The company was able to cut costs. The company wins.
Free software writers get paid for supporting and customizing there code. Free software in general wins. The software writers win.
IT workers that are not able to deliver as well as college students get fired. IT workers lose. Capatialism works as Adam Smith described it.
In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers. This is in part due to reuse of old labor (code)as well as presumebly cheaper pay.
As far as cheaper pay there are already systems of natural and artifical checks and balances to keep an equilibrium of pay for services releative to the cost of living.
As far as free labor (code), the laborers have to feed themselves and therefore will have to dedicate resources to paid labor. Also, the "free" labor could have been part of an assignment for a class that would be bartered for college credits that would eventually be bartered for a degree.
So in conclusion, yes free software is causing companies to fire experienced professionals and replace them with part time college students. However, this is not neccessarally a bad thing. If the professionals are really that damn good they will be able to get another job. If they can't then society probally has little need for their labor and they will learn new other skills or work for what the college students are working for. The obvisious conclusion of this is there will be less college students taking up computer science/CIS and less free software written. This will cause a greater demand for programmers and greater rates of pay. Hence capatialism will keep the market in check.
Well I guess if I was stupid enough to fail out of Poly then I might as well be Stupid enough to post with my real account.
Justin Dearing
EE major Fall 99-Spring 2000
CS Major Fall 2000-Fall 2001
Re:Dirty Pool! But also confusing.
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A lawer could make the argument that the obfuscated source code is not source code as defined by the GPL. It it pretty well stated by the GNU project that the source code of a program is the most understandable and modifyable form of the program. You company is "compiling" this GPL code into a non readable format.
How the hell are all those lonely CS majors supposed to get in good with the Education majors now?
Well you write 2 different versions of each HW. You use two different indentation styles. You use two different varible name schemes. Make sure neither one is hungarian notation because that will attract the attention of the grader. Make the one you hand in look like it was written by a CS and make the one the other person writes look like there only knowledge of computer science came from the course there currently enrolled in.
Ok so you have a start button, gui tools to configure look and feel, package management, and ppp. You have programming, productivity, database and server apps. Perhaps the GUI isn't as great as XP in terms of prettiness, buttdammit it Kicks the hell outa Win 3.1, 9x, NT 4.0, Millenium, and 2k.
And X efficiency beats the hell out of some of the alternatives (anyone used VNC on Windows?)
Mabey your still using the AT&T vnc distrobution, but if you check out TightVNC, you might just discover a version of VNC that gives acceptable performance over a 56k modem.
Also, network transparency is fine and dandy for many purposes, but VNC serves a difference purpose. I personally run a copy of GAIM on an Xvnc session and then vnc into that to check my IMs. This way I never loos ims when I connect to different computers. I also run X apps remotly off a machine I program on through ssh. a couple copies of gvim with all the files and an xterm to run the program from. VNC and remote X serve two completly different purposes.
For me, the only way I could get X to go from 16 colors and 640x480 was to spend 4 hours playing around with the text config file.
Well you must have really ecentric hardware, becasue I never ahd a problem with the vga driver. The svga drivers yeah I've had a few issues with, but n3evefr the vga driver.
As far as detecting 2 netowrk cards, ok certain distrobutions can be weird about it. I can offer a few simple work arounds, such as compiling the drivers in the kernel and not as modules or manually editing modules.conf. Sure your grandmother coul;dn't figure it out, but would your grandmother need 2 network cards in linux.
Last time I checked, you still needed to know the dot clock and monitor frequency settings in XFree86 in order to change the screen resolution and color depth.
Uh yeah if your writing your Xfree86 file from Scratch. I've never had to do that personally. And I've been using Xfree86 since 3.3.3. I'm sure plenty of Slashdotters have been using it since the 2.x days and earlier, but even when I used the xfree86 config script it would onclude all the monitor information so I could alter the resolution lines in the video card section of the file withouhut modifying the monitor section.
Well Redhat and SuSE, and I'm sure other distros tune there kernels and add patches to support the latests stuff such as firewire, USB, and journaling. Hell, even Slackware added Cox patches to its kernel. However, at least in the case of SuSE, an "official" SuSE version of 2.2.19 is included with alot of the neato 2.4 stuff back ported, all with a somewhat slower, but well tested VM. Redhats markets its latest x.2 distro for high availability apps because they have the most polish for a sacrafice of neato.
If I was to pick a big selling point for Linux, it would be based on price and customisability - this branch targets Linux on the workstation whilst the official branch is more aimed at servers, or at least that's how I understand it.
Not exactly, but thats probally how it works out in practice. Production servers tend to require 5 9's of reliability. If the latest kernel patch that provides better page swapping or whatever isn't as throughly tested as the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel, its not going to be incorporated into your production servers. However, for your workstations, having to restart X to get rid of memory leaks once a month or so isn't that big a deal. For workstations people are mnore likely to use 2.4 kernels with patches.
Ok I'll fan this flame.
Interesting. A GPL'd library (Qt) isn't GPL compliant. Very interesting indeed. I'm sure Trolltech would love to hear about this.
Well perhaps your not aware that originally QT was only available under the QPL. Now its available under the GPL, but in the past is wasn't. This is why gnome was started.
Re:Example for mandatory open sourcing
on
Textmode Quake 2
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· Score: 1
Well, yes it is limited, but it is beyond the time neccessary to recoup R&D and make a decent profit. The reasons patents are as short as they are is to encourage people to invent new things to keep the money coming in. 100 years is obvisiously to long to achieve that.
It has to render 3d images with ascii art. Thats auctually more work than rendering 3d images as pixels.
Re:Example for mandatory open sourcing
on
Textmode Quake 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most copyrighted software isn't intended to be put into the public domain anyway.
United States Constitution, atricle one section 8 states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;...
Now IANAL, so take the following as my personal educated opinion.
The purpose of intellectual property law was originally intended by our founding Fathers to server two purposes. The first, is to allow artists and inventors exclusive rights to use there works for the pursuit of profit. This is to encourage and reward successful R&D. The second, is to provide through these same mechanisms, now knows as patenting and copyright, assurance that in a reasonable amount of time such IP is put in the public domain.
IP laws were originally designed so information got into the public domain regardless of what the authors intended.
well true. being the hardware is already purchased, it makes sense to install linux on one machine and create a backup tape/cd/dvd to restore the image from. Although, depending on the size of the hard drives, your probally going to have to get a K6-2 450 to be a file server to mount/usr and/opt from.
No booting off of the CD-Rom, let alone over the network.br
Ok correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't any x86 comouter witha NIC with a proper EPROM network boot?
Iven if this isn't the case, the machines have hard drives which can contain a kernel and a small ramdisk image setup to remotly mount an NFS root partition. The master version of the boot kernel/ramdisk image can be stored on a server and a cron job can check if the image has changed and ddi onto the clients to upgrade. User authentication can be done with an LDAP directory or SQL database, or even yellow pages.
Re:Who does this benifit commercially
on
Ximian for HP-UX
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· Score: 1
So ximian is becoming the official version of gnome supported by HP-UX and bundeled with it?
Re:Who does this benifit commercially
on
Ximian for HP-UX
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· Score: 1
I didn't say nobody used HP-UX, I just questioned a exactly how many people used HP-UX and b how many of those would pay for ximian.
Who does this benifit commercially
on
Ximian for HP-UX
·
· Score: 1
Correct me if I'm wrong, but besides geeks who aqquire HP-UX machines via ebay and dumpsters, who wouls use ximian gnome. Perhaps its imply becasue I've never even seen an HP-UX in my life, but I would assume that Solaris/Sun is the defacto standard for commercial unix desktops.
well I guess all us samba people are in the 1%. Gee and to think of the small minority of people besides muyself who auctually use the domain logon feature to log into NT or samba shares.Lets not get into wins servers while were at it.
If I want bash, I use #!/bin/bash, but if I use #!/bin/sh and write Bourne shell code, I expect it to not break.
Funny, if I want to use bash I use #!/usr/local/bin/bash. Oh wait thats cause I use FreeBSD, a unix with a bourne shell.
You don't ever have to make world in FreeBSD. Snapshots are compiled daily for all to download. In cases such as when another bind exploit is discovered you can just recompile bind or openssh.
Try/stand/sysinstall one of these days. I will usually instal Xfree86 4.x that way. You can even set it do download the curent versions of packages. And while I can't speak for debian, I sure know its alot easier to set compile time options in FreeBSD then with source rpms. Quite frankly source rpms don't provide much benifit other than making sure the source compiles on your box.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers. This is in part due to reuse of old labor (code)as well as presumebly cheaper pay.
As far as cheaper pay there are already systems of natural and artifical checks and balances to keep an equilibrium of pay for services releative to the cost of living.
As far as free labor (code), the laborers have to feed themselves and therefore will have to dedicate resources to paid labor. Also, the "free" labor could have been part of an assignment for a class that would be bartered for college credits that would eventually be bartered for a degree.
So in conclusion, yes free software is causing companies to fire experienced professionals and replace them with part time college students. However, this is not neccessarally a bad thing. If the professionals are really that damn good they will be able to get another job. If they can't then society probally has little need for their labor and they will learn new other skills or work for what the college students are working for. The obvisious conclusion of this is there will be less college students taking up computer science/CIS and less free software written. This will cause a greater demand for programmers and greater rates of pay. Hence capatialism will keep the market in check.
Well I guess if I was stupid enough to fail out of Poly then I might as well be Stupid enough to post with my real account. Justin Dearing EE major Fall 99-Spring 2000 CS Major Fall 2000-Fall 2001
A lawer could make the argument that the obfuscated source code is not source code as defined by the GPL. It it pretty well stated by the GNU project that the source code of a program is the most understandable and modifyable form of the program. You company is "compiling" this GPL code into a non readable format.
Its not a conspiracy. Its simply abuse of the patent system.
How the hell are all those lonely CS majors supposed to get in good with the Education majors now?
Well you write 2 different versions of each HW. You use two different indentation styles. You use two different varible name schemes. Make sure neither one is hungarian notation because that will attract the attention of the grader. Make the one you hand in look like it was written by a CS and make the one the other person writes look like there only knowledge of computer science came from the course there currently enrolled in.
You also get FreeBSD 5-CURRENT and the whole cvs repository.
Ok so you have a start button, gui tools to configure look and feel, package management, and ppp. You have programming, productivity, database and server apps. Perhaps the GUI isn't as great as XP in terms of prettiness, buttdammit it Kicks the hell outa Win 3.1, 9x, NT 4.0, Millenium, and 2k.
And X efficiency beats the hell out of some of the alternatives (anyone used VNC on Windows?)
Mabey your still using the AT&T vnc distrobution, but if you check out TightVNC, you might just discover a version of VNC that gives acceptable performance over a 56k modem.
Also, network transparency is fine and dandy for many purposes, but VNC serves a difference purpose. I personally run a copy of GAIM on an Xvnc session and then vnc into that to check my IMs. This way I never loos ims when I connect to different computers. I also run X apps remotly off a machine I program on through ssh. a couple copies of gvim with all the files and an xterm to run the program from. VNC and remote X serve two completly different purposes.
For me, the only way I could get X to go from 16 colors and 640x480 was to spend 4 hours playing around with the text config file.
Well you must have really ecentric hardware, becasue I never ahd a problem with the vga driver. The svga drivers yeah I've had a few issues with, but n3evefr the vga driver.
As far as detecting 2 netowrk cards, ok certain distrobutions can be weird about it. I can offer a few simple work arounds, such as compiling the drivers in the kernel and not as modules or manually editing modules.conf. Sure your grandmother coul;dn't figure it out, but would your grandmother need 2 network cards in linux.
Last time I checked, you still needed to know the dot clock and monitor frequency settings in XFree86 in order to change the screen resolution and color depth. Uh yeah if your writing your Xfree86 file from Scratch. I've never had to do that personally. And I've been using Xfree86 since 3.3.3. I'm sure plenty of Slashdotters have been using it since the 2.x days and earlier, but even when I used the xfree86 config script it would onclude all the monitor information so I could alter the resolution lines in the video card section of the file withouhut modifying the monitor section.
Well Redhat and SuSE, and I'm sure other distros tune there kernels and add patches to support the latests stuff such as firewire, USB, and journaling. Hell, even Slackware added Cox patches to its kernel. However, at least in the case of SuSE, an "official" SuSE version of 2.2.19 is included with alot of the neato 2.4 stuff back ported, all with a somewhat slower, but well tested VM. Redhats markets its latest x.2 distro for high availability apps because they have the most polish for a sacrafice of neato.
If I was to pick a big selling point for Linux, it would be based on price and customisability - this branch targets Linux on the workstation whilst the official branch is more aimed at servers, or at least that's how I understand it.
Not exactly, but thats probally how it works out in practice. Production servers tend to require 5 9's of reliability. If the latest kernel patch that provides better page swapping or whatever isn't as throughly tested as the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel, its not going to be incorporated into your production servers. However, for your workstations, having to restart X to get rid of memory leaks once a month or so isn't that big a deal. For workstations people are mnore likely to use 2.4 kernels with patches.
I was unaware of that. Anyway the point is originally QT wasn't GPL and that the problem with KDe that caused GNOME to be formed.
Ok I'll fan this flame.
Interesting. A GPL'd library (Qt) isn't GPL compliant. Very interesting indeed. I'm sure Trolltech would love to hear about this.
Well perhaps your not aware that originally QT was only available under the QPL. Now its available under the GPL, but in the past is wasn't. This is why gnome was started.
Well, yes it is limited, but it is beyond the time neccessary to recoup R&D and make a decent profit. The reasons patents are as short as they are is to encourage people to invent new things to keep the money coming in. 100 years is obvisiously to long to achieve that.
It has to render 3d images with ascii art. Thats auctually more work than rendering 3d images as pixels.
Most copyrighted software isn't intended to be put into the public domain anyway. ...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; ...
United States Constitution, atricle one section 8 states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Now IANAL, so take the following as my personal educated opinion.
The purpose of intellectual property law was originally intended by our founding Fathers to server two purposes. The first, is to allow artists and inventors exclusive rights to use there works for the pursuit of profit. This is to encourage and reward successful R&D. The second, is to provide through these same mechanisms, now knows as patenting and copyright, assurance that in a reasonable amount of time such IP is put in the public domain. IP laws were originally designed so information got into the public domain regardless of what the authors intended.
well true. being the hardware is already purchased, it makes sense to install linux on one machine and create a backup tape/cd/dvd to restore the image from. Although, depending on the size of the hard drives, your probally going to have to get a K6-2 450 to be a file server to mount /usr and /opt from.
No booting off of the CD-Rom, let alone over the network.br Ok correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't any x86 comouter witha NIC with a proper EPROM network boot? Iven if this isn't the case, the machines have hard drives which can contain a kernel and a small ramdisk image setup to remotly mount an NFS root partition. The master version of the boot kernel/ramdisk image can be stored on a server and a cron job can check if the image has changed and ddi onto the clients to upgrade. User authentication can be done with an LDAP directory or SQL database, or even yellow pages.
So ximian is becoming the official version of gnome supported by HP-UX and bundeled with it?
I didn't say nobody used HP-UX, I just questioned a exactly how many people used HP-UX and b how many of those would pay for ximian.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but besides geeks who aqquire HP-UX machines via ebay and dumpsters, who wouls use ximian gnome. Perhaps its imply becasue I've never even seen an HP-UX in my life, but I would assume that Solaris/Sun is the defacto standard for commercial unix desktops.
well I guess all us samba people are in the 1%. Gee and to think of the small minority of people besides muyself who auctually use the domain logon feature to log into NT or samba shares.Lets not get into wins servers while were at it.
If I want bash, I use #!/bin/bash, but if I use #!/bin/sh and write Bourne shell code, I expect it to not break.
Funny, if I want to use bash I use #!/usr/local/bin/bash. Oh wait thats cause I use FreeBSD, a unix with a bourne shell.
You don't ever have to make world in FreeBSD. Snapshots are compiled daily for all to download. In cases such as when another bind exploit is discovered you can just recompile bind or openssh. Try /stand/sysinstall one of these days. I will usually instal Xfree86 4.x that way. You can even set it do download the curent versions of packages. And while I can't speak for debian, I sure know its alot easier to set compile time options in FreeBSD then with source rpms. Quite frankly source rpms don't provide much benifit other than making sure the source compiles on your box.