want to pay you for. After all, you're expecting to be paid, so you should be able to put more time/energy into it.
Seesh. What ever happened to doing something just to make the world a better place, or make other people happy? Now it's price fixing. I feel very sad when I see this kind of thing, because it underlines how little regard we have for the world around us. The world is a cold, empty place when people generously and cheerfully giving you something out of the goodness of their hearts is looked upon as price fixing, and it's enough to make me sick.
The worst part of it is, in many these companies are making a profit over and above what they are paying their employees, and yet somehow this isn't enough. Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.
At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state, and I think the US is doomed when this happens because we don't know how not to be greedy, to appreciate the community around us, and be happy that it is prospering. We are focused on ME,ME,ME, and it can't go on forever. The Earth is finite, and the energy costs of space travel are not economic on the large scales of the global system. We WILL have to face it, and when we do I hope we can remember how to be human beings, and not just profit machines.
I have never noticed a significant speedup just because I was using Gentoo. The reasons I use Gentoo (this is just me, your milage may vary)
a) Debian-esq control of how the system gets put together, or maybe even a little finer control. I like this.
b) Being able to dictate at compile time what features to compile in (pdf in Grace plotting tool anyone?)
c) If my hardware lives through the install, I can be fairly certain I've got a solid system. It took memtest86 hours to find a problem with a ram stick that a gentoo build crapped out on almost immediately.
d) Knowing that my system is self consistent in the sense that everything on the system can be built by the system.
The last is a subtle point, but if the rest of the internet fell off the globe tomorrow in theory (provided I saved my tarballs) I could re-create another Gentoo machine from scratch - no binaries needed except those used to bootstrap stage 1 and a couple special cases like nvidia drivers and acroread. I can reasonably expect that if I need to tweak and recompile something my machine, all by itself on its own resources, is up to the challenge. On a more practical note, I can grab almost any source code from the net and already have all the needed libraries to compile the thing. (Debian I always wound up hunting dev packages - I'm sure there is a setting to install all of them but I never did get around to finding it. I really should have.)
I would be REALLY impressed if this sucker could do a Knoppix style detection of what hardware you have on the system, and recommend which modules this will require in the kernel.
I had waaaay too much fun early on figuring out I hadn't complied some specific drivers for controllers or some such and wondering why my harddisk and CDROM were so slow. Please, please, pretty please have it recommend what to compile into a kernel.
Of course, maybe I should just use the general purpose kernel and stop worrying about it. Hmm... naah!;-)
Those companies do use Linux successfully in a commercial sense (as I said before some business models DO work with open source), but I as an end user don't buy stuff from them much. Other businesses are far more likely to deal with them. Open source software is a viable commercial business product when the potential per copy licensing costs of the software are negligible in the overall cost of what is being purchased.
I see I should have more properly defined my scope - I was looking at this from the point of view of how the free vs. commercial software argument plays out IN MY SPECIFIC CASE. For most of the software I, individually, would look at commercially, the model is indeed pay per copy. Microsoft, Adobe, games, development tools, etc. As a total percentage of all software sold this might indeed be the small end of the wedge, but it is the end that is relevant to my decision making process.
People by Redhat for the support. If they just want the software and not the services that go with it, they use Fedora. (Many do.)
"He is insisting that when you sell it, you do not use the long arm of the law to prevent your customers from using product however they want, including modification & redistribution."
Practically speaking, the first time this happens the chances of your selling it to anyone else approach zero, if you consider the software as the product and not the ability to improve it. In essence, once you have made one sale you have a potentially $0 cost competitor. This is not practical for most commercial software business models. So in that sense, it IS related. Repeat sales to different customers of GPL software is (practically) impossible, so any kind of "software purchase" scheme simply won't work. They might make donations to improve the software, but those are voluntary donations and not sales, and cannot be counted on.
There ARE commercial models which will work with the GPL, but the dominant method today (pay per copy) will fail. And I'm sure you've noticed how flexible big business likes to be about their business models. So De Facto, you are giving away your work after the first sale, and most business folk I think would argue this is unacceptable in the modern commercial software world if you want to sell the software itself as a source of revenue (and not "solutions" or services.)
Maybe I'm still wrong, of course - I consider these issues to be very complex when considered in a real world scenario. You are correct in a technical sense that charging for GPL software is unrelated to the license, but you are incorrect as to the impact of the GPL on the commercial sale of software IN THE REAL WORLD. It WON'T WORK, at least not for most of today's models. And to some people today's way of doing business is very much like a matter of principle, however much I would disagree with that thinking.
Anyway. A moot point really, but I wanted to articulate my thoughts on commercial viability vs GPL.
Heh. Except, in this case, I view Free software as helping me avoid a $$$ risk which is assumed by anyone pirating software - think of the fines you could get hit with if they happen to target you.
I never understood why anyone ever regarded or regards pirated software as free - there is a very high financial risk associated with it if a lawyer gets you in his sights (for whatever reason.) If a lawyer is making it his business to make your life a living hell, the more squeaky clean you are legally the safer you (and your $$$) will be. To my mind this is in fact monetary issue, as well as a freedom one, and I find the two more interconnected than separate.
My guess would be their message will be exactly the same (or Linus's will be, given he controls the project). Bitkeeper nonwithstanding, their argument will still be use the best tool for the job. They might be more inclined to think about the potential costs of non-Free software, but their overall philosophy is unlikely to make a significant change.
It's sad, but most people nowadays (including me, for that matter) will take the practical way over the idealistic way. RMS gets pissed (if I read this right) because people by and large steadfastly refuse to be idealists. I would be curious to ask him what his take would be on someone who thinks it is idealistic to promote capitalism and the economy (and hence a better standard of living, at least in their minds) by refusing to give anything away free. My guess is he would say they are dead wrong, tragically wrong, or even criminally wrong, but I'll bet he would find that person less exasperating on some level because they were acting on principle rather than expedience.
I don't say I agree with RMS - in fact in general I tend to be rather pragmatic about this sort of thing. But my pragmatic thinking basically boil down to:
1) We live in a highly litigious society 2) I have a finite amount of money 3) Commercial software is expensive for my income 4) Most of my software use is not the kind of use where the software Must Work. A few bugs or missing features aren't the end of the world. 5) Should I happen to create something with software I want to sell commercially (let's say a book) I don't want to have to worry about Microsoft coming after me for improper licensing and demanding a chunk of royalties or something equally fun. 6) Any kind of legal action, even that with little to no merit, is enough to cause major headaches. 7) Hence, in balance, there is no reason for me to either pay $$$ for commercial software or pirate it when there are workable, free alternatives.
This has some exceptions - I use Acrobat Reader for example, which is only free as in beer but allows me to fill out tax forms. But in general I prefer tools with licenses that cost no money, demand no information, don't expire, and at least in theory allow me and/or anyone to fix them when they break. That's what meets my needs.
Maybe, in some sense, it could be argued that ideals ARE practical, because the long term consequences of going without them don't tend to be good.
Do you know if they offer print copies for sale? Those would be really neat to flip through, although I suppose it would be a lot of volumes.
Advanced graphics programs?
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Window manager effects and all are nice, but the part I find interesting is whether Gimp et. al. will be able to more easily impliment things like layers and transparency now. Anybody know how that would work?
I have used kpdf, gpdf, and xpdf as well - they work OK, but in my experience Acrobat Reader is still the goto client if you have a pdf the others can't read or for advanced features. The others are steadily improving, and I think will get there in time, but basically until kpdf/gpdf/xpdf start opening pdf documents as well as or better than Acrobat for all available features, I fear Acrobat Reader will still be around.
Incidently, 7.0 seems to be a huge leap from version 5. Works much better with modern Linux software, despite a few lingering quirks. I had not heard of any pressure or consideration on the part of Adobe to release the code to Reader, but that would seriously rock if they did.
I note with some amusement that the Linux version of Acrobat Reader still has the purchase Adobe Acrobat link in the menus, despite a version not being available on Linux.
As the technology matures, it will become easier and easier to do virtually anything with nanotech. So, eventually, it will be abused. (Which I assume is what people are worried about.)
The question we SHOULD be asking is how can we develop nanotechnology in such a way as to make sure we can stop dangerous/malicious applications. Because they WILL happen. There are just too many people on this planet for any kind of control to succeed in general on such matters. I suspect in the end nanotechnology will become another kind of virus, and it will take something like nanoengineered biological defenses to stop them, which will have to be continually upgraded.
"'Interstellar space' is an arbitrary distinction. What, it crosses this boundary and all of a sudden the state of the universe massively changes? For all practical purposes, there is no comparatively valuable information that can be obtained beyond the volumes of information it's already given us from it's primary mission."
For all we know, maybe it DOES change. Who's to say? If it did it would have MASSIVE implications for astronomy. If it doesn't, then we have experimentally confirmed that assumption. It's a very rare chance to do this experiment. We've got them out there. Let's check! How many other chances will we get in our lifetimes?
OK, who else thought
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that this might be a story written using the whitespace programming language?
"It was bad enough to read fanzines and fan stories in the 80's - now we have to endure bad storytelling and childish phantasies onscreen."
No, you don't. Don't read/watch them. Problem solved.
"A typewriter doesn't make you an author, a videocam not a Steven Spielberg and a piece of CGI software..."
But if they're having fun, and Lucasfilms isn't upset about it, what's the big deal? It's their time and money. People don't have to be authors to have fun writing, or Steven Spielberg to have fun making a movie. Sure the results will suck, but so what? It's not life or death. It's not even to make money. It's to have fun. I cringe at most of them too, but every once in a while I see one or two I want to take a look at (and occasionally end up liking), which is all I'm concerned about. $DEITY knows enough commercial TV is almost as bad, and they get paid for it.
I'd say Broken Allegiance http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/shortfilms/broken allegiance/ has to be my favorite fan film. Sure the acting isn't top notch, but after all it's a fan film and it's way better than average. Their villian is awesome and a lot of small touches really work well. The design for the villian's ship - amazing. Plus the blooper reel had me laughing almost the whole way through.
I guess my tastes run away from spoofs toward "serious" movies, and in general most fan films don't have the resources to pull this off. I keep hoping Tydirium works out though: http://www.tydirium.tv/
I've often thought that an organized way of providing legal, free content to people would really help such things take off. irate radio is one such example, and although their client and featureset need an overhaul I use and appreciate it. It has the potential to evolve into something that could challenge commercial content distribution methods successfully, although I don't know if that is really their goal.
Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap, and don't know where to look for it. A search portal like Yahoo, which has an enormous weight of credibility as a "legit" internet entity, could really add some luster to the idea of free, community oriented licenses and copyright. If google did something like this, they could even link to commercial alternatives in the ads section:-)
The thing is, I don't know how you cope with people who would want to poison the well, so to speak - put false identification information on their site, try to trick you into using something and then demanding $$, and all the other tricks that the world's ample supply of scum would think up. There almost needs to be some community "ranking" method, like site moderation, to keep those losers out. But then the incentive to abuse THAT system becomes high. Sigh.
Oh well. It's a nice idea, and may even stand a chance of working reasonably well. We'll just have to see what happens.
Because Law Is Everything. That, in a nutshell, is why there is so much fuss. Features mean absolutely nothing if you are sued, your work becomes illegal, it gets taken away from you, etc.
The Law has the power to enforce stuff in a way no other institution does. It is essentially the entire collective national community saying "you can't do this." That has enough power to stop anything people aren't willing to go to jail for. See Napster.
This is why there is always talk about licenses on open source projects - people want to be clear what they can and can't do so the lawyers simply CANNOT poke their noses in and be jerks at some point in the future. The right license is a guarantee of living beyond individual developers, projects, even companies if need be. That's IMPORTANT, just as important as the code itself, so that's why we react the way we do. It MATTERS. And when Microsoft (opensource enemy #1) is involved we get extremely wary. We haven't seen anything like their full legal firepower yet, and we don't want to give them a chance to use it.
After all, from the point of view of downloaders, if the original Napster wasn't too good to quash I don't know what would be.
Fundamentally, people want free stuff and the content providers will do what they can/what it takes to stop them. Therefore, the more successfull something is (what I think most users would term "good") the more likely it is to be quashed.
I wasn't even AWARE BitTorrent was being used for illegal stuff - I thought of it primarily as an anti-slashdot effect tool. (Hint, hint to the editors, by the way.)
The real solution to this is to have people start putting up good, free music and videos. If that can be done, then the RIAA/MPAA can and should die as a result. If the open model doesn't function for those things, then stop being a leech and pay people who are selling what you want.
I still hold out hope for something like iRate http://irate.sourceforge.net/, which given a decent client and critical mass could ignite a revolution of its own. If the freebies get organized, get their own critics and fan bases, and word of mouth gets out that something good can be had for free that's all it will take. But content creation is NOT easy, at least not for software geeks. Let's get busy, clone some high end multimedia apps, and let those with artistic talent do their thing.
I've seen this debate before, and the part I always wonder is "why not both?" At least, when you are starting from scratch. You can verify your components do what they are supposed to and then check for bizarre situations no one thought of with random testing (sometimes you will expose obscure bugs in the software stack itself, not just your code - but remember no code stands alone, and all crashes look the same to the end user no matter what the root cause.)
Particularly on large, old projects one has inherited, random testing can really help because you have absolutely no clue what you are looking for. There are so many discrete components to the system that could be tested it would be the work of ten years to set it up, so you are forced to (as much as possible) assume that things work and find the cases where they don't. Then, you gradually begin to fix things over the long haul while fighting fires.
GCL and the other free Lisp implimentations are a good example of testing - we have a very dedicated individual who has been creating tests of ANSI behavior from the spec and testing a wide variety of implimentations - indeed many non-standard behaviors have been corrected because of these tests. He has also created a "random tester", which I like to call "the Two Year Old Test." It is a code generator which generates random but legally valid Lisp code and throws it at the implimentation. It has exposed some very obscure bugs in GCL which probably would have otherwise hidden for years. Anybody who has been around small kids knows they will introduce you to all sorts of new failure modes in just about everything you own, so I always think the Two Year Old Test should be administered as a final check whenever possible. (Granted this works particularly well for compilers.) Newbies are very useful for this kind of stuff as well, because they will use the software in ways you never thought to.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft will not be "defeated" in the sense of vanishing from the field as a software company. Ever. They have achieved what is probably the most pervasive and addictive vendor lock-in situation in all of human history. An incredible amount of the information critical to maintaining our society at its current level is stored on, written for, and run by Windows computers.
g one they will be able to do it.
Remember, users will now INSIST on Windows, because they want it/know it/are used to it. This is even better than making it a legal requirement to use Windows or threatening people (by whatever means) to use Windows or else. A vast number of addicts (the situation is surprisingly analogous) to Windows will DEMAND it in spite of anything else, becasue for them it makes life easier.
What might happen is Microsoft will lower their prices and improve their quality to prevent the beginnings of a migration to another product - if they make their customers unhappy (i.e. take away what they're plugged in to) something might happen. But Microsoft will never do this. Their tendancy towards not changing anything is actually a bonus for most people, who want to learn a computer once and never have it do anything unexpected for the rest of their lives. (Please note that although I find this frustrating, it is neither surprising or blameworthy - I don't want to relearn how to drive or perform basic car maintainance every few years.) Competition does not produce products like that, since change is integral to competition. And if by some chance real innovation becomes a requirement, Microsoft may in fact be able to achieve this. We don't know - they haven't had to try. But Microsoft R&D has some good people, and it may be that if Microsoft's survival suddenly depends on an innovate product rather than an essentially-unchanging-but-incrementally-improvin
Microsoft is here to stay, in all cases where users choose stability/familiarity over performance. There are, of course, areas of society where the choice will go the other way, where people are willing to put in the extra time and effort to learn something out of the ordinary. But those will always be the exceptions, and they will only serve as a minor annoyance for Microsoft. Linux only gets so much press because of the novelty of it's pricetag and philosophy. There is no such thing as an "up and coming" Microsoft competitor. Apple produces an infinitely better product, and their market share is fairly fixed. Linux is decimating commercial Unix, but Unix users are both more familiar with the basic principles of the system and (of sheer necessity) more adaptable.
Linux will have successes - it will displace Windows in some cases, maybe even a lot of them. But most of the market share is businesses, and businesses will avoid risks that are not integral to their core business if they can. Microsoft is The Standard (de facto) and that fact is unlikely to change for the forseeable future.
someone in the slashdot editors lair made a bet that they could post a story where every single comment except the first would get a "redundant" mod?
Just so I qualify -
Microsoft+Ford = can't crash??
Why did "and the Titanic is unsinkable" just go through my head?
There is a rather vocal individual in the comp.lang.lisp group that makes the argument free software is evil, because it makes it impossible to charge enough for software to make a living. To be fair, he feels this way about ANYTHING for free, so while I strongly disagree with him he is consistent. I'd dearly love to hear him and Stallman have an hour long debate, but I doubt it will ever happen.
People seem to think they have some kind of entitlement to profits. People, the world doesn't owe you ANYTHING. Generally speaking, if you can't convince people to pay you money for your work, it's your problem. If part time hobbiest developers can create free tools that are better for the price than your commercial ones, I'd say you need to work harder.
In a true capitalistic system, profits are VERY hard to come by. This is a good thing, because people work hard without sucking in a huge amount of resources, to the betterment of society. Competition sucks, because you never get to rest on your laurels. You have to keep running to stay in place, and frankly that's BY DESIGN. It is very nearly the whole POINT. You have to really produce something people want to get a profit, and you have to keep innovating to keep it. If volunteer efforts can produce a free tool which is good enough, that means you need to step it up a notch to produce something people want to pay you for. After all, you're expecting to be paid, so you should be able to put more time/energy into it.
Seesh. What ever happened to doing something just to make the world a better place, or make other people happy? Now it's price fixing. I feel very sad when I see this kind of thing, because it underlines how little regard we have for the world around us. The world is a cold, empty place when people generously and cheerfully giving you something out of the goodness of their hearts is looked upon as price fixing, and it's enough to make me sick.
The worst part of it is, in many these companies are making a profit over and above what they are paying their employees, and yet somehow this isn't enough. Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.
At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state, and I think the US is doomed when this happens because we don't know how not to be greedy, to appreciate the community around us, and be happy that it is prospering. We are focused on ME,ME,ME, and it can't go on forever. The Earth is finite, and the energy costs of space travel are not economic on the large scales of the global system. We WILL have to face it, and when we do I hope we can remember how to be human beings, and not just profit machines.
I have never noticed a significant speedup just because I was using Gentoo. The reasons I use Gentoo (this is just me, your milage may vary)
a) Debian-esq control of how the system gets put together, or maybe even a little finer control. I like this.
b) Being able to dictate at compile time what features to compile in (pdf in Grace plotting tool anyone?)
c) If my hardware lives through the install, I can be fairly certain I've got a solid system. It took memtest86 hours to find a problem with a ram stick that a gentoo build crapped out on almost immediately.
d) Knowing that my system is self consistent in the sense that everything on the system can be built by the system.
The last is a subtle point, but if the rest of the internet fell off the globe tomorrow in theory (provided I saved my tarballs) I could re-create another Gentoo machine from scratch - no binaries needed except those used to bootstrap stage 1 and a couple special cases like nvidia drivers and acroread. I can reasonably expect that if I need to tweak and recompile something my machine, all by itself on its own resources, is up to the challenge. On a more practical note, I can grab almost any source code from the net and already have all the needed libraries to compile the thing. (Debian I always wound up hunting dev packages - I'm sure there is a setting to install all of them but I never did get around to finding it. I really should have.)
I would be REALLY impressed if this sucker could do a Knoppix style detection of what hardware you have on the system, and recommend which modules this will require in the kernel.
;-)
I had waaaay too much fun early on figuring out I hadn't complied some specific drivers for controllers or some such and wondering why my harddisk and CDROM were so slow. Please, please, pretty please have it recommend what to compile into a kernel.
Of course, maybe I should just use the general purpose kernel and stop worrying about it. Hmm... naah!
If we can get his webserver to produce more fusion!
I can see it now - "Slashdot - powering the world through mass action browsing."
Ig Nobel Prize!
Those companies do use Linux successfully in a commercial sense (as I said before some business models DO work with open source), but I as an end user don't buy stuff from them much. Other businesses are far more likely to deal with them. Open source software is a viable commercial business product when the potential per copy licensing costs of the software are negligible in the overall cost of what is being purchased.
I see I should have more properly defined my scope - I was looking at this from the point of view of how the free vs. commercial software argument plays out IN MY SPECIFIC CASE. For most of the software I, individually, would look at commercially, the model is indeed pay per copy. Microsoft, Adobe, games, development tools, etc. As a total percentage of all software sold this might indeed be the small end of the wedge, but it is the end that is relevant to my decision making process.
People by Redhat for the support. If they just want the software and not the services that go with it, they use Fedora. (Many do.)
"He is insisting that when you sell it, you do not use the long arm of the law to prevent your customers from using product however they want, including modification & redistribution."
Practically speaking, the first time this happens the chances of your selling it to anyone else approach zero, if you consider the software as the product and not the ability to improve it. In essence, once you have made one sale you have a potentially $0 cost competitor. This is not practical for most commercial software business models. So in that sense, it IS related. Repeat sales to different customers of GPL software is (practically) impossible, so any kind of "software purchase" scheme simply won't work. They might make donations to improve the software, but those are voluntary donations and not sales, and cannot be counted on.
There ARE commercial models which will work with the GPL, but the dominant method today (pay per copy) will fail. And I'm sure you've noticed how flexible big business likes to be about their business models. So De Facto, you are giving away your work after the first sale, and most business folk I think would argue this is unacceptable in the modern commercial software world if you want to sell the software itself as a source of revenue (and not "solutions" or services.)
Maybe I'm still wrong, of course - I consider these issues to be very complex when considered in a real world scenario. You are correct in a technical sense that charging for GPL software is unrelated to the license, but you are incorrect as to the impact of the GPL on the commercial sale of software IN THE REAL WORLD. It WON'T WORK, at least not for most of today's models. And to some people today's way of doing business is very much like a matter of principle, however much I would disagree with that thinking.
Anyway. A moot point really, but I wanted to articulate my thoughts on commercial viability vs GPL.
Heh. Except, in this case, I view Free software as helping me avoid a $$$ risk which is assumed by anyone pirating software - think of the fines you could get hit with if they happen to target you.
;-)
I never understood why anyone ever regarded or regards pirated software as free - there is a very high financial risk associated with it if a lawyer gets you in his sights (for whatever reason.) If a lawyer is making it his business to make your life a living hell, the more squeaky clean you are legally the safer you (and your $$$) will be. To my mind this is in fact monetary issue, as well as a freedom one, and I find the two more interconnected than separate.
Oh man, now he's REALLY gonna be pissed at me
My guess would be their message will be exactly the same (or Linus's will be, given he controls the project). Bitkeeper nonwithstanding, their argument will still be use the best tool for the job. They might be more inclined to think about the potential costs of non-Free software, but their overall philosophy is unlikely to make a significant change.
It's sad, but most people nowadays (including me, for that matter) will take the practical way over the idealistic way. RMS gets pissed (if I read this right) because people by and large steadfastly refuse to be idealists. I would be curious to ask him what his take would be on someone who thinks it is idealistic to promote capitalism and the economy (and hence a better standard of living, at least in their minds) by refusing to give anything away free. My guess is he would say they are dead wrong, tragically wrong, or even criminally wrong, but I'll bet he would find that person less exasperating on some level because they were acting on principle rather than expedience.
I don't say I agree with RMS - in fact in general I tend to be rather pragmatic about this sort of thing. But my pragmatic thinking basically boil down to:
1) We live in a highly litigious society
2) I have a finite amount of money
3) Commercial software is expensive for my income
4) Most of my software use is not the kind of use where the software Must Work. A few bugs or missing features aren't the end of the world.
5) Should I happen to create something with software I want to sell commercially (let's say a book) I don't want to have to worry about Microsoft coming after me for improper licensing and demanding a chunk of royalties or something equally fun.
6) Any kind of legal action, even that with little to no merit, is enough to cause major headaches.
7) Hence, in balance, there is no reason for me to either pay $$$ for commercial software or pirate it when there are workable, free alternatives.
This has some exceptions - I use Acrobat Reader for example, which is only free as in beer but allows me to fill out tax forms. But in general I prefer tools with licenses that cost no money, demand no information, don't expire, and at least in theory allow me and/or anyone to fix them when they break. That's what meets my needs.
Maybe, in some sense, it could be argued that ideals ARE practical, because the long term consequences of going without them don't tend to be good.
Do you know if they offer print copies for sale? Those would be really neat to flip through, although I suppose it would be a lot of volumes.
Window manager effects and all are nice, but the part I find interesting is whether Gimp et. al. will be able to more easily impliment things like layers and transparency now. Anybody know how that would work?
I have used kpdf, gpdf, and xpdf as well - they work OK, but in my experience Acrobat Reader is still the goto client if you have a pdf the others can't read or for advanced features. The others are steadily improving, and I think will get there in time, but basically until kpdf/gpdf/xpdf start opening pdf documents as well as or better than Acrobat for all available features, I fear Acrobat Reader will still be around.
Incidently, 7.0 seems to be a huge leap from version 5. Works much better with modern Linux software, despite a few lingering quirks. I had not heard of any pressure or consideration on the part of Adobe to release the code to Reader, but that would seriously rock if they did.
I note with some amusement that the Linux version of Acrobat Reader still has the purchase Adobe Acrobat link in the menus, despite a version not being available on Linux.
As the technology matures, it will become easier and easier to do virtually anything with nanotech. So, eventually, it will be abused. (Which I assume is what people are worried about.)
The question we SHOULD be asking is how can we develop nanotechnology in such a way as to make sure we can stop dangerous/malicious applications. Because they WILL happen. There are just too many people on this planet for any kind of control to succeed in general on such matters. I suspect in the end nanotechnology will become another kind of virus, and it will take something like nanoengineered biological defenses to stop them, which will have to be continually upgraded.
"'Interstellar space' is an arbitrary distinction. What, it crosses this boundary and all of a sudden the state of the universe massively changes? For all practical purposes, there is no comparatively valuable information that can be obtained beyond the volumes of information it's already given us from it's primary mission."
For all we know, maybe it DOES change. Who's to say? If it did it would have MASSIVE implications for astronomy. If it doesn't, then we have experimentally confirmed that assumption. It's a very rare chance to do this experiment. We've got them out there. Let's check! How many other chances will we get in our lifetimes?
that this might be a story written using the whitespace programming language?
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/index.php
how many of the conservative right would like to see a serious version of this made both the de facto standard and the written law in the US?
We may be laughing at this one right up until a serious version of it hits Congress.
"It was bad enough to read fanzines and fan stories in the 80's - now we have to endure bad storytelling and childish phantasies onscreen."
..."
No, you don't. Don't read/watch them. Problem solved.
"A typewriter doesn't make you an author, a videocam not a Steven Spielberg and a piece of CGI software
But if they're having fun, and Lucasfilms isn't upset about it, what's the big deal? It's their time and money. People don't have to be authors to have fun writing, or Steven Spielberg to have fun making a movie. Sure the results will suck, but so what? It's not life or death. It's not even to make money. It's to have fun. I cringe at most of them too, but every once in a while I see one or two I want to take a look at (and occasionally end up liking), which is all I'm concerned about. $DEITY knows enough commercial TV is almost as bad, and they get paid for it.
I'd say Broken Allegiance http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/shortfilms/broken allegiance/ has to be my favorite fan film. Sure the acting isn't top notch, but after all it's a fan film and it's way better than average. Their villian is awesome and a lot of small touches really work well. The design for the villian's ship - amazing. Plus the blooper reel had me laughing almost the whole way through.
I guess my tastes run away from spoofs toward "serious" movies, and in general most fan films don't have the resources to pull this off. I keep hoping Tydirium works out though: http://www.tydirium.tv/
I've often thought that an organized way of providing legal, free content to people would really help such things take off. irate radio is one such example, and although their client and featureset need an overhaul I use and appreciate it. It has the potential to evolve into something that could challenge commercial content distribution methods successfully, although I don't know if that is really their goal.
:-)
Part of the problem with "free" stuff that is truly free is that people don't know about it, assume by default it must be crap, and don't know where to look for it. A search portal like Yahoo, which has an enormous weight of credibility as a "legit" internet entity, could really add some luster to the idea of free, community oriented licenses and copyright. If google did something like this, they could even link to commercial alternatives in the ads section
The thing is, I don't know how you cope with people who would want to poison the well, so to speak - put false identification information on their site, try to trick you into using something and then demanding $$, and all the other tricks that the world's ample supply of scum would think up. There almost needs to be some community "ranking" method, like site moderation, to keep those losers out. But then the incentive to abuse THAT system becomes high. Sigh.
Oh well. It's a nice idea, and may even stand a chance of working reasonably well. We'll just have to see what happens.
Because Law Is Everything. That, in a nutshell, is why there is so much fuss. Features mean absolutely nothing if you are sued, your work becomes illegal, it gets taken away from you, etc.
The Law has the power to enforce stuff in a way no other institution does. It is essentially the entire collective national community saying "you can't do this." That has enough power to stop anything people aren't willing to go to jail for. See Napster.
This is why there is always talk about licenses on open source projects - people want to be clear what they can and can't do so the lawyers simply CANNOT poke their noses in and be jerks at some point in the future. The right license is a guarantee of living beyond individual developers, projects, even companies if need be. That's IMPORTANT, just as important as the code itself, so that's why we react the way we do. It MATTERS. And when Microsoft (opensource enemy #1) is involved we get extremely wary. We haven't seen anything like their full legal firepower yet, and we don't want to give them a chance to use it.
After all, from the point of view of downloaders, if the original Napster wasn't too good to quash I don't know what would be.
Fundamentally, people want free stuff and the content providers will do what they can/what it takes to stop them. Therefore, the more successfull something is (what I think most users would term "good") the more likely it is to be quashed.
I wasn't even AWARE BitTorrent was being used for illegal stuff - I thought of it primarily as an anti-slashdot effect tool. (Hint, hint to the editors, by the way.)
The real solution to this is to have people start putting up good, free music and videos. If that can be done, then the RIAA/MPAA can and should die as a result. If the open model doesn't function for those things, then stop being a leech and pay people who are selling what you want.
I still hold out hope for something like iRate http://irate.sourceforge.net/, which given a decent client and critical mass could ignite a revolution of its own. If the freebies get organized, get their own critics and fan bases, and word of mouth gets out that something good can be had for free that's all it will take. But content creation is NOT easy, at least not for software geeks. Let's get busy, clone some high end multimedia apps, and let those with artistic talent do their thing.
Security, and stability. Not just "mature" stability and security, but those qualities backed by proof logic.
Security IS a very important quality for software to have. Nowadays, in many cases it can make or break software, as attacks get worse over time.
Yes, normal commercial economics would fail. Hence, open source is the place to look, where economics are not the limiting factor.
I've seen this debate before, and the part I always wonder is "why not both?" At least, when you are starting from scratch. You can verify your components do what they are supposed to and then check for bizarre situations no one thought of with random testing (sometimes you will expose obscure bugs in the software stack itself, not just your code - but remember no code stands alone, and all crashes look the same to the end user no matter what the root cause.)
Particularly on large, old projects one has inherited, random testing can really help because you have absolutely no clue what you are looking for. There are so many discrete components to the system that could be tested it would be the work of ten years to set it up, so you are forced to (as much as possible) assume that things work and find the cases where they don't. Then, you gradually begin to fix things over the long haul while fighting fires.
GCL and the other free Lisp implimentations are a good example of testing - we have a very dedicated individual who has been creating tests of ANSI behavior from the spec and testing a wide variety of implimentations - indeed many non-standard behaviors have been corrected because of these tests. He has also created a "random tester", which I like to call "the Two Year Old Test." It is a code generator which generates random but legally valid Lisp code and throws it at the implimentation. It has exposed some very obscure bugs in GCL which probably would have otherwise hidden for years. Anybody who has been around small kids knows they will introduce you to all sorts of new failure modes in just about everything you own, so I always think the Two Year Old Test should be administered as a final check whenever possible. (Granted this works particularly well for compilers.) Newbies are very useful for this kind of stuff as well, because they will use the software in ways you never thought to.