This inane column was published purely to stir up controversy and thus direct tens if not hundreds of thousands of angry geeks to their website, thus increasing their ad revenue. As the old saying goes, "All publicity is good publicity."
Rather than threatening to go on strike if they don't get paid, the Blogger's Guild could offer to go on strike if they do get paid. That seems far more likely to produce income as far as I can see.
"When you aggregate all the Linux distributions, Linux, not Windows, has had the most security vulnerabilities, year after year."
I've never met anyone who ran the aggregate of all Linux distros. Perhaps he would be good enough to enlighten us as to someone who does. Me? I run Mandrake.
Nope, but if I do put out the money/incur the debt that it takes to go to college, not to mention the hard work, I expect to do better salary-wise than some high-school dropout. These high-tech companies make most of their money off of western markets, yet are unwilling to give back to those western markets by hiring in them and paying out a competitive salary. That is profiteering at the expense of their main market countries and is unacceptable, despite what social-darwinist libertarians might say.
Academia is a whole different story. You're postdoc fellow is working his way up the academic food chain, seeking the Holy Grail of tenure. That's a lot different that some guy with a Master's being asked to perform skilled labor for minimum wage in some high-tech firm, that might just decide down the road that minimum wage is too much and outsource anyway.
Why on Earth would highly educated workers be willing work for minimum wage? Why on Earth should we force them to by allowing companies to outsource every job they possibly can to less developed economies?
It seems like most OSS developers must go through the same milestones of skill development: a new C++ string class, a new IRC client, a new window manager, a new toolkit, and a new update package manager. Stop rewriting the wheel and improve what's out there in meaningful new ways.
Instead of writing their own version of programs already in existence, they should read the source of already existent OSS programs and mess around altering them. If they need to write a program that is redundant, then they should resist the temptation to put it on the web and promote it unless it is significantly better than what is already out their. You're right: the proliferation of redundant programs is harmful.
CD prices have fallen, but the copyright system is becoming even more broken as clamp-downs occur. The vast majority of downloaders don't download because of some abstract philosophical principle; they download for the purely selfish reason that they want the stuff for free. That sort of downloading will only harm the cause of those who really believe that the system is broken. Saying that it is civil disobedience when you don't publicly announce that you are doing it is simply a rationalization.
Uh huh. Supposing that we do manage to come up with a reasonable estimate of when, precisely, the big bang occurred, what are you going to do when the scientific community in fifty years says that that's way off?
The more clueless Microsoft is about Linux, the harder it will be for them to attack Linux. The ultimate reason behind this survey is so they can know better how to herd Linux users back into the M$ fold.
Actually, I think it is a good thing. My point is that I suspect that Bruce Perens doesn't, and would rather use something that is totally Free. To recap, I suspect that Perens didn't make this decision on merits, but on licensing and maybe, just maybe, on history as well.
While the merits of the two environments can be argued up the wazoo, and have been, KDE/Qt is more prevelent, more popular, and is the default on more distros than GNOME. Additionally, Qt is used in more commercial software releases on Linux and elsewhere than GTK/GNOME. In fact, I am using one of those products right now: Opera.
I just wonder whether the reason that Bruce chose Gnome doesn't have something to do with Qt not being completely Free as in speech at first and the fact that Trolltech still puts out a non-free version for that other OS.
Yeah, I know that's what they did. My whole point has been that they did it too late. They really needed to look for a new business model that allowed giving away their browser when Internet Explorer 3 came out.
And Open Sourcing their browser didn't provide any help for a long time, since they were essentially creating a whole new program over the new Gecko rendering engine. I remember trying to use the early Milestone's of Mozilla; it was not an encouraging experience. So Netscape users were stuck with Netscape 4 for a couple of years while MSIE users were getting MSIE 5, which wasa major improvement over 4. Mozilla's great. I use it for my email. But it's inception, let alone it's deliver, was too late to affect the browser wars.
I am not saying that they definitely would have survived. I am just saying that they would have had a better chance of surviving if they had attempted to adapt to the changing situation.
If they had made it work with AOL when AOL wanted to integrate Netscape into AOL, then their marketshare would have remained strong and who knows? maybe AOL would have bought them when Netscape Navigator was still strong in market share and wouldn't have let the browser languish. Giving away the browser free to the general population was important, but the AOL deal was more important.
First of all, they could have done what they did, leveraged their Netscape marketshare to get people to go to their portal site back when portals were the in-thing. Second, if AOL considered the browser marketshare worth maintaining when they acquired Netscape, they would have been able to compete dollar for dollar with Microsoft in the browser wars.
You are right about the anti-trust issues though. But when the world is unfair, you have to adapt. It is better to adapt and survive than to be crushed and complain that you never had a chance.
Okay, I see where you're going. That's true, MS made you pay for IE, but given that unfair, and illegal, situation, Netscape still failed to adapt in a way that would allow them to remain alive. RealNetworks gives away it's basic player without charge and thus has much more of a chance of staying alive long enough to reach the end of the lawsuit.
How many people use Netscape or a derivative on Windows? Very few, compared to the number of Windows users. It is true, though, that Netscape is very alive on other platforms, mainly through Mozilla.
Realplayer doesn't have either of those problems, which gives them a much better chance of surviving against Microsoft until the end of their anti-trust case.
Slashdot Mirror
This inane column was published purely to stir up controversy and thus direct tens if not hundreds of thousands of angry geeks to their website, thus increasing their ad revenue. As the old saying goes, "All publicity is good publicity."
Rather than threatening to go on strike if they don't get paid, the Blogger's Guild could offer to go on strike if they do get paid. That seems far more likely to produce income as far as I can see.
"When you aggregate all the Linux distributions, Linux, not Windows, has had the most security vulnerabilities, year after year."
I've never met anyone who ran the aggregate of all Linux distros. Perhaps he would be good enough to enlighten us as to someone who does. Me? I run Mandrake.
I can guarantee this ISP has lost hundreds of dollars on this guy.
Especially if they didn't cap their upload at something like 256k, like my own dear Adelphia does (it might actually be 128k - it sucks).
Nope, but if I do put out the money/incur the debt that it takes to go to college, not to mention the hard work, I expect to do better salary-wise than some high-school dropout. These high-tech companies make most of their money off of western markets, yet are unwilling to give back to those western markets by hiring in them and paying out a competitive salary. That is profiteering at the expense of their main market countries and is unacceptable, despite what social-darwinist libertarians might say.
Possible, but keeping a Fedora Core bittorrent open since it came out is quite sufficient to explain the warning.
Yeah. Why not just revive full-blown indentured servitude while they're at it? That HP gal used the worst line of argument I've ever come across.
Academia is a whole different story. You're postdoc fellow is working his way up the academic food chain, seeking the Holy Grail of tenure. That's a lot different that some guy with a Master's being asked to perform skilled labor for minimum wage in some high-tech firm, that might just decide down the road that minimum wage is too much and outsource anyway.
Why on Earth would highly educated workers be willing work for minimum wage? Why on Earth should we force them to by allowing companies to outsource every job they possibly can to less developed economies?
It seems like most OSS developers must go through the same milestones of skill development: a new C++ string class, a new IRC client, a new window manager, a new toolkit, and a new update package manager. Stop rewriting the wheel and improve what's out there in meaningful new ways.
Instead of writing their own version of programs already in existence, they should read the source of already existent OSS programs and mess around altering them. If they need to write a program that is redundant, then they should resist the temptation to put it on the web and promote it unless it is significantly better than what is already out their. You're right: the proliferation of redundant programs is harmful.
CD prices have fallen, but the copyright system is becoming even more broken as clamp-downs occur. The vast majority of downloaders don't download because of some abstract philosophical principle; they download for the purely selfish reason that they want the stuff for free. That sort of downloading will only harm the cause of those who really believe that the system is broken. Saying that it is civil disobedience when you don't publicly announce that you are doing it is simply a rationalization.
You just made a very good case for not using the Big Bang in our dating system. Men don't need one more reason to kill each other.
Uh huh. Supposing that we do manage to come up with a reasonable estimate of when, precisely, the big bang occurred, what are you going to do when the scientific community in fifty years says that that's way off?
Naw, if Bill Gates really is interesting in trying to woo Linux users, he'll give 'em a talking Penguin.
The more clueless Microsoft is about Linux, the harder it will be for them to attack Linux. The ultimate reason behind this survey is so they can know better how to herd Linux users back into the M$ fold.
Actually, I think it is a good thing. My point is that I suspect that Bruce Perens doesn't, and would rather use something that is totally Free. To recap, I suspect that Perens didn't make this decision on merits, but on licensing and maybe, just maybe, on history as well.
While the merits of the two environments can be argued up the wazoo, and have been, KDE/Qt is more prevelent, more popular, and is the default on more distros than GNOME. Additionally, Qt is used in more commercial software releases on Linux and elsewhere than GTK/GNOME. In fact, I am using one of those products right now: Opera.
Actually, the X Windows System version of the library toolkit is dually released under the GPL and the QPL. The Windows version is proprietary only.
I just wonder whether the reason that Bruce chose Gnome doesn't have something to do with Qt not being completely Free as in speech at first and the fact that Trolltech still puts out a non-free version for that other OS.
Yeah, I know that's what they did. My whole point has been that they did it too late. They really needed to look for a new business model that allowed giving away their browser when Internet Explorer 3 came out.
And Open Sourcing their browser didn't provide any help for a long time, since they were essentially creating a whole new program over the new Gecko rendering engine. I remember trying to use the early Milestone's of Mozilla; it was not an encouraging experience. So Netscape users were stuck with Netscape 4 for a couple of years while MSIE users were getting MSIE 5, which wasa major improvement over 4. Mozilla's great. I use it for my email. But it's inception, let alone it's deliver, was too late to affect the browser wars.
I am not saying that they definitely would have survived. I am just saying that they would have had a better chance of surviving if they had attempted to adapt to the changing situation.
If they had made it work with AOL when AOL wanted to integrate Netscape into AOL, then their marketshare would have remained strong and who knows? maybe AOL would have bought them when Netscape Navigator was still strong in market share and wouldn't have let the browser languish. Giving away the browser free to the general population was important, but the AOL deal was more important.
First of all, they could have done what they did, leveraged their Netscape marketshare to get people to go to their portal site back when portals were the in-thing. Second, if AOL considered the browser marketshare worth maintaining when they acquired Netscape, they would have been able to compete dollar for dollar with Microsoft in the browser wars.
You are right about the anti-trust issues though. But when the world is unfair, you have to adapt. It is better to adapt and survive than to be crushed and complain that you never had a chance.
Okay, I see where you're going. That's true, MS made you pay for IE, but given that unfair, and illegal, situation, Netscape still failed to adapt in a way that would allow them to remain alive. RealNetworks gives away it's basic player without charge and thus has much more of a chance of staying alive long enough to reach the end of the lawsuit.
How many people use Netscape or a derivative on Windows? Very few, compared to the number of Windows users. It is true, though, that Netscape is very alive on other platforms, mainly through Mozilla.
To Windows users it was for all practical purposes free, which made it preferable to Netscape for many since they didn't have to pay extra for it.
As an aside, did Microsoft ever charge Mac users for IE?
Addendum:
Realplayer doesn't have either of those problems, which gives them a much better chance of surviving against Microsoft until the end of their anti-trust case.