Relax, the Free Software Folks will always have one advantage over the BSD license folks. That advantage is that Free Software folks can borrow BSD code, modify it, and release it under a GPL-like license.
BSD advocates don't mind when commercial companies do this, because commercial projects don't effectively compete with Open projects for volunteer developers. But Free Software projects do. All it takes is one dedicated hacker to change a BSD style project to a GPL style one. Of course, the improvements on the GPLed branch have to be significant enough to entice people towards the GPLed version, but that's not as hard as it sounds. There is a large body of GPLed work available. All you would really have to do is borrow some code from another GPLed product and integrate it with the BSD code.
The PR battle has already been won. Nobody is going to believe that Sun, IBM, HP, and Intel are all un-American, and all of these companies have released software under the GPL. Even the folks at the government will understand that. Especially when they realize they are getting more for their software dollar. Besides, most of the nifty new technologies available for the Free Unixes these days are GPLed. Mozilla, OpenOffice, MySQL, and QT are all examples of this. I almost feel sorry for the BSD advocates when I think of the desktop. The only set of tools that is available under a license that allows the creation of proprietary GUI applications is the LGPLed Gnome libraries.
It has really got to rankle them that their only choice for proprietary desktop applications is the FSF's Gnome. Of course they always could spend money and buy the commercial license of QT.
If they did this [sued a small company for a minor violation] it would really show Stallman's true colors.
It amazes me the length that some people will go to find reasons for hating RMS.
Here's the scenario. Some slimy company FooBarCo takes the source code to Emacs and redistributes it as FooBarMacs without releasing source code. When the FSF comes to them and mentions that doing such is illegal FooBarCo tells the FSF to "go climb a tree."
The FSF sues FooBarCo (and hopefully wins). All of FooBarCo's customers now are able to get the source code to FooBarMacs should they decide they want it.
In real life, The Free Software Foundation has had plenty of opportunities to "sue." For the most part the infractions that have surfaced have been minor, and when the infraction was pointed out to the offender the problem has been cleared up amicably.
Contrast this to what happens if you misuse copyrighted material from anyone else, and you would quickly see that they FSF is a pretty decent group of individuals. If you stole the source code to Windows and sold it as Windows ACV (Anonymous Coward Version) Microsoft would find you and stick hot pokers in your private places.
The GPL was specifically designed to require people to share source code when they distributed binaries. If you don't appreciate that, use software under some other license.
I don't like the fact that I drive a Honda instead of a BMW, but that doesn't mean I go around "borrowing" BMWs out of parking lots. The software that the FSF wrote belongs to them, and they can do what they darn well please with it. I personally am glad that they decided to share, but you certainly don't have to feel that way.
What happens when Big Corp A, B and C throws legal support behind "little, runty corp without lawyers, inc."
Like I said, I find it hard to believe that the software companies would start fighting for limits on copyright terms after so many years of fighting for stronger copyright. Since copyright is their main form of protection the last thing that they want is to weaken copyright laws.
Besides, there are several large corporations that have released software under the GPL (Sun comes to mind). For some things releasing under the GPL makes very good business sense. A combination of the GPL and a separate proprietary license, for example, allows the software company to release their software as Free Software to people willing to abide by the GPL while at the same time still maintaining their right to charge commercial developers for the same product.
In other words I find it highly unlikely that Big Corp "A" will come to runty corp "B"'s rescue. Microsoft and Wind River are two companies that seem to be taking the GPL very seriously. They realize that the GPL could very well destroy their business model, and so we have had two completely FUD articles calling the GPL "un-American" and risky in the same week. If they didn't think that the GPL had a chance of standing up in court, they would simply ignore it.
People, dont license your work under the GPL until such time as the FSF has made and won its case before a court.
And what alternative would you have us use? The BSD style licenses are certainly more liberal, but that sometimes leads to problems. For example, the folks who have poured blood and sweat into Kerberos now have to worry about finding some way to interoperate with Microsoft's bastardized version of their software. That's a pain that could have been avoided with a GPL (or even LGPL) style license. It's an extreme example perhaps, but it shows another reason why some people insist on GPL-like licenses on their software.
At the very worst the GPL won't stand up in court, and we won't be able to distribute our GPLed software until the copyright owners can change the license to something else (probably BSD style). In the meantime, if you are interested in the protections that the GPL offers, then you really don't have much choice but to assume that the GPL is valid.
IANAL, but I think that the GPL probably will turn out to be enforceable for one simple reason. The FSF will be able to pick the time and place for a showdown. Copyright, unlike Trademark, does not require that the owner actively pursue violators. So the FSF can wait until they have just the right violator (someone not very well financed, and in a jurisdiction they feel will be friendly). Once they have nailed one sucker to the proverbial tree they will then have legal precedence.
The other thing that the FSF has in their favor is the fact that the entire software industry has been trying for years to strengthen copyright laws as they apply to software. After all the work and money they have spent they aren't likely to want to have a legal precedent that puts limits on copyright protection.
Oh, and there is a definite difference between most EULAs and the GPL, that is that the EULAs trigger on software use, but the GPL triggers on software distribution. Since copyright is designed to limit the distribution rights of the consumer,and not to specify what he or she may legally do with the material, this is a very important distinction.
You're right, the users are the testers. But my point was, that there is no structured testing done.
Actually in almost every single Open Source project that I can think of there is the equivalent of the "unstable" and the "stable" branch. The unstable branch generally has some nifty new (but untested features). The users that actually need those features excercise them (often in real world conditions). When it looks like it works as advertised it gets rolled into the "stable" branch.
There is no need for a more formal set of tests for the simple reason that the people testing the software are generally in close touch with the people writing the software (ie, there isn't a focus group in the middle). In other words the features generally get specified due to specific needs, and testing against these needs is very straightforward. If you have features that no one is willing to test, then you probably should consider removing those "features" for the good of the project. Clearly they aren't useful.
Now, the best projects do have a set of regression tests. That way you can excercise the various components of your software individually and as a whole. This is quite helpful to make sure you aren't introducing any new bugs in your software.
I guess usenet has outgrown the software. Time to rewrite the software, I think, instead of replacing it with something different (e.g. web forums).
Actually, the reason that I like newsgroups is that I can use GNUS. Editting responses in Emacs is much nicer than using the textbox widget on an HTML form.
From reading your post, I think you more or less fall into the category of "user", even though you are modifying the software and distributing it. I think I make this distrinction because of the fact that the changes made seem to be highly specialised, instead of a generic alteration. Whether or not this makes a difference to the argument of communist vs. capitalist, I'm not sure:). I'll settle for saying open-source is the best of both worlds:).
I suppose I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't consider myself a "user" of software. I consider myself to be a coder who is sufficiently lazy to not want to start from scratch every time I start a project. However, I would certainly admit to not having sufficient expertise to recreate most of the tools that I employ. I certainly couldn't create my own Unix-like kernel, nor a database system like PostgreSQL, nor even the Zope application server that I have begun to use.
However, the people that did create these tools have received a lot of help from the community because they were willing to release their source code. I think that it is safe to say that all of these tools would not be viable pieces of software had they been developed commercially. No one wanted another proprietary Unix kernel, or another proprietary database (especially one as bad as Postgres95 was when I first started playing with it), and Zope is based on Python and neither of these technologies would have a developer community if it weren't for the fact that they are inexpensive and come with source.
I would say that Free Software has all of the warmth and fuzziness of theoretical communism, without all of the negatives (like top down centralized planning, and authoritarian rule). It is definitely not based around the communistic idea of equality. There is no question that there are different social and political strata in the Open Source community, and your place in that strata is determined by how talented you are, and how much you are willing to contribute. Fortunately, the community is quite gracious about this fact, and there is plenty of room for any eager volunteer to help out. If you were cynical you could chalk this up to the fact that even inexperienced helpers are better than doing everything yourself, but I personally believe that for the most part the motivations of Open Source developers are far more altruistic than that.
Eric's stuff is everywhere. Take a look at the Acknowledgements file for Emacs, for example. Every time you fire up a debugger in Emacs, or edit a Makefile, or shoot off a cvs command you have Eric to thank. In fact, he apparently has more Lisp code in Emacs repositories than anyone besides RMS. He also wrote the keeper software for FTP supersite sunsite. He is currently working on a new build structure for the Linux kernel, and apparently some stuff for the PNG picture format. He is also active on the Python development lists (where he is pushing for wxPython over Tkinter).
He also is a major contributor to Nethack. Which means he has been responsible for hours of my lost productivity.
And that's just the stuff that I can think of off the top of my head, and it doesn't include stuff like the fact that he is maintainer of the Terminfo files, the Jargon file, and a whole pile of other stuff (if you haven't read the documentation for Intercal then you really are missing out). Oh, and let's not forget fetchmail. It seems he wrote an entire book on that particular experiment.
If you are really interested in reading about the code he has contributed go here. Most of the interesting bits are at the bottom.
I don't agree with all of ESR's views either, but saying that ESR doesn't deliver is completely untrue. What's more, the software that he has written is quite well done. The documentation, in particular, is usually quite astoundingly good.
The fact of the matter is that ESR is probably twice as talented a hacker as both you and I put together.
Nothing frustrates me more than an intelligent reply to one of my posts on Slashdot. I would like to go over each of your points, but that is simply too much work.
I really miss useable newsgroups.
Presumably, at some point your improved GIFgraph had advantages over the free software counterpart. Whether or not it paid out in the long term is irrelevent - at some point the closed version was of greater value than the version everybody else had, and you had a monopoly on that piece of software, purely because you acted in your own interests above that of the community (not a flame, honest, just pointing out the facts).
My version of GIFgraph had some advantages over the stock version of the time. The principal benefit was that it would easily generate a certain type of graph that I needed. However, this feature didn't give me any particular commercial advantage. It just freed me from paying money for a less desirable, but still workable solution.
For me the only "value" from my software is use value, and the capital that I saved by not having to pay for a commercial counterpart. The graph in question was not a company secret, nor was it the sort of information that would help my competitors.
And that really is the key to Free Software's present growth. It grows because it is useful, and because it is oftentimes less expensive to adapt Free Software to your needs than to pay for commercial software (not to mention the fact that source code allows for much more flexible solutions).
The reason that people then re-release their "patches" to Free Software is that it allows for easier code maintenance. After all, the current maintainers are almost certainly planning on making changes to their software. If you want your patches to be compatible with the next release, you almost have to share. Besides, if you share your source someone else may find a bug in it for you, or they might even base some of their work on your source code and create another feature that you find useful.
In that particular scenario, there aren't any sales involved. There is some money that is saved by not having to purchase commercial software, but no sales.
You are judging open-source software purely on the basis on it's usefulness to the end-user. While this is an important consideration, I think the communist slant is more obvious when you apply it to the software industry. Everybody can "take" from the shared pool of knowledge & material (code), and it fails if everybody is too selfish (i.e. nobody contributes public code, and everybody goes closed-source).
I am judging open source by the only measure that makes any sense. It's all about the users plain and simple. When I started using Linux there wasn't any "industry," there was just a bunch of users/hackers who saw some useful code and who felt that it would be easier to adapt Linux to their particular needs than to start completely from scratch.
The funny thing is that it really doesn't take too terribly many people sharing their source code to make the economics of Free Software work. And people that don't share code are at a disadvantage the second a Free Software project becomes useable. Once the project becomes self sustaining it literally sucks the air out of the room for commercial software vendors who want to charge high prices for software "licenses."
Therefore, it is in the commmunity's best interests for people to contribute, yet in an individual's best interests to be selfish (go closed-source and get a head-start on the other companies in the industry). Yet, without consideration for the community as a whole, the individuals (and end-users) are much worse off, because the open code is less useful. Of course, in relation to the others in the community, they are no worse off, and this is where it counts when it comes to making money.
I disagree with this as well. It has overwhelmingly been in the best interest of Free Software hackers as individuals to release their source code. For example, what would folks like Linus Torvalds or Miguel de Icaza be doing if they hadn't released their source. I can guarantee you that they wouldn't be in the position they are in today. Even RMS could almost certainly get himself a very well paying job creating Free Software if he were to actually look for one.
From my own experience I have found that not releasing source code can often be a horrible mistake. For example, I once made some "improvements" to the GIFgraph Perl module that I didn't share with the rest of the community. Now I am stuck maintaining legacy code (including having to stick with an ancient version of Perl) simply because I didn't share.
Trust me, it wasn't worth whatever mythical advantage my company has received by not sharing.
Marxism is by its very nature a top down sort of thing. Linux is almost one hundred percent the opposite. And don't let anyone fool you, it's all about the money. Linux gets used because it is economical to do so, and it gets improved because in many cases it is cheaper to adapt Linux to a particular use than to pay for the equivalent functionality from commercial software. Free Software removes the largely artificial barriers that have been keeping software prices so high. Because of this Linux is having great success, but it is success based primarily on very capitalistic economic factors. Linux is inexpensive, and for many projects it is "good enough" (or better).
The good news is that Linux is also a very friendly community. We build mailing lists, and we subscribe to them. We even read the lists and answer questions. The reason that we do this is because we know that eventually we will need some help as well (and because it's fun).
In Marxism everyone reaps equal benefits, but with Free Software the benefits reaped are equal to the ability and work that one puts into it. For example, my father couldn't even get his printer to work when he was using Linux, and yet I can use it to run my business. The difference, of course, is that I have invested more in learning how to put Linux to use than he has.
People that are even brighter than I am have even been able to turn their passion for Linux into a full-time paid position.
But this is all still classic capitalism. The difference now is that the capital we are dealing with is experience and knowledge, and not material goods. My Linux experience is worth money in much the same way that a Lawyer's knowledge of the law is worth money, or a CPA's knowledge of finance.
The software is just a necessary part of the equation. Without it my knowledge is useless.
At this point what could Microsoft possibly say. Heck, they just hired Akmai to maintain there DNS servers for them using Linux. They have added Windows 2000 to the mix at Hotmail, and now Hotmail sucks. And their Mindcraft benchmarks turned into a big pile of Microsoft-sponsored R&D for the Linux kernel group, fat chance of them trying that again. It backfired miserably. Not to mention the fact that they had to stretch pretty far to come up with something that Windows 2000 did better than Linux in the first place. What sort of benchmarks is Microsoft going to throw at us next, total rounds of solitaire per day.
Now some Yahoo at Microsoft has pulled out the "Linux is Un-American" card, and millions of people around the globe are thinking to themselves "I hate Americans, I wonder how hard Linux is to install." It amazes me that Microsoft is actually paying this guy!
Microsoft isn't going to be able to do anything about the continued rise of Linux. Heck, people coded for Linux when it sucked. Now that it is, for many uses, a real alternative Microsoft is done. No matter what Microsoft does tomorrow, there will still be a veritable army of intelligent coders who will continue developing for Linux. And Linux will continue to be a real choice for companies that are interested in cutting down on the amount of money they spend on software.
While I certainly agree that Microsoft plans to wage an all-out war on Linux, I can't see how idiotic statements made by Microsoft execs constitute any sort of a viable strategy. Alchin's remarks are barely more literate than the "LiNukS rul3z wInDoZe suXXors" trolls right here on/.
Seriously, if this is all the better that Microsoft can do, then they truly deserve to die. That article was just pitiful.
And you believe that we should all just live in grass huts and use nuts and berries as medicine, I suppose?
While it certainly is true that I can not personally afford the very best in health care, I certainly am glad that someone can afford it, because without the research and development that goes into creating new medical techniques many of the procedures that I can afford would be unavailable. Sticking your head in the sand and crying out "not fair" doesn't help.
I personally agree that everyone should get good healthcare. I spent several years of my life without insurance, and I remember very well how that felt. But I don't have an answer to the question of who should pay for universal healthcare. It's easy to point out that the medical companies are well off, but if they had to subsidize everyone's healthcare they would be bankrupted overnight and their research would disappear. All things considered I like the idea of the rich paying gobs of money for experimental procedures much better than the alternative where the poor receive experimental healthcare for free and the rich pay for the privilege of not being used as a guinea pig.
I would certainly argue that the Human Genome should be public domain, simply because it is too darn important to have in private hands. Since advances here are a benefit to everyone (well, all humans anyway:) it is easy to justify paying for this research out of public funds.
There is still lost time. For example, the system administrators probably had something else they needed to be doing. In most of the organizations I have worked for the sysadmins don't just sit around all day playing quake and waiting for a fire. The lost time simply applies to all of the things that the sysadmin could have accomplished if he hadn't been cleaning up viruses. If your systems adminstrators are only busy when you have a virus, eliminating viruses would allow you to cut back on the amount of systems adminstrators that you hire.
Also, there is the fact that when a virus epidemic hits there are generally more than one system affected. Email servers are shut off, multiple workstations re-formatted and re-seeded. The largest expense of nearly any business is its payroll (in the US anyway). If a part of a company's workforce is unable to work at peak capacity it is squandering it's most costly resource. Viruses often affect entire departments, and can cost real money to a business.
The chances of such a worm propagating are essentially nill. The trick worked in this one particular case because you happened to know exactly the software that your friend would be using. If your Applescript were sent to a Mac user that used some other email client it would have simply crashed. There simply aren't enough Mac Eudora users to sustain such a beast.
You tricked one guy (who you happened to know), but how many of the messages in his inbox were from Eudora using Mac addicts? And of those few who actually use the right type of software how many of them would open up any random jpeg from your buddy without poking at it a little first?
Microsoft is certainly responsible for creating software with such disregard for security. But it isn't the fact that all of the other email clients in the world are so much more secure that keeps their users from becoming targets, it is the fact that Windows + Outlook has the largest install base. There are scads of gullible Windows users, and there is a good chance that most of the addresses in a typical Windows User's address book are running the same sort of software.
Fah, I have a whole pile of systems that were deemed to be not Y2K compliant. Of all of them one required that the clock be reset, but only under Windows, it runs Linux just fine.
The rest of the world spent far less on their computer systems, and yet there lights stayed on. Y2K was a myth, for all intents and purposes. But it got rid of a lot of cruft, and it made a bunch of hardware and software companies very wealthy, so it wasn't all bad.
Ah, but there is a small problem with your GPL'd service. And that is that it becomes impossible to hold your customers hostage. You have to add real value. After all, just as you can create a service and sell "access" using nothing but GPLed tools, so can I, and so can everyone else. If your customer service is poor, then your customers will look around for another provider, and they will quickly find that nearly everyone has the same product to sell.
It will be much like the dial-up ISP business today. And like the ISP business expensive proprietary software will be the exception instead of the norm. Honestly, point to an ISP that doesn't rely heavily on Free Software, and I will show you an ISP that isn't long for the world. And no, Microsoft's money pit MSN doesn't count.
This is why Sun is jazzed enough about the ASP model to actually give away the source to Star Office. They know that this model will require some serious hardware on the server side. Since they are a hardware company they can afford to give away the software and sell the hardware.
Microsoft's model only works as long as everyone else is willing to play by their rules.
If another software developer decides that they would like a piece of Microsoft's market, and they are willing to give the software away and make money on support then Microsoft (or whomever) is vulnerable. The reason for this is simple. Software is not an asset, or at least it isn't an asset that has a great deal of intrinsic worth. Once the software is created it can be copied at little or no cost.
The value lies in the ability that created the software.
For many years most people writing software carried out their business the Microsoft way. But that is no longer the case. As a purchaser of software and software support I now, in many cases, can choose to use software that comes without strings or license fees attached, and simply pay for the support that I need. As free software gets better, and it will, I will have even more choices.
Right now Microsoft makes its money from operating systems and office suites. Soon these will be commodity markets, with plenty of Free pieces of software to choose from. At that point Microsoft's business model will be ludicrously outdated. They might as well flood the market with buggy whips for all of the good it will do them.
Now, they could move on and sell different non-commodity pieces of software, but compared to what they do now any such move will be towards a relatively small niche market.
Yes, this does mean that software programmers will be nothing more than high paid burger flippers, but then again so are doctors, lawyers, and a whole host of other professionals. There are very few professions that can create assets out of thin air. Even writers generally have to put their work to paper and get paid for a physical book.
Yow, if that were true we would all be using 8 bit programs on some ancient machinery, because all of the problems would have been solved years ago.
The part that you are missing is that no software has "lasting" value. When was the last time you paid for Appleworks, for example. Software that doesn't change dies. There is no such thing as a software gravy train that goes on and on without requiring more effort.
And if, for some reason, you have planted your software in a niche that is narrow enough that your customers have to come to you, whether or not your program actually gets better, then all you have done is create an environment where competition is not only inevitable, but it will be easy as well. After all, the tools available today make creating applications much easier than whenever you wrote your application with "lasting" value. One determined hacker could probably easily recreate your software. And he might even give it away for free.
As someone who both produces software and pays for software, I can guarantee you that your customers are already looking for alternatives to your software, and they might be writing it themselves this very minute.
I think that us Unix users just tend to cut things up into smaller pieces. Before I started using Linux there was the Operating system, and the programs, and I basically counted everything that came on the disks as the operating system, including things like notepad.
In Unix the "OS" is split into a thousand different interchangeable parts. Even the GUI is separated into X, a Window manager, and a pile of Widget Toolkits (and some session stuff and other whatnots if you are running something like Gnome). Each of these pieces can be removed, or replaced, and Unixers are constantly doing precisely that.
The author thinks that more emphasis should be put on the application, and the rest of the gook should just happen automagically. Which is all well and good as long as I don't have to use his darn machine.
Heck, RedHat's doing pretty well for a company that literally started in someone's closet. I would agree that they will never have Microsoft-like profits, but neither will the Food Service company I work for. I imagine that they will manage to send their kids to college.
Linux is becoming popular enough, at this point, so that it is beginning to take a profound effect on the software industry. SCO is already gone, and who knows who will be next. Operating systems are becoming a commodity (and Office suites are right behind them).
First of all Applix doesn't have any open source products. They happen to have an office suite that runs on Linux, but nowadays everyone has an office suite that runs on Linux (and most of those applications are free as in free beer). You don't see a lot of people making money selling air either, and that's because the competition (the atmosphere) is under-cutting them. In 1995, however, Applix was pretty much the entire market for Linux office suites. Their decision to keep their code probably seemed like a good idea then, but it has doomed their product in the long run.
Open source businesses are about making money. And in fact, most are doing a pretty good job of it. After all, without Linux and the Free Software that is available for Linux RedHat and VA Linux and the rest wouldn't even exist. Yet here they are with millions of dollars in revenue, and most will probably even reach profitability on a scale that would have been impossible if they were using the old proprietary software model. Honestly, those folks wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in hell in getting the types of contracts they have been able to grab without Free Software. Linux clearly is good for business in that sense. More importantly, Linux is good for it's users. I know that I have saved thousands of dollars with Linux.
The difference, long term, is whether or not service and support is a viable business to be in. It's almost certainly not going to be as viable a business as selling binary-only software, but that's just life. Ten years from now no one is going to pay money for the right to run an Office Suite or an OS, in much the same way that no one pays for a text editor today. These types of computer software will merely become part of the infrastructure.
Applix simply didn't offer customers enough of an incentive to use their software, and now they are done. However, their Free Software competitors are still around, and they are looking around for fresh blood as well. My guess is that Corel is going to have a hard time convincing people that using Perfect Office is a good idea as well. Windows users will continue to gravitate to MS Office, and the rest of us will probably end up using something like Abiword/Gnumeric or Open Office.
I can't speak for the situation in Africa, but I have actually lived in several Third World countries in South America, and I can tell you that the problems of corruption and lack of infrastructure are serious concerns when you are tackling a problem of this magnitude. Some of the nicest people I have ever met hailed from the Peruvian town of Huancayo, and yet it is safe to say that their political system is so corrupt, and their infrastructure so under-developed that for all intents and purposes they are living hundreds of years behind the times. Sending supplies to this area either required that you transport the goods yourself, or that you "pay off" any number of people so that they would not be stolen.
I imagine that Africa is worse.
For example, even if the required medicine were to magically appear off of the coast of Africa there is little guarantee that this medicine would be dispersed properly throughout the population, and there is even less chance that the medicine would be used correctly if the instructions were more complicated than "take two of these and call me in the morning." It is much more likely that these medical supplies would become one more pawn in the ever increasing war between the various competing countries and factions.
Besides, no such super drug for AIDS exists. The best we can do now is either abstain from drugs and sex with multiple partners and/or to always use a condom and fresh needles. This is not rocket science. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the world who feel that they should be able to maintain a dangerous lifestyle without consequences. Of course, there are always plenty of truly innocent victims as well. People who either didn't know about how to avoid AIDS or who became infected from their parents or some other method. But that just underscores the importance of education. People should know the facts so that they can choose their lifestyle wisely.
The US drug companies are businesses, and as businesses I would bet that any one of these organizations would love to come up with a cure for AIDS for the simple reason that it would be worth a lot of money. Blaming these companies for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is ridiculous. You might as well blame me for the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I haven't come up with a cure for AIDS either. Heck, I haven't even tried to come up with a cure for AIDS.
Until there is a cure for AIDS the only tool available to us is education. If the individual African decides that his or her lifestyle choices are more important than avoiding the AIDS virus, then there is little that the rest of us can do other than pray for the other innocent victims of this persons choice.
Well said. The one thing that I like about the configuration files in etc is that they almost always are exceptionally well documented. With Windows you have to hunt around in the Knowledge base for documentation on some obscure setting. Then when you find it you have to use a special editor to make the changes.
With Linux chances are good that you can simply cd/etc/programname and read the configuration files provided. Nine out of ten times the option that you need is as easy to change as uncommented the correct line.
Microsoft has, once again, shrewdly managed to neutralize a possible competitor. However, I don't think that Corel had much of a shot anyhow. I like WordPerfect, I think that it is the finest word processor in existence, but I don't think that the Linux version of WordPerfect is likely to withstand Microsoft Office on the one hand, and the growing array of Free Software on the other.
Open Office is getting to the point where it is good enough and it's price simply can not be beat. People that are willing to pay money for an Office Suite are almost certainly going to buy MS Office and run it on Windows, and those that aren't willing to pay money can almost certainly get by with Open Office (it even runs on their platform of choice).
Microsoft deal with Corel has not set back Linux desktop development by "years." In fact, it might actually save us time in the long run. We all know that a rather large percentage of Linuxers are not going to be satisfied with an Office Suite for Linux until it is Open Source. Perfect Office simply splits the community into two groups. The more pragmatic group will use WordPerfect, and the more dogmatic group will develop an alternative. This way the entire Linux community is on the same page. We need an Office Suite, and the most advanced version (outside of Perfect Office) just happens to be licensed under the GPL.
I personally would rather have Perfect Office prevail, as I think that Corel has done a good job with their office suite, but I am also a little relieved. It is always safer to base your work on an open standard. After years of using Linux I am now skittish about basing my hard work on software that doesn't come with source code.
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Relax, the Free Software Folks will always have one advantage over the BSD license folks. That advantage is that Free Software folks can borrow BSD code, modify it, and release it under a GPL-like license.
BSD advocates don't mind when commercial companies do this, because commercial projects don't effectively compete with Open projects for volunteer developers. But Free Software projects do. All it takes is one dedicated hacker to change a BSD style project to a GPL style one. Of course, the improvements on the GPLed branch have to be significant enough to entice people towards the GPLed version, but that's not as hard as it sounds. There is a large body of GPLed work available. All you would really have to do is borrow some code from another GPLed product and integrate it with the BSD code.
The PR battle has already been won. Nobody is going to believe that Sun, IBM, HP, and Intel are all un-American, and all of these companies have released software under the GPL. Even the folks at the government will understand that. Especially when they realize they are getting more for their software dollar. Besides, most of the nifty new technologies available for the Free Unixes these days are GPLed. Mozilla, OpenOffice, MySQL, and QT are all examples of this. I almost feel sorry for the BSD advocates when I think of the desktop. The only set of tools that is available under a license that allows the creation of proprietary GUI applications is the LGPLed Gnome libraries.
It has really got to rankle them that their only choice for proprietary desktop applications is the FSF's Gnome. Of course they always could spend money and buy the commercial license of QT.
It's a funny world.
It amazes me the length that some people will go to find reasons for hating RMS.
Here's the scenario. Some slimy company FooBarCo takes the source code to Emacs and redistributes it as FooBarMacs without releasing source code. When the FSF comes to them and mentions that doing such is illegal FooBarCo tells the FSF to "go climb a tree."
The FSF sues FooBarCo (and hopefully wins). All of FooBarCo's customers now are able to get the source code to FooBarMacs should they decide they want it.
In real life, The Free Software Foundation has had plenty of opportunities to "sue." For the most part the infractions that have surfaced have been minor, and when the infraction was pointed out to the offender the problem has been cleared up amicably.
Contrast this to what happens if you misuse copyrighted material from anyone else, and you would quickly see that they FSF is a pretty decent group of individuals. If you stole the source code to Windows and sold it as Windows ACV (Anonymous Coward Version) Microsoft would find you and stick hot pokers in your private places.
The GPL was specifically designed to require people to share source code when they distributed binaries. If you don't appreciate that, use software under some other license.
I don't like the fact that I drive a Honda instead of a BMW, but that doesn't mean I go around "borrowing" BMWs out of parking lots. The software that the FSF wrote belongs to them, and they can do what they darn well please with it. I personally am glad that they decided to share, but you certainly don't have to feel that way.
Like I said, I find it hard to believe that the software companies would start fighting for limits on copyright terms after so many years of fighting for stronger copyright. Since copyright is their main form of protection the last thing that they want is to weaken copyright laws.
Besides, there are several large corporations that have released software under the GPL (Sun comes to mind). For some things releasing under the GPL makes very good business sense. A combination of the GPL and a separate proprietary license, for example, allows the software company to release their software as Free Software to people willing to abide by the GPL while at the same time still maintaining their right to charge commercial developers for the same product.
In other words I find it highly unlikely that Big Corp "A" will come to runty corp "B"'s rescue. Microsoft and Wind River are two companies that seem to be taking the GPL very seriously. They realize that the GPL could very well destroy their business model, and so we have had two completely FUD articles calling the GPL "un-American" and risky in the same week. If they didn't think that the GPL had a chance of standing up in court, they would simply ignore it.
And what alternative would you have us use? The BSD style licenses are certainly more liberal, but that sometimes leads to problems. For example, the folks who have poured blood and sweat into Kerberos now have to worry about finding some way to interoperate with Microsoft's bastardized version of their software. That's a pain that could have been avoided with a GPL (or even LGPL) style license. It's an extreme example perhaps, but it shows another reason why some people insist on GPL-like licenses on their software.
At the very worst the GPL won't stand up in court, and we won't be able to distribute our GPLed software until the copyright owners can change the license to something else (probably BSD style). In the meantime, if you are interested in the protections that the GPL offers, then you really don't have much choice but to assume that the GPL is valid.
IANAL, but I think that the GPL probably will turn out to be enforceable for one simple reason. The FSF will be able to pick the time and place for a showdown. Copyright, unlike Trademark, does not require that the owner actively pursue violators. So the FSF can wait until they have just the right violator (someone not very well financed, and in a jurisdiction they feel will be friendly). Once they have nailed one sucker to the proverbial tree they will then have legal precedence.
The other thing that the FSF has in their favor is the fact that the entire software industry has been trying for years to strengthen copyright laws as they apply to software. After all the work and money they have spent they aren't likely to want to have a legal precedent that puts limits on copyright protection.
Oh, and there is a definite difference between most EULAs and the GPL, that is that the EULAs trigger on software use, but the GPL triggers on software distribution. Since copyright is designed to limit the distribution rights of the consumer,and not to specify what he or she may legally do with the material, this is a very important distinction.
Actually in almost every single Open Source project that I can think of there is the equivalent of the "unstable" and the "stable" branch. The unstable branch generally has some nifty new (but untested features). The users that actually need those features excercise them (often in real world conditions). When it looks like it works as advertised it gets rolled into the "stable" branch.
There is no need for a more formal set of tests for the simple reason that the people testing the software are generally in close touch with the people writing the software (ie, there isn't a focus group in the middle). In other words the features generally get specified due to specific needs, and testing against these needs is very straightforward. If you have features that no one is willing to test, then you probably should consider removing those "features" for the good of the project. Clearly they aren't useful.
Now, the best projects do have a set of regression tests. That way you can excercise the various components of your software individually and as a whole. This is quite helpful to make sure you aren't introducing any new bugs in your software.
Actually, the reason that I like newsgroups is that I can use GNUS. Editting responses in Emacs is much nicer than using the textbox widget on an HTML form.
I suppose I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't consider myself a "user" of software. I consider myself to be a coder who is sufficiently lazy to not want to start from scratch every time I start a project. However, I would certainly admit to not having sufficient expertise to recreate most of the tools that I employ. I certainly couldn't create my own Unix-like kernel, nor a database system like PostgreSQL, nor even the Zope application server that I have begun to use.
However, the people that did create these tools have received a lot of help from the community because they were willing to release their source code. I think that it is safe to say that all of these tools would not be viable pieces of software had they been developed commercially. No one wanted another proprietary Unix kernel, or another proprietary database (especially one as bad as Postgres95 was when I first started playing with it), and Zope is based on Python and neither of these technologies would have a developer community if it weren't for the fact that they are inexpensive and come with source.
I would say that Free Software has all of the warmth and fuzziness of theoretical communism, without all of the negatives (like top down centralized planning, and authoritarian rule). It is definitely not based around the communistic idea of equality. There is no question that there are different social and political strata in the Open Source community, and your place in that strata is determined by how talented you are, and how much you are willing to contribute. Fortunately, the community is quite gracious about this fact, and there is plenty of room for any eager volunteer to help out. If you were cynical you could chalk this up to the fact that even inexperienced helpers are better than doing everything yourself, but I personally believe that for the most part the motivations of Open Source developers are far more altruistic than that.
What the heck are you talking about?
Eric's stuff is everywhere. Take a look at the Acknowledgements file for Emacs, for example. Every time you fire up a debugger in Emacs, or edit a Makefile, or shoot off a cvs command you have Eric to thank. In fact, he apparently has more Lisp code in Emacs repositories than anyone besides RMS. He also wrote the keeper software for FTP supersite sunsite. He is currently working on a new build structure for the Linux kernel, and apparently some stuff for the PNG picture format. He is also active on the Python development lists (where he is pushing for wxPython over Tkinter).
He also is a major contributor to Nethack. Which means he has been responsible for hours of my lost productivity.
And that's just the stuff that I can think of off the top of my head, and it doesn't include stuff like the fact that he is maintainer of the Terminfo files, the Jargon file, and a whole pile of other stuff (if you haven't read the documentation for Intercal then you really are missing out). Oh, and let's not forget fetchmail. It seems he wrote an entire book on that particular experiment. If you are really interested in reading about the code he has contributed go here. Most of the interesting bits are at the bottom.
I don't agree with all of ESR's views either, but saying that ESR doesn't deliver is completely untrue. What's more, the software that he has written is quite well done. The documentation, in particular, is usually quite astoundingly good.
The fact of the matter is that ESR is probably twice as talented a hacker as both you and I put together.
Nothing frustrates me more than an intelligent reply to one of my posts on Slashdot. I would like to go over each of your points, but that is simply too much work.
I really miss useable newsgroups.
My version of GIFgraph had some advantages over the stock version of the time. The principal benefit was that it would easily generate a certain type of graph that I needed. However, this feature didn't give me any particular commercial advantage. It just freed me from paying money for a less desirable, but still workable solution.
For me the only "value" from my software is use value, and the capital that I saved by not having to pay for a commercial counterpart. The graph in question was not a company secret, nor was it the sort of information that would help my competitors.
And that really is the key to Free Software's present growth. It grows because it is useful, and because it is oftentimes less expensive to adapt Free Software to your needs than to pay for commercial software (not to mention the fact that source code allows for much more flexible solutions).
The reason that people then re-release their "patches" to Free Software is that it allows for easier code maintenance. After all, the current maintainers are almost certainly planning on making changes to their software. If you want your patches to be compatible with the next release, you almost have to share. Besides, if you share your source someone else may find a bug in it for you, or they might even base some of their work on your source code and create another feature that you find useful.
In that particular scenario, there aren't any sales involved. There is some money that is saved by not having to purchase commercial software, but no sales.
I am judging open source by the only measure that makes any sense. It's all about the users plain and simple. When I started using Linux there wasn't any "industry," there was just a bunch of users/hackers who saw some useful code and who felt that it would be easier to adapt Linux to their particular needs than to start completely from scratch.
The funny thing is that it really doesn't take too terribly many people sharing their source code to make the economics of Free Software work. And people that don't share code are at a disadvantage the second a Free Software project becomes useable. Once the project becomes self sustaining it literally sucks the air out of the room for commercial software vendors who want to charge high prices for software "licenses."
I disagree with this as well. It has overwhelmingly been in the best interest of Free Software hackers as individuals to release their source code. For example, what would folks like Linus Torvalds or Miguel de Icaza be doing if they hadn't released their source. I can guarantee you that they wouldn't be in the position they are in today. Even RMS could almost certainly get himself a very well paying job creating Free Software if he were to actually look for one.
From my own experience I have found that not releasing source code can often be a horrible mistake. For example, I once made some "improvements" to the GIFgraph Perl module that I didn't share with the rest of the community. Now I am stuck maintaining legacy code (including having to stick with an ancient version of Perl) simply because I didn't share.
Trust me, it wasn't worth whatever mythical advantage my company has received by not sharing.
Marxism is by its very nature a top down sort of thing. Linux is almost one hundred percent the opposite. And don't let anyone fool you, it's all about the money. Linux gets used because it is economical to do so, and it gets improved because in many cases it is cheaper to adapt Linux to a particular use than to pay for the equivalent functionality from commercial software. Free Software removes the largely artificial barriers that have been keeping software prices so high. Because of this Linux is having great success, but it is success based primarily on very capitalistic economic factors. Linux is inexpensive, and for many projects it is "good enough" (or better).
The good news is that Linux is also a very friendly community. We build mailing lists, and we subscribe to them. We even read the lists and answer questions. The reason that we do this is because we know that eventually we will need some help as well (and because it's fun).
Actually Mozilla is now released under a dual MPL/GPL license. So RMS should be quite happy with it.
Check it out!
In Marxism everyone reaps equal benefits, but with Free Software the benefits reaped are equal to the ability and work that one puts into it. For example, my father couldn't even get his printer to work when he was using Linux, and yet I can use it to run my business. The difference, of course, is that I have invested more in learning how to put Linux to use than he has.
People that are even brighter than I am have even been able to turn their passion for Linux into a full-time paid position.
But this is all still classic capitalism. The difference now is that the capital we are dealing with is experience and knowledge, and not material goods. My Linux experience is worth money in much the same way that a Lawyer's knowledge of the law is worth money, or a CPA's knowledge of finance.
The software is just a necessary part of the equation. Without it my knowledge is useless.
At this point what could Microsoft possibly say. Heck, they just hired Akmai to maintain there DNS servers for them using Linux. They have added Windows 2000 to the mix at Hotmail, and now Hotmail sucks. And their Mindcraft benchmarks turned into a big pile of Microsoft-sponsored R&D for the Linux kernel group, fat chance of them trying that again. It backfired miserably. Not to mention the fact that they had to stretch pretty far to come up with something that Windows 2000 did better than Linux in the first place. What sort of benchmarks is Microsoft going to throw at us next, total rounds of solitaire per day.
Now some Yahoo at Microsoft has pulled out the "Linux is Un-American" card, and millions of people around the globe are thinking to themselves "I hate Americans, I wonder how hard Linux is to install." It amazes me that Microsoft is actually paying this guy!
Microsoft isn't going to be able to do anything about the continued rise of Linux. Heck, people coded for Linux when it sucked. Now that it is, for many uses, a real alternative Microsoft is done. No matter what Microsoft does tomorrow, there will still be a veritable army of intelligent coders who will continue developing for Linux. And Linux will continue to be a real choice for companies that are interested in cutting down on the amount of money they spend on software.
While I certainly agree that Microsoft plans to wage an all-out war on Linux, I can't see how idiotic statements made by Microsoft execs constitute any sort of a viable strategy. Alchin's remarks are barely more literate than the "LiNukS rul3z wInDoZe suXXors" trolls right here on /.
Seriously, if this is all the better that Microsoft can do, then they truly deserve to die. That article was just pitiful.
And you believe that we should all just live in grass huts and use nuts and berries as medicine, I suppose?
While it certainly is true that I can not personally afford the very best in health care, I certainly am glad that someone can afford it, because without the research and development that goes into creating new medical techniques many of the procedures that I can afford would be unavailable. Sticking your head in the sand and crying out "not fair" doesn't help.
I personally agree that everyone should get good healthcare. I spent several years of my life without insurance, and I remember very well how that felt. But I don't have an answer to the question of who should pay for universal healthcare. It's easy to point out that the medical companies are well off, but if they had to subsidize everyone's healthcare they would be bankrupted overnight and their research would disappear. All things considered I like the idea of the rich paying gobs of money for experimental procedures much better than the alternative where the poor receive experimental healthcare for free and the rich pay for the privilege of not being used as a guinea pig.
I would certainly argue that the Human Genome should be public domain, simply because it is too darn important to have in private hands. Since advances here are a benefit to everyone (well, all humans anyway :) it is easy to justify paying for this research out of public funds.
There is still lost time. For example, the system administrators probably had something else they needed to be doing. In most of the organizations I have worked for the sysadmins don't just sit around all day playing quake and waiting for a fire. The lost time simply applies to all of the things that the sysadmin could have accomplished if he hadn't been cleaning up viruses. If your systems adminstrators are only busy when you have a virus, eliminating viruses would allow you to cut back on the amount of systems adminstrators that you hire.
Also, there is the fact that when a virus epidemic hits there are generally more than one system affected. Email servers are shut off, multiple workstations re-formatted and re-seeded. The largest expense of nearly any business is its payroll (in the US anyway). If a part of a company's workforce is unable to work at peak capacity it is squandering it's most costly resource. Viruses often affect entire departments, and can cost real money to a business.
The chances of such a worm propagating are essentially nill. The trick worked in this one particular case because you happened to know exactly the software that your friend would be using. If your Applescript were sent to a Mac user that used some other email client it would have simply crashed. There simply aren't enough Mac Eudora users to sustain such a beast.
You tricked one guy (who you happened to know), but how many of the messages in his inbox were from Eudora using Mac addicts? And of those few who actually use the right type of software how many of them would open up any random jpeg from your buddy without poking at it a little first?
Microsoft is certainly responsible for creating software with such disregard for security. But it isn't the fact that all of the other email clients in the world are so much more secure that keeps their users from becoming targets, it is the fact that Windows + Outlook has the largest install base. There are scads of gullible Windows users, and there is a good chance that most of the addresses in a typical Windows User's address book are running the same sort of software.
Fah, I have a whole pile of systems that were deemed to be not Y2K compliant. Of all of them one required that the clock be reset, but only under Windows, it runs Linux just fine.
The rest of the world spent far less on their computer systems, and yet there lights stayed on. Y2K was a myth, for all intents and purposes. But it got rid of a lot of cruft, and it made a bunch of hardware and software companies very wealthy, so it wasn't all bad.
Ah, but there is a small problem with your GPL'd service. And that is that it becomes impossible to hold your customers hostage. You have to add real value. After all, just as you can create a service and sell "access" using nothing but GPLed tools, so can I, and so can everyone else. If your customer service is poor, then your customers will look around for another provider, and they will quickly find that nearly everyone has the same product to sell.
It will be much like the dial-up ISP business today. And like the ISP business expensive proprietary software will be the exception instead of the norm. Honestly, point to an ISP that doesn't rely heavily on Free Software, and I will show you an ISP that isn't long for the world. And no, Microsoft's money pit MSN doesn't count.
This is why Sun is jazzed enough about the ASP model to actually give away the source to Star Office. They know that this model will require some serious hardware on the server side. Since they are a hardware company they can afford to give away the software and sell the hardware.
Microsoft's model only works as long as everyone else is willing to play by their rules.
If another software developer decides that they would like a piece of Microsoft's market, and they are willing to give the software away and make money on support then Microsoft (or whomever) is vulnerable. The reason for this is simple. Software is not an asset, or at least it isn't an asset that has a great deal of intrinsic worth. Once the software is created it can be copied at little or no cost.
The value lies in the ability that created the software.
For many years most people writing software carried out their business the Microsoft way. But that is no longer the case. As a purchaser of software and software support I now, in many cases, can choose to use software that comes without strings or license fees attached, and simply pay for the support that I need. As free software gets better, and it will, I will have even more choices.
Right now Microsoft makes its money from operating systems and office suites. Soon these will be commodity markets, with plenty of Free pieces of software to choose from. At that point Microsoft's business model will be ludicrously outdated. They might as well flood the market with buggy whips for all of the good it will do them.
Now, they could move on and sell different non-commodity pieces of software, but compared to what they do now any such move will be towards a relatively small niche market.
Yes, this does mean that software programmers will be nothing more than high paid burger flippers, but then again so are doctors, lawyers, and a whole host of other professionals. There are very few professions that can create assets out of thin air. Even writers generally have to put their work to paper and get paid for a physical book.
Yow, if that were true we would all be using 8 bit programs on some ancient machinery, because all of the problems would have been solved years ago.
The part that you are missing is that no software has "lasting" value. When was the last time you paid for Appleworks, for example. Software that doesn't change dies. There is no such thing as a software gravy train that goes on and on without requiring more effort.
And if, for some reason, you have planted your software in a niche that is narrow enough that your customers have to come to you, whether or not your program actually gets better, then all you have done is create an environment where competition is not only inevitable, but it will be easy as well. After all, the tools available today make creating applications much easier than whenever you wrote your application with "lasting" value. One determined hacker could probably easily recreate your software. And he might even give it away for free.
As someone who both produces software and pays for software, I can guarantee you that your customers are already looking for alternatives to your software, and they might be writing it themselves this very minute.
I think that us Unix users just tend to cut things up into smaller pieces. Before I started using Linux there was the Operating system, and the programs, and I basically counted everything that came on the disks as the operating system, including things like notepad.
In Unix the "OS" is split into a thousand different interchangeable parts. Even the GUI is separated into X, a Window manager, and a pile of Widget Toolkits (and some session stuff and other whatnots if you are running something like Gnome). Each of these pieces can be removed, or replaced, and Unixers are constantly doing precisely that.
The author thinks that more emphasis should be put on the application, and the rest of the gook should just happen automagically. Which is all well and good as long as I don't have to use his darn machine.
Heck, RedHat's doing pretty well for a company that literally started in someone's closet. I would agree that they will never have Microsoft-like profits, but neither will the Food Service company I work for. I imagine that they will manage to send their kids to college.
Linux is becoming popular enough, at this point, so that it is beginning to take a profound effect on the software industry. SCO is already gone, and who knows who will be next. Operating systems are becoming a commodity (and Office suites are right behind them).
First of all Applix doesn't have any open source products. They happen to have an office suite that runs on Linux, but nowadays everyone has an office suite that runs on Linux (and most of those applications are free as in free beer). You don't see a lot of people making money selling air either, and that's because the competition (the atmosphere) is under-cutting them. In 1995, however, Applix was pretty much the entire market for Linux office suites. Their decision to keep their code probably seemed like a good idea then, but it has doomed their product in the long run.
Open source businesses are about making money. And in fact, most are doing a pretty good job of it. After all, without Linux and the Free Software that is available for Linux RedHat and VA Linux and the rest wouldn't even exist. Yet here they are with millions of dollars in revenue, and most will probably even reach profitability on a scale that would have been impossible if they were using the old proprietary software model. Honestly, those folks wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in hell in getting the types of contracts they have been able to grab without Free Software. Linux clearly is good for business in that sense. More importantly, Linux is good for it's users. I know that I have saved thousands of dollars with Linux.
The difference, long term, is whether or not service and support is a viable business to be in. It's almost certainly not going to be as viable a business as selling binary-only software, but that's just life. Ten years from now no one is going to pay money for the right to run an Office Suite or an OS, in much the same way that no one pays for a text editor today. These types of computer software will merely become part of the infrastructure.
Applix simply didn't offer customers enough of an incentive to use their software, and now they are done. However, their Free Software competitors are still around, and they are looking around for fresh blood as well. My guess is that Corel is going to have a hard time convincing people that using Perfect Office is a good idea as well. Windows users will continue to gravitate to MS Office, and the rest of us will probably end up using something like Abiword/Gnumeric or Open Office.
I can't speak for the situation in Africa, but I have actually lived in several Third World countries in South America, and I can tell you that the problems of corruption and lack of infrastructure are serious concerns when you are tackling a problem of this magnitude. Some of the nicest people I have ever met hailed from the Peruvian town of Huancayo, and yet it is safe to say that their political system is so corrupt, and their infrastructure so under-developed that for all intents and purposes they are living hundreds of years behind the times. Sending supplies to this area either required that you transport the goods yourself, or that you "pay off" any number of people so that they would not be stolen.
I imagine that Africa is worse.
For example, even if the required medicine were to magically appear off of the coast of Africa there is little guarantee that this medicine would be dispersed properly throughout the population, and there is even less chance that the medicine would be used correctly if the instructions were more complicated than "take two of these and call me in the morning." It is much more likely that these medical supplies would become one more pawn in the ever increasing war between the various competing countries and factions.
Besides, no such super drug for AIDS exists. The best we can do now is either abstain from drugs and sex with multiple partners and/or to always use a condom and fresh needles. This is not rocket science. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the world who feel that they should be able to maintain a dangerous lifestyle without consequences. Of course, there are always plenty of truly innocent victims as well. People who either didn't know about how to avoid AIDS or who became infected from their parents or some other method. But that just underscores the importance of education. People should know the facts so that they can choose their lifestyle wisely.
The US drug companies are businesses, and as businesses I would bet that any one of these organizations would love to come up with a cure for AIDS for the simple reason that it would be worth a lot of money. Blaming these companies for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is ridiculous. You might as well blame me for the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I haven't come up with a cure for AIDS either. Heck, I haven't even tried to come up with a cure for AIDS.
Until there is a cure for AIDS the only tool available to us is education. If the individual African decides that his or her lifestyle choices are more important than avoiding the AIDS virus, then there is little that the rest of us can do other than pray for the other innocent victims of this persons choice.
Well said. The one thing that I like about the configuration files in etc is that they almost always are exceptionally well documented. With Windows you have to hunt around in the Knowledge base for documentation on some obscure setting. Then when you find it you have to use a special editor to make the changes.
With Linux chances are good that you can simply cd /etc/programname and read the configuration files provided. Nine out of ten times the option that you need is as easy to change as uncommented the correct line.
Microsoft has, once again, shrewdly managed to neutralize a possible competitor. However, I don't think that Corel had much of a shot anyhow. I like WordPerfect, I think that it is the finest word processor in existence, but I don't think that the Linux version of WordPerfect is likely to withstand Microsoft Office on the one hand, and the growing array of Free Software on the other.
Open Office is getting to the point where it is good enough and it's price simply can not be beat. People that are willing to pay money for an Office Suite are almost certainly going to buy MS Office and run it on Windows, and those that aren't willing to pay money can almost certainly get by with Open Office (it even runs on their platform of choice).
Microsoft deal with Corel has not set back Linux desktop development by "years." In fact, it might actually save us time in the long run. We all know that a rather large percentage of Linuxers are not going to be satisfied with an Office Suite for Linux until it is Open Source. Perfect Office simply splits the community into two groups. The more pragmatic group will use WordPerfect, and the more dogmatic group will develop an alternative. This way the entire Linux community is on the same page. We need an Office Suite, and the most advanced version (outside of Perfect Office) just happens to be licensed under the GPL.
I personally would rather have Perfect Office prevail, as I think that Corel has done a good job with their office suite, but I am also a little relieved. It is always safer to base your work on an open standard. After years of using Linux I am now skittish about basing my hard work on software that doesn't come with source code.