Most likely an employer that requires modifications to be kept proprietary would not consider using a GPL'd version either; so in the GPL case I might be forced to re-write the code from scratch yet again -- not something I'd want to do. (Of course I would probably not want to work for such an employer anyway)
But in any case, the one thing no employer can do is make proprietary the existing open source codebase. Since the code is fairly mature, I think that is the important thing.
Obviously a city can't be self-sustainable if its citizens wants things from outside the city.
It's not about what citizens want, it's about what they need. A city can sustain itself with or without access to neat gadgets from Japan. A city cannot sustain itself without water and food.
It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.
Practical compared to what? Compared to the status quo, where there is plenty of fossil fuel to go around? Probably not. Compared to starving to death because you didn't plan ahead for clearly forseeable problems? Very practical.
Yup, you're a cynic. A realist would know that it's the vested interests (real estate developers, big box retailers, and purblind NIMBYism) that will keep this from happening in the U.S.
The problem is that humans don't always operate in the best faith, another person could take your code make some changes and never release those changes. As such, you may have helped someone make money from your code, and you got no code in return for the favor.
How exactly is that a problem? It sounds to me like the author of the BSD'd code made the world a better place, at no additional cost to himself.
If you want to convince closed-source software developers to consider writing open source software
At my previous job, I wrote a lot of useful (to me, anyway) networking code. That code was all closed-source, owned by the company. So when I moved to my current job, I no longer had (legal) access to any of that code, and had to essentially re-write it all from scratch.
Determined not to make the same mistake twice, I got permission from my current employer to open source the re-written code. Now I am guaranteed access to it for the rest of my life, for any professional or personal project I ever do. I'll never have to re-invent this particular wheel again. (Having other people contribute free bug fixes and new features to the code on a semi-regular basis is the icing on the cake)
So there is a nice, selfish reason to write open sourced code. The code got written on company time, but because anyone can use it for anything, that means I can use it for anything. And since I wrote it, it's designed exactly the way I want it to be.
creating the fuel source(positrons) is the problem. I smell something similar here but I might be wrong
In this case, the important ingredient is deuterium, which can be extracted from sea water. If there is anything that Earth has a lot of, it's sea water. So with any luck you are wrong.
(optional) if you still need to run Windows programs, install VMWare and run them on the virtual machine. If (when?) the virtual machine becomes infested with malware, delete it and create a new one.
In that time every Longhorn user will go back to IE, because there is no way to use longhorn without IE, the usage of Firefox will drop from 40% to 20%.
You really think that 20% of the web-browsing population is going to upgrade to Longhorn within six months? Based on the minimum specs I've seen bandied about for Longhorn, my guess is that most people will only "upgrade" as part of buying a new computer... which means that it will be at least several years before a significant number of people are running Longhorn. After all, the PC market is fairly saturated, and I think most people will just "stick with what works" until their current system dies.
"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code."
It's true, they did find this in many cases. But in each case, it was because both SCO and Linux were (legally) using code from the same third-party source.
So it appears the problem is that Darl didn't recognize that code can come from places other than SCO.
True, if by "morons" you mean "people who want to get work done with their computer, rather than spend hours fighting with it to get it configured properly".
Do you really think the masses will start to READ again? Ask your average person what the last book he/she read and they will more than likely not remember.
Bookstores, magazines, and web pages all seem to be doing quite well... presumably somebody is reading them.
I don't see a big literary use for this, except for folks like/.ers.
I do. With a sheet of this paper and an internet connection, you can read any web site, newspaper, magazine, or book, at full resolution, at any time, anywhere. Think iPod, but for text (with a much better display, of course).
Nevermind all that -- what is really needed is a wifi-enabled electronic newspaper page. Then I can read Slashdot (etc) at the breakfast table without worrying about spilling Cheerios into my laptop.
I understand that they will not catch up with the mileage of smaller cars for the most part, but some things can be done.
Perhaps a simpler solution is what the Europeans do -- tax the $#% out of gasoline, and let the market handle it. The people who are willing to pay $8/gallon for their 2005 Behemoth can do so, and the rest of us will save money by buying more efficient cars.
Of course, getting such a tax hike passed in the current political climate might be a bit difficult...
In an age of worms and malicious programs, you never hear of ATM's getting hacked
Of course, even if ATMs were getting hacked, you wouldn't hear about it... banks try to keep that sort of thing as quiet as possible. Otherwise people might lose their faith in them.
But FWIW, ATMs do get "hacked", just at the hardware level. I'm told the "glue a little extra card-reader to the front of the card slot" gag works pretty well...
If an apple branded PC can run Windows better than a regular PC. Outside of price, why would you want to buy anything else?
I rememember what happened to OS/2, with their vow to make "a better Windows than Windows". They did a good job of making sure that Windows apps ran well under OS/2... so good, in fact, that many app vendors stopped developing the OS/2 versions of their software. (After all, why spend money to develop both a Windows and an OS/2 port of your software, when OS/2 customers can just run the Windows version?) The result: less "native" OS/2 software, and the eventual decline and death of OS/2.
Being a niche player (with great margins) in the computer marketplace is a better prospect than gaining 10% marketshare with paper-thin margins.
But Apple won't be competing on price. Apple computers will still do a couple of things that Dell and HP vanillaboxes can't: run OS/X, and look good doing it.
I assume we are talking about how Bush "lied" about Saddam's weapons capabilities in order to justify going to war. If we are it is important to remember that before the war no one argued that Husein did not have such weapons or was aggressively seeking them
In particular, I was referring to this -- the fact that the US government was deliberately "fixing the facts around the policy", and was pretending to act in good faith when in fact the invasion was a foregone conclusion. This was apparent at the time, to anyone who chose to look, and it is documented fact now.
Whether Iraqis think Bush lied or not should make no difference on what is going on over there right now
I wasn't referring to the Iraqis in particular (although I think the US's legitimacy, or lack thereof, does play a significant role there), but to the world at large. If the US had been able and willing to make an honest, persuasive case for an invasion, they might have been able to gain significant support from other countries (comparable, say, to the amount of support Bush's father received in the first Iraq War). With the full support (and even more importantly, the nation-building expertise) of the UN and other countries, the post-Hussein transition could have gone more smoothly, without the mass looting and chaos, and costly mistakes (like disbanding the Iraqi army) might have been avoided. In this scenario, the insurgency might never have taken root, and the US would be in a position to triumphantly leave a peaceful Iraq today. But because of the Bush Administration's dishonesty and arrogant "we know best and fuck you if you disagree" attitude, they got only half-hearted token support at best. That leaves us in the position we are in today -- alone and paralyzed in an Iraq that is spinning out of control.
It is remarkable how quickly Iraq was able to hold elections and also the degree to which most of Iraq (with a few notable exceptions - Baghdad and Falujah esp) has become a free and functioning society
When that society can function without the presence of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and a billion dollars a week in American tax money propping it up, then I'll be convinced. At the moment it looks like it is on life support.
So, treason is a-okay with you, then? A fine citizen you are. I can imagine you praising Mussolini too... "sure he's a fascist thug, but he makes the trains run on time".
We picked a fight with Iraq because we were looking for WMD, which many of us knew to be a bullshit reason.
Never mind 'many of us', Bush knew it was a bullshit reason. That's why they had to 'fix the facts around the policy', instead of letting the policy fit the facts.
Whatever Bush's true reasons for the Iraq invasion were, WMDs were not one of them. WMDs were a PR trick.
Comparing car acidents or smoking-related (not "caused", no causal link with tobacco has been established, only a correlation with excessive smoking) is to my mind a non sequitur
[...]
The war (and home security measures) has so far prevented another 9/11.
I think your non-sequitur detector is only working sporadically....
Also, it was by no means a rash "berserk" decision
I think "berserk" part of the decision was the method by which they gathered support for the invasion: by deliberately lying to the public. It's the dishonesty, as much as anything else, that has cost the US leadership their moral legitimacy, and led to many of the problems in Iraq today. Few people (in Iraq or elsewhere) feel genuine loyalty to a bald faced liar.
Slashdot Mirror
But in any case, the one thing no employer can do is make proprietary the existing open source codebase. Since the code is fairly mature, I think that is the important thing.
It's not about what citizens want, it's about what they need. A city can sustain itself with or without access to neat gadgets from Japan. A city cannot sustain itself without water and food.
It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.
Practical compared to what? Compared to the status quo, where there is plenty of fossil fuel to go around? Probably not. Compared to starving to death because you didn't plan ahead for clearly forseeable problems? Very practical.
Yup, you're a cynic. A realist would know that it's the vested interests (real estate developers, big box retailers, and purblind NIMBYism) that will keep this from happening in the U.S.
"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." -- Henry Mencken
"GPL - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be benefitting from your code" -- parent post
How exactly is that a problem? It sounds to me like the author of the BSD'd code made the world a better place, at no additional cost to himself.
At my previous job, I wrote a lot of useful (to me, anyway) networking code. That code was all closed-source, owned by the company. So when I moved to my current job, I no longer had (legal) access to any of that code, and had to essentially re-write it all from scratch.
Determined not to make the same mistake twice, I got permission from my current employer to open source the re-written code. Now I am guaranteed access to it for the rest of my life, for any professional or personal project I ever do. I'll never have to re-invent this particular wheel again. (Having other people contribute free bug fixes and new features to the code on a semi-regular basis is the icing on the cake)
So there is a nice, selfish reason to write open sourced code. The code got written on company time, but because anyone can use it for anything, that means I can use it for anything. And since I wrote it, it's designed exactly the way I want it to be.
In this case, the important ingredient is deuterium, which can be extracted from sea water. If there is anything that Earth has a lot of, it's sea water. So with any luck you are wrong.
You really think that 20% of the web-browsing population is going to upgrade to Longhorn within six months? Based on the minimum specs I've seen bandied about for Longhorn, my guess is that most people will only "upgrade" as part of buying a new computer... which means that it will be at least several years before a significant number of people are running Longhorn. After all, the PC market is fairly saturated, and I think most people will just "stick with what works" until their current system dies.
It's easier than that -- just re-link the 'big e' icon so that double clicking on it starts up FireFox. Problem solved, no hassle.
Funny world, isn't it?
Last time I went, they wanted an arm and a leg.
It's true, they did find this in many cases. But in each case, it was because both SCO and Linux were (legally) using code from the same third-party source.
So it appears the problem is that Darl didn't recognize that code can come from places other than SCO.
True, if by "morons" you mean "people who want to get work done with their computer, rather than spend hours fighting with it to get it configured properly".
Bookstores, magazines, and web pages all seem to be doing quite well... presumably somebody is reading them.
I don't see a big literary use for this, except for folks like
I do. With a sheet of this paper and an internet connection, you can read any web site, newspaper, magazine, or book, at full resolution, at any time, anywhere. Think iPod, but for text (with a much better display, of course).
Nevermind all that -- what is really needed is a wifi-enabled electronic newspaper page. Then I can read Slashdot (etc) at the breakfast table without worrying about spilling Cheerios into my laptop.
Perhaps a simpler solution is what the Europeans do -- tax the $#% out of gasoline, and let the market handle it. The people who are willing to pay $8/gallon for their 2005 Behemoth can do so, and the rest of us will save money by buying more efficient cars.
Of course, getting such a tax hike passed in the current political climate might be a bit difficult...
Of course, even if ATMs were getting hacked, you wouldn't hear about it
But FWIW, ATMs do get "hacked", just at the hardware level. I'm told the "glue a little extra card-reader to the front of the card slot" gag works pretty well...
I rememember what happened to OS/2, with their vow to make "a better Windows than Windows". They did a good job of making sure that Windows apps ran well under OS/2... so good, in fact, that many app vendors stopped developing the OS/2 versions of their software. (After all, why spend money to develop both a Windows and an OS/2 port of your software, when OS/2 customers can just run the Windows version?) The result: less "native" OS/2 software, and the eventual decline and death of OS/2.
Apple may want to watch out for that trap...
But Apple won't be competing on price. Apple computers will still do a couple of things that Dell and HP vanillaboxes can't: run OS/X, and look good doing it.
In particular, I was referring to this -- the fact that the US government was deliberately "fixing the facts around the policy", and was pretending to act in good faith when in fact the invasion was a foregone conclusion. This was apparent at the time, to anyone who chose to look, and it is documented fact now.
Whether Iraqis think Bush lied or not should make no difference on what is going on over there right now
I wasn't referring to the Iraqis in particular (although I think the US's legitimacy, or lack thereof, does play a significant role there), but to the world at large. If the US had been able and willing to make an honest, persuasive case for an invasion, they might have been able to gain significant support from other countries (comparable, say, to the amount of support Bush's father received in the first Iraq War). With the full support (and even more importantly, the nation-building expertise) of the UN and other countries, the post-Hussein transition could have gone more smoothly, without the mass looting and chaos, and costly mistakes (like disbanding the Iraqi army) might have been avoided. In this scenario, the insurgency might never have taken root, and the US would be in a position to triumphantly leave a peaceful Iraq today. But because of the Bush Administration's dishonesty and arrogant "we know best and fuck you if you disagree" attitude, they got only half-hearted token support at best. That leaves us in the position we are in today -- alone and paralyzed in an Iraq that is spinning out of control.
It is remarkable how quickly Iraq was able to hold elections and also the degree to which most of Iraq (with a few notable exceptions - Baghdad and Falujah esp) has become a free and functioning society
When that society can function without the presence of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and a billion dollars a week in American tax money propping it up, then I'll be convinced. At the moment it looks like it is on life support.
So, treason is a-okay with you, then? A fine citizen you are. I can imagine you praising Mussolini too... "sure he's a fascist thug, but he makes the trains run on time".
What I recall is that the weapons inspectors were given free reign, but then had to be withdrawn because the US was going to invade anyway.
Too bad for him, that his bluff was convincing
Too bad for us, too -- if our government hadn't been fooled by his bluff, we could have avoided this whole goddamn unnecessary war.
Never mind 'many of us', Bush knew it was a bullshit reason. That's why they had to 'fix the facts around the policy', instead of letting the policy fit the facts.
Whatever Bush's true reasons for the Iraq invasion were, WMDs were not one of them. WMDs were a PR trick.
[...]
The war (and home security measures) has so far prevented another 9/11.
I think your non-sequitur detector is only working sporadically....
Also, it was by no means a rash "berserk" decision
I think "berserk" part of the decision was the method by which they gathered support for the invasion: by deliberately lying to the public. It's the dishonesty, as much as anything else, that has cost the US leadership their moral legitimacy, and led to many of the problems in Iraq today. Few people (in Iraq or elsewhere) feel genuine loyalty to a bald faced liar.