baloney. there are flip sides to your arguments and ignoring them does not make your case.
the firm may have the responsibility to hire smart people, but 90-something percent of the time that never happens, especially after the politics start. And if productivity grinds to a halt on an open source project over a dispute like this, that is balanced by higher productivity when people work on what they love free from interference and distraction.
We have a healthy commercial software industry, and a healthy open and free software "industry" and their pluses and minuses are identifiable a priori. it is ridiculous to make sweeping statements "proving" that one or the other is ailing.
the emotional stress of constantly having to deal with flaming and dissent from the leader of another development group
there is a higher level of psychological well-being where that stuff can go on and not be stressful to you. Would the Dalai Lama get stressed over something like this? Would the Pope? you don't need to either. Don't like flamers? Watch how angry they'll get if you remain calm.
this is not a curse of open and free source; it is the curse of smart people. The nice thing about open and free source is that we get to see all the details, but these flamewars take place inside of companies, and people quit over them too.
actually, you have it wrong too. It is not about profit. It is about granting users the right to see the source, the right to modify, and the right to redistribute their improvements.
any effect on profit is a side-effect of the main goal, to guarantee users these rights.
This sort of unconditional gift isn't possible with the GPL, so I use the BSD license.
You're right, it is about gifts. The gift that the GPL gives is that users of GPL software and of deriviatives of the software always have the right to see the source. This gift is not possible with the BSD license. That's why users prefer the more magnanimous gift of GPL software.
as I pointed out in an adjacent post, GPL is about granting rights ("freedoms" as in "free") to users that they be able to access the source. It is not about stopping commercial use. The BSD does not guarantee this freedom to users and that's why it is unsuitable all the time, even in the cases you specify.
I really like the "sharing is a two-way street"
mentality of the GPL.
You may like that mentality, but that's not the mentality of the GPL. The mentality of the GPL is that users of software should have the right to access and modify the source, and if they make such improvements they should be able to share those with others so long as they grant others that same rights.
There is no requirement that changes be shared which is what your mentality would imply.
By the way, there is a flaw in the GPL for its stated purpose: a company giving copies of software to its employees is not considered distribution. It should be, because these users do not get the right to see the source and distribute their changes and they should.
actually, guido inexplicibly links to the FSF letter http://www.python.org/2.1/fsf.html which, if you read it you will see, contains reasonable concerns. guido might be frustrated with the state of the legal system, but the FSF in that letter makes much more sense than guido so elegantly does not.
I can see the cause of your angst, but this wasn't a personal attack. rather, you seem ignorant of the fact that "stinks up the room" is a common idiom meaning "performed badly and disappointed the audience."
"How did do?" "Jerry, you really stunk up the room," said Kramer.
Linus was using the phrase in a to make a rather mild joke. How it is that Linus, a foreigner, has a better command of English idiom than you, well... it's just one example so there is no conclusion to be drawn.
thanks for the clarification on Common Lisp having implemented operator overloading, the most important part of polymorphism. I didn't realize they had (it was a long time ago that I used lisp). does it support inheritance, abstracts/pure virtuals, and all that stuff? How do they handle user-defined data types? are they first class? I'm thinking they aren't. What I mean is that if you implement some semantics in terms of conses, you don't want all conses to polymorph the same way: a list of people is not the same abstract type as a list of temperatures.
As to the traditional meaning of "strongly typed", I think it's an almost archaic distinction (not obsolete, but missing all of what is truly interesting about semantics), but it still means what it means, compilers that check actual parameters agains formals and spew errors.
FWIW, they've been pretty successful at getting violators into compliance
how can you attribute all of the successes to their actions when many of the violations have been accompanied by the haranguing and spamming. I'll bet the haranguing and spamming has successfully created an urgency that would be lacking in the nice guy approach.
there's a reason that the fuzz deploy good cop and bad cop at the same time.
I'm on your side in defending Lisp, and you're right, many of these criticisms are very old-fashioned. But, your statements aren't exactly correct.
There are no typing issues with Lisp... If you want a string you've got a string
if you want a string and somebody passes you a cons, you've got a cons, and that's a problem. that's what the "strongly typed" crowd means by "weakly typed". Yes, lisp gives you the ability to inspect type at runtime, and that's very powerful, but it's not strongly typed. You may declare it to be better than strongly typed, but it's not strongly typed. You have similar problems with your statements casting [pun alert!] aspersions toward C. C is relatively strongly typed (with the exception of the short/long int business, the "see-through" typedefs and the "no formal paremeter" nature of cast operators)
And, polymorphism: once again, lisp allows you to implement powerful polymorphic capabilities with its first-class user defined types, but it is not
polymorphic in the sense that OOP people mean. You might argue "better", ok, but still, it's not polymorphic.
all of what you said is true, but if an employee incorporates already GPLed code into a project, that employee has not violated his employment contract: the employer still owns the employee's work output and all copyrights.
Of course, the employer is now distributing GPLed code, but c'est la vie. Any beef they have with that needs to be taken up with their lawyers (who can be identified by the IAAL in their emails) who clearly failed to rule out an industry-standard software licensing practice.
GPL'ed code continues to belong to whoever owns it, so just that clause would not stop an employee choosing to incorporate GPL'ed code if that employee sees that it is in the company's best interest to get the head start and benefits of other people fixing the bugs. Ah, the benefits of that happy virus...
There's some key stuff that, if you have not learned--and I mean learned, been steeped in, experienced, breathed--then no matter what you have learned, you don't know shit. Get the following things added to your CS curriculum some way or other:
exception handling or signalling. Yeah, yeah, I know, you learn this. But don't learn it as what you do for an "error" or a rare exceptional condition. Learn it as what you do for any case where you really wish to return a value of a different type, or simply to break out of a loop. For example, any "search" method should return a reference to anything it finds, but should "signal" not found. Then you can "search" and process the answer without a pesky "if". It's subtle. It changes the way you work, but what it really does is teach you to strictly obey type correctness. You'll write more code that can be reused because when you plug it in somewhere, it brings its own context with it.
tail recursion. No, not the compiler optimization that makes it possible. Instead, the application programmer's semantic that's been called "the ultimate goto". It will erase the distinction in your mind between blocks and functions and make you realize that languages like C++ put some real shackles on the things you'd like to do.
closures. When you enter a sub-function, the variables get pushed onto a stack frame, right? Closures offer the ability to hang onto a stack frame explicitly. The way you can then preserve state achieves a break with the way you used to program that's very similar to the OOP paradigm, except it's runtime "data" inheritance rather than compile time "type" inheritance.
sorry, there're more, but I've got to head out the door.
These things have been part of the MIT freshman CS curriculum for upwards of 25 years, and they'll be lessons you never forget.
Now, if someone were to post a snippet that was necessary for a discussion of the document as a whole, that would be legal under "fair use", right? Then, if someone else posted a different snippet for some other reason, that would be fair use too, right... even a journey of a 1000 miles starts with the first step.
Or, could anybody please post a piece of C code (or is it perl) which I'm sure exists. It has variables named after certain words from English, and coincidentally certain space beings. It's a funny piece of code because it almost reads like English. Anyway, it does something useful and I'd like to use it.
Our lawyers tell us that it appears to be a violation of Copyright law,
How can your lawyers think it's a copy of a copyrighted work unless the crazy cultists provided a copy of the original text to compare against? Could you post that as part of your full disclosure of the case? They sent it to you.
we simply can't defend an
anonymous poster who violates copyright law.
In taking down the deleted story, is Slash also turning the IP address of the poster over to the bad guys?
Let me start by saying that I'm believe that there is discrimination against blacks in high tech, and on a cultural level I'm sure that there a problem with "acceptance." Even people "treating you equally" don't. This isn't necessarily the fault of the individuals involved, it's just a tough problem. As a society, I think we are and have been improving.
In response to the this thread, a problem I have with a lot of statistics is the "double counting" to prove discrimination and gain government rememdies: if this huge percentage of black males I keep hearing about is going to jail, then I wouldn't expect them to wind up in high tech. There may be unfairness and racism involved early in the process, but you can hardly expect employers to ignore their resumes. And the same goes for high school graduation, etc. etc. So, when calculating what the percentages should be, you've got to subtract out subcategories.
Also, I have been waiting for years to use this little gem I once thought up. When Jesse Jackson gets involved, he should feel free to borrow this:
"You say "Mic-ro-soft', but ah see 'Jim Crow-soft'"
Why should an author only be paid once when two people gain the ideas or learn the
stories?
presumably, the prices that the author and publisher have been willing to sell books for, and the prices that readers have been willing to pay reflect on average exactly the uses to which the books will be put. The $6.95 I pay for a paperback includes the discounted resale potential, gift to a friend, etc.
If it's not easy to make a living from writing, then fewer people will write which will drive up the value to the remaining writers. The system is working just fine.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the bullshit that 'businessmen' have brought to the internet...Drop into town, screw everyone over, use up all the resources to push your
product
I'm not going to say that that sort of behavior is a good thing, but here's a different way to look at it that makes it go down easier: it's human nature, honed through millennia of evolution. Like sharks, or vultures, or jackals, or mosquitoes or seagulls in the wild who all engage in irritating yet unreproachable behavior, hungry businessman swarming to make a buck is something that will never stop. What regulated free market capitalism has done is foster competition so all this exploitative energy leads to low prices overall, and pretty widespread distribution of benefits. The internet has provided many benefits to many people, though some benefits to a small number of people have been lost.
reminds me of a funny story I heard in the early days of the big internet boom. A guy I knew at ZDNet went to a meeting with one of the search-engine-except-we're-a-portal-now companies and they went through a whole entire meeting with a half dozen people from each side discussing and negotiating, traffic, price, etc. Only at the very end of the meeting did they discover that each side of the table expected the other side to pay them:)
So why do I think it's clearly better? Because it's clear to me that less finger movement is better and
Dvorak puts more of the common letters on the home row.
so, how does it work? are the { and } under the index fingers?
how can they call that the world's smallest ad? it's written on the leg of a bee... check this IBM logo out, it's much smaller (35 atoms!) and it was done some 10 years ago.
and featured in Slashdot before.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry: [sound of mechanical breathing aahhhh] I'm your father [hhhhhaaaaa], son.
Son: but, but, but your my brother!
Larry: yes, Luke [hhhhaaaaaa] I am [aaaaahhhh]
the firm may have the responsibility to hire smart people, but 90-something percent of the time that never happens, especially after the politics start. And if productivity grinds to a halt on an open source project over a dispute like this, that is balanced by higher productivity when people work on what they love free from interference and distraction.
We have a healthy commercial software industry, and a healthy open and free software "industry" and their pluses and minuses are identifiable a priori. it is ridiculous to make sweeping statements "proving" that one or the other is ailing.
there is a higher level of psychological well-being where that stuff can go on and not be stressful to you. Would the Dalai Lama get stressed over something like this? Would the Pope? you don't need to either. Don't like flamers? Watch how angry they'll get if you remain calm.
this is not a curse of open and free source; it is the curse of smart people. The nice thing about open and free source is that we get to see all the details, but these flamewars take place inside of companies, and people quit over them too.
any effect on profit is a side-effect of the main goal, to guarantee users these rights.
You're right, it is about gifts. The gift that the GPL gives is that users of GPL software and of deriviatives of the software always have the right to see the source. This gift is not possible with the BSD license. That's why users prefer the more magnanimous gift of GPL software.
as I pointed out in an adjacent post, GPL is about granting rights ("freedoms" as in "free") to users that they be able to access the source. It is not about stopping commercial use. The BSD does not guarantee this freedom to users and that's why it is unsuitable all the time, even in the cases you specify.
You may like that mentality, but that's not the mentality of the GPL. The mentality of the GPL is that users of software should have the right to access and modify the source, and if they make such improvements they should be able to share those with others so long as they grant others that same rights.
There is no requirement that changes be shared which is what your mentality would imply.
By the way, there is a flaw in the GPL for its stated purpose: a company giving copies of software to its employees is not considered distribution. It should be, because these users do not get the right to see the source and distribute their changes and they should.
actually, guido inexplicibly links to the FSF letter http://www.python.org/2.1/fsf.html which, if you read it you will see, contains reasonable concerns. guido might be frustrated with the state of the legal system, but the FSF in that letter makes much more sense than guido so elegantly does not.
Linus was using the phrase in a to make a rather mild joke. How it is that Linus, a foreigner, has a better command of English idiom than you, well... it's just one example so there is no conclusion to be drawn.
As to the traditional meaning of "strongly typed", I think it's an almost archaic distinction (not obsolete, but missing all of what is truly interesting about semantics), but it still means what it means, compilers that check actual parameters agains formals and spew errors.
how can you attribute all of the successes to their actions when many of the violations have been accompanied by the haranguing and spamming. I'll bet the haranguing and spamming has successfully created an urgency that would be lacking in the nice guy approach.
there's a reason that the fuzz deploy good cop and bad cop at the same time.
There are no typing issues with Lisp... If you want a string you've got a string
if you want a string and somebody passes you a cons, you've got a cons, and that's a problem. that's what the "strongly typed" crowd means by "weakly typed". Yes, lisp gives you the ability to inspect type at runtime, and that's very powerful, but it's not strongly typed. You may declare it to be better than strongly typed, but it's not strongly typed. You have similar problems with your statements casting [pun alert!] aspersions toward C. C is relatively strongly typed (with the exception of the short/long int business, the "see-through" typedefs and the "no formal paremeter" nature of cast operators)
And, polymorphism: once again, lisp allows you to implement powerful polymorphic capabilities with its first-class user defined types, but it is not polymorphic in the sense that OOP people mean. You might argue "better", ok, but still, it's not polymorphic.
Of course, the employer is now distributing GPLed code, but c'est la vie. Any beef they have with that needs to be taken up with their lawyers (who can be identified by the IAAL in their emails) who clearly failed to rule out an industry-standard software licensing practice.
GPL'ed code continues to belong to whoever owns it, so just that clause would not stop an employee choosing to incorporate GPL'ed code if that employee sees that it is in the company's best interest to get the head start and benefits of other people fixing the bugs. Ah, the benefits of that happy virus...
sorry, there're more, but I've got to head out the door. These things have been part of the MIT freshman CS curriculum for upwards of 25 years, and they'll be lessons you never forget.
Or, could anybody please post a piece of C code (or is it perl) which I'm sure exists. It has variables named after certain words from English, and coincidentally certain space beings. It's a funny piece of code because it almost reads like English. Anyway, it does something useful and I'd like to use it.
Our lawyers tell us that it appears to be a violation of Copyright law,
How can your lawyers think it's a copy of a copyrighted work unless the crazy cultists provided a copy of the original text to compare against? Could you post that as part of your full disclosure of the case? They sent it to you.
we simply can't defend an anonymous poster who violates copyright law.
In taking down the deleted story, is Slash also turning the IP address of the poster over to the bad guys?
In response to the this thread, a problem I have with a lot of statistics is the "double counting" to prove discrimination and gain government rememdies: if this huge percentage of black males I keep hearing about is going to jail, then I wouldn't expect them to wind up in high tech. There may be unfairness and racism involved early in the process, but you can hardly expect employers to ignore their resumes. And the same goes for high school graduation, etc. etc. So, when calculating what the percentages should be, you've got to subtract out subcategories.
Also, I have been waiting for years to use this little gem I once thought up. When Jesse Jackson gets involved, he should feel free to borrow this:
"You say "Mic-ro-soft', but ah see 'Jim Crow-soft'"
presumably, the prices that the author and publisher have been willing to sell books for, and the prices that readers have been willing to pay reflect on average exactly the uses to which the books will be put. The $6.95 I pay for a paperback includes the discounted resale potential, gift to a friend, etc.
If it's not easy to make a living from writing, then fewer people will write which will drive up the value to the remaining writers. The system is working just fine.
I'm not going to say that that sort of behavior is a good thing, but here's a different way to look at it that makes it go down easier: it's human nature, honed through millennia of evolution. Like sharks, or vultures, or jackals, or mosquitoes or seagulls in the wild who all engage in irritating yet unreproachable behavior, hungry businessman swarming to make a buck is something that will never stop. What regulated free market capitalism has done is foster competition so all this exploitative energy leads to low prices overall, and pretty widespread distribution of benefits. The internet has provided many benefits to many people, though some benefits to a small number of people have been lost.
reminds me of a funny story I heard in the early days of the big internet boom. A guy I knew at ZDNet went to a meeting with one of the search-engine-except-we're-a-portal-now companies and they went through a whole entire meeting with a half dozen people from each side discussing and negotiating, traffic, price, etc. Only at the very end of the meeting did they discover that each side of the table expected the other side to pay them :)
so, how does it work? are the { and } under the index fingers?
yeah, but if it's not part of the spec, it isn't the Ultimate Goto.
how can they call that the world's smallest ad? it's written on the leg of a bee... check this IBM logo out, it's much smaller (35 atoms!) and it was done some 10 years ago. and featured in Slashdot before.
...and then when they came for me there was nobody left but the French.