One of the best things about my company (and probably the #1 reason I'm still with them) is that they let me release some of my code as open source. This has several nice benefits:
I get to use the same code for my own 'side projects', and will get to use it even after I leave the company. I'll never have to rewrite it!:^)
Having the public see my code encourages me to keep it in tip-top shape, as a matter of pride
The code now functions as a public resume for my skills (better than a resume, because it is actual proof, not just my say-so)
Other people help me debug:^)
I realize this post mostly just reiterates the parent post, but from the opposite directions.... but I have to say, I'm very happy with the situation.
Nope it's because they really are dealing with a service that facilitates piracy, even if it was not their goal.
Not true at all. "Doing nothing to prevent piracy" is not the same thing as "facilitating piracy". Facilitating piracy implies an intentional act (e.g. offering warez'd binaries for download). Simply failing to do key checking is not.
Shall we make ftp illegal now because it does no checking to make sure that the files you transfer aren't copy protected? Most of the Internet would be a violation of the DMCA under your criteria. (hell, maybe it is... in which case either the DMCA goes or the Internet goes... they can't co-exist)
It can ultimately harm the quality of their product.
What in the world does that have to do with copyrights, the subject that the DMCA is (ostensibly) supposed to address? Oh yeah, I forgot, the DMCA is about letting companies do whatever the hell they want at the expense of the public.
What we need is a system that rips off neither the musicians nor the fans, not one that promotes illegal activity...
Well, maybe... or perhaps we need to redefine what "ripping off" means wrt "intellectual property".
I assert that the advent of cheap PCs on the the Internet changes what "natural rights" people ought to have. I believe that rights can and sometimes should change in response to changes in technology -- the Internet's great gift to humanity is that it makes data sharing as easy as speaking; that advantage outweighs the content producer's disadvantage of having to find a new business model to adapt.
Specifically, people ought to be able to copy any data they want at any time, as long as they are not benefitting commercially from that copying. As for the artists, I think systems like OpenCulture or FairTunes may be the best answer to their problems.
... then stop voting for it. The sooner people stop voting for the Demopublican Party, the sooner we can wrest control of our country/airwaves/lives back from corporations.
As for people who argue that voting for a 3rd party is 'throwing your vote away', I submit that not voting for a 3rd party is throwing your vote away, since it doesn't much matter whether you vote democratic or republican anymore; either way you are just voting for corporate control of government.
As for which 3rd party to vote for, I prefer the Green party (natch) because they don't accept contributions from corporations, but there are probably other good 3rd parties out there as well. Voting for any of them will at least signal your discontent with the status quo, and maybe the demos/repubs will take notice and clean up their act (well.... could happen, anyway)
Based on observing Be's behaviour over the last 2-3 years, I'd say they have three main goals in mind: (1) get money, (2) get money, and (3) get money. All motivations other than greed flew out of Be's office windows the day they went public.
Heaven forbid a company not wanting to give free advertisement to it's competitors.
Microsoft wasn't asked to give advertising to anyone. Rather, they went out of their way to prevent other companies (Dell, Hitachi, etc) from advertising as well, by leveraging their monopoly to intimidate them.
Nothing prevented the OEM's from creating a bootloader menu so that the user could select which OS they wanted
Uh, did you read the article? That's exactly what Microsoft did.
That's not a gun. That's a mutual agreement between two consenting private parties. For example, there is nothing forcing OEM's to deal with Microsoft at all. They only do so because it's in their self-interest.
No, they do it because if they didn't do it, they would be out of the PC OEM business, because Windows has a monopoly on the PC desktop market.
Silly example: if I was the only person on earth who could provide you with food, you would be free to "not deal with me at all", by starving, right? So therefore any contract I asked you to sign, no matter how draconian, would be a "mutual agreement between two consenting parties"?
No, it's a gun to the head, and anyone who tells you otherwise hadn't thought the situation through.
Yeah, but then you wouldn't waste time trying to develop time travel and it would not get discovered in the future. Thus, it would be impossible to bring it back to the past, since it has not been invented in the future.
Yeah, but we'll work around that by calling fork() on the destination universe first, to avoid the causal loop. Subsequent iterations will use a copy-on-write scheme, to avoid the overhead of duplicating the universe in cases where you never actually change the past...
Sure. Microsoft's products (in general) suck, but people are forced to use them anyway (for various reasons). Apple's products (in general) are quite good, and nobody is forced to use them unless they want to.
In that case what's the appeal of MS Windows? It's neither fast nor cheap. Then again, it isn't reliable either.
It doesn't need 'appeal' -- people have no choice. For a large number of applications, its either run Windows, or you don't get to use the application. The fact that it is fairly difficult to buy a name-brand PC clone without Windows pre-installed (and pre-paid-for!) certainly helps as well.
I rather think the analogy does work, if you don't try to extend it further than how it was intended. You need the source code in order to fix bugs (no, binary hacking doesn't count).
My aunt Benita isn't going to track down a Microsoft Word bug and fix it even if she HAD the source.
True. But Aunt Benita might go to www.joescodefixingservice.com and pay Joe $50 to fix the bug for her, if she needed it fixed right away. Without the source code, she (and Joe) don't have that option.
Imagine there was something wrong with your car's engine, and the only place that could fix it was Honda Corporate headquarters in Japan. Wouldn't you like to have the option to go to the local mechanic instead?
Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout.
Apparently you and I are very different people. I get burned out writing software for money. Writing software that is 'cool', on the other hand, is fun.
At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us.
I get something back from my 'cool' software -- reputation and job opportunities. When I want a job with XYZ-Corp, I don't have to make do with just a (mostly unverifiable) resume; I can point them to places on the internet where my code is in use every day, let them download source code of my work and look at it for themselves, and send them the email addresses of my code's happy users. That way they know just what sort of programmer they will get for their money, and I get the job I want.
As for "ruining it for the rest of you", tough shit. I bet you complained about the people in your college classes who set the curve on exams, too.
I dunno, how hard would it be for a disgruntled employee to install a pirated copy of M$ Office on a Linux or *BSD box?
Trivial; he could just do a bit for bit copy of the CDs to a.ISO file on the hard drive. I don't think the BSA would say "oh, it's not executable on that machine, so it's okay" -- instead, they'd say it was a distribution site or somesuch.
Hell, if he were extra clever he'd probably throw some kiddie porn in too.
What you've been dealing with is flaming zealots, not the mainstream creationist; who really only wants to be allowed to believe that God exists and that He created us in His image--without being mocked as lunatics and defectives
I don't understand why it's an either/or choice in the first place. Is God not clever enough to come up with evolution as his mechanism for creating human beings? Perhaps God used evolution as the process by which he created humans in his own image.
Okay, for the sake of the arguement, suppose that.NET's architecture is the technically the best way for Gnome to go. There is still the 'poison pill' issue to think about. Will using Microsoft's technology this way give Microsoft any kind of legal, technical, or competitive power of the Gnome project? Will it allow Microsoft to shut down the Gnome project or marginalize/cripple Gnome in some other sneaky way if they decide Gnome is a problem for them?
Keep in mind that Microsoft has unheard-of amounts of money and lawyers to throw at the problem, and that they have demonstrated time and again that they have no scruples about doing whatever it takes to eliminate their competition.
If I was Miguel, I would tread very, very carefully when considering the adoption of Microsoft's "Open" APIs...
At that point, the ISP can either: [several non-optimal remedies presented]
Or, they could do the right thing, and just reprogram their routers to dynamically bandwidth-limit the 'hogs' whenever there is bandwidth contention. Doing this would avoid pissing off their customers, save them lots of time and money that would have otherwise been spent harrassing their clientele, and solve the hogging problem.
... but oh yeah, they're a cable company. They couldn't come up with a technical solution if you wrapped it around a gold brick and beat them with it.
I *do* want a third-world standard of entertainment. I'd like to see a society where as many people are entertain-ers as entertain-ees. The current situation where a small number of people are paid a lot of money by corporations to entertain the masses means that the masses are by and large exposed only to the types of entertainment that the corporations choose to expose them to. Compare this to a potential future where you have your choice of millions of disparate amateur sources of entertainment, and I think you'll agree that even the "500 channels" dream of digital cable looks pretty poor in comparison.
Just being able to tell the computer what channel to record and when isn't enough. Call me when I can tell it to record "X" no matter what time and what channel it comes on.
Agreed. How long before we see a collectively maintained database of show times, similar to what FreeDB is for CD titles?
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I realize this post mostly just reiterates the parent post, but from the opposite directions.... but I have to say, I'm very happy with the situation.
Not true at all. "Doing nothing to prevent piracy" is not the same thing as "facilitating piracy". Facilitating piracy implies an intentional act (e.g. offering warez'd binaries for download). Simply failing to do key checking is not.
Shall we make ftp illegal now because it does no checking to make sure that the files you transfer aren't copy protected? Most of the Internet would be a violation of the DMCA under your criteria. (hell, maybe it is... in which case either the DMCA goes or the Internet goes... they can't co-exist)
What in the world does that have to do with copyrights, the subject that the DMCA is (ostensibly) supposed to address? Oh yeah, I forgot, the DMCA is about letting companies do whatever the hell they want at the expense of the public.
Well, maybe... or perhaps we need to redefine what "ripping off" means wrt "intellectual property".
I assert that the advent of cheap PCs on the the Internet changes what "natural rights" people ought to have. I believe that rights can and sometimes should change in response to changes in technology -- the Internet's great gift to humanity is that it makes data sharing as easy as speaking; that advantage outweighs the content producer's disadvantage of having to find a new business model to adapt.
Specifically, people ought to be able to copy any data they want at any time, as long as they are not benefitting commercially from that copying. As for the artists, I think systems like OpenCulture or FairTunes may be the best answer to their problems.
This is just the impetus Gnutella, Morpheus, Kazaa, and friends need to add anonymous peer-to-peer streaming support :^)
As for people who argue that voting for a 3rd party is 'throwing your vote away', I submit that not voting for a 3rd party is throwing your vote away, since it doesn't much matter whether you vote democratic or republican anymore; either way you are just voting for corporate control of government.
As for which 3rd party to vote for, I prefer the Green party (natch) because they don't accept contributions from corporations, but there are probably other good 3rd parties out there as well. Voting for any of them will at least signal your discontent with the status quo, and maybe the demos/repubs will take notice and clean up their act (well.... could happen, anyway)
Based on observing Be's behaviour over the last 2-3 years, I'd say they have three main goals in mind: (1) get money, (2) get money, and (3) get money. All motivations other than greed flew out of Be's office windows the day they went public.
Microsoft wasn't asked to give advertising to anyone. Rather, they went out of their way to prevent other companies (Dell, Hitachi, etc) from advertising as well, by leveraging their monopoly to intimidate them.
Nothing prevented the OEM's from creating a bootloader menu so that the user could select which OS they wanted
Uh, did you read the article? That's exactly what Microsoft did.
No, they do it because if they didn't do it, they would be out of the PC OEM business, because Windows has a monopoly on the PC desktop market.
Silly example: if I was the only person on earth who could provide you with food, you would be free to "not deal with me at all", by starving, right? So therefore any contract I asked you to sign, no matter how draconian, would be a "mutual agreement between two consenting parties"?
No, it's a gun to the head, and anyone who tells you otherwise hadn't thought the situation through.
Or just send them some money and a nice thank you note. (see sig)
Yeah, but we'll work around that by calling fork() on the destination universe first, to avoid the causal loop. Subsequent iterations will use a copy-on-write scheme, to avoid the overhead of duplicating the universe in cases where you never actually change the past...
Sure. Microsoft's products (in general) suck, but people are forced to use them anyway (for various reasons). Apple's products (in general) are quite good, and nobody is forced to use them unless they want to.
It doesn't need 'appeal' -- people have no choice. For a large number of applications, its either run Windows, or you don't get to use the application. The fact that it is fairly difficult to buy a name-brand PC clone without Windows pre-installed (and pre-paid-for!) certainly helps as well.
Maybe start with just a single computer. Once that seems to be working flawlessly your manager will see the wisdom of installing 20-25.
I rather think the analogy does work, if you don't try to extend it further than how it was intended. You need the source code in order to fix bugs (no, binary hacking doesn't count).
Care to back this up, say with some examples of projects where large numbers of people swarmed over the code and still couldn't fix the bugs?
True. But Aunt Benita might go to www.joescodefixingservice.com and pay Joe $50 to fix the bug for her, if she needed it fixed right away. Without the source code, she (and Joe) don't have that option.
Imagine there was something wrong with your car's engine, and the only place that could fix it was Honda Corporate headquarters in Japan. Wouldn't you like to have the option to go to the local mechanic instead?
Apparently you and I are very different people. I get burned out writing software for money. Writing software that is 'cool', on the other hand, is fun.
At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us.
I get something back from my 'cool' software -- reputation and job opportunities. When I want a job with XYZ-Corp, I don't have to make do with just a (mostly unverifiable) resume; I can point them to places on the internet where my code is in use every day, let them download source code of my work and look at it for themselves, and send them the email addresses of my code's happy users. That way they know just what sort of programmer they will get for their money, and I get the job I want.
As for "ruining it for the rest of you", tough shit. I bet you complained about the people in your college classes who set the curve on exams, too.
Trivial; he could just do a bit for bit copy of the CDs to a
Hell, if he were extra clever he'd probably throw some kiddie porn in too.
I don't understand why it's an either/or choice in the first place. Is God not clever enough to come up with evolution as his mechanism for creating human beings? Perhaps God used evolution as the process by which he created humans in his own image.
They can.
Keep in mind that Microsoft has unheard-of amounts of money and lawyers to throw at the problem, and that they have demonstrated time and again that they have no scruples about doing whatever it takes to eliminate their competition.
If I was Miguel, I would tread very, very carefully when considering the adoption of Microsoft's "Open" APIs...
Or, they could do the right thing, and just reprogram their routers to dynamically bandwidth-limit the 'hogs' whenever there is bandwidth contention. Doing this would avoid pissing off their customers, save them lots of time and money that would have otherwise been spent harrassing their clientele, and solve the hogging problem.
... but oh yeah, they're a cable company. They couldn't come up with a technical solution if you wrapped it around a gold brick and beat them with it.
I *do* want a third-world standard of entertainment. I'd like to see a society where as many people are entertain-ers as entertain-ees. The current situation where a small number of people are paid a lot of money by corporations to entertain the masses means that the masses are by and large exposed only to the types of entertainment that the corporations choose to expose them to. Compare this to a potential future where you have your choice of millions of disparate amateur sources of entertainment, and I think you'll agree that even the "500 channels" dream of digital cable looks pretty poor in comparison.
Agreed. How long before we see a collectively maintained database of show times, similar to what FreeDB is for CD titles?