It's true that 90% of everything is crap. Back when I was hiring on a regular basis, I was just astounded by how willing people were to apply for jobs for which they're obviously nowhere near qualified. I was equally astounded by how bad many resumes and cover letters looked, with misspellings and grammatical errors all over the place. So take heart: If you're not one of those, you're probably already in the top 10%!
In the middle ages it was easy to justify the absurd by using religion. Now it's science.
And things were so much better back then.
Science is just knowledge governed by systematic quality control. That doesn't mean that its conclusions are always correct or complete, but it does mean that the methods and reasoning behind them are available and open to scrutiny. If, as you say, it's performed poorly over the last few centuries, then I suppose we should consider abandoning the scientific method and officially making the President of the United States the Supreme Arbiter of Knowledge and Truth. That's essentially what the conservatives are arguing in this thread.
Why should these scientists be any less prone to political bias than anyone else?
You'll have to make up your own mind whether to believe the results of scientific studies or the Bush administration. Which side is "right" on any particular issue is not the point here. What the administration has been doing is squelching the results of studies and replacing scientists who don't give them the results that they and their big contributors want. That is the point.
This has been an on-going issue for the past couple of years, and pretty much every scientist who is paying attention is aware of it. This report is simply an attempt to inform the general public about what's been happening.
Then why does so much of their funding come from opposition (liberal, democrat) linked sources?
Because if the Republicans had funded it, the conclusions would have been rewritten and the Nobel laureates on the panel replaced by industry lobbyists and political hacks.
And don't forget that, despite what opponents of national health insurance would have you believe, our system of private insurance - and the haphazard way we deal with the uninsured - adds heavy layers of bureaucracy that comsume a substantial percentage of the total health care dollar. I don't have figures in front of me, but I think I remember it being in the neighborhood of 40%...
For a relatively poor country they have a pretty decent education system; that's the key. Here in the U.S., the whole notion of broad public education has been under assault for the last couple of decades.
Features that are demanded by users may be quickly developed if the developers agree that the features are needed and/or the developers find it interesting to develop them.
Well of course you're right... If developers are going to perform this kind of service gratis, they will have to perceive it as useful and maybe even interesting. There's also the need to avoid software bloat, which can easily happen if there's no gatekeeper keeping an eye on things. It follows that there will be more OSS options in areas where software is fun to write than for more nitty-gritty things. You may not - and, for highly specialized purposes, probably will not - find an acceptable OSS solution for every particular need you may have. But when you do, there are many good reasons to consider it.
By the way, if there are many businesses that would use OSS package X if only it had feature Y, there is usually nothing preventing any enterprising programmer from starting a new branch that better meets needs that the parent branch is ignoring. Under the GPL you can even sell the derived software (so long as you also provide the source code). Couple this with a support commitment and it's probably not a bad way to make a living, if demand is high.
Others here have pointed out that it's not a matter of joining one camp or the other. The are a lot of Open Source packages - most of them, maybe - that run on Microsoft operating systems. You don't have to buy into Linux if you're happy with whatever you're using (and don't mind the viruses, spyware, and trojan horses that come with that). Decide which software solutions fit your needs and budget, and if some of them are Open Source you'd be silly not to consider them.
But if your competitors manages to substantially reduce costs and maximize control and flexibility by going OSS, you'll have some explaining to do to your boss and/or your shareholders.
How many people in the world even have the skill to do this within in a few days? Is it possible, yes. Is it cheap? No.
I don't know how many, but it's a lot more than could do it if you didn't have the source code. And it's almost always cheaper and faster than relying on most vendors for customizations, if they'll do it at all.
Pretty bad argument for business. "So our security, and my job, relies on what people do in their spare time?"
I guess you're not in the entertainment industry, then...
But seriously, that's a pretty foolish statement. You're saying that you'll take the black box over the product plainly visible for all to see, on principle.
In the end what I'm saying is that while choosing for the right tool for the job you should be careful not to be locked into something that will force you to pick a lot of tools not so right for the job!
But it's not like the vendors are doing that on purpose or anything...
I love a good conspiracy theory, so... I have to wonder whether Microsoft was complicit in this. They're trying to prove to the world that the availability of source code makes software less secure (!), and have already warned that this would likely be so in this case. Perhaps the prophesy is supposed to be fulfilled, both proving their point and scaring boatloads of NT and 2000 users along the upgrade path?
Just a thought. And no, I haven't had that 2nd cup of coffee yet...
Ignorant statements like yours show why the OSS community is having trouble getting its message across.
I respectfully submit that the OSS community is not having problems getting its message across. The message has "legs" and is capable of spreading all by itself, despite all of the FUD that is - and will continue to be - thrown against it.
There seems to be this assumption out there that OSS is some sinister conspiracy bent on taking over the world by stealing market share from commercial vendors. The OSS model is nothing more nor less than programmers sharing their code with the world. It's done for pride more than anything else, and it's often the only feasible way to get their creations seen and used by anybody.
They're like musicians without big record contracts who nevertheless put on a hell of a concert, for free.
Oh great, we can 'read the code'. What do we do now?
I don't think you're getting the point here. If you're talking about software that is so specialized that it's unique to your little niche, then yes, access to the source may only be important if you're equipped to do something with it yourself. But in that case a commercial version would likely be supported by one company, and woe unto you if they went out of business or chose to stop supporting it (perhaps to force you into an "upgrade"). With access to the source (and a license that allows you to use that access), you at least have the option of hiring someone to maintain or customize it. To say you'd prefer to put your business at the mercy of a single vendor, large or small, is just plain nutty, in my opinion.
For more generic applications there are several advantages to Open Source:
You are not dependent on a single vendor for support, nor vulnerable if that support ceases to be available.
The very fact that the source is available makes it much less likely that it will contain hidden undesirable functionality that benefits the vendor but not you. To prefer closed source is akin to disliking ingredient labels on food and drugs because you'd rather not know what's in there. Even if you can't utilize that information directly, it is important that there will be other eyes that can.
Open source development is user-driven, and not vendor-driven. Features that are demanded by users will quickly be developed without concern for any vendor's business model or revenue stream (maybe that's why you hate it?). Owning or controlling the customer will never be an issue.
You can modify and customize it any way you want to fit your own needs, and this can be done by any programmer you may have on staff or hire by the hour off the street.
I personally don't care whether you or your company employs Open Source software in your operations, and I doubt that the developers of the software you're not using care very much either, since they're not selling anything (except occasionally support and packaging). If I were a shareholder I'd have some tough questions for you, though, because then it would be my money that you're farting away...
I wouldn't discount the "major competitor" side of things!
It helps if the competitor is a sworn enemy, like the good old days during the cold war. We'll need another few years of Bush before Europe achieves that status...
Find me a country with so called 'Universal Health Care' with the quality of care that exists in the US. You won't.
Funny you should ask. Just yesterday I ran into this little story:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/ ar ticles/2004/02/10/why_canadians_are_healthier/
My favorite quote: "There isn't a single measure in which the US excels in the health arena," said Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We spend half of the world's health care bill and we are less healthy than all the other rich countries.
Have you considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes?
As opposed to, say, Microsoft or Oracle providing the software? And you don't think that the Chinese (or Indians, or Russians, or whatever) have the ability to write software themselves, that programming is somehow a uniquely American talent? If you get your head out of whatever other anatomical place it's parked in, you'd see how silly that is.
One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency.
And you wonder why the rest of the world is moving away from it. Whether it's true or not, just making statements like this hurts the U.S. software industry more than anything that Stallman can say.
A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies.
Well golly, Bubba, it seems that the Bush administration has been getting pretty cozy with the Chinese government, too. If anyone's looking to sell out Taiwan, there's where you want to direct your vitriol. Are you aware that the President's brother, Neil Bush, is getting rich lobbying for China? No, I didn't think so...
And I'm guessing that you were so pleased with your own cleverness that you paid no attention to what she actually said.
She has accused me of that from time to time... But my point was that it's silly to give blanket credibility to all of them even if a few may be effective for some people. And if not all claims are valid, then you need a method to determine which ones are and which aren't.
Not all science is done in corporate labs. If the native people have been using bugwort root to cure the dropsy for a few centuries (traditional) that might be worth a look. It's quite different from accepting anything some smart-ass makes up on the spot.
Well then it should at least be possible to validate the claim experimentally, shouldn't it? Besides, you're assuming that we know that therapy X was used successfully to treat a condition Y in some specified ancient culture, when what we often really have is someone selling something who says so. For many people, there's no good way to differentiate the "smartass on the spot" from anyone who might deserve more credibility. They're all trying to make a buck. That's why we need scientifically conducted clinical trials for drugs (and drugs masquerading as nutrutional supplements).
There's now an institute at NIH that is charged with testing "alternative" remedies, and I expect if they're doing any decent science they'll find some merit in a few, but little or none in many, many others. Of course, at that point the ones in the former group cease to be "alternative".
Do you have any evidence that drug companies don't tend to favor research in patentable pills over simple, cheap, traditional remedies that are already in the public domain?
Of course they do! They've developed greed into a high art. They may have to prove that their patented stuff is "safe and effective", but that doesn't mean it's any better than an existing drug costing 2% as much. But they're good at marketing to physicians and the public, who will simply assume that the new stuff is better. Don't peg me as a pharmco apologist; I'm as cynical as they come!
Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded to him, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." In other words, he won his prize for his role in the creation of quantum physics.
Well you're not, really. Einstein was an important early player, and I kind of dissed the guy by saying he resisted the whole thing; what he resisted was the idea that the physical world was probabilistic at a fundamental level. Founding credit for "discovering" quantum theory probably goes to Max Planck in 1900, but Einstein was the one in 1905 who proposed that light energy exists in discrete packets called quanta, although I don't think he identified this with the photon. He did speculate that there were two ways of looking at light, and he hoped that these would some day be unified (it was de Broglie who formalized the idea of a wave/particle duality, though). From there, most of the credit for actually developing quantum theory into something coherent in the 1920s goes to Niels Bohr, Max Born, Satyenra Bose (quantum statistics), Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and others, including Einstein.
Oh, and sorry for that "you're not a physicist" remark... I'm not either. I just recently read a book that discusses this and, of course, had to run back to it to write this response...
In academia there tends to be a strong bias against anyone who becomes "popular." Any academic who can write such that people who haven't studied the field for 15 years will understand will probably get labelled as a "hack" or "completely without merit" and some other unsavory adjectives, regardless of the quality of their other work.
You can always find examples of that (can you?), but on the whole most people who seem to be hacks really are. The judgement is often bestowed on people who don't really know what they're talking about, especially when it's painfully obvious to those who do. Science isn't a democracy, and never will be.
It's story time, now...
Some asked me recently if I "believe in alternative medicine," and I answered "usually not." After several minutes of hearing about how western scientific medicine suppresses knowledge that springs from traditional, "unscientific" sources, I asked her if she believed in all alternative therapies, and if I made one up right now and started selling it, would she believe in that one too. Well no, some may work better than others, and probably mine wouldn't work at all. So I asked, "Then how do you tell the difference?", and she didn't really have an answer for that. For her, I'm guessing, testimonials in ads and being mentioned on TV talk shows was all the evidence that mattered.
Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order is better in every way. Inspiring, humble before his subject, full of actual insights and examples from the real world, and absolutely beautiful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that 90% of everything is crap. Back when I was hiring on a regular basis, I was just astounded by how willing people were to apply for jobs for which they're obviously nowhere near qualified. I was equally astounded by how bad many resumes and cover letters looked, with misspellings and grammatical errors all over the place. So take heart: If you're not one of those, you're probably already in the top 10%!
Maybe you should try reading the reports themselves...
Yet the Environmental Protection Agency is taking a big hit (7%, I think) in Bush's budget proposal. Is anyone surprised?
And things were so much better back then.
Science is just knowledge governed by systematic quality control. That doesn't mean that its conclusions are always correct or complete, but it does mean that the methods and reasoning behind them are available and open to scrutiny. If, as you say, it's performed poorly over the last few centuries, then I suppose we should consider abandoning the scientific method and officially making the President of the United States the Supreme Arbiter of Knowledge and Truth. That's essentially what the conservatives are arguing in this thread.
You'll have to make up your own mind whether to believe the results of scientific studies or the Bush administration. Which side is "right" on any particular issue is not the point here. What the administration has been doing is squelching the results of studies and replacing scientists who don't give them the results that they and their big contributors want. That is the point.
This has been an on-going issue for the past couple of years, and pretty much every scientist who is paying attention is aware of it. This report is simply an attempt to inform the general public about what's been happening.
Because if the Republicans had funded it, the conclusions would have been rewritten and the Nobel laureates on the panel replaced by industry lobbyists and political hacks.
And don't forget that, despite what opponents of national health insurance would have you believe, our system of private insurance - and the haphazard way we deal with the uninsured - adds heavy layers of bureaucracy that comsume a substantial percentage of the total health care dollar. I don't have figures in front of me, but I think I remember it being in the neighborhood of 40%...
For a relatively poor country they have a pretty decent education system; that's the key. Here in the U.S., the whole notion of broad public education has been under assault for the last couple of decades.
Well of course you're right... If developers are going to perform this kind of service gratis, they will have to perceive it as useful and maybe even interesting. There's also the need to avoid software bloat, which can easily happen if there's no gatekeeper keeping an eye on things. It follows that there will be more OSS options in areas where software is fun to write than for more nitty-gritty things. You may not - and, for highly specialized purposes, probably will not - find an acceptable OSS solution for every particular need you may have. But when you do, there are many good reasons to consider it.
By the way, if there are many businesses that would use OSS package X if only it had feature Y, there is usually nothing preventing any enterprising programmer from starting a new branch that better meets needs that the parent branch is ignoring. Under the GPL you can even sell the derived software (so long as you also provide the source code). Couple this with a support commitment and it's probably not a bad way to make a living, if demand is high.
But if your competitors manages to substantially reduce costs and maximize control and flexibility by going OSS, you'll have some explaining to do to your boss and/or your shareholders.
I don't know how many, but it's a lot more than could do it if you didn't have the source code. And it's almost always cheaper and faster than relying on most vendors for customizations, if they'll do it at all.
Pretty bad argument for business. "So our security, and my job, relies on what people do in their spare time?"
I guess you're not in the entertainment industry, then...
But seriously, that's a pretty foolish statement. You're saying that you'll take the black box over the product plainly visible for all to see, on principle.
But it's not like the vendors are doing that on purpose or anything...
I love a good conspiracy theory, so... I have to wonder whether Microsoft was complicit in this. They're trying to prove to the world that the availability of source code makes software less secure (!), and have already warned that this would likely be so in this case. Perhaps the prophesy is supposed to be fulfilled, both proving their point and scaring boatloads of NT and 2000 users along the upgrade path?
Just a thought. And no, I haven't had that 2nd cup of coffee yet...
I respectfully submit that the OSS community is not having problems getting its message across. The message has "legs" and is capable of spreading all by itself, despite all of the FUD that is - and will continue to be - thrown against it.
There seems to be this assumption out there that OSS is some sinister conspiracy bent on taking over the world by stealing market share from commercial vendors. The OSS model is nothing more nor less than programmers sharing their code with the world. It's done for pride more than anything else, and it's often the only feasible way to get their creations seen and used by anybody.
They're like musicians without big record contracts who nevertheless put on a hell of a concert, for free.
I don't think you're getting the point here. If you're talking about software that is so specialized that it's unique to your little niche, then yes, access to the source may only be important if you're equipped to do something with it yourself. But in that case a commercial version would likely be supported by one company, and woe unto you if they went out of business or chose to stop supporting it (perhaps to force you into an "upgrade"). With access to the source (and a license that allows you to use that access), you at least have the option of hiring someone to maintain or customize it. To say you'd prefer to put your business at the mercy of a single vendor, large or small, is just plain nutty, in my opinion.
For more generic applications there are several advantages to Open Source:
I personally don't care whether you or your company employs Open Source software in your operations, and I doubt that the developers of the software you're not using care very much either, since they're not selling anything (except occasionally support and packaging). If I were a shareholder I'd have some tough questions for you, though, because then it would be my money that you're farting away...
It helps if the competitor is a sworn enemy, like the good old days during the cold war. We'll need another few years of Bush before Europe achieves that status...
Funny you should ask. Just yesterday I ran into this little story:
/ ar ticles/2004/02/10/why_canadians_are_healthier/
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science
My favorite quote: "There isn't a single measure in which the US excels in the health arena," said Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We spend half of the world's health care bill and we are less healthy than all the other rich countries.
And even that was tainted by electoral fraud in Florida...
As opposed to, say, Microsoft or Oracle providing the software? And you don't think that the Chinese (or Indians, or Russians, or whatever) have the ability to write software themselves, that programming is somehow a uniquely American talent? If you get your head out of whatever other anatomical place it's parked in, you'd see how silly that is.
One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency.
And you wonder why the rest of the world is moving away from it. Whether it's true or not, just making statements like this hurts the U.S. software industry more than anything that Stallman can say.
A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies.
Well golly, Bubba, it seems that the Bush administration has been getting pretty cozy with the Chinese government, too. If anyone's looking to sell out Taiwan, there's where you want to direct your vitriol. Are you aware that the President's brother, Neil Bush, is getting rich lobbying for China? No, I didn't think so...
Oops... I think I got baited!
She has accused me of that from time to time... But my point was that it's silly to give blanket credibility to all of them even if a few may be effective for some people. And if not all claims are valid, then you need a method to determine which ones are and which aren't.
Not all science is done in corporate labs. If the native people have been using bugwort root to cure the dropsy for a few centuries (traditional) that might be worth a look. It's quite different from accepting anything some smart-ass makes up on the spot.
Well then it should at least be possible to validate the claim experimentally, shouldn't it? Besides, you're assuming that we know that therapy X was used successfully to treat a condition Y in some specified ancient culture, when what we often really have is someone selling something who says so. For many people, there's no good way to differentiate the "smartass on the spot" from anyone who might deserve more credibility. They're all trying to make a buck. That's why we need scientifically conducted clinical trials for drugs (and drugs masquerading as nutrutional supplements).
There's now an institute at NIH that is charged with testing "alternative" remedies, and I expect if they're doing any decent science they'll find some merit in a few, but little or none in many, many others. Of course, at that point the ones in the former group cease to be "alternative".
Do you have any evidence that drug companies don't tend to favor research in patentable pills over simple, cheap, traditional remedies that are already in the public domain?
Of course they do! They've developed greed into a high art. They may have to prove that their patented stuff is "safe and effective", but that doesn't mean it's any better than an existing drug costing 2% as much. But they're good at marketing to physicians and the public, who will simply assume that the new stuff is better. Don't peg me as a pharmco apologist; I'm as cynical as they come!
You're more correct that I was here...
Well you're not, really. Einstein was an important early player, and I kind of dissed the guy by saying he resisted the whole thing; what he resisted was the idea that the physical world was probabilistic at a fundamental level. Founding credit for "discovering" quantum theory probably goes to Max Planck in 1900, but Einstein was the one in 1905 who proposed that light energy exists in discrete packets called quanta, although I don't think he identified this with the photon. He did speculate that there were two ways of looking at light, and he hoped that these would some day be unified (it was de Broglie who formalized the idea of a wave/particle duality, though). From there, most of the credit for actually developing quantum theory into something coherent in the 1920s goes to Niels Bohr, Max Born, Satyenra Bose (quantum statistics), Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and others, including Einstein.
Oh, and sorry for that "you're not a physicist" remark... I'm not either. I just recently read a book that discusses this and, of course, had to run back to it to write this response...
You can always find examples of that (can you?), but on the whole most people who seem to be hacks really are. The judgement is often bestowed on people who don't really know what they're talking about, especially when it's painfully obvious to those who do. Science isn't a democracy, and never will be.
It's story time, now...
Some asked me recently if I "believe in alternative medicine," and I answered "usually not." After several minutes of hearing about how western scientific medicine suppresses knowledge that springs from traditional, "unscientific" sources, I asked her if she believed in all alternative therapies, and if I made one up right now and started selling it, would she believe in that one too. Well no, some may work better than others, and probably mine wouldn't work at all. So I asked, "Then how do you tell the difference?", and she didn't really have an answer for that. For her, I'm guessing, testimonials in ads and being mentioned on TV talk shows was all the evidence that mattered.
Or try Stuart Kaufman's "The Origins of Order".