With linux, the drivers you need are either on the cd (95% of the time) or their non-existance is well-known enough that it's covered on a HCL somewhere.
Now that has to be the funniest "It's not a bug, it's a feature" line I've ever heard. Don't worry about finding a driver under Linux: if it's not on the CD, odds are it doesn't exist!
Seriously: when new cars come out, they try to sell you on the sexy things: how powerful the engine is, how fast it accelerates or handles, how luxurious the ride is, and if it's an SUV, how rugged you'll look when you drive it through old-growth pine forests - or, at least, while picking up the kids from band rehersal.
But in our rush to go faster and look better, the only time that automotive ads seriously push the economics issue is when a) they're trying to clear out old inventory and have slashed financing rates, or b) there's an energy crisis and they're selling low gas-consumption cars.
In the computer world, there's never an energy crisis, thanks to Moore's Law (or whatever). Many people who are buying computers are buying far more power than they actually need, or are ever likely to use. The only people who are really worried about computational overhead are wonks like us - professionals. Lots of folks are willing to plunk down for a 700 GHz machine on which to check e-mail and browse Sports Illustrated online.
Think about it. If NVidia wanted to please Microsoft, what worse way to do it than provide hardware to a Linux-based competitor? I'm sure Microsoft asked NVidia to do the X-Box, not vice-versa.
In the end, I'm sure that Microsoft did ask NVIDIA to supply the cards for the X-Box, but you shouldn't interpret that as meaning that the NVIDIA folks were doing Microsoft a favor. Microsoft, and a bunch of other people, are fairly certain that X-Box is going to sell pretty damn well (probably better than Indrema), and NVIDIA would have been stupid to turn its back on that.
Quite on the contrary, I would be willing to bet that NVIDIA lobbied pretty hard to get into the X-Box. In the end, MS had to pick a partner who was willing to a) give them a quality product which b) was capable of delivering good D3D performance, all c) at a reasonable price point (cheap enough to stick in a consumer-level game machine). That NVIDIA answered the call indicates that they have no interest in playing hardball with MS. And frankly, I don't blame them: it would be a counterproductive and costly fight to pick.
This line of reasoning is usually brought up in relation to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If you don't have the time to click the link, Sapir and Whorf essentially claimed that our language defines the way in which we perceive the universe, a belief which has also been termed "Linguistic Determinism." Frequently, it's mentioned in connection to The Great Eskimo Snow Hoax, which is that dumb-ass story everyone hears at one point about how there are 400 words in Inuit for the English word "snow". (Which, of course, is bullshit. There are likely more slang terms for snow used among English speaking skiers and snowboarders than in "standard Inuit," such as it is. IANALinguist.)
The only problem is that no linguist who has done any serious experimentation on the subject has been able to support Sapir-Whorf to any reasonable degree. Furthermore, they pretty much managed to undermine their own argument: in saying that an Inuit might have one word for snow lying on the ground, and another for snow falling, for example, you can see that we don't need a specific lexeme to grok the difference between falling snow and lying snow.
With that in mind, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that language ain't got much to do with it. Maybe our keyboards would look different, and we'd all having Unicode native operating systems - which, now that I think about it, would be pretty damn cool - but I don't see that programming languages would be otherwise greatly affected.
They don't really hold that much of an alliance to Microsoft.
I'll go one better here. AOL disklikes Microsoft in a pretty big way, and the feeling is mutual. First, they co-existed in a sort of uneasy way. Then, Microsoft rolled out MSN, which competes directly with AOL. Then, AOL bought Netscape, even though they were ostensibly pushing MSIE, a move which couldn't have given the Redmond crew many warm fuzzies. Next, we had the Instant Messenger Wars, which enabled us to witness the bizarre spectacle of Microsoft calling for standards.
What chafes AOL so badly is that no matter what they've done , they've been stuck with Microsoft, because the vast majority of their clients use MS operating systems. For the first time, it looks like they may have the opportunity to change that.
If I were Steve Case, I'd be thinking very hard about funding Linux development in a highly public way, or making an alliance with some OEM which sells Linux systems. That would pave the way for OEM boxes running Linux, preconfigured to use AOL.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'm starting to scare myself. Little Linux boxen, stripped of their "nonessential" functionality, all set to connect the average joe into a world of happy AOL-Time Warner content. I think I'm going to curl up with some milk and cookies.
Funny, but you're missing the point. When the automobile started to replace horses, it wasn't the case that horses were getting signifigantly better and easier to manage every day. These days, as storage (both volatile and non) prices continue to drop, the question becomes not whether Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3s, but whether its better enough to make lots of people really care about it. If, as another poster suggests, I can get similar results with at 128 with Ogg Vorbis as I can at 192 with MP3, who cares if I'm not sample-rate limited?
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting.
Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Be fair to Slashdot, too. The post was in the category "It's funny. Laugh," and the commentary you quote comes courtesy of the original story you quote, not any of the/. crew.
Unless I'm mistaken, they're referring to the use of tear-away tabbed toolbars. That's kind of a mouthful, but you can get the idea here.
If you look at the screenshot, you'll note a floating toolbox with a tab at the top which says "layers". The tab can be dragged onto other toolboxes to create customized versions, or torn off of toolboxes if you prefer to give it a space of its own.
I don't recall ever having seen one of these in an application besides those belonging to Adobe and Macromedia, although Painter (now owned by Corel, formerly by Metatools, and before that by Fractal Design) had something similar.
Still, it's obvious at this point that Adobe is pretty desperate. Photoshop still reigns supreme for high-end still image editing and pre-production, but Macromedia is kicking their tail all over the place on the web. To be fair, Adobe LiveMotion looks like a pretty nifty tool (I haven't tried it), but at this point Adobe knows that it's playing catch-up, and doesn't much like it.
It's not as though Big Evil Corporation (TM) calls up the office of Columbia's president and says: "Quick, we need some research and statistics from the Chemical Engineering department to support our evil, corporatist, anti-geek agenda!"
Katz's point is not that Columbia's administration has it in for geekhood, as your jab seems to imply. It's that there is a danger in tying the funding of an academic institution to a corporate agenda. I know that as an employee of a state university, I'm forbidden from officially endorsing any product (at least in the IT field), but I wonder if that would be the case if we became the Microsoft Information Technology Research Center.
Scientific research isn't like that. It's based on facts -- you can't just magically come up with results to support your personal agenda. In that way, it's quite different from journalism, don't you think?
Who told you that? The Science Fairy?
It's a running joke now, in the tech industry especially, that two competing corporations which comission studies on the same topic will come up with differing answers. Third party research which is funded by corporate entities is always suspect. Even in instances where no improper behavior takes place, such studies are often treated with skepticism just because of the possibility of bias. Witness the Mindcraft/Microsoft debacle of a few months ago.
For the most part, Katz is speaking less to direct funding of academe than academe's entrance into the corporate arena in its own right. And here, my own testimony is a bit suspect - we do what amounts to consulting services for money here (although we're salaried, and make considerably less than the average consultant). But I have to admit that part of me regrets the loss of the whole "ivory tower academia" stereotype.
If memory serves (I haven't read the cease and desist orders, or any subpoenae), Apple's cause of action is that the pictures of the Cube constitued a trade secret, and their publication caused harm to Apple as a company. This seems a little counter-intuitive (read: bullshit) considering that they published identical pictures the next day, but like I said before, IANAL.
I'm not sure it's entirely true that anyone can be sued for any reason. It is at least expected that a plaintiff have a cause of action - that they have been wronged in some way, and that they attribute the wrong to the defendant. I can't sue someone for wearing an orange leisure suit, but I can sue someone for wearing an orange leisure suit if it made me violently ill.
One of my favorite Guiness films was The Horse's Mouth, a comedy about a down and out artist desperately trying to find a way to finance his work. It's Guiness at his crankiest, and the only film in which you'll get to here Sir Alec impersonating the Duchess of Blackpool. Worth renting, if you can find it.
The maxim that I usually hear used when contemplating when to release source code into the community is, "When it does what it does reliably." In short, mark whatever subset of code is necessary as not ready for prime time, but make sure that it's in good enough shape that you can do one thing with it without fail. So given the choice between expanding features and improving reliability on current features, you should be merciless in choosing the latter. Then release.
Of course, you'll probably find out later that the "one thing without fail" isn't as bulletproof as you think, but it's still a nice thought. Folks are more interested in a project if they can see that it's actually usable for something right now, even if it isn't the be-all end-all.
people suing because they spilled hot McDonalds coffee on themselves, would be laughed out of court in Germany.
The "McDonald's coffee case" is frequently held up to ridicule as a classic example of a frivolous lawsuit. After all, old lady spills coffee on herself and gets burned, then sues - what's more to know?
The coffee one gets out of a home coffee machine is about 140 degrees F. A really hot cup of coffee out of a commercial device might hit 160. During the trial, a McDonald's QA manager testified that company policy dictated that their coffee be maintained at not less than 180. That's enough to cause a third degree burn in less than five seconds.
Which is what happened. Stella Liebeck was handed a cup of this coffee in a styrofoam container. When she spilled it, the burns were bad enough to necessitate the use of skin grafts. I refer you to the Consumer Attorneys of California pages, where they lay out a pretty good summary of the proceedings.
If you want to make fun of the US judicial system, go ahead, we can take it. But don't make fun of a poor old lady who got handed a little coffee grenade. Some people screw up, but she just got screwed.
Pick a worthy open source project and try to suss the entire thing out as an assignment. Extend its functionality as a class project - for example, using ext_skel as a start, write a new module for PHP. When you're done, offer the maintainers the fruits of your students' labors.
Think of an application that would benefit your school in general - say, a web discussion board for planning extra-curricular events - and code one up, from scratch (or from a much smaller project.
I get warm fuzzies when I see educators at the high-school level trying to make classes interesting and relevent to students in an immediate sense, as opposed to merely informative. Good luck!
Linux distributions are unlike record companies in two major ways.
Public vs. private licensure. You brought up the idea of a "General Public Music" somewhat facetiously, but it's a non-trivial point that you missed there. Linux (and the majority of non-Linux software included in the average distribution) are freely (as in speech) licensed, under the GPL, BSD, or some similar license. None of the big open source licenses prohibit redistribution of licensed software, and the GPL expressly allows redistribution for a fee. That means that by the time the distro gets to it, they implicitly have permission to redistribute, something record companies can't say until they have a contract.
Non-exclusivity. During a contract dispute with their lable, the pop act XTC refrained from recording any new material, because they knew that whatever they recorded would be the property of their label. They were essentially forced to sit on their hands until their label blinked. Because free software developers don't have exclusive relationships with distributions (unlike musicians with record labels), a distribution can't leverage any pressure on the developer beyond refusing to include his software.
Finally, I have to take exception to your comment about distributions giving lip service to "giving back to the community." Recording artists enter into deals with record companies because they think that they will make money off of it. No one gets into writing free software for the purpose of making money off the deal - those who do deserve what they get (with the notable exception of services like SourceXchange). The way in which distrubtions usually give back to the community is in funding development in areas where Linux is lacking, and by encouraging employees to continue to devleop for the platform.
So, in short, don't look your gift-culture in the mouth. Beyond the utterly superficial, I don't see any similarity between record companies and Linux distros.
There's a saying: "People will speak well of me when I'm dead." In other words, it's much easier to be a big guy and say nice things about someone when they're down, than when they're actively being a thorn in your side (or at least a worthy competitor).
I'll admit to the following bit of newbie-ishness: my first trip to Kuro5hin was last week. Which is a shame, because it seemed like a pretty quality site, with the exception of the dumbass "You won't see this story on Slashdot, because they're censoring it, those corporate running dogs," posts. I suspect that the site will return before too terribly long, but this is just a damn shame.
After you check out the link to the story, please take a moment to read Chip Salzenberg's response. I reproduce it in its entirety here, as it's relatively brief, well-worded, and the server is slammed eight ways from sunday just now:
I was there. It's real. (Score:1) I was there. Here are the facts as I remember them:
The only things actually decided at the ``closed-door'' meeting (actually we had a visitor and we didn't throw him out) were [1] that a rewrite could be attempted; [2] that it didn't have to be 100% compatible; [3] that one big list like p5p can't support such a large developer population.
Tom C. hasn't been excommunicated or anything, any more than I have. (I'm not on the list either, you notice.) Tom C. left the meeting soon after it started, so he wasn't around to volunteer when the chairs were being assigned.
We shut down p6p because we don't want another p5p shark tank. The bootstrap mailing list works; I know that people have been using it. It's only a temporary list, anyway; that's why it has that name. Some (not all, I think) development lists will be closed, also to avoid the p5p-alike fate.
The assignment list is real. I can't help what seems real to you.
Perl needs a spin doctor to fight the FUD spawned by anti-Perl bigots of various persuasions.
Meritocracy means that promotions go by ability. What makes you think that only the ability to code is the exclusive measure of ability that should matter? Management is, contrary to popular opinion, a real skill that some people have more of than others.
We already do hear from the community. They use mail and news and Slashdot and use Perl. But the non-traditional-hacker user base doesn't communicate through those channels. Consider Dick Hardt our ``speaker to suits''.
As for your participation, well, you're welcome to stay.
(Note: I wasn't at OLS. I'm getting this from the article.)
Miguel de Icaza shows up at OLS and immediately begins ranting about how bad Unix in general (and Linux in particular) is. Partially, he says, this is because the kernel doesn't decide on any particular "policy" (by which, one can assume he means any number of things), but mostly it's because there is little-to-no code reuse among Unix applications.
By the way - Miguel's (or, at least, Helixcode's) latest project, called Bonobo, is a software component system designed to make code reuse easy. If you're using GNOME, anyway.
It's classic marketing technique: you build up a problem in the mind of a listener, then solve it for him with your product. That doesn't necessarily invalidate it (Unix systems do lack reusable software components, and that's a real problem). It's similar to what John Carmack did at Macworld when he issued that backhanded comment about Mac 3D hardware finally not sucking. We're just not used to hearing it from Open Source people.
There are good journalists and bad journalists. Regardless of your opinions of the quality of Katz's writings, I challenge you to provide a single example of an article he's written which, in any notable way, infringed on an individual's privacy.
I'm actually pretty shocked that you managed to score a rating of 4: Insightful off this one, but what the hell, I'll bite.
Hi, I'd like to move a server from NT4 to Linux. I'd like to stress that it is a server that is extremely vital to my company's business. It is so vital in fact that I'm prepared to spend no money on it at all. I want someone to give me high-powered, reliable software upon which I can bet my job, for free.
Is that not reasonable? I use OpenSSH, Snort, and nmap all the time at my place of business for security. For other purposes, I use Red Hat, Debian, Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL, and PostgresSQL. All "high-powered, reliable software," as you put it. All free.
Why must Open-Source necessarily equal free?
This may come as a shock to you, but I'm not in the habit of spending money on Open Source software unless I absolutely have to. Oh, I've certainly purchased the occasional RH distro CD because I wanted to install it at home, but at work, where I'm fortunate to have a decent net connection, I do net installs like crazy.
It's true that you can spend money on OSS. However, most people associate OSS with no charge, and not without reason.
Why does Open-Source necessarily equal best?
The orignal poster stated that he would rather go with an Open Source solution rather than ones that "carry a hefty pricetag, upwards of several thousand dollars." I think that this is an important consideration for him. Since you didn't suggest any commercial solutions (or, in fact, OSS ones), I'll pose the converse question to you: what is your familiarity with VPN software, and what commercial solution would you say was the best?
If it were my job on the line here, I'd find the best solution, not necessarily the one that meets my agenda.
I thought that the original post articulated his reasons for pursuing an Open Source package pretty nicely. On the flip side, your post seems to reflect a prejudice that only businessess with money to burn should have access to decent software. If you're of the opinion that Open Source software has no role in mission critical applications, fine, but just out of curiosity, why the hell would you read/.?
I think that the binary vs. textual format you're describing is something of a red herring. It doesn't matter if a program produces HTML, TXT, or XML (all textual), or GIF, JPG, or PNG (binary). The bottom line is that they're all products of the program, not derivative of the program.
The GPL applies to two types of things: the actual program itself, and any work based on the program. They go on to define that in the following way:
a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
With that said, I doubt that there's really much cause for concern that Enzyme (or any other web-based application) has any signifigant problems with the GPL, any more than any program in an interpreted language which produces textual output. Basically, you're dealing with three sets of items:
The actual code which drives the back end of your application (Enzyme's PHP, and raw bits of static HTML), which is protected by the GPL.
The data that you're archiving using Enzyme, protected by Copyright (or not, depending on who is collecting the information and the terms under which they acquired it).
The confluence of the code and database, which produces the actual site with published information.
With that said, I do not believe that running a web-based application is equivalent to redistribution-without-source, as you suggest. If I install a program on a remote computer, then open an Xterm window to interact with it on my local workstation, I haven't redistributed the initial app, despite the fact that my workstation and the remote server are exchanging all kinds of information necessary to my interaction with the application. I'm merely accessing it using another means. If that was really redistribution without source, then anyone taking advantage of the Compaq Test Drive on a Linux server would have caused Compaq to violate the GPL.
Similarly, if I set up an Enzyme driven site and open it up to the world, I haven't redistributed the code, even in binary form. I'm letting people interact with it to produce output specifically tailored for their needs, using an intermediary program (Netscape, Lynx, Mozilla, IE...) of their choosing.
While from a design point of view, it's nice that you can view all of the elements of a web-driven system - database, server, client, network - as a unified whole, it isn't. At least, not as far as the GPL is concerned. Your program rides piggyback on a web server, process requests based on the clients' requests, and transmits information back accordingly. And that's all.
I think that you're missing my point. There have been alternatives to the "Clippit" personality all the way back from its original incarnation, including a cat which appeared to be assembled from pieces of scrap paper, and "Power Pup," a superhero dog. I didn't mean to suggest that there was a lack of choice in the office assistant department, but rather that the whole office assistant concept is a bad idea. I base this on three key supporting facts
In all my time doing tech support, I have yet to speak to someone who felt anything more positive than a vague sort of annoyance towards the office assistant.
My wife, who taught MS Word as a technical trainer for several years, always began each class with "How to turn off the office assistant." By popular demand.
I am a curmedgeon, and it is therefore beyond the scope of anything I write to be positive about anything.
Clippit bore the brunt of my ire primarily because it is the default assistant, and because it is, in fact, incredibly annoying. Especially in its default behavior. I apologize profusely to you, Microsoft, Clippit, and the general public if I was unduly harsh to that twisted, hateful, useless fucking piece of scrap metal.
I am informed that the correct name of the demonic fucking paper clip is, in fact, "Clippit," and not "Clippy," as previously reported. Sammy Baby regrets the error.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that has to be the funniest "It's not a bug, it's a feature" line I've ever heard. Don't worry about finding a driver under Linux: if it's not on the CD, odds are it doesn't exist!
Because it doesn't sell cars.
Seriously: when new cars come out, they try to sell you on the sexy things: how powerful the engine is, how fast it accelerates or handles, how luxurious the ride is, and if it's an SUV, how rugged you'll look when you drive it through old-growth pine forests - or, at least, while picking up the kids from band rehersal.
But in our rush to go faster and look better, the only time that automotive ads seriously push the economics issue is when a) they're trying to clear out old inventory and have slashed financing rates, or b) there's an energy crisis and they're selling low gas-consumption cars.
In the computer world, there's never an energy crisis, thanks to Moore's Law (or whatever). Many people who are buying computers are buying far more power than they actually need, or are ever likely to use. The only people who are really worried about computational overhead are wonks like us - professionals. Lots of folks are willing to plunk down for a 700 GHz machine on which to check e-mail and browse Sports Illustrated online.
In the end, I'm sure that Microsoft did ask NVIDIA to supply the cards for the X-Box, but you shouldn't interpret that as meaning that the NVIDIA folks were doing Microsoft a favor. Microsoft, and a bunch of other people, are fairly certain that X-Box is going to sell pretty damn well (probably better than Indrema), and NVIDIA would have been stupid to turn its back on that.
Quite on the contrary, I would be willing to bet that NVIDIA lobbied pretty hard to get into the X-Box. In the end, MS had to pick a partner who was willing to a) give them a quality product which b) was capable of delivering good D3D performance, all c) at a reasonable price point (cheap enough to stick in a consumer-level game machine). That NVIDIA answered the call indicates that they have no interest in playing hardball with MS. And frankly, I don't blame them: it would be a counterproductive and costly fight to pick.
The only problem is that no linguist who has done any serious experimentation on the subject has been able to support Sapir-Whorf to any reasonable degree. Furthermore, they pretty much managed to undermine their own argument: in saying that an Inuit might have one word for snow lying on the ground, and another for snow falling, for example, you can see that we don't need a specific lexeme to grok the difference between falling snow and lying snow.
With that in mind, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that language ain't got much to do with it. Maybe our keyboards would look different, and we'd all having Unicode native operating systems - which, now that I think about it, would be pretty damn cool - but I don't see that programming languages would be otherwise greatly affected.
I'll go one better here. AOL disklikes Microsoft in a pretty big way, and the feeling is mutual. First, they co-existed in a sort of uneasy way. Then, Microsoft rolled out MSN, which competes directly with AOL. Then, AOL bought Netscape, even though they were ostensibly pushing MSIE, a move which couldn't have given the Redmond crew many warm fuzzies. Next, we had the Instant Messenger Wars, which enabled us to witness the bizarre spectacle of Microsoft calling for standards.
What chafes AOL so badly is that no matter what they've done , they've been stuck with Microsoft, because the vast majority of their clients use MS operating systems. For the first time, it looks like they may have the opportunity to change that.
If I were Steve Case, I'd be thinking very hard about funding Linux development in a highly public way, or making an alliance with some OEM which sells Linux systems. That would pave the way for OEM boxes running Linux, preconfigured to use AOL.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'm starting to scare myself. Little Linux boxen, stripped of their "nonessential" functionality, all set to connect the average joe into a world of happy AOL-Time Warner content. I think I'm going to curl up with some milk and cookies.
Funny, but you're missing the point. When the automobile started to replace horses, it wasn't the case that horses were getting signifigantly better and easier to manage every day. These days, as storage (both volatile and non) prices continue to drop, the question becomes not whether Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3s, but whether its better enough to make lots of people really care about it. If, as another poster suggests, I can get similar results with at 128 with Ogg Vorbis as I can at 192 with MP3, who cares if I'm not sample-rate limited?
Be fair to Slashdot, too. The post was in the category "It's funny. Laugh," and the commentary you quote comes courtesy of the original story you quote, not any of the /. crew.
Unless I'm mistaken, they're referring to the use of tear-away tabbed toolbars. That's kind of a mouthful, but you can get the idea here.
If you look at the screenshot, you'll note a floating toolbox with a tab at the top which says "layers". The tab can be dragged onto other toolboxes to create customized versions, or torn off of toolboxes if you prefer to give it a space of its own.
I don't recall ever having seen one of these in an application besides those belonging to Adobe and Macromedia, although Painter (now owned by Corel, formerly by Metatools, and before that by Fractal Design) had something similar.
Still, it's obvious at this point that Adobe is pretty desperate. Photoshop still reigns supreme for high-end still image editing and pre-production, but Macromedia is kicking their tail all over the place on the web. To be fair, Adobe LiveMotion looks like a pretty nifty tool (I haven't tried it), but at this point Adobe knows that it's playing catch-up, and doesn't much like it.
Katz's point is not that Columbia's administration has it in for geekhood, as your jab seems to imply. It's that there is a danger in tying the funding of an academic institution to a corporate agenda. I know that as an employee of a state university, I'm forbidden from officially endorsing any product (at least in the IT field), but I wonder if that would be the case if we became the Microsoft Information Technology Research Center.
Who told you that? The Science Fairy?
It's a running joke now, in the tech industry especially, that two competing corporations which comission studies on the same topic will come up with differing answers. Third party research which is funded by corporate entities is always suspect. Even in instances where no improper behavior takes place, such studies are often treated with skepticism just because of the possibility of bias. Witness the Mindcraft/Microsoft debacle of a few months ago.
For the most part, Katz is speaking less to direct funding of academe than academe's entrance into the corporate arena in its own right. And here, my own testimony is a bit suspect - we do what amounts to consulting services for money here (although we're salaried, and make considerably less than the average consultant). But I have to admit that part of me regrets the loss of the whole "ivory tower academia" stereotype.
If memory serves (I haven't read the cease and desist orders, or any subpoenae), Apple's cause of action is that the pictures of the Cube constitued a trade secret, and their publication caused harm to Apple as a company. This seems a little counter-intuitive (read: bullshit) considering that they published identical pictures the next day, but like I said before, IANAL.
IANAL, so everyone off my case. =)
</disclaimer>
I'm not sure it's entirely true that anyone can be sued for any reason. It is at least expected that a plaintiff have a cause of action - that they have been wronged in some way, and that they attribute the wrong to the defendant. I can't sue someone for wearing an orange leisure suit, but I can sue someone for wearing an orange leisure suit if it made me violently ill.
Regrettably, I would be likely to lose this case.
One of my favorite Guiness films was The Horse's Mouth, a comedy about a down and out artist desperately trying to find a way to finance his work. It's Guiness at his crankiest, and the only film in which you'll get to here Sir Alec impersonating the Duchess of Blackpool. Worth renting, if you can find it.
The maxim that I usually hear used when contemplating when to release source code into the community is, "When it does what it does reliably." In short, mark whatever subset of code is necessary as not ready for prime time, but make sure that it's in good enough shape that you can do one thing with it without fail. So given the choice between expanding features and improving reliability on current features, you should be merciless in choosing the latter. Then release.
Of course, you'll probably find out later that the "one thing without fail" isn't as bulletproof as you think, but it's still a nice thought. Folks are more interested in a project if they can see that it's actually usable for something right now, even if it isn't the be-all end-all.
Just a quick note on frivolous lawsuits:
The "McDonald's coffee case" is frequently held up to ridicule as a classic example of a frivolous lawsuit. After all, old lady spills coffee on herself and gets burned, then sues - what's more to know?
The coffee one gets out of a home coffee machine is about 140 degrees F. A really hot cup of coffee out of a commercial device might hit 160. During the trial, a McDonald's QA manager testified that company policy dictated that their coffee be maintained at not less than 180. That's enough to cause a third degree burn in less than five seconds.
Which is what happened. Stella Liebeck was handed a cup of this coffee in a styrofoam container. When she spilled it, the burns were bad enough to necessitate the use of skin grafts. I refer you to the Consumer Attorneys of California pages, where they lay out a pretty good summary of the proceedings.
If you want to make fun of the US judicial system, go ahead, we can take it. But don't make fun of a poor old lady who got handed a little coffee grenade. Some people screw up, but she just got screwed.
I get warm fuzzies when I see educators at the high-school level trying to make classes interesting and relevent to students in an immediate sense, as opposed to merely informative. Good luck!
Finally, I have to take exception to your comment about distributions giving lip service to "giving back to the community." Recording artists enter into deals with record companies because they think that they will make money off of it. No one gets into writing free software for the purpose of making money off the deal - those who do deserve what they get (with the notable exception of services like SourceXchange). The way in which distrubtions usually give back to the community is in funding development in areas where Linux is lacking, and by encouraging employees to continue to devleop for the platform.
So, in short, don't look your gift-culture in the mouth. Beyond the utterly superficial, I don't see any similarity between record companies and Linux distros.
I'll admit to the following bit of newbie-ishness: my first trip to Kuro5hin was last week. Which is a shame, because it seemed like a pretty quality site, with the exception of the dumbass "You won't see this story on Slashdot, because they're censoring it, those corporate running dogs," posts. I suspect that the site will return before too terribly long, but this is just a damn shame.
After you check out the link to the story, please take a moment to read Chip Salzenberg's response. I reproduce it in its entirety here, as it's relatively brief, well-worded, and the server is slammed eight ways from sunday just now:
(Note: I wasn't at OLS. I'm getting this from the article.)
Miguel de Icaza shows up at OLS and immediately begins ranting about how bad Unix in general (and Linux in particular) is. Partially, he says, this is because the kernel doesn't decide on any particular "policy" (by which, one can assume he means any number of things), but mostly it's because there is little-to-no code reuse among Unix applications.
By the way - Miguel's (or, at least, Helixcode's) latest project, called Bonobo, is a software component system designed to make code reuse easy. If you're using GNOME, anyway.
It's classic marketing technique: you build up a problem in the mind of a listener, then solve it for him with your product. That doesn't necessarily invalidate it (Unix systems do lack reusable software components, and that's a real problem). It's similar to what John Carmack did at Macworld when he issued that backhanded comment about Mac 3D hardware finally not sucking. We're just not used to hearing it from Open Source people.
There are good journalists and bad journalists. Regardless of your opinions of the quality of Katz's writings, I challenge you to provide a single example of an article he's written which, in any notable way, infringed on an individual's privacy.
I'm actually pretty shocked that you managed to score a rating of 4: Insightful off this one, but what the hell, I'll bite.
Is that not reasonable? I use OpenSSH, Snort, and nmap all the time at my place of business for security. For other purposes, I use Red Hat, Debian, Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL, and PostgresSQL. All "high-powered, reliable software," as you put it. All free.
This may come as a shock to you, but I'm not in the habit of spending money on Open Source software unless I absolutely have to. Oh, I've certainly purchased the occasional RH distro CD because I wanted to install it at home, but at work, where I'm fortunate to have a decent net connection, I do net installs like crazy.
It's true that you can spend money on OSS. However, most people associate OSS with no charge, and not without reason.
The orignal poster stated that he would rather go with an Open Source solution rather than ones that "carry a hefty pricetag, upwards of several thousand dollars." I think that this is an important consideration for him. Since you didn't suggest any commercial solutions (or, in fact, OSS ones), I'll pose the converse question to you: what is your familiarity with VPN software, and what commercial solution would you say was the best?
I thought that the original post articulated his reasons for pursuing an Open Source package pretty nicely. On the flip side, your post seems to reflect a prejudice that only businessess with money to burn should have access to decent software. If you're of the opinion that Open Source software has no role in mission critical applications, fine, but just out of curiosity, why the hell would you read /.?
I think that the binary vs. textual format you're describing is something of a red herring. It doesn't matter if a program produces HTML, TXT, or XML (all textual), or GIF, JPG, or PNG (binary). The bottom line is that they're all products of the program, not derivative of the program.
With that said, I do not believe that running a web-based application is equivalent to redistribution-without-source, as you suggest. If I install a program on a remote computer, then open an Xterm window to interact with it on my local workstation, I haven't redistributed the initial app, despite the fact that my workstation and the remote server are exchanging all kinds of information necessary to my interaction with the application. I'm merely accessing it using another means. If that was really redistribution without source, then anyone taking advantage of the Compaq Test Drive on a Linux server would have caused Compaq to violate the GPL.
Similarly, if I set up an Enzyme driven site and open it up to the world, I haven't redistributed the code, even in binary form. I'm letting people interact with it to produce output specifically tailored for their needs, using an intermediary program (Netscape, Lynx, Mozilla, IE...) of their choosing.
While from a design point of view, it's nice that you can view all of the elements of a web-driven system - database, server, client, network - as a unified whole, it isn't. At least, not as far as the GPL is concerned. Your program rides piggyback on a web server, process requests based on the clients' requests, and transmits information back accordingly. And that's all.
I think that you're missing my point. There have been alternatives to the "Clippit" personality all the way back from its original incarnation, including a cat which appeared to be assembled from pieces of scrap paper, and "Power Pup," a superhero dog. I didn't mean to suggest that there was a lack of choice in the office assistant department, but rather that the whole office assistant concept is a bad idea. I base this on three key supporting facts
Clippit bore the brunt of my ire primarily because it is the default assistant, and because it is, in fact, incredibly annoying. Especially in its default behavior. I apologize profusely to you, Microsoft, Clippit, and the general public if I was unduly harsh to that twisted, hateful, useless fucking piece of scrap metal.
I am informed that the correct name of the demonic fucking paper clip is, in fact, "Clippit," and not "Clippy," as previously reported. Sammy Baby regrets the error.