Frankly, I don't care if the program executable is Open Source, Free, or Commercial. But I want the file format to be open, documented, and for there to be nothing stopping me from writing a program of my own to manipulate that format without paying a dime to anyone.
Why? It's my forking data! I wrote this paper, not Microsoft/Sun/whoever. This is my image, not Adobe's, Microsoft's, Quark's, or whoever. It's my intellectual property. I do not want to be bound to one company to access MY OWN STUFF. Imagine if to open the door to your own house, you needed a key from a company that went out of business. If you ever break the key, if the company isn't selling that key anymore, tough. You can't get into your house. (And calling a locksmith to "reverse engineer" the lock is violating the builder's intellectual property on their lock design.)
So should there be a time limit on propretary file formats? Yes. The day the program is released, I want full documentation of the format available for free and an agreement that I can't be sued for using the documentation. It's my data, not the company's and I do not want to be locked to that one company for MY data. If I choose to edit the file with a commercial, closed source program, that is my choice. If I choose to edit the file with a Free Software program, so be it. I should never, ever be beholden to a 3rd party for my own intellectual property.
"I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it."
On the other hand, the company should be proud that their program is so easy to use that no one needs a tutorial, but so good that everyone wants a copy. I'd be flattered. Pissed off, but flattered.:-)
The story you are about to read is true. The company name has not been changed, because it is anything but innocent.
Back when my family got its first PC, a 1993-era 486, we bought the standard Microsoft mouse with it. It works for a while, but by spring 1994 it had developed a problem where the pointer would "stick" on screen when moving horizontally, as if it hit the edge of the screen. (It only happed in Win 3.1, though, not in GeoWorks Ensemble. Hmmm...) So, I called Microsoft.
Over the course of the next two months, we bought mouse cleaning kits (didn't fix it), downloaded new drivers (didn't fix it), had MS send us a new mouse (didn't fix it), changed mouse pad (didn't fix it), and otherwise, well, couldn't fix it. Finally, I called MS tech support for the 119th time and explained the situation again. The rep. on the other end replied, and I quote:
MS Tech Support Rep: "Well, I suppose if you don't like it you can just take your business elsewhere."
The next day we went out and bought a Logitech mouse. It worked flawlessly for years, and we have used nothing but Logitech mice since without the problem ever recurring. This is also when I first began to dislike Microsoft, long before the question of business practices or monopolies came into the picture.
The best tech support from any PDA company that I know is from little-known HandEra, Inc. They sell Palm OS devices, really good ones too, but don't get much recognition because it's hard to compete with Sony for mind share.
Their tech support, though, is without equal. When they had a bad run of hardware on a new device last year that resulted in many devices cracking, they exchanged hundreds of devices for people at no charge. HandEra has a few people who frequent the various User Group mailing lists and occationally answer questions, or in some cases will even respond to someone's problem with "Yeah, that's a flaw, email [tech support guy's name] and have him exchange it." They're that personal, and they actually do. I've had to send a device in before, and if I got it in the mail by Tuesday I generally had it back before dinner on Friday. That's the travel time for BOTH directions. Amazing.
The reason they can do that, frankly, is because they're so small. Large companies don't have the time/money to train decent tech support people. At a smaller company, they can spare the developers for an hour a day to train tech support people, or even BE the tech support, so you're talking to someone that really knows what they're doing rather than someone who's NEXT job will be "would you like fries with that?"
Have you used echo.com? They're moving servers at the moment (natch), but once they're up again check them out. Their an audio streaming site that is entirely JSP and Flash, and is extremely well designed. They only downside is that they do browser checking and reject non-NS4/IE browsers. But their use of Flash as an interactive page design system is amazing.
I've got the Developer model (SL-5000d). Yes, the headphone jack and microphone jack are the same thing, I've tried it and the quality both ways is excellent. I don't know if it does full duplex, though, as I don't have the right equipment to plug into it to find out. If it is full duplex, though, a GSM CF card would make a highly interesting addition.....
The same solution is possible in the context of music on the Net. But here, rather than balance, the rhetoric is about "theft" and "crime." Congress should empower file sharing by recognizing a similar system of compulsory licenses. These fees should not be set by an industry set on killing this new mode of distribution. They should be set, as they have always been set, by a policy maker keen on striking a balance. If only such a policy maker were somewhere to be found.
What that last sentence means is that Congress makes laws. If we want good laws, we need good Senators and Congressmen. We seem to have a shortage of them, however, especially on this issue. Rick Boucher is the only one who comes to mind.
This cannot be said enough: In a democratic society, the people are the government. If you want good people (specifically on this issue) in Congress, vote them in! Ignore the paid advertisements by PACs supporting/slamming one candidate or another over some meaningless hot button issue. Find out where the candidates stand on the issues that matter and vote based on that. Get your friends to vote that way. Fax (mail letters are ignored now due to anthrax concerns) your Congress-critter and state your opinion, clearly and concisely. (That makes them take notice more than anything else.) Get your friends to do so as well. If you find that your representative doesn't know the first thing about this "freedom of information" thing, do your best to educate them, from the standpoint of someone who put them in office, and who can take them out.
This is your government, people. If it fails, it's because you failed it.
Coolness! I've been waiting for this for a long time, and it even looks like they're doing it right by not putting a mere 2 episodes on a disk. (It's still a bit pricy, but not as extortionary as it could have been.)
Oh, wait, I don't buy DVDs on principle. Damn you moral code!!!
THIS is how a company makes money producing Free Software. Don't, at least not at the beginning. I'm sure RMS would have my head for this, but it's the truth.
Consumer-oriented retail software and GPL code are simply incompatble as a business model. If Id released the source for RtCW today, they wouldn't make a penny on their retail sales. Somone would get the source code, edit one line, stick it on an FTP server, and make it available to the world free (as in beer), and most people would get it from there. There would be no legal reason to stop them, and every financial reason for them to do so. That goes for any consumer-targeted application, game, utility, or whatever. You just can't make money with consumers that way. (Consumers aren't interested in "selling support". If they need you to support it, then it was a bad program to start with in their minds.)
Now here comes Id. They develop excellent code, and sell it and license it commercially like any other company. Then, once they've made their money back with a nice comfortable profit and moved on to bigger and better things, they open source the code. They're not doing anything more with it, so why should they prevent others from enjoying it? It's the original idea behind copyright in the first place! Author(s) get limited monopoly for a limited time so that they can make a living producing content, then it goes to the public domain. (OK, that would be more BSD license than GPL, that's a minor issue.)
For the FSF and its supporters, economics aren't the issue, it's all principle and philosophy and idealism. That's all well and good, I agree with their ideals for the most part. But idealism must be tempered by reality to produce pragmatism sometimes. The Id model is the best way I've seen to make money in the consumer space while still supporting Free Software / Open Source (take your pick).
Unless someone else has a better suggestion on how to make money in the consumer space with FS/OS code (remember, after the cash register the consumer doesn't want to ever have to talk to you), we should all bug companies to follow Id's excellent example. If they balk at the "lost revenue", just show them Carmak's twin Lamborginis.;-)
And of course if you find that your system has been infected and you run an AV program on it, you are arrested for violating national security.
That's like saying that the police have the right to break your window and then look inside from across the street. While a dozen other people climb through it, of course.
Interesting. Depending on the dates, that could coincide a lot better with the Old Testament.
Do recall, there are two different accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea (more accurate, "Sea of Reeds, which is NOT the modern-day Red Sea but a small lake in what is today the Suez Canal) in Exodus, one in prose and one as a song/poem. Professional linguists have determined that the poem is in fact the older, more "original" version, based on the sentence structure. In the poem, the sea does not part for the Hebrews and then fall back in. Rather, the Hebrews meander around the Suez for a while, eventually ending up at the NORTHERN end of what is today the Suez Canal, near the Mediterranian coast. The Hebrews move across an area of dry land, and then the hand of God rises from the sea and drags the Egyptians into it. It is very clearly a tidal wave, not a parting sea.
A volcano-induced tsunami would certainly have caused such a tidal wave. Sprinkle lightly with religious imagery, add a dash of selective editing over the following few centuries, and you have a receipe for the story of Exodus.
I'm afraid I have no links to other sites to offer on this one, but it's something to ponder.
The FSF and the Open Source / Free Software movement have generally focused on custom application development. That is, the market segment where Customer A goes to Consultancy B and says "Hey, write me a program that does X, Y, and Z, and I'll give you a fat check for it." In that market, the GPL (or BSD, or any other FS/OS license) works great. It reduces development time, encourages code reuse, reuses good code, and all the other fun stuff that the FSF likes to talk about. And the fact that you can't then sell or license it for money doesn't matter. You've already been paid a good hunk of change for writing it in the first place, and it's usually very targeted and specific so you wouldn't be able to mass market it anyway.
Things are entirely different in the consumer application world. The average consumer, that is, someone who plunks down $50 for a shrink-wrapped piece of software and expects it to just work, is not interested in a targeted application. Nor are they interested in paying for a given feature to be added (buying a feature costs a LOT more than a standard upgrade price), or in having their friend down the street hack a new feature in just for them. That could easily break compatibility with everyone else's copy, and is way more trouble than it is worth. And what is this "compile" you speak of? The user knows not what you speak.
Despite my best efforts to find one, I have yet to figure out a way to make money in the consumer space with FS/OS software. The most extreme example (though not the only) is the gaming industry. Blizzard Software would go out of business in a heart beat if Diablo were open source. Even if they sold CDs of it, I give it 10 minutes before someone modifies it enough to remove registration codes and makes an ISO. Even Linux-friendly id Software releases commercial, pay-per-copy programs, because they simply could not function otherwise. They make their money on producing a product at their own expense, and then getting as many other people to use it as possible, on a per-user fee basis. That is the only way to really make money in the consumer space, and is incompatible with the GPL and FSF philosophy.
You also cannot charge for "support." Sure, for a custom app you can charge for supporting the program, vis, running it, testing it, answering questions when it's broken, etc. Most importantly, you are being paid as a form of insurance. Companies LIKE having someone else to blame (you), and are willing to pay a pretty penny for it. In the consumer space, however, support is a bad thing. If a consumer ever has to call technical support, for any reason whatsoever, it is a flaw in the program. The only way to make money there is to charge a very hefty premium for technical support (which results in very unhappy users) and release a program that requires contacting technical support often. A consumer-oriented program that requires frequent communication with technical support is what we like to call "crap" (or a Microsoft product, take your pick). A business model that encourages the creation of crap is inherently immoral, IMHO.
Incidentally, I did pose this question to FSF VP Brad Kuhn a few months ago when he was in Chicago. His response was to brush off the consumer market as trivially small compared to the custom business market. Personally I don't consider anything that is measured in the billions to be trivial.:-) If anyone else reading this has a proposed solution to the natural incompatibility between custom software and consumer behavior, please let me know so that I can make money in the consumer space with open source.:-)
Intel's obsession with serial isn't really an obsession with serial. It's an obsession with clock-cycle-centric technologies. Take USB vs. FireWire (both actually serial, but bear with me). FireWire is peer-to-peer. That means it runs at a given speed regardless of the CPU, and devices can talk to each other directly. Take USB, which is master/slave based on the CPU. If you want to have several USB devices all talking to each other, they have to go through the CPU to do it. That means you need a bigger processor. That means you need a higher clock rate. That means you need Intel's higher-priced offerings. That means more money for Intel.
A serial interface needs to cycle faster than an equivalent parallel interface in order to get the same bandwidth out of it. Therefore, it also requires a meatier CPU. That means more money for Intel.
Re:Why did they spin *THIS* part off?
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They spun off the software division because the hardware is where the money is. The software division makes less than 5% of the company's gross revenue. If they spun it off completely into a public company, it would never survive the first year. They need for it to be able to mooch off of the parent company for now.
And a side note: Sony didn't invent VFS. Palm gave them an early release of their VFS APIs for the original CLIE in order to get them on board for the PalmOS. And TRG (now HandEra) had their own API for the TRGpro (their original device, with CF slot), which frankly was a lot faster.:-)
Nobody beyond a handful of wannabe-geeks who want to say "look what my handheld can do!" give a damn about multimedia on a handheld. "Ooh, I can look at 3"x2" color Powerpoint slides, and listen to supercompressed MP3s over tinny speakers!"
Which is exactly what Microsoft has yet to figure out with the PocketPC line, and Palm has always known. Yet they do need to advance the product beyond a single-tasking 33 MHz device. A VGA screen would make some tasks far easier (an address book not being one of them). For PowerPoint, you're not going to use the device to show PowerPoint slides. You can't croud everyone around a 3" screen. But you CAN use it as your remote control for the slides, with a real time display and your own notes. For that, a better screen/processor does come in useful.
Incremental improvement as they are able to do it RIGHT is what Palm (and most of its licensees) have been good at, and they need to keep that up. They just need to get it right a little faster to keep the MHz kiddies (who run IT departments) happy.
Sure, a company could take the Linux kernel and tools and write a Palm-esque interface for it, and rewrite the guts enough to be naturally resource-based XIP.
Like this? [agendacomputing.com]
And every company is going to have their own "redux Tux", which means you won't be able to generate a single executable file that you can throw on any device, the way you can with a Palm.
Yep, exactly like that. Now also look at http://www.linuxda.com/. Both are Palm-like Linux-based PDAs. I'll lay you odds that you can't beam an executable from one to the other and have it work without recompiling. (For one thing, the Agenda uses a MIPS processor, the PowerPlay III uses Dragonball.) That may be great for darwinism, but not for selling units. Not in the handheld space.
Re:Spinning off an OS division. What about BeOS?
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Palm's reasoning behind buying Be was very sound. They didn't want the BeOS codebase. It doesn't fit into a handheld. Neither does BeIA, which is designed for the niche-that-wasn't "Internet Appliance". They wanted the people who wrote a multithreaded, multitasking, multimedia OS in the first place.
Palm: Hey, you guys wrote a super cool OS for the desktop that rocked, and you did it relatively quickly, too.
Be engineers: Thanks!
Palm: We've got to write a new OS for the ARM archetecture that is fast, multimedia-ready, and backward compatible. Think you can do it?
Be engineers: Uhhh...
Palm: Here's $11 million, we just bought what's left of your company.
Be engineers: Sure!
Don't look for BeOS to appear on the Palm anytime soon. Look for the same kind of cool developments on the Palm, this time with a market share that can actually appreciate all that hard work.
Re:hercules using arm?
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i guess that means we'll finally see linux on genuine Palm(tm) hardware, at the expense of have a cool processor name like the Dragonball VZ.
Oh come on. "Palm" OS running on an "ARM" processor, but without the "Thumb" extensions to the chipset, being sold by "Hand"spring and "Hand"Era? The possibilities are endless...:-)
No Linux in Sight
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Several posters so far have speculated on what this all means for Linux on the Palm. In truth, it means absolutely nothing.
When Palm eventually moves to ARM-based hardware, I'm sure we'll see creative, inventive people making Linux ROM images for the hardware the same as they have for the iPAQ. But they won't be coming from Palm Solutions (the hardware/parent company), and I sincerely doubt they will be coming from any of the licensees. Why jump ship from a platform that had 80% of the retail market in August of this year, in addition to 80%-90% of the market for the past six years? That's foolish.
In addition, there is a world of difference between a Linux PDA and a Palm PDA. The PalmOS is built from the ground up as a handheld, all-in-RAM, XIP OS. Linux is originally a server OS. Yes, there has been absolutely astounding work in recent years in bringing Linux into embedded systems, but that's not enough. The paradigm of Linux is the same as the paradigm of the PocketPCs; a file system. The PalmOS has no file system, save for on expansion cards which are a new development. It's a database-like in-RAM format. That's what makes it so fast. You can get better performance out of a 33MHz Palm than you do out of a 150MHz PocketPC. There's a fundamental archetectural reason for that. Sure, Linux and Win32 may be familiar for many developers, but in order to do it right you need an archetecture and API that is designed for that type of system.
There's also the UI issue. The Palm UI was designed with Mac-like simplicity and consistency from the get-go. (Not surprising, considering that the majority of the founders were ex-Apple ane ex-Newton people.) The "Zen of Palm", alternately the subject of praise and flame wars, is really what made this organizer work as a portable computer. For cultural reasons, Linux doesn't have that. We (Slashdot readers) put up with a great deal more disparity in UI across a Linux desktop than a handheld user is willing to deal with. Simply throwing KDE or QT at it won't solve the problem of a UI that is consistent, learnable, and has almost zero learning curve.
Sure, a company could take the Linux kernel and tools and write a Palm-esque interface for it, and rewrite the guts enough to be naturally resource-based XIP. But by that point, you're almost writing a new OS to start with. And every company is going to have their own "redux Tux", which means you won't be able to generate a single executable file that you can throw on any device, the way you can with a Palm. One truism of the Open Source / Free Software (whichever camp you are in) movement is a lack of unity in APIs and UI. That will kill any mass market attempt at a handheld. The market is not interested in a device you can tweak and customize and recompile. It wants a device you can charge, pickup, and use. And at least right now, Linux is not that.
Does it bother you that Linda Park (Hoshi Sato on the new series "Enterprise") says that she grew up on TNG and had a crush on you/Wesley? Or does it feel good after reading certain Usenet groups?
PS: I happen to like the Wesley character (aside from his final episode, which was lame), so there!
The real future is not in copy prevention mechanisms. Those will be broken. Those infringe upon fair use, and will eventually be killed by new innovations or else kill off new innovations, and either way a lot of people on both sides of the cash register are metaphorically sexually active.
The real future is in authenticity. Just look at the satire mp3s on the net that get attributed to Weird Al Yankovic, that he never wrote. How do you know that this song you downloaded is really by him? How do you know it's not? How do you know that it wasn't modified to delete an explative, delete a line one person didn't like, add in a new stanza in order to defame the artist, etc? You don't. There is no way to prove that the movie you're watching really is an unedited copy of The Godfather. You can't be sure that your copy of Eminem's latest CD isn't the Lovey-Dovey-Censorship-Agency's "modified for familes" edition.
What would you be willing to pay for a method to prove that yes, this song is the artist's original? Or that this movie has not been edited for television? $15 a CD, I doubt. But 50 cents a song? $1? I'll let the economists figure that one out.
What we need is to expand watermarking and key-based signatures (NOT encryption, signatures) to make it easier to confirm that a given piece of work is authentic. Instead of CDDB being a clearing house for stealing people's information about their CDs, make it (or something like it) into a low-cost subscription service with public keys. When you play an mp3, the track info for is is confirmed against the key (which you can download permanently) to check that the file has not been modified. If it passes, you know that this is a "genuine, authentic *insert work here*". If it fails, you know that chances are it is not. If you care, you'll go and find a real one. If you don't care, that's your perogative.
Notice that nowhere in there is there any copy-prevention mechanism. None. Copy prevention is alien to any digital system, and is inherently weak, defeatable, and in the end futile. Authentication, however, is a booming industry, and is of legitimate value to the society.
Protecting against lies is in EVERYONE's interest. Preventing copying is in no one's interest, not even copyright holders.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? It's my forking data! I wrote this paper, not Microsoft/Sun/whoever. This is my image, not Adobe's, Microsoft's, Quark's, or whoever. It's my intellectual property. I do not want to be bound to one company to access MY OWN STUFF. Imagine if to open the door to your own house, you needed a key from a company that went out of business. If you ever break the key, if the company isn't selling that key anymore, tough. You can't get into your house. (And calling a locksmith to "reverse engineer" the lock is violating the builder's intellectual property on their lock design.)
So should there be a time limit on propretary file formats? Yes. The day the program is released, I want full documentation of the format available for free and an agreement that I can't be sued for using the documentation. It's my data, not the company's and I do not want to be locked to that one company for MY data. If I choose to edit the file with a commercial, closed source program, that is my choice. If I choose to edit the file with a Free Software program, so be it. I should never, ever be beholden to a 3rd party for my own intellectual property.
On the other hand, the company should be proud that their program is so easy to use that no one needs a tutorial, but so good that everyone wants a copy. I'd be flattered. Pissed off, but flattered. :-)
Back when my family got its first PC, a 1993-era 486, we bought the standard Microsoft mouse with it. It works for a while, but by spring 1994 it had developed a problem where the pointer would "stick" on screen when moving horizontally, as if it hit the edge of the screen. (It only happed in Win 3.1, though, not in GeoWorks Ensemble. Hmmm...) So, I called Microsoft.
Over the course of the next two months, we bought mouse cleaning kits (didn't fix it), downloaded new drivers (didn't fix it), had MS send us a new mouse (didn't fix it), changed mouse pad (didn't fix it), and otherwise, well, couldn't fix it. Finally, I called MS tech support for the 119th time and explained the situation again. The rep. on the other end replied, and I quote:
MS Tech Support Rep: "Well, I suppose if you don't like it you can just take your business elsewhere."
The next day we went out and bought a Logitech mouse. It worked flawlessly for years, and we have used nothing but Logitech mice since without the problem ever recurring. This is also when I first began to dislike Microsoft, long before the question of business practices or monopolies came into the picture.
Their tech support, though, is without equal. When they had a bad run of hardware on a new device last year that resulted in many devices cracking, they exchanged hundreds of devices for people at no charge. HandEra has a few people who frequent the various User Group mailing lists and occationally answer questions, or in some cases will even respond to someone's problem with "Yeah, that's a flaw, email [tech support guy's name] and have him exchange it." They're that personal, and they actually do. I've had to send a device in before, and if I got it in the mail by Tuesday I generally had it back before dinner on Friday. That's the travel time for BOTH directions. Amazing.
The reason they can do that, frankly, is because they're so small. Large companies don't have the time/money to train decent tech support people. At a smaller company, they can spare the developers for an hour a day to train tech support people, or even BE the tech support, so you're talking to someone that really knows what they're doing rather than someone who's NEXT job will be "would you like fries with that?"
Have you used echo.com? They're moving servers at the moment (natch), but once they're up again check them out. Their an audio streaming site that is entirely JSP and Flash, and is extremely well designed. They only downside is that they do browser checking and reject non-NS4/IE browsers. But their use of Flash as an interactive page design system is amazing.
Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis already did this, as I recall. Well, they floated across. :-)
As for a review, I wrote a long review of the SL-5000d (the developer edition of the SL-5500) back in January. Linkage below.
http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=1292
I've got the Developer model (SL-5000d). Yes, the headphone jack and microphone jack are the same thing, I've tried it and the quality both ways is excellent. I don't know if it does full duplex, though, as I don't have the right equipment to plug into it to find out. If it is full duplex, though, a GSM CF card would make a highly interesting addition.....
The same solution is possible in the context of music on the Net. But here, rather than balance, the rhetoric is about "theft" and "crime." Congress should empower file sharing by recognizing a similar system of compulsory licenses. These fees should not be set by an industry set on killing this new mode of distribution. They should be set, as they have always been set, by a policy maker keen on striking a balance. If only such a policy maker were somewhere to be found.
What that last sentence means is that Congress makes laws. If we want good laws, we need good Senators and Congressmen. We seem to have a shortage of them, however, especially on this issue. Rick Boucher is the only one who comes to mind.
This cannot be said enough: In a democratic society, the people are the government. If you want good people (specifically on this issue) in Congress, vote them in! Ignore the paid advertisements by PACs supporting/slamming one candidate or another over some meaningless hot button issue. Find out where the candidates stand on the issues that matter and vote based on that. Get your friends to vote that way. Fax (mail letters are ignored now due to anthrax concerns) your Congress-critter and state your opinion, clearly and concisely. (That makes them take notice more than anything else.) Get your friends to do so as well. If you find that your representative doesn't know the first thing about this "freedom of information" thing, do your best to educate them, from the standpoint of someone who put them in office, and who can take them out.
This is your government, people. If it fails, it's because you failed it.
Congratulations to the future KathleenTaco! (Does this mean she has to change her account name now?)
Then would a "root kit" be something you can only get in 21+ stores? :-)
Coolness! I've been waiting for this for a long time, and it even looks like they're doing it right by not putting a mere 2 episodes on a disk. (It's still a bit pricy, but not as extortionary as it could have been.)
Oh, wait, I don't buy DVDs on principle. Damn you moral code!!!
THIS is how a company makes money producing Free Software. Don't, at least not at the beginning. I'm sure RMS would have my head for this, but it's the truth.
;-)
Consumer-oriented retail software and GPL code are simply incompatble as a business model. If Id released the source for RtCW today, they wouldn't make a penny on their retail sales. Somone would get the source code, edit one line, stick it on an FTP server, and make it available to the world free (as in beer), and most people would get it from there. There would be no legal reason to stop them, and every financial reason for them to do so. That goes for any consumer-targeted application, game, utility, or whatever. You just can't make money with consumers that way. (Consumers aren't interested in "selling support". If they need you to support it, then it was a bad program to start with in their minds.)
Now here comes Id. They develop excellent code, and sell it and license it commercially like any other company. Then, once they've made their money back with a nice comfortable profit and moved on to bigger and better things, they open source the code. They're not doing anything more with it, so why should they prevent others from enjoying it? It's the original idea behind copyright in the first place! Author(s) get limited monopoly for a limited time so that they can make a living producing content, then it goes to the public domain. (OK, that would be more BSD license than GPL, that's a minor issue.)
For the FSF and its supporters, economics aren't the issue, it's all principle and philosophy and idealism. That's all well and good, I agree with their ideals for the most part. But idealism must be tempered by reality to produce pragmatism sometimes. The Id model is the best way I've seen to make money in the consumer space while still supporting Free Software / Open Source (take your pick).
Unless someone else has a better suggestion on how to make money in the consumer space with FS/OS code (remember, after the cash register the consumer doesn't want to ever have to talk to you), we should all bug companies to follow Id's excellent example. If they balk at the "lost revenue", just show them Carmak's twin Lamborginis.
And of course if you find that your system has been infected and you run an AV program on it, you are arrested for violating national security.
That's like saying that the police have the right to break your window and then look inside from across the street. While a dozen other people climb through it, of course.
Interesting. Depending on the dates, that could coincide a lot better with the Old Testament.
Do recall, there are two different accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea (more accurate, "Sea of Reeds, which is NOT the modern-day Red Sea but a small lake in what is today the Suez Canal) in Exodus, one in prose and one as a song/poem. Professional linguists have determined that the poem is in fact the older, more "original" version, based on the sentence structure. In the poem, the sea does not part for the Hebrews and then fall back in. Rather, the Hebrews meander around the Suez for a while, eventually ending up at the NORTHERN end of what is today the Suez Canal, near the Mediterranian coast. The Hebrews move across an area of dry land, and then the hand of God rises from the sea and drags the Egyptians into it. It is very clearly a tidal wave, not a parting sea.
A volcano-induced tsunami would certainly have caused such a tidal wave. Sprinkle lightly with religious imagery, add a dash of selective editing over the following few centuries, and you have a receipe for the story of Exodus.
I'm afraid I have no links to other sites to offer on this one, but it's something to ponder.
:-) If anyone else reading this has a proposed solution to the natural incompatibility between custom software and consumer behavior, please let me know so that I can make money in the consumer space with open source. :-)
The FSF and the Open Source / Free Software movement have generally focused on custom application development. That is, the market segment where Customer A goes to Consultancy B and says "Hey, write me a program that does X, Y, and Z, and I'll give you a fat check for it." In that market, the GPL (or BSD, or any other FS/OS license) works great. It reduces development time, encourages code reuse, reuses good code, and all the other fun stuff that the FSF likes to talk about. And the fact that you can't then sell or license it for money doesn't matter. You've already been paid a good hunk of change for writing it in the first place, and it's usually very targeted and specific so you wouldn't be able to mass market it anyway.
Things are entirely different in the consumer application world. The average consumer, that is, someone who plunks down $50 for a shrink-wrapped piece of software and expects it to just work, is not interested in a targeted application. Nor are they interested in paying for a given feature to be added (buying a feature costs a LOT more than a standard upgrade price), or in having their friend down the street hack a new feature in just for them. That could easily break compatibility with everyone else's copy, and is way more trouble than it is worth. And what is this "compile" you speak of? The user knows not what you speak.
Despite my best efforts to find one, I have yet to figure out a way to make money in the consumer space with FS/OS software. The most extreme example (though not the only) is the gaming industry. Blizzard Software would go out of business in a heart beat if Diablo were open source. Even if they sold CDs of it, I give it 10 minutes before someone modifies it enough to remove registration codes and makes an ISO. Even Linux-friendly id Software releases commercial, pay-per-copy programs, because they simply could not function otherwise. They make their money on producing a product at their own expense, and then getting as many other people to use it as possible, on a per-user fee basis. That is the only way to really make money in the consumer space, and is incompatible with the GPL and FSF philosophy.
You also cannot charge for "support." Sure, for a custom app you can charge for supporting the program, vis, running it, testing it, answering questions when it's broken, etc. Most importantly, you are being paid as a form of insurance. Companies LIKE having someone else to blame (you), and are willing to pay a pretty penny for it. In the consumer space, however, support is a bad thing. If a consumer ever has to call technical support, for any reason whatsoever, it is a flaw in the program. The only way to make money there is to charge a very hefty premium for technical support (which results in very unhappy users) and release a program that requires contacting technical support often. A consumer-oriented program that requires frequent communication with technical support is what we like to call "crap" (or a Microsoft product, take your pick). A business model that encourages the creation of crap is inherently immoral, IMHO.
Incidentally, I did pose this question to FSF VP Brad Kuhn a few months ago when he was in Chicago. His response was to brush off the consumer market as trivially small compared to the custom business market. Personally I don't consider anything that is measured in the billions to be trivial.
Intel's obsession with serial isn't really an obsession with serial. It's an obsession with clock-cycle-centric technologies. Take USB vs. FireWire (both actually serial, but bear with me). FireWire is peer-to-peer. That means it runs at a given speed regardless of the CPU, and devices can talk to each other directly. Take USB, which is master/slave based on the CPU. If you want to have several USB devices all talking to each other, they have to go through the CPU to do it. That means you need a bigger processor. That means you need a higher clock rate. That means you need Intel's higher-priced offerings. That means more money for Intel.
A serial interface needs to cycle faster than an equivalent parallel interface in order to get the same bandwidth out of it. Therefore, it also requires a meatier CPU. That means more money for Intel.
And a side note: Sony didn't invent VFS. Palm gave them an early release of their VFS APIs for the original CLIE in order to get them on board for the PalmOS. And TRG (now HandEra) had their own API for the TRGpro (their original device, with CF slot), which frankly was a lot faster. :-)
Which is exactly what Microsoft has yet to figure out with the PocketPC line, and Palm has always known. Yet they do need to advance the product beyond a single-tasking 33 MHz device. A VGA screen would make some tasks far easier (an address book not being one of them). For PowerPoint, you're not going to use the device to show PowerPoint slides. You can't croud everyone around a 3" screen. But you CAN use it as your remote control for the slides, with a real time display and your own notes. For that, a better screen/processor does come in useful.
Incremental improvement as they are able to do it RIGHT is what Palm (and most of its licensees) have been good at, and they need to keep that up. They just need to get it right a little faster to keep the MHz kiddies (who run IT departments) happy.
Like this? [agendacomputing.com]
And every company is going to have their own "redux Tux", which means you won't be able to generate a single executable file that you can throw on any device, the way you can with a Palm.
Yep, exactly like that. Now also look at http://www.linuxda.com/. Both are Palm-like Linux-based PDAs. I'll lay you odds that you can't beam an executable from one to the other and have it work without recompiling. (For one thing, the Agenda uses a MIPS processor, the PowerPlay III uses Dragonball.) That may be great for darwinism, but not for selling units. Not in the handheld space.
Palm: Hey, you guys wrote a super cool OS for the desktop that rocked, and you did it relatively quickly, too.
Be engineers: Thanks!
Palm: We've got to write a new OS for the ARM archetecture that is fast, multimedia-ready, and backward compatible. Think you can do it?
Be engineers: Uhhh...
Palm: Here's $11 million, we just bought what's left of your company.
Be engineers: Sure!
Don't look for BeOS to appear on the Palm anytime soon. Look for the same kind of cool developments on the Palm, this time with a market share that can actually appreciate all that hard work.
Oh come on. "Palm" OS running on an "ARM" processor, but without the "Thumb" extensions to the chipset, being sold by "Hand"spring and "Hand"Era? The possibilities are endless... :-)
When Palm eventually moves to ARM-based hardware, I'm sure we'll see creative, inventive people making Linux ROM images for the hardware the same as they have for the iPAQ. But they won't be coming from Palm Solutions (the hardware/parent company), and I sincerely doubt they will be coming from any of the licensees. Why jump ship from a platform that had 80% of the retail market in August of this year, in addition to 80%-90% of the market for the past six years? That's foolish.
In addition, there is a world of difference between a Linux PDA and a Palm PDA. The PalmOS is built from the ground up as a handheld, all-in-RAM, XIP OS. Linux is originally a server OS. Yes, there has been absolutely astounding work in recent years in bringing Linux into embedded systems, but that's not enough. The paradigm of Linux is the same as the paradigm of the PocketPCs; a file system. The PalmOS has no file system, save for on expansion cards which are a new development. It's a database-like in-RAM format. That's what makes it so fast. You can get better performance out of a 33MHz Palm than you do out of a 150MHz PocketPC. There's a fundamental archetectural reason for that. Sure, Linux and Win32 may be familiar for many developers, but in order to do it right you need an archetecture and API that is designed for that type of system.
There's also the UI issue. The Palm UI was designed with Mac-like simplicity and consistency from the get-go. (Not surprising, considering that the majority of the founders were ex-Apple ane ex-Newton people.) The "Zen of Palm", alternately the subject of praise and flame wars, is really what made this organizer work as a portable computer. For cultural reasons, Linux doesn't have that. We (Slashdot readers) put up with a great deal more disparity in UI across a Linux desktop than a handheld user is willing to deal with. Simply throwing KDE or QT at it won't solve the problem of a UI that is consistent, learnable, and has almost zero learning curve.
Sure, a company could take the Linux kernel and tools and write a Palm-esque interface for it, and rewrite the guts enough to be naturally resource-based XIP. But by that point, you're almost writing a new OS to start with. And every company is going to have their own "redux Tux", which means you won't be able to generate a single executable file that you can throw on any device, the way you can with a Palm. One truism of the Open Source / Free Software (whichever camp you are in) movement is a lack of unity in APIs and UI. That will kill any mass market attempt at a handheld. The market is not interested in a device you can tweak and customize and recompile. It wants a device you can charge, pickup, and use. And at least right now, Linux is not that.
PS: I happen to like the Wesley character (aside from his final episode, which was lame), so there!
The real future is in authenticity. Just look at the satire mp3s on the net that get attributed to Weird Al Yankovic, that he never wrote. How do you know that this song you downloaded is really by him? How do you know it's not? How do you know that it wasn't modified to delete an explative, delete a line one person didn't like, add in a new stanza in order to defame the artist, etc? You don't. There is no way to prove that the movie you're watching really is an unedited copy of The Godfather. You can't be sure that your copy of Eminem's latest CD isn't the Lovey-Dovey-Censorship-Agency's "modified for familes" edition.
What would you be willing to pay for a method to prove that yes, this song is the artist's original? Or that this movie has not been edited for television? $15 a CD, I doubt. But 50 cents a song? $1? I'll let the economists figure that one out.
What we need is to expand watermarking and key-based signatures (NOT encryption, signatures) to make it easier to confirm that a given piece of work is authentic. Instead of CDDB being a clearing house for stealing people's information about their CDs, make it (or something like it) into a low-cost subscription service with public keys. When you play an mp3, the track info for is is confirmed against the key (which you can download permanently) to check that the file has not been modified. If it passes, you know that this is a "genuine, authentic *insert work here*". If it fails, you know that chances are it is not. If you care, you'll go and find a real one. If you don't care, that's your perogative.
Notice that nowhere in there is there any copy-prevention mechanism. None. Copy prevention is alien to any digital system, and is inherently weak, defeatable, and in the end futile. Authentication, however, is a booming industry, and is of legitimate value to the society.
Protecting against lies is in EVERYONE's interest. Preventing copying is in no one's interest, not even copyright holders.