is not to make money off of it but to bring it into people's lives to better our standards of living.
Yeah, sure thats abstract idea of techonology, but the whole thing takes money flowing in many directions.
No it does not, and that's precisely the point. I use lots of software every day, and my standard of living is arguably higher because of it, yet no money has changed hands.
I hope OSS can make it, but more and more its looking like most OSS development and distribution will be done by groups of individuals rather than corporations/commerical entities.
The legal definition is really irrelevant: the job of the police is to reduce the number of crimes and solve crimes with actual victims, not to artificially create crimes just so that they can improve their arrest statistics.
The GPL is a license which allows you to do things with a copyrighted work you would not otherwise be allowed to do. A contract is an agreement where two parties exchange something of value; both parties have to explicitly agree to the contract and have to be over 18. You don't have to agree to the GPL, and you don't have to give anything in value, and you don't have to be over 18. If you do anything with a copyrighted work that is not allowed by the GPL license, you are breaking copyright law.
Being a minor, NO contract he agrees to is valid - he could do anything he wanted to with whatever information he gets from Apple.
In other words, shrink wrap licenses don't apply to minors? They can do whatever they want with software they buy (short of breaking copyright law)? Cool. Finally a reason to get kids.
There is a plethora of
good, free software, but it sometimes lacks a certain polish.
Well, then sit down and polish some of if for heaven's sake! Linux is not a spectator sport.
The GIMP is pretty cool, but Adobe spends millions of dollars and a ridiculous number of man hours from a dedicated team, while the GIMP is a hobbyist project (if skillfully conceived and rendered)
You are arguing my point. All you need for high quality software is a bunch of enthusiastic and knowledgable volunteers. You can flush your millions of dollars and man months down the toilet.
but people who spend all of their waking hours working on quality software
should be entitled to some compensation for their efforts from the end users
If you make something which volunteers are happy to make for free then you are not entitled to compensation.
If software development wasn't tied to the OS, it wouldn't matter so much. But thanks to certain institutions, it is, and we've got to deal with it one way or another. The only answer to this problem is to break the link between the OS and the software, at least at the level of typical software development.
Check out any decent open source app, apache, php, imagemagick, gcc, emacs, perl, tex, and you will see that it compiles on any platform out there. The problem of OS dependency has been solved long ago by GNU configure. I agree that non-free software is not as evolved, but who cares?
You got it backwards. People like you, who applaud every commercial app on Linux and want Linux to "succeed in the marketplace", are shortsighted. Every commercial app is built on sand; the company dies, gets bought out or decides to discontinue the product, and it's over. There is never any security unless you have a decent free software license in hand. That's the lesson of the Blender fiasco. Never use nor support non-free software.
We write a free (GNU) encyclopedia using the wiki paradigm at Wikipedia.com. So far, we have produced over 20,000 articles in one year. Quality varies, of course.
Show me one compiler that's better documented than gcc, and then we talk. Show me one web server that is more complete than apache, and then we talk.
Why else do KDE and GNOME look more or less like wholesale ripoffs of CDE, Windows, and MacOS?
Because if your target is end users, you need to avoid all surprises. That's why CDE, Windows and MacOS look like ripoffs of each other in the first place. There are plenty of innovative interfaces in the free software world, much more than corporations ever invented with all their R&D money.
Why are there no free *games* written on top of the Crystal Space engine?
Why are there no free books, no free music, no free movies? Don't ask me, ask your friends the corporations. Are hackers supposed to solve all problems in the world?
And your claim that operating systems don't need design, but graphical interfaces do, is ridiculous. What do you think how much R&D money Microsoft burned on the Windows NT kernel? Linux did the same, five years earlier, with no budget.
the "outdated" corporate model has proven to make money now.
Above all, it has proven that you can burn through investor money in record time. Besides, who cares about money? The very existence of free software proves that quality can be produced without monetary incentives.
Free software will still be around, yes, but it will no longer be able to improve at the exponential rate it has been without corporate backing and most importantly money going into it.
Corporate backing hasn't helped free software one bit. Compare the contributions of Redhat or IBM to the contributions of the KDE project. Redhat stinks of money and still can't produce anything of significance. The real stuff is happening elsewhere. It's the enthusiasm of the hackers. Redhat goes bust today, Alan Cox will find some other job, the whole story is forgotten the day after tomorrow and everything goes on exactly as before. And if Alan loses interest, there are ten bright young hackers eager to take his place.
Free software has grown long before the suits found it, and will continue to grow long after the suits have forgotten it. You don't need money to induce people to do what they want to do anyway.
People have to make money (in this society) when they spend a lot of time and resources in something. Otherwise they starve or they lose sleep or other needed resources. They will fight for this availability to make money, no matter what.
That's simply inaccurate. Many people play chess without being paid for it. Many people program without being paid for it. Many people build garden railways without being paid for it. In fact, most of what people do is not paid work.
If you need money, may I suggest getting a job? This has nothing to do with free software, which is produced for the fun of it (and, by some, to make the world a better place).
A corporation provides a single, monolithic entity to approach for licencing; an open-source project provides an unkempt mishmash of hundreds of hard-to-find developers with different ideals and personalities; your average company isn't going to bother rectifying licence terms with that many different, unpredictable people.
And what exactly is the problem with that? Let them do their things their outdated ways, who cares? Tell you what: most of the corporations who currently think they're so hot will be bankrupt ten years from now; there is no question that free software will still be around. Their model is wrong, not ours.
I don't understand what is going on at all. What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own? Did they do business with At&T, or with consumers directly? What is AT&T@Home? And At&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?
It's been impossible to avoid the hype on this film. Even if you avoid TV, the whole web has been bursting with bits, ranging from eBay to CNN.com.
If you avoid idiotic media, it's easy to avoid the hype on idiotic films. Except that slashdot now joins the hype. Does AOL/Time Warner/CNN own OSDN yet?
I have contributed several little things to the website over the years. I never signed over my copyrights. CRC therefore owes me royalities. The letter will go out soon. Maybe I can find a crappy lawyer who takes on the case for 70% of the settlement?
If you think it is totally arbitrary what we can eat, then killing people to eat them should be ok: animals kill members of their own species, and humans, all the time for food. If it's ok for them, it should be ok for us, no?
While the "face standard" is obviously idiotic, the moral position is in fact not totally arbitrary: if something has the ability to suffer, then it deserves moral consideration. It's clear that higher animals suffer; most people believe that plants do not. Those people kill and eat plants but not animals. The few who believe that plants can suffer eat only fruits, nuts, grains and seeds, thereby helping plants to reproduce.
Maybe I should start with your veganism. If it's just for health reasons, then that's OK. If it's for moral reasons, then you are wrong-headed. We are absolutely morally correct to eat animals, because we are omnivorous. If it's moral for a cat to eat a mouse, it's moral for us to eat a cow. It's called the "food chain", and anyone who feels guilt about their place in it doesn't have any understanding of nature.
You confuse nature with ethics. Nature has built a strong urge to rape into many males, and rape is a common occurance in many animals including humans. If it occurs in chimpanzees, there are no moral issues; if it occurs in humans, it is wrong.
Just found this which seems to confirm that the mines were not designed as toys, but their green butterfly like appearance led to their being picked up by children.
And you inturn forgot to mention that the majority of such mines had "Made in USA" mark on them and were imported into Afhanistan across the Pakistan border. CIA did not hesitate to use dirties tactics to fight "evil empire" and Ben Laden and others like him are their creation.
You don't make any sense. The CIA used dirty tactics to blow off the extremeties of the children of its own allies, the mujahedeen? Why?
Please support your claim that the toy mines were manufactured in the US.
It almost appears as if you tend to think that being homosexual is bad. Tsk tsk.
Atrocity is the name of the game in war.
You don't understand the first thing about human psychology if you think this. How can maiming children possibly help in winning a war? It makes your opponent more determined, not less.
Now try to put yourself in the place of those families 1 year from now, and figure out how many of them want justice for their loved ones' deaths.
And also try to imagine how many of those families and victims are abhorred by the thought that other innocent civilians would suffer like they did.
We're certainly giving anybody who wants to leave the country a fair chance, and they're eating it up.
What? Where can Afghans sign up for a green card? The border to Pakistan has just been closed: we don't even let civilian refugees out of Afghanistan. We don't want our targets to leave.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, sure thats abstract idea of techonology, but the whole thing takes money flowing in many directions.
No it does not, and that's precisely the point. I use lots of software every day, and my standard of living is arguably higher because of it, yet no money has changed hands.
I hope OSS can make it, but more and more its looking like most OSS development and distribution will be done by groups of individuals rather than corporations/commerical entities.
I hope that trend continues.
The convicted software monopolist doesn't like the GPL.
Who could ever use another license again?
The legal definition is really irrelevant: the job of the police is to reduce the number of crimes and solve crimes with actual victims, not to artificially create crimes just so that they can improve their arrest statistics.
The GPL is a license which allows you to do things with a copyrighted work you would not otherwise be allowed to do. A contract is an agreement where two parties exchange something of value; both parties have to explicitly agree to the contract and have to be over 18. You don't have to agree to the GPL, and you don't have to give anything in value, and you don't have to be over 18. If you do anything with a copyrighted work that is not allowed by the GPL license, you are breaking copyright law.
The GPL is not a contract. If you break the GPL, you break copyright law, and not even minors are allowed to do that.
In other words, shrink wrap licenses don't apply to minors? They can do whatever they want with software they buy (short of breaking copyright law)? Cool. Finally a reason to get kids.
Well, then sit down and polish some of if for heaven's sake! Linux is not a spectator sport.
The GIMP is pretty cool, but Adobe spends millions of dollars and a ridiculous number of man hours from a dedicated team, while the GIMP is a hobbyist project (if skillfully conceived and rendered)
You are arguing my point. All you need for high quality software is a bunch of enthusiastic and knowledgable volunteers. You can flush your millions of dollars and man months down the toilet.
but people who spend all of their waking hours working on quality software should be entitled to some compensation for their efforts from the end users
If you make something which volunteers are happy to make for free then you are not entitled to compensation.
Check out any decent open source app, apache, php, imagemagick, gcc, emacs, perl, tex, and you will see that it compiles on any platform out there. The problem of OS dependency has been solved long ago by GNU configure. I agree that non-free software is not as evolved, but who cares?
You got it backwards. People like you, who applaud every commercial app on Linux and want Linux to "succeed in the marketplace", are shortsighted. Every commercial app is built on sand; the company dies, gets bought out or decides to discontinue the product, and it's over. There is never any security unless you have a decent free software license in hand. That's the lesson of the Blender fiasco. Never use nor support non-free software.
We write a free (GNU) encyclopedia using the wiki paradigm at Wikipedia.com. So far, we have produced over 20,000 articles in one year. Quality varies, of course.
Yes, poorly-documented, half-finished, unorganised quality.
Show me one compiler that's better documented than gcc, and then we talk. Show me one web server that is more complete than apache, and then we talk.
Why else do KDE and GNOME look more or less like wholesale ripoffs of CDE, Windows, and MacOS?
Because if your target is end users, you need to avoid all surprises. That's why CDE, Windows and MacOS look like ripoffs of each other in the first place. There are plenty of innovative interfaces in the free software world, much more than corporations ever invented with all their R&D money.
Why are there no free *games* written on top of the Crystal Space engine?
Why are there no free books, no free music, no free movies? Don't ask me, ask your friends the corporations. Are hackers supposed to solve all problems in the world?
And your claim that operating systems don't need design, but graphical interfaces do, is ridiculous. What do you think how much R&D money Microsoft burned on the Windows NT kernel? Linux did the same, five years earlier, with no budget.
Above all, it has proven that you can burn through investor money in record time. Besides, who cares about money? The very existence of free software proves that quality can be produced without monetary incentives.
Free software will still be around, yes, but it will no longer be able to improve at the exponential rate it has been without corporate backing and most importantly money going into it.
Corporate backing hasn't helped free software one bit. Compare the contributions of Redhat or IBM to the contributions of the KDE project. Redhat stinks of money and still can't produce anything of significance. The real stuff is happening elsewhere. It's the enthusiasm of the hackers. Redhat goes bust today, Alan Cox will find some other job, the whole story is forgotten the day after tomorrow and everything goes on exactly as before. And if Alan loses interest, there are ten bright young hackers eager to take his place.
Free software has grown long before the suits found it, and will continue to grow long after the suits have forgotten it. You don't need money to induce people to do what they want to do anyway.
People have to make money (in this society) when they spend a lot of time and resources in something. Otherwise they starve or they lose sleep or other needed resources. They will fight for this availability to make money, no matter what.
That's simply inaccurate. Many people play chess without being paid for it. Many people program without being paid for it. Many people build garden railways without being paid for it. In fact, most of what people do is not paid work.
If you need money, may I suggest getting a job? This has nothing to do with free software, which is produced for the fun of it (and, by some, to make the world a better place).
A corporation provides a single, monolithic entity to approach for licencing; an open-source project provides an unkempt mishmash of hundreds of hard-to-find developers with different ideals and personalities; your average company isn't going to bother rectifying licence terms with that many different, unpredictable people.
And what exactly is the problem with that? Let them do their things their outdated ways, who cares? Tell you what: most of the corporations who currently think they're so hot will be bankrupt ten years from now; there is no question that free software will still be around. Their model is wrong, not ours.
I don't understand what is going on at all. What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own? Did they do business with At&T, or with consumers directly? What is AT&T@Home? And At&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?
If you avoid idiotic media, it's easy to avoid the hype on idiotic films. Except that slashdot now joins the hype. Does AOL/Time Warner/CNN own OSDN yet?
I have contributed several little things to the website over the years. I never signed over my copyrights. CRC therefore owes me royalities. The letter will go out soon. Maybe I can find a crappy lawyer who takes on the case for 70% of the settlement?
If you think it is totally arbitrary what we can eat, then killing people to eat them should be ok: animals kill members of their own species, and humans, all the time for food. If it's ok for them, it should be ok for us, no?
While the "face standard" is obviously idiotic, the moral position is in fact not totally arbitrary: if something has the ability to suffer, then it deserves moral consideration. It's clear that higher animals suffer; most people believe that plants do not. Those people kill and eat plants but not animals. The few who believe that plants can suffer eat only fruits, nuts, grains and seeds, thereby helping plants to reproduce.
Maybe I should start with your veganism. If it's just for health reasons, then that's OK. If it's for moral reasons, then you are wrong-headed. We are absolutely morally correct to eat animals, because we are omnivorous. If it's moral for a cat to eat a mouse, it's moral for us to eat a cow. It's called the "food chain", and anyone who feels guilt about their place in it doesn't have any understanding of nature.
You confuse nature with ethics. Nature has built a strong urge to rape into many males, and rape is a common occurance in many animals including humans. If it occurs in chimpanzees, there are no moral issues; if it occurs in humans, it is wrong.
Just found this which seems to confirm that the mines were not designed as toys, but their green butterfly like appearance led to their being picked up by children.
Well, maybe the toy mines are a myth after all. I was looking at this site which however is not neutral. Any way to find out?
You don't make any sense. The CIA used dirty tactics to blow off the extremeties of the children of its own allies, the mujahedeen? Why?
Please support your claim that the toy mines were manufactured in the US.
It almost appears as if you tend to think that being homosexual is bad. Tsk tsk.
Atrocity is the name of the game in war.
You don't understand the first thing about human psychology if you think this. How can maiming children possibly help in winning a war? It makes your opponent more determined, not less.
Now try to put yourself in the place of those families 1 year from now, and figure out how many of them want justice for their loved ones' deaths.
And also try to imagine how many of those families and victims are abhorred by the thought that other innocent civilians would suffer like they did.
We're certainly giving anybody who wants to leave the country a fair chance, and they're eating it up.
What? Where can Afghans sign up for a green card? The border to Pakistan has just been closed: we don't even let civilian refugees out of Afghanistan. We don't want our targets to leave.
After you see videos of what the Afgans did to 18 year old Russian conscript soldiers, you wouldn't blame them.
How dare you suggest that I would justify an atrocity by pointing to atrocities of the other side?