They still have an office in Oakland (and another in Sunnyvale). The San Francisco office is related to the acquisition of a Web development company (Atomic Vision) there. Maybe they decided they didn't need to be on both sides of the bay?
Bill Atkinson (creator of much of the Mac's user interface, developer of QuickDraw, MacPaint and Hypercard) is now a photographer. (Personally, I think his stint at General Magic burned him out on programming.)
(That is, "an empty or forsaken place; a wasteland"; not something you would put whipped cream on.)
I spent a year and a half at a start-up on 23rd St. (just across the street from Madison Square Park). For the last six months, my title was "Manager, Content Acquisition Software"; I had about half a dozen programmers reporting to me. We shipped client software (and hardware) and ran a production service, but never signed up anywhere near enough customers to approach our expenses.
One problem was how hard it was finding good technical staff. The quality of the average candidate was pathetic. Most of the C/C++ programmers I interviewed didn't know how to do pointer arithemetic!
Worse, everyone with even a shred of talent was heavily recruited by Wall Street. The guys down there offered $100K if you could even spell HTML; but they'd expect you to show up, wearing a suit, promptly at 8 a.m. every morning, and wouldn't think twice about expecting you to work until midnight for long stretches. After all, they're paying you big bucks! (Compared to everyone but the traders.) Techies on The Street are lucky to last two years before burning out.
So where's the nearest techie oasis? Believe it or not, central New Jersey. The legacy of the Bell System, and the huge Bell Labs installations here, has created a seed of talent not often seen outside Silicon Valley. I have friends at half a dozen startups founded here, and several more at companies based in the West Coast but opening offices here to take advantage of the great people. Ten minutes to the east is the Atlantic Ocean; fifteen to the west, horse farms. If you hate surburbs, forget it; if you like them, it's wonderful. Real estate, both residential and commercial, is relatively inexpensive, especially compared to the Valley or the Alley.
Planetunreal has this story about the work by Digitalo Design on VRND: the real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. (There's also this article in Newsday Online.) Digitalo has modeled other stuff with the Unreal engine, including twelve acres of the Everglades.
Slashdot user "Vito" mentioned this in a comment on a July story, and appears to be working on a virtual reality office building tour package called "Unrealty" (being used but no yet being distributed).
P.S.: UT starts shipping for the Playstation 2 this week (before the PS2 itself ships), according to this story.
On the flipside, it's not like Xerox has ever capitalized on having this asset. PARC claims invention of Ethernet, laser printer...
Xerox botched the laser printer business, sure; but even in botching it, they made billions (Brits: thousands of millions) of dollars in their big (e.g., series 9700, priced at $100K up) high volume laser printers in the early 1980s. PARC was a very profitable investment for Xerox.
The recording industry has said, in effect, "We won't sell electronic music (for less than overpriced CDs, Senator Hatch) until we have a secure way to do so."
Great book, possibly the best, on what makes software development organizations work: Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. (Link is to Fatbrain, but everyone carries it.) Possibly the most relevant to your new position: the list of ten things you can do to prevent teams from forming. (There's nothing you can do to make teams form, but lots you can do to prevent them.)
All these boil down to one thing: You can't do it all. (If you can, you don't need to manage anyone.-) 99.44% of your success will depend on the success of the people who report to you. 99.44% of your job means making sure they're excited, hard working, and pointed in the right direction.
That's how to make this change. Here's why you might consider it.
The best managers (and former managers) I know decided the most important thing about an organization's success was about how the organization worked, not how they as individuals could contribute. They either expressed interest in that, or made an impact without being asked. (The latter is how I got promoted to management in my last job. No one in my group was sure if I was their boss or not. I was happy with the ambiguity. My boss wasn't, so he promoted me.)
You can go home again. When I changed companies (the old company rolled the dice on a new technology and lost), the new position was purely technical, and I'm still there and still happy there. Smart companies will let you "step down" in place, somehow preventing it from being a demotion. Dumb companies aren't worth staying at anyway.
Don't do it unless you really want it. Don't do it unless you can make more of a difference where you're pointed than where you are now. (But don't let fear hold you back.) If your boss says you have no choice... remember how many choices you really have. --PSRC
I started reading Netnews back in 1982 or so, before the Great Renaming... heck, back when "the Internet" was a Larry Landweber proposal to replace ARPANET. At the time, aside from mailing lists, it was the only electronic discussion medium in existence. Like the current e-mail network and the World Wide Web, and IRC at one point, it had an interesting property: there was *one* network. Some sites got full feeds, some partial feeds, and there were a handfull of local groups, but everyone was on "the 'Net" whether they were at UC Berkeley or Bell Labs or the Pentagon. If you wanted a discussion, you took it to a mailing list, or you took it to Netnews. (There was FIDO, but rounded to the nearest hundred thousand, it had zero users.)
That creates an effect not everyone sees. Usenet was the birthplace of hundreds, maybe thousands, of electronic communities, long before people were using "e-" as a prefix. Those communities, the people and personalities and cultures, are what made Netnews so attractive, so involving. (The current buzzword is "sticky.") Of course you're going to come back to see if your favorite netscum posted something outrageous, or if someone answered your question or replied to your answer.
Web-based discussions didn't kill Usenet, but they darned sure hurt it. Instead of one "'Net," there are tens of thousands, maybe more. I can't count the number of Web-based discussion forums I've seen. This conversation we're having right now is off in some tiny little corner instead of in a news group. There are lots of advantages to having it here... and *all* those advantages have hurt Usenet when it comes to mindshare, and to the ability to attract the people who make 'Net communities work.
Instead of a grand city, with some wonderful neighborhoods and some seedy ones, we've got surburban sprawl.
Netnews could have survived spam. It could have survived the astonishing growth of online participants in the past five years. (It survived AOL, in many senses.) It's having a hard time suriving its current competition. Part of me is very sad to see it wither.
Ironically, the Web is both the medium in which Dejanews tried to grow, and the medium that choked off some of its best source material.
I'm saddened by Deja's dwindling support for Netnews archives. (Did they used to go back as far as 1990?) I understand why they failed to turn a profit on the business, why they've got a terabyte and a half (literally) of archived material they consider too expensive to keep online. I appreciate what they've done, and I'm glad to have what they still offer. I wish the Dejanews business had thrived; I still wish it well. --PSRC
"I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind." (my old Netnews.sig)
The second item, and possibly the most important, is getting people to run a distributed client itself.... People need to be passionately involved to run distributed clients.
No, people need to be passionately involved to install distributed clients... but that's not the only way such clients can get (ahem) distributed.
When a new employee joins our organization, he or she gets a computer with a "corporate image" on it; an approved operating system (NT, Linux, or Solaris) and the associated applications. If we had a corporate need for some sort of distributed computing, the client could be added to the image, so it would be part of every PC on every desk (or in every lap). With distributed administration tools, such clients could even be installed retroactively. It's the company's computer; is it so wrong for the company to direct its use? (Assume they're smart enough to set this up so it doesn't screw up employee productivity, which is more important than "computing.")
I think this model might have been used by the staff of the company that did the graphics for Babylon 5. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA already does this. --PSRC
... if a cracker really screwed something up and the astronaut died as a result, is it murder?
There's a name for it: "felony murder." If, while commiting certain felony crimes, someone dies, the perpetrator is considered criminally responsible for that death. (Example: Some idiot with a gun holds up a convenience store. No shots are fired. The clerk has a heart attack and later dies.)
Details vary from (U.S.) state to state. I don't know where the crime would be considered to have occured; probably where the hacked server was physically located.
IANAL, but I was a juror in a trial where the charges were "assault and felony murder."
Here is the page announcing the proposal, with links to the proposal itself (a formal Internet Draft and this diagram showing the client/server and server/server architecture.
Only Windows 2000, not "all Windows"
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 2
Despite what the Infoworld article claims, this only applies to Windows 2000, not "all versions of Windows except for the Server Edition of Windows 2000."
My new home PC probably has a real Windows 98 SE CD-ROM. Our new W2K systems in the office have no CD-ROMs.
I love this from a Microsoft rep: "This change is based on feedback from end-user customers"; yeah, I'll just bet end-users were complaining about it being too easy to reinstall Windows.-(
This case is concluded; as a result, the findings of fact (Microsoft is a monopoly) and the findings of law (Microsoft violated the Sherman Act) are now legal precedent. In particular, the findings of fact are almost impossible to overturn; to negate them, a higher court would have to find no reasonable person would have deduced these facts from the testimony. (Source: prior Slashdot postings).
Avoiding this is the one thing Microsoft could have gained by a settlement.
Bad news: this is prime fodder for ambulance chasers.
Squeak has a lot going for it, but familiarity for Windows users is not on the list. Probably a better choice would be Dolphin Smalltalk; it "feels like Windows" (a good thing in this case), it's a real Smalltalk, it comes with good tutorial documentation, and there's a free (as in beer) version available.
Good news: Smalltalk was designed (back in the 1970s, assuming computers as powerful as we have today!) to be a programming language for kids. Bad news: Really smart kids took to it like fish to water, but most really struggled.
Those of us who cut our teeth on punch cards and Teletypes were used to command line (or worse) interfaces and text programs. Today's kids aren't; even typing Smalltalk programs may bore them.
Consider Stagecast Creator or Toon Talk as a couple of purely visual development environments. They're more suited towards development of games and simulations, but that's a plus if the goal is to get your children excited about programming (probably the right target at first).
Here are a couple of stories about teaching kids to program: This one from Kids Domain has a lot of links to resources, while this one from Suite101.com is an interview (with fewer but entirely distinct links).
It suggests how Microsoft #3 (IE, Inc.) might turn a profit (hosting a web portal on the new default home page, ala www.netscape.com; selling engineering services, to customers including Microsoft #1 and Microsoft #2; pp. 59-60), and even mentions the Microsoft vs. Slashdot battle over the Kerebos extension specs (p. 53).
hypergeek writes: "The author himself villifies taxpayer-supported free software, but shouldn't something that's paid for by the public be freely available to the public?"
Sure, and often is. For example, intellectual property created by many parts of the U.S. goverment is, by law, public domain. That's why Expect is free software but not GPL'ed.
IMHO, though, that's not the game Meyer's playing. He doesn't want to trumpet the benefits of taxpayer-supported "free" software. He wants to say there's no such thing as free software, and that some "free beer" (and free speech!) software was "paid for by your tax dollars, even though you didn't say you wanted to pay for it!" That's pure propaganda, but it can play in Peoria.-(
Jonathan's point (that not all university-supported software ends up free) is worth noting. Consider Spyglass Mosaic, the WATCOM compilers, UCSD Pascal, the X Windows System, and BSDI. But also consider FreeBSD, vi, TeX (Knuth was on Stanford's payroll at the time, wasn't he?), NSCA httpd, and many others.
Freely sharing information (and software) is a very natural mindset in academia. It's certainly where Stallman's ethics appear to have been nurtured.
Meyers starts by saying ethics should be judged by acts, not attitudes. Then he spends almost the entire article attacking attitudes. RMS villifies "non-free" software; that's Bad. ESR villifies gun control; that's Bad. JMS villifies the Shadows... oops, sorry, wrong TLA.
In fact, most of his points in COURSE OF ACTION seem aimed at RMS; ESR already supports all but one (two if "moral premises" means his attitude on guns).
The only "course of action" I think is silly is number 8: "Demand (in the spirit of faithful advertising) that the economic origin of 'free' software be clearly stated, and that the products be classified as one of 'donated', 'taxpayer-funded' and the other categories described in this article." He's asking the Free/Open movement to surrender the moral high ground (to him, naturally): he's saying, there is no such thing as "free" software, so stop using such a nice word for it! Well, tough.
("Taxpayer supported"... I can almost hear William Proxmire, may he rest in peace having repented for his sins: "Do you mean to tell me, the American taxpayers paid for the development of this... this... this so-called 'free' software? Without any congressional oversight?")
For example the GNU Eiffel compiler was developed at the University of Nancy by employees of that university who (in contrast with commercial Eiffel vendors, who need paying customers to survive) get every month a salary from the State, whether the users are happy or not with the product. This is a typical case of taxpayer-funded software.
The "commercial Eiffel vendors" include Meyers' company. He's got to compete with free software.
Ironically, a free Eiffel distribution is probably the best thing that ever happened to those vendors; it increases the population of Eiffel programmers, and thus, of the potential employees of projects that want to spend money on commercial Eiffel implementations.
(I hit return instead of tab, and posted an empty article. Please moderate that one down. Sorry and TIA. --PSRC
>>"net" was traditionally intended for use by network service providers.
>Yes, and I've only seen one ISP (UUNet) which actually uses that as their primary address. Many of the other big ISP's hold on to the.net TLD, but it's nothing more than a redirect to the.com address, which is by your definition another "ridiculous misuse of the namespace."
Yet Another example: att.com is AT&T, the company (and user@att.com is an employee); att.net is AT&T WorldNet Services and other ISP stuff (and user@att.net is a customer).
Slashdot Mirror
They still have an office in Oakland (and another in Sunnyvale). The San Francisco office is related to the acquisition of a Web development company (Atomic Vision) there. Maybe they decided they didn't need to be on both sides of the bay?
Bill Atkinson (creator of much of the Mac's user interface, developer of QuickDraw, MacPaint and Hypercard) is now a photographer. (Personally, I think his stint at General Magic burned him out on programming.)
ftp://ftp6.n ets cape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6.0/unix/linux22/se a/
/ sea/
ftp://ftp6. net scape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6.0/windows/win32
(ftp6 is one I chose at random; ftp2 through ftp9 should all work)
(That is, "an empty or forsaken place; a wasteland"; not something you would put whipped cream on.)
I spent a year and a half at a start-up on 23rd St. (just across the street from Madison Square Park). For the last six months, my title was "Manager, Content Acquisition Software"; I had about half a dozen programmers reporting to me. We shipped client software (and hardware) and ran a production service, but never signed up anywhere near enough customers to approach our expenses.
One problem was how hard it was finding good technical staff. The quality of the average candidate was pathetic. Most of the C/C++ programmers I interviewed didn't know how to do pointer arithemetic!
Worse, everyone with even a shred of talent was heavily recruited by Wall Street. The guys down there offered $100K if you could even spell HTML; but they'd expect you to show up, wearing a suit, promptly at 8 a.m. every morning, and wouldn't think twice about expecting you to work until midnight for long stretches. After all, they're paying you big bucks! (Compared to everyone but the traders.) Techies on The Street are lucky to last two years before burning out.
So where's the nearest techie oasis? Believe it or not, central New Jersey. The legacy of the Bell System, and the huge Bell Labs installations here, has created a seed of talent not often seen outside Silicon Valley. I have friends at half a dozen startups founded here, and several more at companies based in the West Coast but opening offices here to take advantage of the great people. Ten minutes to the east is the Atlantic Ocean; fifteen to the west, horse farms. If you hate surburbs, forget it; if you like them, it's wonderful. Real estate, both residential and commercial, is relatively inexpensive, especially compared to the Valley or the Alley.
http://dai lyn ews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20001023/tc/internet_filters_ 3.html
Planetunreal has this story about the work by Digitalo Design on VRND: the real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. (There's also this article in Newsday Online.) Digitalo has modeled other stuff with the Unreal engine, including twelve acres of the Everglades.
Slashdot user "Vito" mentioned this in a comment on a July story, and appears to be working on a virtual reality office building tour package called "Unrealty" (being used but no yet being distributed).
P.S.: UT starts shipping for the Playstation 2 this week (before the PS2 itself ships), according to this story.
... was TouchNet. I found a News.com article from 1996 about it.
He also founded Chuck E. Cheese.
On the flipside, it's not like Xerox has ever capitalized on having this asset. PARC claims invention of Ethernet, laser printer ...
Xerox botched the laser printer business, sure; but even in botching it, they made billions (Brits: thousands of millions) of dollars in their big (e.g., series 9700, priced at $100K up) high volume laser printers in the early 1980s. PARC was a very profitable investment for Xerox.
Great book on PARC: Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (buy where ever you'd like).
Well, would anyone have expected Kevin Mitnick's first priority to be privacy?-) (Heaven knows he's not likely to have any real soon.)
The recording industry has said, in effect, "We won't sell electronic music (for less than overpriced CDs, Senator Hatch) until we have a secure way to do so."
What's their rush?
No, really, as close as can really exist in a 3D universe:
http://www.kleinbottle.com/
Great book, possibly the best, on what makes software development organizations work: Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. (Link is to Fatbrain, but everyone carries it.) Possibly the most relevant to your new position: the list of ten things you can do to prevent teams from forming. (There's nothing you can do to make teams form, but lots you can do to prevent them.)
... remember how many choices you really have. --PSRC
Other good reads: Jim Coplien's organization patterns (don't worry about the word "process," Cope doesn't believe that process generates quality), also found in the first PLoP book; DeMarco's The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management ; maybe Jerry Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming ; and (as others have suggested) many books by Steve McConnell.
All these boil down to one thing: You can't do it all. (If you can, you don't need to manage anyone.-) 99.44% of your success will depend on the success of the people who report to you. 99.44% of your job means making sure they're excited, hard working, and pointed in the right direction.
That's how to make this change. Here's why you might consider it.
The best managers (and former managers) I know decided the most important thing about an organization's success was about how the organization worked, not how they as individuals could contribute. They either expressed interest in that, or made an impact without being asked. (The latter is how I got promoted to management in my last job. No one in my group was sure if I was their boss or not. I was happy with the ambiguity. My boss wasn't, so he promoted me.)
You can go home again. When I changed companies (the old company rolled the dice on a new technology and lost), the new position was purely technical, and I'm still there and still happy there. Smart companies will let you "step down" in place, somehow preventing it from being a demotion. Dumb companies aren't worth staying at anyway.
Don't do it unless you really want it. Don't do it unless you can make more of a difference where you're pointed than where you are now. (But don't let fear hold you back.) If your boss says you have no choice
I started reading Netnews back in 1982 or so, before the Great Renaming ... heck, back when "the Internet" was a Larry Landweber proposal to replace ARPANET. At the time, aside from mailing lists, it was the only electronic discussion medium in existence. Like the current e-mail network and the World Wide Web, and IRC at one point, it had an interesting property: there was *one* network. Some sites got full feeds, some partial feeds, and there were a handfull of local groups, but everyone was on "the 'Net" whether they were at UC Berkeley or Bell Labs or the Pentagon. If you wanted a discussion, you took it to a mailing list, or you took it to Netnews. (There was FIDO, but rounded to the nearest hundred thousand, it had zero users.)
... and *all* those advantages have hurt Usenet when it comes to mindshare, and to the ability to attract the people who make 'Net communities work.
.sig)
That creates an effect not everyone sees. Usenet was the birthplace of hundreds, maybe thousands, of electronic communities, long before people were using "e-" as a prefix. Those communities, the people and personalities and cultures, are what made Netnews so attractive, so involving. (The current buzzword is "sticky.") Of course you're going to come back to see if your favorite netscum posted something outrageous, or if someone answered your question or replied to your answer.
Web-based discussions didn't kill Usenet, but they darned sure hurt it. Instead of one "'Net," there are tens of thousands, maybe more. I can't count the number of Web-based discussion forums I've seen. This conversation we're having right now is off in some tiny little corner instead of in a news group. There are lots of advantages to having it here
Instead of a grand city, with some wonderful neighborhoods and some seedy ones, we've got surburban sprawl.
Netnews could have survived spam. It could have survived the astonishing growth of online participants in the past five years. (It survived AOL, in many senses.) It's having a hard time suriving its current competition. Part of me is very sad to see it wither.
Ironically, the Web is both the medium in which Dejanews tried to grow, and the medium that choked off some of its best source material.
I'm saddened by Deja's dwindling support for Netnews archives. (Did they used to go back as far as 1990?) I understand why they failed to turn a profit on the business, why they've got a terabyte and a half (literally) of archived material they consider too expensive to keep online. I appreciate what they've done, and I'm glad to have what they still offer. I wish the Dejanews business had thrived; I still wish it well. --PSRC
"I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind." (my old Netnews
The second item, and possibly the most important, is getting people to run a distributed client itself.... People need to be passionately involved to run distributed clients.
... but that's not the only way such clients can get (ahem) distributed.
No, people need to be passionately involved to install distributed clients
When a new employee joins our organization, he or she gets a computer with a "corporate image" on it; an approved operating system (NT, Linux, or Solaris) and the associated applications. If we had a corporate need for some sort of distributed computing, the client could be added to the image, so it would be part of every PC on every desk (or in every lap). With distributed administration tools, such clients could even be installed retroactively. It's the company's computer; is it so wrong for the company to direct its use? (Assume they're smart enough to set this up so it doesn't screw up employee productivity, which is more important than "computing.")
I think this model might have been used by the staff of the company that did the graphics for Babylon 5. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA already does this. --PSRC
... if a cracker really screwed something up and the astronaut died as a result, is it murder?
There's a name for it: "felony murder." If, while commiting certain felony crimes, someone dies, the perpetrator is considered criminally responsible for that death. (Example: Some idiot with a gun holds up a convenience store. No shots are fired. The clerk has a heart attack and later dies.)
Details vary from (U.S.) state to state. I don't know where the crime would be considered to have occured; probably where the hacked server was physically located.
IANAL, but I was a juror in a trial where the charges were "assault and felony murder."
C# is the dumbest name that I've seen trundled out in this space so far.
You never heard of the C+@ programming language? (I swear I'm not making this up.) --PSRC
Here is the page announcing the proposal, with links to the proposal itself (a formal Internet Draft and this diagram showing the client/server and server/server architecture.
Despite what the Infoworld article claims, this only applies to Windows 2000, not "all versions of Windows except for the Server Edition of Windows 2000."
My new home PC probably has a real Windows 98 SE CD-ROM. Our new W2K systems in the office have no CD-ROMs.
I love this from a Microsoft rep: "This change is based on feedback from end-user customers"; yeah, I'll just bet end-users were complaining about it being too easy to reinstall Windows.-(
This case is concluded; as a result, the findings of fact (Microsoft is a monopoly) and the findings of law (Microsoft violated the Sherman Act) are now legal precedent. In particular, the findings of fact are almost impossible to overturn; to negate them, a higher court would have to find no reasonable person would have deduced these facts from the testimony. (Source: prior Slashdot postings).
Avoiding this is the one thing Microsoft could have gained by a settlement.
Bad news: this is prime fodder for ambulance chasers.
Squeak has a lot going for it, but familiarity for Windows users is not on the list. Probably a better choice would be Dolphin Smalltalk; it "feels like Windows" (a good thing in this case), it's a real Smalltalk, it comes with good tutorial documentation, and there's a free (as in beer) version available.
Good news: Smalltalk was designed (back in the 1970s, assuming computers as powerful as we have today!) to be a programming language for kids. Bad news: Really smart kids took to it like fish to water, but most really struggled.
Those of us who cut our teeth on punch cards and Teletypes were used to command line (or worse) interfaces and text programs. Today's kids aren't; even typing Smalltalk programs may bore them.
Consider Stagecast Creator or Toon Talk as a couple of purely visual development environments. They're more suited towards development of games and simulations, but that's a plus if the goal is to get your children excited about programming (probably the right target at first).
Here are a couple of stories about teaching kids to program: This one from Kids Domain has a lot of links to resources, while this one from Suite101.com is an interview (with fewer but entirely distinct links).
http://www.siia.net/shar edcontent/press/2000/amicusbr2.pdf
It suggests how Microsoft #3 (IE, Inc.) might turn a profit (hosting a web portal on the new default home page, ala www.netscape.com; selling engineering services, to customers including Microsoft #1 and Microsoft #2; pp. 59-60), and even mentions the Microsoft vs. Slashdot battle over the Kerebos extension specs (p. 53).
hypergeek writes: "The author himself villifies taxpayer-supported free software, but shouldn't something that's paid for by the public be freely available to the public?"
Sure, and often is. For example, intellectual property created by many parts of the U.S. goverment is, by law, public domain. That's why Expect is free software but not GPL'ed.
IMHO, though, that's not the game Meyer's playing. He doesn't want to trumpet the benefits of taxpayer-supported "free" software. He wants to say there's no such thing as free software, and that some "free beer" (and free speech!) software was "paid for by your tax dollars, even though you didn't say you wanted to pay for it!" That's pure propaganda, but it can play in Peoria.-(
Jonathan's point (that not all university-supported software ends up free) is worth noting. Consider Spyglass Mosaic, the WATCOM compilers, UCSD Pascal, the X Windows System, and BSDI. But also consider FreeBSD, vi, TeX (Knuth was on Stanford's payroll at the time, wasn't he?), NSCA httpd, and many others.
Freely sharing information (and software) is a very natural mindset in academia. It's certainly where Stallman's ethics appear to have been nurtured.
... and ad hominim attacks.
... oops, sorry, wrong TLA.
... I can almost hear William Proxmire, may he rest in peace having repented for his sins: "Do you mean to tell me, the American taxpayers paid for the development of this ... this ... this so-called 'free' software? Without any congressional oversight?")
Meyers starts by saying ethics should be judged by acts, not attitudes. Then he spends almost the entire article attacking attitudes. RMS villifies "non-free" software; that's Bad. ESR villifies gun control; that's Bad. JMS villifies the Shadows
In fact, most of his points in COURSE OF ACTION seem aimed at RMS; ESR already supports all but one (two if "moral premises" means his attitude on guns).
The only "course of action" I think is silly is number 8: "Demand (in the spirit of faithful advertising) that the economic origin of 'free' software be clearly stated, and that the products be classified as one of 'donated', 'taxpayer-funded' and the other categories described in this article." He's asking the Free/Open movement to surrender the moral high ground (to him, naturally): he's saying, there is no such thing as "free" software, so stop using such a nice word for it! Well, tough.
("Taxpayer supported"
For example the GNU Eiffel compiler was developed at the University of Nancy by employees of that university who (in contrast with commercial Eiffel vendors, who need paying customers to survive) get every month a salary from the State, whether the users are happy or not with the product. This is a typical case of taxpayer-funded software.
The "commercial Eiffel vendors" include Meyers' company. He's got to compete with free software.
Ironically, a free Eiffel distribution is probably the best thing that ever happened to those vendors; it increases the population of Eiffel programmers, and thus, of the potential employees of projects that want to spend money on commercial Eiffel implementations.
(I hit return instead of tab, and posted an empty article. Please moderate that one down. Sorry and TIA. --PSRC
>>"net" was traditionally intended for use by network service providers.
.net TLD, but it's nothing more than a redirect to the .com address, which is by your definition another "ridiculous misuse of the namespace."
>Yes, and I've only seen one ISP (UUNet) which actually uses that as their primary address. Many of the other big ISP's hold on to the
Yet Another example: att.com is AT&T, the company (and user@att.com is an employee); att.net is AT&T WorldNet Services and other ISP stuff (and user@att.net is a customer).