One element which you are forgetting is that the free market depends upon its participants being knowledgeable
This is not necessarily true. Given a large number of unknowledgable participants in a market, to the degree that they cannot tell if they have chosen a poor product even after the fact: some of them will choose poor products, and by luck some will accidentally choose better products.
Those that go out of business will stop buying the poor products, or at least not expand as quickly as the business which made better decisions.
In reality it is somewhat difficult to tell how good your security is until youve been breeched.
It is also true that the market is not really large enough for a fully liquid "Free Market".
The truth is somewhere in the middle, where companies that make it their business to be informed about security will have an advantage over those that do not, hence government intervention will be bad: it will encourage businesses to let an external organization worry about their security.
If you're engineering a bridge, does "freedom of speech" give you the right to design it so that it will collapse when people try to use it?
Well if your bridge collapses then ill take my business to a competing bridge;)
Sarcasm aside, the free market is the best way to sort out things such as optimal value. When there is a free, level, and liquid market, then it is the best choice.
I do believe that there is a sufficiently free market for OS's that no government regulation could help. (It could easily make things worse though). Even Microsoft uses unix to master their CD's, because their own OS is not secure enough to handle such a critical function. (anyone still have that link?)
ONLY in cases where the free market doesnt work (because of practical barriers to competition) (Utilities,Transportation, and "Last mile" Communications) should government oversight be accepted as the lesser evil. And in those area's, the government might restrict your right to produce faulty products.
PS: Free speach applies to source code, but not necesarrily to the commercial sale of source code. In cases where code is simply exchanged with no sale, contract, implicit guarantees, warantees, or other inference that the code is useful for any particular purpose, then no regulation or liability should be able to arise.
There is an ongoing argument that releasing things into the public domain could create liability for the releasor. Since it is fully possible to release things into the public domain anonymously, then the argument can be rendered moot. Just dont say who you are when you post things to freenet.
No matter how you hype it, it's just not legal for a company to own (or sometimes not) a single copy of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office and run it on 10's or 100's of computers. Somebody has to enforce the law or it breaks down. Incedentally, it's the same copyright law that keeps your GPL software free that they are protecting!
Absolutely wrong. You can download a sigle copy of a GPL program, modify the source, and install it an as many computers as you like. You dont have to give your changes to anyone eles either.
ONLY if you want to distribute the modified code outside of your company, then you have to attach the source & license.
The GPL does not cover USE of the software- only redistribution. You can use the software however you like.
Programmers that I've worked with have almost always intuitively known this to be true, and non-programmers (in particular, product managers responsible for scheduling) have almost never understood this.
Those in the "Programming is an Art" camp tend to agree that there is no real way to estimate how long doing something new is going to take.
Those who think of programming as simply bulk engineering, repetetive, boring, or just "coding" tend to be frustrated by this seeming fact. It is almost irreconcilable with normal business practices to know how long a job will take until it is actually done. This makes it extremely difficult to make close-ended contracts, and to predict budgets.
Asking how long a particular software job will take is often equivalent to asking how long a research job will take.
Im sure the scientists would be amused if a suit walked down into R&D and asked them when they would be "done";)
If you really dont want to recieve or promulgate any word documents, set up your mailserver to filter out all.doc attachments and replace them with a small ascii note:
<<< Word.doc 900k -- file removed by VirusScanner 7.0 >>>
Then anyone who uses the server can honestly reply- "I want to get that document from you, but my virus scanner keeps deleting it, if you could send it as plain text or rtf... "
This directive will fit nicely next to the ones for *.exe, *.vbs, etc.
The profession you are in is one which does not have rock solid job-security. They removed the cheif network architect at my work with no advance notice to him or anyone else. (He must have angered some higher-up person)
But the network survived with only the remaining staff. You can bring in new admins, tell them your local topology, and have them be productive on the first day.
If you want more job security, you have to get into a position where the company needs you as much as or more than you need them. A good programmer will find himself in this position easily.(no matter how well he documents his code- programmers will never be interchangeable)
We "donate" money/resources/time/etc not because we want to thank or subsidize free software developers for code they have arleady written. No, the reason is instead that we are greedy for new free software, with more delicious features.
So this really has little to do with charity- its capitalism. And its even more pure than than monetary capitalism- we trade value for value with no intermediary.
I work on satellite IP, and you can get 500ms-700ms ping times with a good system.
Its still more latency than you want with games or even ssh, but for web-surfing its fine. With the added bandwidth (right now I can go 4.5 mbit to a single remote, downstream) you dont even notice the latency.
Thats all fantastic speculation there, save for the fact this is going down IN ENGLAND!!!!!!!
England is probably a worse place for the modchip makers to defend- that country seems to be even more deeply in the clutches of the IR (intellectual restricton) owners than the US.
With lidless eyes guarding an ever increasing proportion of the island, and a health care and national government network beholden to a software tyrant, England is becoming Mordor.
Because OpenBSD's connection state tracker with ipfilter isn't as good as iptables.
Dont get me wrong, I like the syntax of ipf more, but I hate every minute of being behind my firewall when it was openbsd.
I cant comment on ipf or pf, but I do agree that iptables is a huge jump in firewall ability for linux.
I was behind an ipchains firewall, and I had tried every trick in the book, but there was no way to get 2 people an my subnet to play each other over battlenet. Plus my firewall script was a huge mess, hard to maintain. And the automatic IPchains load/restore didnt save port-forward settings properly- so I had to hook in another shell script to kick it off.
With a 2.4 kernel upgrade and iptables, my firewall does more, anyone can play starcraft even vs each other, it restores after power failure automatically with no initscript hacking, and the shell script to kick it off it simple and easy to understand.
But that post was pure. There was no commentary before or after about what it meant, and it was untainted by reflection or further consideration. It just showed what one person knew.
Most of them haven't developed in a decade+, so now they know just enough to be dangerous
Well there not really programmers then are they. Programmers dont quit their hobby because theyre getting paid more to do it. Even a CEO could find time to work on a pet project. (certainly beats the hell out of golf(i think))
The specie you are talking of are an evil worse than the marketroid drones, or even the dread PHBs. You speak of the Pretengineers, the false.
They know only ever enough to be dangerous- for they do not love the craft which they proclaim to master. Any venture they manage is doomed.
In a way, Mac OS X is the greatest loss-leader of them all--driving the hardware sales with fat margins that keeps the company afloat
If such is the case they why are they so upset about the possibility of the updater being misused? Its not like you can install OSX on your common beige box clone.
This issue probably has alot more to do with apple's corporate culture than rampant sharing of their software: They value their patents, copyrights, look and feel, and other intellectual restictions disproportionally as if they were a primary revenue stream. They wont take a stance on whether or not the freetype project may decode their pantented bytecode, They wont clarify that spec following SVG and PNG implementations do not infringe their alpha mask patent, they send cease and desist to any theme reminicent of any of their GUI's, etc... Note that none of the following concessions could hurt apple, and the proliferation of common standards could only help them.
Sadly it seems that Microsoft allows apple to exist only so as to have a token competitor. (And even that they contrive to whither away with mass "donations" of software to schools) while apple wedges itself further into a corner by refusing the only strategy that could redeem them. (Openness & common API/Protocols/Formats)
Their hardware is truely top-notch, and if they would only loosen their iron grasp a bit they could flourish selling more of it.
Since you, being the only designee of the release agreements signed by all contributors, are the only person with the authority to relicense, they couldnt do it.
They could fork the codebase still, making a LGPL only version, but they could not sell a private non-LGPL license.
If you were in the position where you were trying to get a handle on rampant piracy of your work, what (digital) means would you pursue to secure your work?
Since your question is so loaded with industry propaganda words, Ive composed a more logical alternative:
"If you were in the position where your outdated business model was poised to become unprofitable as the market began realize that your company was a useless fat layer that provides no added value, what digital algorithm could you deploy to extend your control over distribution while preserving high profit margins?"
read the whole post- esp the part about a release.
It wouldnt need to be over-formal- perhaps just a comment block above any significant contributed code that says the developer of the following is not adverse to relicensing of the code given that it follows the stated guildlines.
There would have to be a designee of who is the arbiter of such relicensing, but nothing stops someone who doesnt trust said designee from forking and creating a non-relicensable branch, but that might only happen if the designee were to become a lax maintainer or abuse the relicensing contracts (which is what they amount to, since they are not part of the copyright).
I just wonder how a free software anti-virus lab would work
Easy- we fix the problem instead of treating the symptoms:
If there are exploits, they get fixed. So you would never have to worry about an email or webpage hijacking your machine.
And so long as you stick to source-available code (not necessarily the same as open-source) which has at least a moderate distribution, you dont have to worry about trojans.
The run-away virus problems you see in windows are a direct result of a closed source culture where all software is delivered and exchanged via inscrutable black-box binaries. A typical windows user thinks nothing of downloading a.exe file from an untrusted source then running it, whereas a typical unix user would get shivers just at the thought of doing so.
Virus scanner software is just a huge patchwork of duct tape that is fundamentally incapable of solving any problem- or providing any security.
(for example nimda: it had already done its damage by the time it was in the pattern files)
If an open-source system and philosophy were ta take hold of the desktop- an entire industry (virus scanning/recovery) would simply disappear.
Charge them a reasonable one-time relicensing fee that gives them an non-exclusive unlimited license to the code base with the exception that they may not patent any algorithms derived from the codebase. Also make sure the price is reasonable and small.
You can keep the main release LGPL, and anytime you take on a new code contributor ask them to agree to a release saying that FLAC may be privately relicensed upon those specific terms above and that all proceeds will go towards the development of FLAC.
So you can eat your cake and have it too. And if the company comes back wanting a license to a more recent version of the code- which has been evolving with LGPL contributions, then they can pay another one-time relicensing fee (a form of recurring funding if development keeps up)
Now this probably wont get you as wide distribution as a BSD license, because of the small hassle, but its the next best thing if you want to keep your copyleft. And your guaranteed to get compensated by anyone who wants to develop FLAC, either with LGPL code or hard cash.
Is based upon having lots of customers with under-used accounts. Its called over-subscription. They sell more bandwidth than they actually have- and if most users are only using 50% of what they are paying for, then the ISP can charge less to its customers (being competitive) and have more customers than they can really support.
The thing they want to do is prevent people from sharing or reselling portions of their bandwidth with their neighbors, because then every customer will be alot closer to 100% utilization.
To simplify: What they want is to have 2 paying customers at 50% utilization rather than 1 paying customer at 100% utilization.
Slashdot Mirror
One element which you are forgetting is that the free market depends upon its participants being knowledgeable
This is not necessarily true. Given a large number of unknowledgable participants in a market, to the degree that they cannot tell if they have chosen a poor product even after the fact: some of them will choose poor products, and by luck some will accidentally choose better products.
Those that go out of business will stop buying the poor products, or at least not expand as quickly as the business which made better decisions.
In reality it is somewhat difficult to tell how good your security is until youve been breeched.
It is also true that the market is not really large enough for a fully liquid "Free Market".
The truth is somewhere in the middle, where companies that make it their business to be informed about security will have an advantage over those that do not, hence government intervention will be bad: it will encourage businesses to let an external organization worry about their security.
If you're engineering a bridge, does "freedom of speech" give you the right to design it so that it will collapse when people try to use it?
Well if your bridge collapses then ill take my business to a competing bridge ;)
Sarcasm aside, the free market is the best way to sort out things such as optimal value. When there is a free, level, and liquid market, then it is the best choice.
I do believe that there is a sufficiently free market for OS's that no government regulation could help. (It could easily make things worse though). Even Microsoft uses unix to master their CD's, because their own OS is not secure enough to handle such a critical function. (anyone still have that link?)
ONLY in cases where the free market doesnt work (because of practical barriers to competition) (Utilities,Transportation, and "Last mile" Communications) should government oversight be accepted as the lesser evil. And in those area's, the government might restrict your right to produce faulty products.
PS: Free speach applies to source code, but not necesarrily to the commercial sale of source code. In cases where code is simply exchanged with no sale, contract, implicit guarantees, warantees, or other inference that the code is useful for any particular purpose, then no regulation or liability should be able to arise.
There is an ongoing argument that releasing things into the public domain could create liability for the releasor. Since it is fully possible to release things into the public domain anonymously, then the argument can be rendered moot. Just dont say who you are when you post things to freenet.
No matter how you hype it, it's just not legal for a company to own (or sometimes not) a single copy of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office and run it on 10's or 100's of computers. Somebody has to enforce the law or it breaks down. Incedentally, it's the same copyright law that keeps your GPL software free that they are protecting!
Absolutely wrong. You can download a sigle copy of a GPL program, modify the source, and install it an as many computers as you like. You dont have to give your changes to anyone eles either.
ONLY if you want to distribute the modified code outside of your company, then you have to attach the source & license.
The GPL does not cover USE of the software- only redistribution. You can use the software however you like.
Programmers that I've worked with have almost always intuitively known this to be true, and non-programmers (in particular, product managers responsible for scheduling) have almost never understood this.
Those in the "Programming is an Art" camp tend to agree that there is no real way to estimate how long doing something new is going to take.
Those who think of programming as simply bulk engineering, repetetive, boring, or just "coding" tend to be frustrated by this seeming fact. It is almost irreconcilable with normal business practices to know how long a job will take until it is actually done. This makes it extremely difficult to make close-ended contracts, and to predict budgets.
Asking how long a particular software job will take is often equivalent to asking how long a research job will take.
Im sure the scientists would be amused if a suit walked down into R&D and asked them when they would be "done"
If you really dont want to recieve or promulgate any word documents, set up your mailserver to filter out all .doc attachments and replace them with a small ascii note:
<<< Word.doc 900k -- file removed by VirusScanner 7.0 >>>
Then anyone who uses the server can honestly reply- "I want to get that document from you, but my virus scanner keeps deleting it, if you could send it as plain text or rtf... "
This directive will fit nicely next to the ones for *.exe, *.vbs, etc.
Miss Onkelinx speaks about her plan to provide every Belgian household with a computer
With a name like that, she could even get distro named after her
...if she does the right thing
The profession you are in is one which does not have rock solid job-security. They removed the cheif network architect at my work with no advance notice to him or anyone else. (He must have angered some higher-up person)
But the network survived with only the remaining staff. You can bring in new admins, tell them your local topology, and have them be productive on the first day.
If you want more job security, you have to get into a position where the company needs you as much as or more than you need them. A good programmer will find himself in this position easily.(no matter how well he documents his code- programmers will never be interchangeable)
We "donate" money/resources/time/etc not because we want to thank or subsidize free software developers for code they have arleady written. No, the reason is instead that we are greedy for new free software, with more delicious features.
So this really has little to do with charity- its capitalism. And its even more pure than than monetary capitalism- we trade value for value with no intermediary.
I work on satellite IP, and you can get 500ms-700ms ping times with a good system.
Its still more latency than you want with games or even ssh, but for web-surfing its fine. With the added bandwidth (right now I can go 4.5 mbit to a single remote, downstream) you dont even notice the latency.
How could microsoft possibly be worried about a competitor they can afford?
Wind River has a market cap, and they could easily end up with a Microsoft controlling interest if they are insurmoutable with the usual techniques.
Redhat and Lineo could be bought out as well, but their product couldnt be.
Linux has an unfair advantage: the GPL.
Thats all fantastic speculation there, save for the fact this is going down IN ENGLAND!!!!!!!
England is probably a worse place for the modchip makers to defend- that country seems to be even more deeply in the clutches of the IR (intellectual restricton) owners than the US.
With lidless eyes guarding an ever increasing proportion of the island, and a health care and national government network beholden to a software tyrant, England is becoming Mordor.
Because OpenBSD's connection state tracker with ipfilter isn't as good as iptables.
Dont get me wrong, I like the syntax of ipf more, but I hate every minute of being behind my firewall when it was openbsd.
I cant comment on ipf or pf, but I do agree that iptables is a huge jump in firewall ability for linux.
I was behind an ipchains firewall, and I had tried every trick in the book, but there was no way to get 2 people an my subnet to play each other over battlenet. Plus my firewall script was a huge mess, hard to maintain. And the automatic IPchains load/restore didnt save port-forward settings properly- so I had to hook in another shell script to kick it off.
With a 2.4 kernel upgrade and iptables, my firewall does more, anyone can play starcraft even vs each other, it restores after power failure automatically with no initscript hacking, and the shell script to kick it off it simple and easy to understand.
So I like iptables.
This story probably wont generate a slashdotting, in some part because of the number of different sites linked to.
But somebody always has to complain about something then, dont they.
You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, because you need to download the wuftpd-of-the-week sometime.
What I would like to know is how many terroists insist upon running anonymous ftp from their warboxen.
Maybe if you simply turn off the unnecessary services that you never use, it wont be as much of a problem.
But that post was pure. There was no commentary before or after about what it meant, and it was untainted by reflection or further consideration. It just showed what one person knew.
So didnt you just ruin it then?
What he said is that hes Not going to make a writable cvs available to anyone else: all contributions will have come come as patches in email.
In summary he gets cvs and you dont.
And for our next government policy: we all have a right to "Heads" but "Tails" will be outlawed.
Most of them haven't developed in a decade+, so now they know just enough to be dangerous
Well there not really programmers then are they. Programmers dont quit their hobby because theyre getting paid more to do it. Even a CEO could find time to work on a pet project. (certainly beats the hell out of golf(i think))
The specie you are talking of are an evil worse than the marketroid drones, or even the dread PHBs. You speak of the Pretengineers, the false.
They know only ever enough to be dangerous- for they do not love the craft which they proclaim to master. Any venture they manage is doomed.
In a way, Mac OS X is the greatest loss-leader of them all--driving the hardware sales with fat margins that keeps the company afloat
If such is the case they why are they so upset about the possibility of the updater being misused? Its not like you can install OSX on your common beige box clone.
This issue probably has alot more to do with apple's corporate culture than rampant sharing of their software: They value their patents, copyrights, look and feel, and other intellectual restictions disproportionally as if they were a primary revenue stream. They wont take a stance on whether or not the freetype project may decode their pantented bytecode, They wont clarify that spec following SVG and PNG implementations do not infringe their alpha mask patent, they send cease and desist to any theme reminicent of any of their GUI's, etc... Note that none of the following concessions could hurt apple, and the proliferation of common standards could only help them.
Sadly it seems that Microsoft allows apple to exist only so as to have a token competitor. (And even that they contrive to whither away with mass "donations" of software to schools) while apple wedges itself further into a corner by refusing the only strategy that could redeem them. (Openness & common API/Protocols/Formats)
Their hardware is truely top-notch, and if they would only loosen their iron grasp a bit they could flourish selling more of it.
They could fork the codebase still, making a LGPL only version, but they could not sell a private non-LGPL license.
If you were in the position where you were trying to get a handle on rampant piracy of your work, what (digital) means would you pursue to secure your work?
Since your question is so loaded with industry propaganda words, Ive composed a more logical alternative:
"If you were in the position where your outdated business model was poised to become unprofitable as the market began realize that your company was a useless fat layer that provides no added value, what digital algorithm could you deploy to extend your control over distribution while preserving high profit margins?"
read the whole post- esp the part about a release.
It wouldnt need to be over-formal- perhaps just a comment block above any significant contributed code that says the developer of the following is not adverse to relicensing of the code given that it follows the stated guildlines.
There would have to be a designee of who is the arbiter of such relicensing, but nothing stops someone who doesnt trust said designee from forking and creating a non-relicensable branch, but that might only happen if the designee were to become a lax maintainer or abuse the relicensing contracts (which is what they amount to, since they are not part of the copyright).
FWIW, IANAL, etc
I just wonder how a free software anti-virus lab would work
Easy- we fix the problem instead of treating the symptoms:
If there are exploits, they get fixed. So you would never have to worry about an email or webpage hijacking your machine.
And so long as you stick to source-available code (not necessarily the same as open-source) which has at least a moderate distribution, you dont have to worry about trojans.
The run-away virus problems you see in windows are a direct result of a closed source culture where all software is delivered and exchanged via inscrutable black-box binaries. A typical windows user thinks nothing of downloading a .exe file from an untrusted source then running it, whereas a typical unix user would get shivers just at the thought of doing so.
Virus scanner software is just a huge patchwork of duct tape that is fundamentally incapable of solving any problem- or providing any security.
(for example nimda: it had already done its damage by the time it was in the pattern files)
If an open-source system and philosophy were ta take hold of the desktop- an entire industry (virus scanning/recovery) would simply disappear.
Charge them a reasonable one-time relicensing fee that gives them an non-exclusive unlimited license to the code base with the exception that they may not patent any algorithms derived from the codebase. Also make sure the price is reasonable and small.
You can keep the main release LGPL, and anytime you take on a new code contributor ask them to agree to a release saying that FLAC may be privately relicensed upon those specific terms above and that all proceeds will go towards the development of FLAC.
So you can eat your cake and have it too. And if the company comes back wanting a license to a more recent version of the code- which has been evolving with LGPL contributions, then they can pay another one-time relicensing fee (a form of recurring funding if development keeps up)
Now this probably wont get you as wide distribution as a BSD license, because of the small hassle, but its the next best thing if you want to keep your copyleft. And your guaranteed to get compensated by anyone who wants to develop FLAC, either with LGPL code or hard cash.
Is based upon having lots of customers with under-used accounts. Its called over-subscription. They sell more bandwidth than they actually have- and if most users are only using 50% of what they are paying for, then the ISP can charge less to its customers (being competitive) and have more customers than they can really support.
The thing they want to do is prevent people from sharing or reselling portions of their bandwidth with their neighbors, because then every customer will be alot closer to 100% utilization.
To simplify: What they want is to have 2 paying customers at 50% utilization rather than 1 paying customer at 100% utilization.