Well, for one thing various governments have given communism quite a bad name. People tend to equate it with totalitarianism.
This is because communism implies some level of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism implies some level of communism. The difference is only in why they behave as they do.
Communism starts with wanting everyone to be equals and manages that by making everything public owned. This means those that want to do something that is not publicly owned, or even publicly approved, must be smacked down in a totalitarian manner.
Totalitarianism starts with the government being a control freak that wants its fingers in everything. Thus everything you do economically needs government approval, and you end up with companies run identically as they would under a communistic regime, to the point that all companies must run equally bureaucratically as to be indistinguishable from each other in terms of real choice for their customers.
I think this is a very interesting question, and I pondered it for a few minutes...
I decided that I am more free if I can choose to contract myself into slavery. Such laws preventing it are attempting to protect people that are easily coerced into such contracts. In a perfect justice system, such coerced agreements are null anyway--you cannot be a party to a contract if you are placed under duress in order to get you to agree to the terms (in theory anyway).
A bunch of big dinosaur companies aren't capable of coming up with a solution to this problem, or for that matter, most of the worlds problems. Any real development will come from either a small startup, a single hacker in his basement, or one of the close-knit open source communities.
That sounds like a problem that can only occur if the server doesn't enforce proper ACLs. Older files cannot be corrupted by "updates" or "checkouts" unless there's an architectural problem with the server.
A source control system should enforce immutability of older revisions. Only administrators should have any delete powers at all to clean up, and the idea of modification of committed revisions should be right out! I expect the server to enforce this.
If word gets out that that damn BitKeeper source control system has corrupted 6 months worth of work, that's bad publicity.
And it's their own fault for that bad publicity. They should have written code that properly enforced immutability of older stuff.
Of course, if that data cannot be recovered from backups, then it's Linus's fault.:)
Macintosh users adjusted rather well to OS X's behavior, which basically mimic's a GUI sudo whenever root privs are needed. I think if application installers start popping up the password prompt, people will figure out what to type in there.
On the other hand, perhaps people will end up getting too used to typing in the password whenever it's presented.
If the majority of people didn't die, we'd undoubtably end up with new ideas being squelched even harder than they are now, as the carriers of the old ideas (e.g. Earth is flat) will never die.
We need to move forward with innovative thinking over the span of centuries and not recycle the same arguments over and over again. Imagine the evolution vs. creation argument never ending. Ever!
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This anti–open-source issue is what Nokia has now married itself to for its phones.
I wonder if Nokia knew about this *before* the ceremony, or if this is like growing a beer belly right after the honeymoon?
"OK. And to make it fair, let's let lawmakers be responsible for all the unintended consequences their legislation brings about."
And also the think tanks and lobbyists that came up with the legislation and pushed the lawmakers to vote for it.
This is because communism implies some level of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism implies some level of communism. The difference is only in why they behave as they do.
Communism starts with wanting everyone to be equals and manages that by making everything public owned. This means those that want to do something that is not publicly owned, or even publicly approved, must be smacked down in a totalitarian manner.
Totalitarianism starts with the government being a control freak that wants its fingers in everything. Thus everything you do economically needs government approval, and you end up with companies run identically as they would under a communistic regime, to the point that all companies must run equally bureaucratically as to be indistinguishable from each other in terms of real choice for their customers.
Not directly related to the topic on hand, read Paul Graham's latest essay "Inequality and Risk" for some nifty insights: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
I think this is a very interesting question, and I pondered it for a few minutes...
I decided that I am more free if I can choose to contract myself into slavery. Such laws preventing it are attempting to protect people that are easily coerced into such contracts. In a perfect justice system, such coerced agreements are null anyway--you cannot be a party to a contract if you are placed under duress in order to get you to agree to the terms (in theory anyway).
The software playing field is no different.
A bunch of big dinosaur companies aren't capable of coming up with a solution to this problem, or for that matter, most of the worlds problems. Any real development will come from either a small startup, a single hacker in his basement, or one of the close-knit open source communities.
What happens if Tridge's client sucks?
:)
Someone looks at the source and makes it better.
What happens if it corrupts older files?
That sounds like a problem that can only occur if the server doesn't enforce proper ACLs. Older files cannot be corrupted by "updates" or "checkouts" unless there's an architectural problem with the server.
A source control system should enforce immutability of older revisions. Only administrators should have any delete powers at all to clean up, and the idea of modification of committed revisions should be right out! I expect the server to enforce this.
If word gets out that that damn BitKeeper source control system has corrupted 6 months worth of work, that's bad publicity.
And it's their own fault for that bad publicity. They should have written code that properly enforced immutability of older stuff.
Of course, if that data cannot be recovered from backups, then it's Linus's fault.
Macintosh users adjusted rather well to OS X's behavior, which basically mimic's a GUI sudo whenever root privs are needed. I think if application installers start popping up the password prompt, people will figure out what to type in there.
On the other hand, perhaps people will end up getting too used to typing in the password whenever it's presented.
"Installer? Check! Installer? Check! Virus? Check!"
And IE for Mac is still better than IE for Windows!
At least until IE 7 comes out.
Maybe.
If the majority of people didn't die, we'd undoubtably end up with new ideas being squelched even harder than they are now, as the carriers of the old ideas (e.g. Earth is flat) will never die.
We need to move forward with innovative thinking over the span of centuries and not recycle the same arguments over and over again. Imagine the evolution vs. creation argument never ending. Ever!