My guess is that if you want to make money from software, distributing it would be a good start.
Unless you plan to charge your employees for the software they use to do their work, but I've heard that most people won't go for that one.
So the only businesses that make money using computers are software companies? Who do they sell their software to, each other?
People can use GPL software to run their business (or their tanks, planes and bombs) and not have to distribute a thing. They can modify it as much as they like and not have to return a single patch. GPL does not cover use; in fact it vehemently opposes the very idea that people should need a license to use software. Interestingly enough case law seems to currently agree that you do not need a license to use software as it is purchased, not leased.
Per conversations I had with my bank (ironically because of a mix-up involving PayPal) if someone has your account and routing number they can take money out of your account and there is nothing you can do about it except perhaps sue/prosecute them. (basically giving someone these numbers means you gave them permission to take money out and put it in). So no, posting the account and routing number publicly is a Bad Plan.
Although snopes says the story is not true, they go on to say it is true. I don't understand what criteria they used to determine this. The pen really did cost $1.5 Million to develop. Granted NASA did not pay $1.5 million, but the company that made the pen did. Both the US and the Russian astronauts used pencils, again according to snopes. So why do they say the story is false when their own quotations corroborate the story?
You miss the point entirely. If people contribute patches, you are not the author of those bits, nor the copyright holder (unless it gets transferred). And no, the GPL does not transfer copyrights. Therefore once you accept patches from others, you cannot close those bits. YOu can, however, take the bits you made and close that part.
Oh, please, $100,000? For half a year's work? If you're worth that much, you'd have started your own business already based on this software.
Actually this project is more than 6 years old, highly popular, and useful to quite a few people. Usually LRP is mentioned to anyone who wants to set up a cheap Linux router. It is sad to me that a programmer capable of writing stuff like this is unable to find a job right now. That is mainly what his complaint is about.
Also, I wonder what you mean by "poor". I have a nice little family, can pay my bills, and get paid doing what I like to do -- what more could I possibly want from life? I don't have to be a millionaire. To me it's more about what remains when you die, and when I die, I will leave some offspring and some (fine?) free software behind. What (besides some mediocre slashdot trolls) are you planning to leave behind for future generations?
Many here could only dream of being so rich as that.
If you give others the power to make derivative works you're giving up any power over the code. It's so obvious to most other people. The GPL is all about destroying intellectual property rights in software. Controlling other people's usage is what property rights are all about.
=sniff= =sniff= Man, what is that I smell? Oh... SCO Employees^wTrolls! GPL works *because* of intellectual property rights. It in fact protects them quite strenuously. Read the actual GPL and you will find handlers for Patents, Copyrights, everything is there. The fact an author retains copyright is what gives the GPL teeth.
If I write something and distribute it under the GPL I am controlling what you can do with the code through the license. If you fail to abide by its terms you violate copyright law. This is something the SCO lawyers/FUDMonkeys fail to understand. Then again their education is not comparable to the real 5th grade education required to grok the GPL.
I think most of you are missing the point. It's not necessarily that he was expecting this project to yield an income, though it would be nice. It is that he thought his expertise in computers and routing should yield an income, which honestly is not too much to ask of the world, and sadly is not the case these days.
His tale of lengthy unemployment when he is clearly very skilled is all-too-common. Anyway he has decided to switch jobs, and likely won't have time to mess with LRP (or the inclination after being burned so badly by his chosen career).
In other news, SCO inc. sued the creators and users of Freesco for $1Billion for vague IP infringement which they refused to disclose. Then Cisco suggested the IP in question was probably theirs and sued the Freesco project as well. Then SCO sued Cisco, resulting in an infinite loop which caused all lawsuits involving companies with the letter sco in their name and unix IP to vanish in a puff of logic, and we all lived happily ever after. The End.:)
Wait. You don't understand what communism has to do with property?
Intellectual Property is no more of an arbitrary construction than money is. You can still trade it for food booze and sex. "Collective delusion" said Marx.
The AC is right. In Soviet Russia, there was no intellectual property. Well at least not that an individual could own, because the government owned everything. (In Soviet Russia, the government 0wnz j00!) Ask Alexei Pazhitnov how he felt about the Communist way of handling intellectual property sometime.
SCO is barely worth 100 Million dollars, and even then only because of the lawsuit. SCO was in the red until this and has made a pretty measly profit. Now they did sue a multi-billion dolar company, and their employees will be unemployed as a result, but your assertions are wholly inaccurate.
Are you sure it's the French? Or is it the French Foreign legion? If it really is the French it's a historical moment, the first time since Napoleon they have actually fought in their own wars instead of getting someone else to do it for them. So far my googles have revealed articles saying "French Troops" but not specifying whether it is the Legion. My money is still on it being the French Foreign Legion, though.
You are right, of course. But I am rebutting those who say that because we have a client we have a game. IN the case of NWN that is not true because the toolset is the whole point of the game. Without it, you're stuck with Windows if you actually want to use their program, which is their point.
It is Bioware's prerogative, of course, to do whatever they want with their product. I fully support that. What I do not support is lying to the public as they have done (remember NWN was from the beginning supposed to be something for Linux and Mac, not just Windows, though to this day it is still just for Windows essentially) nor do I support slashdot as a medium for disseminating such misinformation. Then again I suppose that is what slashdot is for, besides the trolls.
And your knowlege would be wrong. Yes, the drivers provided with XFree86 support 3d. No they do not work with all Radeons. Therefore you end up with the vesa driver which does not support 3d. I am speaking from complete experience having actually taken the trouble of participating in the xfree86.org list and having an actual ati card instead of believing bullshit I read on slashdot. You, however, are free to do what pleases you.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see on the link you posted that the 9500/9700 are supported. I might go for that. But in the discussion I read on the xfree86.org list they went into excruciating detail about why later cards would not be supported. I noticed that the 9500/9700 use the Firegl driver, which fits what I read, and what I said to you.
It is very difficult for hackers to create good drivers without information about the hardware being provided for them. What we have now we have because information was provided before from ATI. If they follow up on their promise of not providing that information, we will likely not get drivers.
I have favored ATI in the past because the drivers were open source and I agree that is better. But when I read that this open sourceness was an accident of history and would not be repeated it made me rethink this stance with ATI.
XFRee86 works if you use the vesa driver. Whoopie! 2D action!. But there are no native drivers for ATI Radeons past 8500, and therefore no 3d. The XFree86.org folks are saying there never will be because ATI is not going to develop them and is not going to share their data. The drivers we have now are there because tat used to be different.
Anyway I am a pissed-off ATI user whose card does not work and will have to get Nvidia therefore. erhaps the Radeon 9XXX people you were talking about are 9700 users, since I found out today the 8500 drivers work with that card. I might have considered getting a 9700 if it had not been for ATI having the audacity to promise never to support Linux again. The XFree poeple say the drivers we have now are an accident of some drivers they made for high-end graphics cards working on consumer cards, and ATI did not actually mean to make drivers for consumer cards.
You are correct sir. KDE and OO are bloated because they are trying to be Windows and Office. Therefore they are very slow no matter what. I am sure they could be optimized somehow (for instance if you compiled them for your hardware or changed some of the things that are being loaded for you in the background). However, Linux is not in itself slow.
Personally, I have similar hardware to yours and run fvwm2 as my window manager. I also use the sourcemage distro because it makes compiling difficult packages (like kde and oo) easier. I can still run the kde applications (like koffice) so long as I compile/install kde as well, but I have less overhead because I am basically running a window manager and whatever app I am using. Since I compile everything on my system it improves performance even more, and keeping things straight is even easier than it was with Mandrake.
Anyway you may or may not like fvwm2 but I suggest you give it a try no matter your distro. What I have said also applies with other slimmed down window managers as well.
I have to agree this is a problem in the Linux community, but it is a chicken-egg problem. People keep Windows on their main hardware when they think they can only do their usual work on Windows. That is why when I decided to take the plunge several years back and use only Linux I made sure to install it on my main machine. Linux on decent hardware is a far better experience than Linux on a POS, though it is still fun to see what you can accomplish on a properly configured/tweaked 486 running Linux.
The problem is, people won't do this unless they can do on Linux what they normally do on Windows, and most people aren't adventurous enough to force themselves to figure out the 5000 things they need to to do this. Just judging by/., there are at least a few who were ready to take the plunge because they can play this game on Linux now. That is good.
More focus needs to go into this IMHO. It is not just about making Linux useful to Joe Sixpack, which many Linux developers do not care about. It is about making LInux more useful so people are empowered by their computer (instead of being controlled by it like Microsoft wants you to be).
*shrugs* To each his own I guess. At this point I will have to write a whole game from scratch just to do what I wanted to do with Bioware's product. It is something I should have done anyway, but since I am much better at creating stories and scenarios than writing code or drawing tools like this have always appealed to me more. Time to get off my butt I guess and learn how.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that if you want to make money from software, distributing it would be a good start.
Unless you plan to charge your employees for the software they use to do their work, but I've heard that most people won't go for that one.
So the only businesses that make money using computers are software companies? Who do they sell their software to, each other?
People can use GPL software to run their business (or their tanks, planes and bombs) and not have to distribute a thing. They can modify it as much as they like and not have to return a single patch. GPL does not cover use; in fact it vehemently opposes the very idea that people should need a license to use software. Interestingly enough case law seems to currently agree that you do not need a license to use software as it is purchased, not leased.
Does Microsoft's use of BSD code count??
Absolutamente! Otherwise, we would not be living happily ever after!
Per conversations I had with my bank (ironically because of a mix-up involving PayPal) if someone has your account and routing number they can take money out of your account and there is nothing you can do about it except perhaps sue/prosecute them. (basically giving someone these numbers means you gave them permission to take money out and put it in). So no, posting the account and routing number publicly is a Bad Plan.
Although snopes says the story is not true, they go on to say it is true. I don't understand what criteria they used to determine this. The pen really did cost $1.5 Million to develop. Granted NASA did not pay $1.5 million, but the company that made the pen did. Both the US and the Russian astronauts used pencils, again according to snopes. So why do they say the story is false when their own quotations corroborate the story?
So why did you not give her one? It would not have been difficult to add a "My Computer" icon that launched a file browser to the desktop...
You miss the point entirely. If people contribute patches, you are not the author of those bits, nor the copyright holder (unless it gets transferred). And no, the GPL does not transfer copyrights. Therefore once you accept patches from others, you cannot close those bits. YOu can, however, take the bits you made and close that part.
Oh, please, $100,000? For half a year's work? If you're worth that much, you'd have started your own business already based on this software.
Actually this project is more than 6 years old, highly popular, and useful to quite a few people. Usually LRP is mentioned to anyone who wants to set up a cheap Linux router. It is sad to me that a programmer capable of writing stuff like this is unable to find a job right now. That is mainly what his complaint is about.
Also, I wonder what you mean by "poor". I have a nice little family, can pay my bills, and get paid doing what I like to do -- what more could I possibly want from life? I don't have to be a millionaire. To me it's more about what remains when you die, and when I die, I will leave some offspring and some (fine?) free software behind. What (besides some mediocre slashdot trolls) are you planning to leave behind for future generations?
Many here could only dream of being so rich as that.
If you give others the power to make derivative works you're giving up any power over the code. It's so obvious to most other people. The GPL is all about destroying intellectual property rights in software. Controlling other people's usage is what property rights are all about.
=sniff= =sniff= Man, what is that I smell? Oh... SCO Employees^wTrolls! GPL works *because* of intellectual property rights. It in fact protects them quite strenuously. Read the actual GPL and you will find handlers for Patents, Copyrights, everything is there. The fact an author retains copyright is what gives the GPL teeth.
If I write something and distribute it under the GPL I am controlling what you can do with the code through the license. If you fail to abide by its terms you violate copyright law. This is something the SCO lawyers/FUDMonkeys fail to understand. Then again their education is not comparable to the real 5th grade education required to grok the GPL.
"No-one needs to talk to you to use your GPL'd stuff commercially."
If they want to keep their modifications to the source private they do.
No they don't, unless they distribute the result.
Hrm.. it does not look like it is the same David Cinege. Do you have proof to the contrary?
I think most of you are missing the point. It's not necessarily that he was expecting this project to yield an income, though it would be nice. It is that he thought his expertise in computers and routing should yield an income, which honestly is not too much to ask of the world, and sadly is not the case these days.
His tale of lengthy unemployment when he is clearly very skilled is all-too-common. Anyway he has decided to switch jobs, and likely won't have time to mess with LRP (or the inclination after being burned so badly by his chosen career).
In other news, SCO inc. sued the creators and users of Freesco for $1Billion for vague IP infringement which they refused to disclose. Then Cisco suggested the IP in question was probably theirs and sued the Freesco project as well. Then SCO sued Cisco, resulting in an infinite loop which caused all lawsuits involving companies with the letter sco in their name and unix IP to vanish in a puff of logic, and we all lived happily ever after. The End. :)
Why doesn't paypal cut it? I have seen individual hackers use it... it seems the easiest way to give micropayments electronically to me...
Wait. You don't understand what communism has to do with property?
Intellectual Property is no more of an arbitrary construction than money is. You can still trade it for food booze and sex. "Collective delusion" said Marx.
The AC is right. In Soviet Russia, there was no intellectual property. Well at least not that an individual could own, because the government owned everything. (In Soviet Russia, the government 0wnz j00!) Ask Alexei Pazhitnov how he felt about the Communist way of handling intellectual property sometime.
SCO is barely worth 100 Million dollars, and even then only because of the lawsuit. SCO was in the red until this and has made a pretty measly profit. Now they did sue a multi-billion dolar company, and their employees will be unemployed as a result, but your assertions are wholly inaccurate.
Are you sure it's the French? Or is it the French Foreign legion? If it really is the French it's a historical moment, the first time since Napoleon they have actually fought in their own wars instead of getting someone else to do it for them. So far my googles have revealed articles saying "French Troops" but not specifying whether it is the Legion. My money is still on it being the French Foreign Legion, though.
Hmm, that reminds me. I am out of cheeto's... mmmmm cheetos...
You are right, of course. But I am rebutting those who say that because we have a client we have a game. IN the case of NWN that is not true because the toolset is the whole point of the game. Without it, you're stuck with Windows if you actually want to use their program, which is their point.
It is Bioware's prerogative, of course, to do whatever they want with their product. I fully support that. What I do not support is lying to the public as they have done (remember NWN was from the beginning supposed to be something for Linux and Mac, not just Windows, though to this day it is still just for Windows essentially) nor do I support slashdot as a medium for disseminating such misinformation. Then again I suppose that is what slashdot is for, besides the trolls.
And your knowlege would be wrong. Yes, the drivers provided with XFree86 support 3d. No they do not work with all Radeons. Therefore you end up with the vesa driver which does not support 3d. I am speaking from complete experience having actually taken the trouble of participating in the xfree86.org list and having an actual ati card instead of believing bullshit I read on slashdot. You, however, are free to do what pleases you.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see on the link you posted that the 9500/9700 are supported. I might go for that. But in the discussion I read on the xfree86.org list they went into excruciating detail about why later cards would not be supported. I noticed that the 9500/9700 use the Firegl driver, which fits what I read, and what I said to you.
It is very difficult for hackers to create good drivers without information about the hardware being provided for them. What we have now we have because information was provided before from ATI. If they follow up on their promise of not providing that information, we will likely not get drivers.
I have favored ATI in the past because the drivers were open source and I agree that is better. But when I read that this open sourceness was an accident of history and would not be repeated it made me rethink this stance with ATI.
Yes, I was wrong about that, but you still cannot create them, which defeats the purpose really.
XFRee86 works if you use the vesa driver. Whoopie! 2D action!. But there are no native drivers for ATI Radeons past 8500, and therefore no 3d. The XFree86.org folks are saying there never will be because ATI is not going to develop them and is not going to share their data. The drivers we have now are there because tat used to be different.
Anyway I am a pissed-off ATI user whose card does not work and will have to get Nvidia therefore. erhaps the Radeon 9XXX people you were talking about are 9700 users, since I found out today the 8500 drivers work with that card. I might have considered getting a 9700 if it had not been for ATI having the audacity to promise never to support Linux again. The XFree poeple say the drivers we have now are an accident of some drivers they made for high-end graphics cards working on consumer cards, and ATI did not actually mean to make drivers for consumer cards.
You are correct sir. KDE and OO are bloated because they are trying to be Windows and Office. Therefore they are very slow no matter what. I am sure they could be optimized somehow (for instance if you compiled them for your hardware or changed some of the things that are being loaded for you in the background). However, Linux is not in itself slow.
Personally, I have similar hardware to yours and run fvwm2 as my window manager. I also use the sourcemage distro because it makes compiling difficult packages (like kde and oo) easier. I can still run the kde applications (like koffice) so long as I compile/install kde as well, but I have less overhead because I am basically running a window manager and whatever app I am using. Since I compile everything on my system it improves performance even more, and keeping things straight is even easier than it was with Mandrake.
Anyway you may or may not like fvwm2 but I suggest you give it a try no matter your distro. What I have said also applies with other slimmed down window managers as well.
I have to agree this is a problem in the Linux community, but it is a chicken-egg problem. People keep Windows on their main hardware when they think they can only do their usual work on Windows. That is why when I decided to take the plunge several years back and use only Linux I made sure to install it on my main machine. Linux on decent hardware is a far better experience than Linux on a POS, though it is still fun to see what you can accomplish on a properly configured/tweaked 486 running Linux.
The problem is, people won't do this unless they can do on Linux what they normally do on Windows, and most people aren't adventurous enough to force themselves to figure out the 5000 things they need to to do this. Just judging by /., there are at least a few who were ready to take the plunge because they can play this game on Linux now. That is good.
More focus needs to go into this IMHO. It is not just about making Linux useful to Joe Sixpack, which many Linux developers do not care about. It is about making LInux more useful so people are empowered by their computer (instead of being controlled by it like Microsoft wants you to be).
*shrugs* To each his own I guess. At this point I will have to write a whole game from scratch just to do what I wanted to do with Bioware's product. It is something I should have done anyway, but since I am much better at creating stories and scenarios than writing code or drawing tools like this have always appealed to me more. Time to get off my butt I guess and learn how.