One of the points Lars makes is that people have been taking for granted their right to the free exchange of information. Meanwhile, he is taking for granted his right to own information. In the U. S., this is a right granted by Congress. It is supposed to represent the will of the people. If the people decide that it is not in their best interest for ideas to be legal possessions of a sort, then that right can be taken away.
While RMS seems to note that we must always imagine ourselves in the situation of the people our actions affect. This does not seem to apply when the question of his mrights being violated would supersede my righ (if I exercised this one) to produce proprietary software and sell it.
Certainly you have the right to produce software. The FSF vigorously defends that right. You also have every right to keep your source closed. You're even permitted to keep your modifications of copylefted code private, unless you decide to distribute it. Any software you do legally distribute, though, you have every right to charge money for. However, I reccommend that you read Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen -- essentially, RMS would not have your right to produce and sell proprietary software denied. He also would not have our right to copy that software and other media denied, whether the originator likes it or not. You probably couldn't make money selling proprietary software in such a world, but you would be perfectly free to try. This issue makes both proprietary software developers and the RIAA angry, but that unfortunately cannot be helped. This is the critical issue for which you have not indicated your stance.
The essence of intelligence is performing actions appropriate to one's objectives given limited computational resources and uncertain, incomplete information. -Devika Subramanian, AI researcher
from the activity log of Special Agent Armageddon, 30 January 2000:
read slashdot postings re "crash". note - slashdot user KristianC. dangerously unstable. good probable cause. keeping an eye on this one. sent cc's to senator hatch and vice president gore. thinks we're assfucking the country. wait'll he feels a *real* assfucking...
I more or less agree with this user's opinion: Good UI design is not important for applications that cater to IT pros.
(though the term "IT pros" frankly makes me want to blow chunks all over his wing tips.)
I agree even moreso with the user who wrote this: The developers of successful Open Source projects are its users.
Also, a number of.sig cliches apply to this article, like "Unix is user friendly - it's just picky about its users" and also "It's a feature, not a bug" -- kind of like a child-proof cap. To this I have added, "Those who reinvent Windows are missing the point of Unix."
Unix was designed to be a pleasant programming environment. Others have used it for many other purposes, and that's fine with me, but that isn't what its creators had in mind. I guess the article makes some good points regarding those who would write "open source" apps which cater to the general public. But they are not of the same spirit, contrary to popular opinion.
Whenever possible, you should split your program into at least two parts: the main application logic and a client/front-end. This way, you can write a client for GNOME, a client for KDE, maybe even a Java client - whatever. The point is, you're sharing the core of the application, only rewriting what you have to, and you're doing this very cleanly. Use the GUI toolkits to do what they're designed for: GUI's. Try not to couple this too tightly with the rest of your application.
I think that it's really in all of our best interests to "monetize" online information as soon as possible.
This is a bold statement to make without giving us any rationale whatsoever. It is not in humankind's best interest to take a naturally plentiful, in essence infinite supply (information), and turn it into a limited resource by placing these artificial monetary restrictions on it.
Get it into your head, Tim: information is not a tangible good. The people who produce it should be paid for their services, but once it has been produced, it should be shared without restrictions or not shared at all. Trying to control it has socioeconmic ramifications that a man of your vested interests and your station in life cannot possibly fathom.
I'm sorry, but your personal best interests do not transfer to all humankind. You are too egocentric. You are blind to the suffering of others, and you do not realize that ideas like this can only add to the suffering in this world. It's not worth it, Tim. I challenge you to look deep inside yourself and meditate very seriously on this.
That is a nice argument, however it dies in the face on one small, inescapable fact: Copyright is Good.
The problem I see here is that you are not asking, "What is good?" but rather, "What is good for me?"
Have you ever seen a child refuse to share a toy? Too many people never outgrow this mentality of "Mine!"
Please, my friend, try to overcome this weakness. Resist the alluring temptation of doing whatever you feel you must to make a fortune for yourself. Consider the effects of your actions upon other people.
Truly free software builds wealth at a greater rate than GPL'd software.
I'm afraid this statement is misguided on more than one level.
First: You say that proprietary software builds wealth. By this, you are referring to the money that is made by those who control proprietary software. Why not measure wealth by the extent to which the software helps people? If you measure wealth by this, you will see that by restricting the distribution of software, you are greatly reducing the amount of wealth it contributes to this world. Since when is money the standard by which we measure the rightness or wrongness of our actions?
Second: Once a software package has been written, its supply is in essence infinitely greater than the demand for it. How can you stick a price tag on something like this? Doing so is oppression and extortion, hardly what I would call truly free. The money you are "generating" for those who control the software should be spent on other, truly scarce resources. This is depriving society of wealth, not generating it - even by your definition of wealth as money.
If copyrights were eliminated then I could still "freely" close my source code.
Yes, that would be your privilege, but you could not legally restrict people from redistributing or reverse engineering the binaries.
Without the copyright on the GPL then anyone can make it "nonfree."
Only to a very limited extent.
In a world without copyrights I can take your source code, modify it, distribute it binary-only (with heavy copy protection), sell it, etc.
Yes, of course you could - and someone else could legally dismantle your copy protection and freely redistribute the binaries. So it probably would not be worth your while, but certainly you would be welcome to try.
But if you don't believe in IP, but continue to use the GPL, understand that many people will see you as inconsistant and maybe even hypocritical.
I respectfully disagree, because as you pointed out yourself, someone else can take work that we place in the public domain, modify it a bit, and claim legal ownership. Therefore, it is perfectly consistent of us to use the GPL and simultaneously believe that software and ideas should not be legally ownable. I do not want legal ownership of my own ideas. I do not want want any legal ownership of any ideas to exist in this world. However, it does exist, and the only way to protect the freedom of software I write or ideas I express is to use a tool like the GPL.
The purpose of GPL is to destroy the software industry. I view it more along the lines of aspiring to transform the industry - and beyond that, society.
The enjoyment of the act of creation will not lead me to create something great in proportion unless I should be fairly compensated for my time). This is understandable. You should certainly be paid for the service you perform of writing software. However, I ask that you please try to discern in your mind that software is not a tangible good and should not be treated as such.
Additionally, I beleive the GPL will ruin an industry I intend to make my livelyhood from. Again, I think I can understand your concern. However, people need programmers to write software whether it is free or propriety. This is where the mechanism of supply and demand legitimately enters the picture, in contrast to the idea of placing artificial restrictions on the software by treating it as a tangible good; once software has been written, it can inherently be shared as much as you want it to be - in other words, its true supply is unlimited. How much would you pay for a bucket of sand at the beach? You should not be willing to pay more than this for software that has already been written. Your time and the specific work you perform at any given time, on the other hand, are truly limited resources and will be in demand in a world with or without proprietary software. Even without this industry, you will be able to pursue your livelihood of choice.
There's no sense arguing over which is "freer" since neither has anything at all to do with political liberty.
On the contrary, it has everything to do with political liberty. For example, when a third world nation spends money on software, it is not spending that same amount of money, e.g., on paying its workers or addressing its social problems. Once software has been developed, it can and should be freely distributed; that is its nature, just as it is the nature of ideas. By forbidding others to do this, you are restricting their freedom to help one another and to share ideas, and you are in essence performing a legal form of extortion.
Who cares about these scum? You should, whether your own system is secure or not. The fact that cracking systems requires such low technical competence indicates that we need to do something.
The problem is analogous to the in-band signalling that telephone switches formerly used. An outside agent should not be able to hijack a cpu's execution flow any more than an outside agent should be able to hijack the routing of a phone call. Until we universally implement mechanisms, preferably in hardware, to protect this data, for example by separating an execution stack from the general data stack and placing them in memory correctly, ridiculous problems such as this will persist. Patching holes like we currently do is not enough.
One of the first of these stories to gain national attention way back when, including a cover of Newsweek, was that of the 414's, a group from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Now there's this guy up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and he couldn't look any dumber if he had one of those big foam hunks of cheese on his head with a picket sign sticking out saying, "BUST ME: I'M AN IDIOT!!"
So there I think you have it: In honor of these Northern intellectual behemoths, I hereby dub a new eponym upon all who aspire to emulate them - not script kiddies, for scripts say very little about these people and demean an otherwise useful thing; not crackers, which is actually a derogotory name for white folks; no, I think these Wisconsin boys stand for them all: cheese heads. That is what I shall call them henceforth, and I would love to see them immortalized as such in the jargon file someday.
I apologize if this has been said a kazillion times already; I have not read any of the 'Linux IPO' stories here. I simply want to express my humble opinion. You're perfectly entitled to yours if you disagree with it.
Have you read the essay on the GNU web site entitled, "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator?" If not, perhaps you should, particularly if you're one of those individuals who has expressed concern over the fate of the "Linux community" because of the mixture of grass-roots hackers and for-profit businesses.
For example, note this: "Extrinsic rewards can erode intrinsic interest. People who see themselves as working for money, approval or competitive success find their tasks less pleasurable, and therefore do not do them as well."
I find this an interesting qualifier to many of the views espoused by Eric Raymond. I'm sorry, but I think that the Slashdot guys have been spending too much time with the guys in Mountain View and not enough time with the spirit of Berkeley. The minute those dollar signs appear in your eyes, you begin to lose your vision.
This article is cute, but I got bored after the first few paragraphs. It would have been funnier if the underlying bitterness wasn't so transparent. Eric Raymond and Tom Christiansen are both talented individuals who are jealous of Richard Stallman. Fact is, however, that the hacking I do would be very difficult without gcc, gas, glibc, binutils, and gdb. It would make no difference at all if I didn't have Perl or fetchmail.
Eric seems to have misconstrued Richard's post as a personal attack on his ethics. If he would only cool his jets a little, he would see that wasn't the point at all. Perhaps ironically, this post actually helps to substantiate Richard's point that the FSF and OSI have different emphases. Eric, however, seems to insist on raving about why his approach is better, while Richard seems content to acknowledge that the two see things differently, to clarify to others that he does not consider himself a member of the open source camp, and to leave it at that.
But the point is that, yes, the majority of the potential user base will pay for software. There is certainly the High Church of Emacs, which won't use anything that isn't GPL, or can't be assimilated by the GPL, but these are a minority now, and will become a smaller minority as linux actually gets purchased for the desktop--into the hands of people who have proved they're willing to pay for software, and will already have paid for linux.
I have no intention of preaching right now, but I would like to point out a couple areas where I think you missed the mark a little. First, even if you are willing to pay for a binary-only license, I think that with a bleeding edge system like Linux, you should insist on an upgrade clause which will give you some insurance against premature obsolescence (relative to software for Windows, Mac, or even OS/2). Second, as with you, price is largely irrelevant to people who insist on running free software. Having source protects you against problems like the one I just mentioned much more than an upgrade clause in a binary-only license ever could.
I was just looking through the comp.benchmarks FAQ and noticed this. I remembered this question coming up here a few days ago, and upon quick inspection, I did not see any references to it here. I hope it is not too late for this to be of use to somebody, at least for further research:
2.9. Nhfsstone
Benchmark intended to measure the performance of file servers that follow the NFS protocol. The work in this area continued within the LADDIS group and finally within SPEC. The SPEC benchmark 097.LADDIS (SFS benchmark suite, see separate FAQ file on SPEC) is intended to replace Nhfsstone, it is superior to Nhfsstone in several aspects (multi-client capability, less client sensitivity).
Slashdot Mirror
One of the points Lars makes is that people have been taking for granted their right to the free exchange of information. Meanwhile, he is taking for granted his right to own information. In the U. S., this is a right granted by Congress. It is supposed to represent the will of the people. If the people decide that it is not in their best interest for ideas to be legal possessions of a sort, then that right can be taken away.
Certainly you have the right to produce software. The FSF vigorously defends that right. You also have every right to keep your source closed. You're even permitted to keep your modifications of copylefted code private, unless you decide to distribute it. Any software you do legally distribute, though, you have every right to charge money for. However, I reccommend that you read Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen -- essentially, RMS would not have your right to produce and sell proprietary software denied. He also would not have our right to copy that software and other media denied, whether the originator likes it or not. You probably couldn't make money selling proprietary software in such a world, but you would be perfectly free to try. This issue makes both proprietary software developers and the RIAA angry, but that unfortunately cannot be helped. This is the critical issue for which you have not indicated your stance.
The essence of intelligence is performing actions appropriate to one's objectives given limited computational resources and uncertain, incomplete information.
-Devika Subramanian, AI researcher
read slashdot postings re "crash". note - slashdot user KristianC. dangerously unstable. good probable cause. keeping an eye on this one. sent cc's to senator hatch and vice president gore. thinks we're assfucking the country. wait'll he feels a *real* assfucking...
signing off
(though the term "IT pros" frankly makes me want to blow chunks all over his wing tips.)
I agree even moreso with the user who wrote this: The developers of successful Open Source projects are its users.
Also, a number of
Unix was designed to be a pleasant programming environment. Others have used it for many other purposes, and that's fine with me, but that isn't what its creators had in mind. I guess the article makes some good points regarding those who would write "open source" apps which cater to the general public. But they are not of the same spirit, contrary to popular opinion.
Whenever possible, you should split your program into at least two parts: the main application logic and a client/front-end. This way, you can write a client for GNOME, a client for KDE, maybe even a Java client - whatever. The point is, you're sharing the core of the application, only rewriting what you have to, and you're doing this very cleanly. Use the GUI toolkits to do what they're designed for: GUI's. Try not to couple this too tightly with the rest of your application.
This is a bold statement to make without giving us any rationale whatsoever. It is not in humankind's best interest to take a naturally plentiful, in essence infinite supply (information), and turn it into a limited resource by placing these artificial monetary restrictions on it.
Get it into your head, Tim: information is not a tangible good. The people who produce it should be paid for their services, but once it has been produced, it should be shared without restrictions or not shared at all. Trying to control it has socioeconmic ramifications that a man of your vested interests and your station in life cannot possibly fathom.
I'm sorry, but your personal best interests do not transfer to all humankind. You are too egocentric. You are blind to the suffering of others, and you do not realize that ideas like this can only add to the suffering in this world. It's not worth it, Tim. I challenge you to look deep inside yourself and meditate very seriously on this.
The problem I see here is that you are not asking, "What is good?" but rather, "What is good for me?"
Have you ever seen a child refuse to share a toy? Too many people never outgrow this mentality of "Mine!"
Please, my friend, try to overcome this weakness. Resist the alluring temptation of doing whatever you feel you must to make a fortune for yourself. Consider the effects of your actions upon other people.
I'm afraid this statement is misguided on more than one level.
First: You say that proprietary software builds wealth. By this, you are referring to the money that is made by those who control proprietary software. Why not measure wealth by the extent to which the software helps people? If you measure wealth by this, you will see that by restricting the distribution of software, you are greatly reducing the amount of wealth it contributes to this world. Since when is money the standard by which we measure the rightness or wrongness of our actions?
Second: Once a software package has been written, its supply is in essence infinitely greater than the demand for it. How can you stick a price tag on something like this? Doing so is oppression and extortion, hardly what I would call truly free. The money you are "generating" for those who control the software should be spent on other, truly scarce resources. This is depriving society of wealth, not generating it - even by your definition of wealth as money.
Yes, that would be your privilege, but you could not legally restrict people from redistributing or reverse engineering the binaries.
Without the copyright on the GPL then anyone can make it "nonfree."
Only to a very limited extent.
In a world without copyrights I can take your source code, modify it, distribute it binary-only (with heavy copy protection), sell it, etc.
Yes, of course you could - and someone else could legally dismantle your copy protection and freely redistribute the binaries. So it probably would not be worth your while, but certainly you would be welcome to try.
I respectfully disagree, because as you pointed out yourself, someone else can take work that we place in the public domain, modify it a bit, and claim legal ownership. Therefore, it is perfectly consistent of us to use the GPL and simultaneously believe that software and ideas should not be legally ownable. I do not want legal ownership of my own ideas. I do not want want any legal ownership of any ideas to exist in this world. However, it does exist, and the only way to protect the freedom of software I write or ideas I express is to use a tool like the GPL.
I view it more along the lines of aspiring to transform the industry - and beyond that, society.
The enjoyment of the act of creation will not lead me to create something great in proportion unless I should be fairly compensated for my time).
This is understandable. You should certainly be paid for the service you perform of writing software. However, I ask that you please try to discern in your mind that software is not a tangible good and should not be treated as such.
Additionally, I beleive the GPL will ruin an industry I intend to make my livelyhood from.
Again, I think I can understand your concern. However, people need programmers to write software whether it is free or propriety. This is where the mechanism of supply and demand legitimately enters the picture, in contrast to the idea of placing artificial restrictions on the software by treating it as a tangible good; once software has been written, it can inherently be shared as much as you want it to be - in other words, its true supply is unlimited. How much would you pay for a bucket of sand at the beach? You should not be willing to pay more than this for software that has already been written. Your time and the specific work you perform at any given time, on the other hand, are truly limited resources and will be in demand in a world with or without proprietary software. Even without this industry, you will be able to pursue your livelihood of choice.
On the contrary, it has everything to do with political liberty. For example, when a third world nation spends money on software, it is not spending that same amount of money, e.g., on paying its workers or addressing its social problems. Once software has been developed, it can and should be freely distributed; that is its nature, just as it is the nature of ideas. By forbidding others to do this, you are restricting their freedom to help one another and to share ideas, and you are in essence performing a legal form of extortion.
The problem is analogous to the in-band signalling that telephone switches formerly used. An outside agent should not be able to hijack a cpu's execution flow any more than an outside agent should be able to hijack the routing of a phone call. Until we universally implement mechanisms, preferably in hardware, to protect this data, for example by separating an execution stack from the general data stack and placing them in memory correctly, ridiculous problems such as this will persist. Patching holes like we currently do is not enough.
Global Hell - ah, so that's what it stands for. Of course. I always wondered what that symbol for David Geffen was all about.
So there I think you have it: In honor of these Northern intellectual behemoths, I hereby dub a new eponym upon all who aspire to emulate them - not script kiddies, for scripts say very little about these people and demean an otherwise useful thing; not crackers, which is actually a derogotory name for white folks; no, I think these Wisconsin boys stand for them all: cheese heads. That is what I shall call them henceforth, and I would love to see them immortalized as such in the jargon file someday.
Have you read the essay on the GNU web site entitled, "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator?" If not, perhaps you should, particularly if you're one of those individuals who has expressed concern over the fate of the "Linux community" because of the mixture of grass-roots hackers and for-profit businesses.
For example, note this: "Extrinsic rewards can erode intrinsic interest. People who see themselves as working for money, approval or competitive success find their tasks less pleasurable, and therefore do not do them as well."
I find this an interesting qualifier to many of the views espoused by Eric Raymond. I'm sorry, but I think that the Slashdot guys have been spending too much time with the guys in Mountain View and not enough time with the spirit of Berkeley. The minute those dollar signs appear in your eyes, you begin to lose your vision.
hackito ergo sum
here is one of the better comparisons I have seen between *bsd and linux on the net.
The html version of this paper can be viewed at Larry's site here.
Axiom 1: Being a jackass is parallelizable.
All these guys who hate RMS should get together and form the ASHO: Anti-Stallman Hacker Organization.
This article is cute, but I got bored after the first few paragraphs. It would have been funnier if the underlying bitterness wasn't so transparent. Eric Raymond and Tom Christiansen are both talented individuals who are jealous of Richard Stallman. Fact is, however, that the hacking I do would be very difficult without gcc, gas, glibc, binutils, and gdb. It would make no difference at all if I didn't have Perl or fetchmail.
Eric seems to have misconstrued Richard's post as a personal attack on his ethics. If he would only cool his jets a little, he would see that wasn't the point at all. Perhaps ironically, this post actually helps to substantiate Richard's point that the FSF and OSI have different emphases. Eric, however, seems to insist on raving about why his approach is better, while Richard seems content to acknowledge that the two see things differently, to clarify to others that he does not consider himself a member of the open source camp, and to leave it at that.
cat esr >/dev/null
But the point is that, yes, the majority of the potential user base will pay for software. There is certainly the High Church of Emacs, which won't use anything that isn't GPL, or can't be assimilated by the GPL, but these are a minority now, and will become a smaller minority as linux actually gets purchased for the desktop--into the hands of people who have proved they're willing to pay for software, and will already have paid for linux.
I have no intention of preaching right now, but I would like to point out a couple areas where I think you missed the mark a little. First, even if you are willing to pay for a binary-only license, I think that with a bleeding edge system like Linux, you should insist on an upgrade clause which will give you some insurance against premature obsolescence (relative to software for Windows, Mac, or even OS/2). Second, as with you, price is largely irrelevant to people who insist on running free software. Having source protects you against problems like the one I just mentioned much more than an upgrade clause in a binary-only license ever could.
I was just looking through the comp.benchmarks FAQ and noticed this. I remembered this question coming up here a few days ago, and upon quick inspection, I did not see any references to it here. I hope it is not too late for this to be of use to somebody, at least for further research:
2.9. Nhfsstone
Benchmark intended to measure the performance of file servers that follow the NFS protocol. The work in this area continued within the LADDIS group and finally within SPEC. The SPEC benchmark 097.LADDIS (SFS benchmark suite, see separate FAQ file on SPEC) is intended to replace Nhfsstone, it is superior to Nhfsstone in several aspects (multi-client capability, less client sensitivity).