Why the fuck should I care if I can see the source or not?
For the same reason you get to vote for your President. Do you want to be in control of your environment or do you want to trust someone? The Constitution provides an assurance that you will never have to blindly trust a leader, because in the end this trust is always broken.
Likewise for software - the GPL is an insurance policy against someone else controlling what happens on your computer in a way that requires your trust.
Let him use Visual Studio, SourceSafe and Word to do it if he wants.
From all indications, he doesn't want to.
OSDL should have recognized that Linux is a more important project than reverse-engineering BitKeeper and told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired.
This isn't just "OSDL employees"...and frankly OSDL only exists because Linus allows the copyright he owns to be co-managed under the umbrella of this organization.
but sometimes you got to pay to get some piece of software that does something mundane that FOSS developers don't want to work on.
But someone did want to work on this, namely Linus himself...so not sure what your point is.
And RMS has always said that it is perfectly fine for someone to set up a business marketing and supporting free software. I have no idea where you are pulling your information from. Certainly not any of the RMS interviews I have read.
If we are going to develop free software and continue to be dedicated to its freeness as part of its advantage, we are (or should be) obligated to keep the toolchain for constructing this software free as well.
git will get better and one day it will be competitive with the best-of-breed software, and the benefits of this will flow to everyone - from rabif free software gurus to people who just can't afford commercialware.
Joss likes to tell stories about people, and the interesting thing is people who change.
And if this is as far as the/. crowd gets to exploring human nature in culture, thats sad. Try some Tolstoy, he had the heights and depths plumbed and gutted out in its honest form before Whedon's grandparent were born.
Why is it that the only popular culture that gets press on this site is adolescent crap about vampires and teenage girls? First if you just want porn stop playing around and go get the real stuff. Then when you are done try some heavyweight culture on for size, you might actually learn something about human nature and about yourself. Try Irvine Welsh, J.G. Ballard, Christ even slum it with some Chuck Palahniuk...anything but the purile two-dimensional sopa-operas-for-boy/men that Whedon spits out.
How pathetic that the same poeple who will sit in front of a computer for hours learning its guts need to be forced to absorb literature by their teachers and profs, come on kids, you have brains or you wouldn't be here, put down the D&D and trying blowing your minds with some real insight.
I understand the role those people serve today, and I understand they cannot be laid off tomorrow, but you will never have a viable private space industry if each flight is treated like an experiment. Of course the fact that pioneering flights are in fact experiments is independent of the human factor, but I'm talking about more routine matters, such as eventual space tourism etc. These types of enterprises will never be viable if they staff each flight the same way NASA staffs a shuttle flight. The first flight certainly will just for the novelty, but there won't be a flight 100 if they use the same approach.
When people start venturing further "out there" beyond the moon, they will need to be more autonomous, which means higher degrees of reliable automation. This is just to keep themselves alive - a ground crew will not be able to provide timely assistance at Mars-like distances.
Also all those people in the control room are getting paid. I'm not trying to be glib, but seriously, if we want to make spaceflight profitable, you are going to have to get some very serious advances in reducing the number of people involved in preparing and supporting these endeavors. Otherwise they will always be pork projects.
Sure the internet can make you more intelligent if you spend your time reading Wolfram Mathworld, Scientific American, Project Gutenburg texts, and Wikipedia...but who does? Is the back-forth banter here really intelligent? Seems more like smalltalk. The bloggers are just writing about each other. Everquest is pulling people away from reality entirely.
Maybe the library isn't such a bad idea after all.
This is just the software business maturing. There are no great expectations for this marriage, its just a strong player with a strong stock using it as currency to remove a competitor.
Yahoo is apparently rolling out a similar type service soon...don't see much use in looking up old searches frankly. Its probably more useful for these firms to collect data for advertisers than it is for aiding in my future data retrieval.
You can't just hand-wave and apply some subjective label and presume the issue goes away. The content repurposing debate has just begun, and don't be surprised if by time it is over, linking and republishing the first paragraph (aka the summary) will be considered legally tantamount to publishing the content.
This is why you usually see license agreements state "in whole or in part". Google is republishing these stories, at least in part. I don't think that can be disputed.
I suspect at some point people will try to make the point that linking == publishing in court, and in Google's case may be succesful since Google does republish part of the text. Also, they have bags of money and are an easy target.
People here seem totally comfortable that one of the highest traffic sites in the world will get a free pass on paying this fee. Watch for Google's "we only link" excuse to be challenged.
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason you get to vote for your President. Do you want to be in control of your environment or do you want to trust someone? The Constitution provides an assurance that you will never have to blindly trust a leader, because in the end this trust is always broken.
Likewise for software - the GPL is an insurance policy against someone else controlling what happens on your computer in a way that requires your trust.
From all indications, he doesn't want to.
OSDL should have recognized that Linux is a more important project than reverse-engineering BitKeeper and told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired.
This isn't just "OSDL employees"...and frankly OSDL only exists because Linus allows the copyright he owns to be co-managed under the umbrella of this organization.
But someone did want to work on this, namely Linus himself...so not sure what your point is.
And RMS has always said that it is perfectly fine for someone to set up a business marketing and supporting free software. I have no idea where you are pulling your information from. Certainly not any of the RMS interviews I have read.
IE is free once you get above software.
No matter what tool or code you cite, I can cite closed code that is very cheap or no cost.
We are not in this just to save money, if that is what you are thinking you have missed the entire point of free software.
git will get better and one day it will be competitive with the best-of-breed software, and the benefits of this will flow to everyone - from rabif free software gurus to people who just can't afford commercialware.
No, just injest some cultural artifacts more advanced than that which I would feed a ten year old.
And if this is as far as the /. crowd gets to exploring human nature in culture, thats sad. Try some Tolstoy, he had the heights and depths plumbed and gutted out in its honest form before Whedon's grandparent were born.
How pathetic that the same poeple who will sit in front of a computer for hours learning its guts need to be forced to absorb literature by their teachers and profs, come on kids, you have brains or you wouldn't be here, put down the D&D and trying blowing your minds with some real insight.
Does anyone know of a flash based device like the Shuffle that handles Ogg?
This will make it easier to negotiate future wages for my already ridiculous salary. To all prospective students - STAY OUT OF CS!!!
I understand the role those people serve today, and I understand they cannot be laid off tomorrow, but you will never have a viable private space industry if each flight is treated like an experiment. Of course the fact that pioneering flights are in fact experiments is independent of the human factor, but I'm talking about more routine matters, such as eventual space tourism etc. These types of enterprises will never be viable if they staff each flight the same way NASA staffs a shuttle flight. The first flight certainly will just for the novelty, but there won't be a flight 100 if they use the same approach.
Also all those people in the control room are getting paid. I'm not trying to be glib, but seriously, if we want to make spaceflight profitable, you are going to have to get some very serious advances in reducing the number of people involved in preparing and supporting these endeavors. Otherwise they will always be pork projects.
Sure the internet can make you more intelligent if you spend your time reading Wolfram Mathworld, Scientific American, Project Gutenburg texts, and Wikipedia...but who does? Is the back-forth banter here really intelligent? Seems more like smalltalk. The bloggers are just writing about each other. Everquest is pulling people away from reality entirely.
Maybe the library isn't such a bad idea after all.
Its amazing how much content in the blogosphere has to do with...the blogosphere.
based on?
Suse is the dominant desktop Linux distro and Suse is KDE-oriented.
Suse no longer exists, it has been acquired by a company focuing on GNOME.
These Op-Ed blog posts rarely indicate policy...regardless of your position on forking and GNOME.
Gay bashing is now a socially acceptable form of discrimination in this country. See also: Texas to ban gays from being foster parents.
Over the long term your search history will features thousands of entries. Hardly a bookmark manager.
This is just the software business maturing. There are no great expectations for this marriage, its just a strong player with a strong stock using it as currency to remove a competitor.
Yahoo is apparently rolling out a similar type service soon...don't see much use in looking up old searches frankly. Its probably more useful for these firms to collect data for advertisers than it is for aiding in my future data retrieval.
You can't just hand-wave and apply some subjective label and presume the issue goes away. The content repurposing debate has just begun, and don't be surprised if by time it is over, linking and republishing the first paragraph (aka the summary) will be considered legally tantamount to publishing the content.
AP is simply moving to a model that Reuters has used for decades.
This is why you usually see license agreements state "in whole or in part". Google is republishing these stories, at least in part. I don't think that can be disputed.
I suspect at some point people will try to make the point that linking == publishing in court, and in Google's case may be succesful since Google does republish part of the text. Also, they have bags of money and are an easy target.
People here seem totally comfortable that one of the highest traffic sites in the world will get a free pass on paying this fee. Watch for Google's "we only link" excuse to be challenged.