I'd be more impressed if they offered large sums of money. I mean, how much is it costing them to ship a bunch of their own software? FedEx charges are probably more than what the box, manual and CD-ROM cost.
(I'm always bemused when I see big headlines about some multimillion dollar donation MS or Gates has made to some organization or school, where most of that is in software. Yeah, they donate a few bucks worth of CDs and claim a few thousand worth (at retail) of donation.)
If you read the report from which these numbers were taken, they acknowledge that yes, their total survey numbers were skewed by the slashdot effect.
However, they were snapshotting the data at regular intervals and could tell from the server logs when the slashdot effect started to kick in, so they threw out the survey responses after that point. Which is why they analyzed 1999 responses (the first 1999) rather than the >5000 (or whatever) they actually got.
Note that these data are from an NT oriented site, and they were originally expecting the results to show a lot less Linux use.
No, it's just that the significance of Microsoft using Solaris of all things is much greater than that it's a unix. It's Sun's unix, and Microsoft hates Sun.
That they're using Solaris is especially telling to the audience of this piece. The use of FreeBSD may be of interest to us, but mentioning it to the PHB's just dilutes the impact.
Microsoft holds the final key for implementation of direct printing over the Web.
"The real bottleneck is Microsoft," Held said. "You need software on your computer that will allow you to select and talk to a destination device."
Yes, but why does that have to be Microsoft software? (Held's ignorance here is appalling, given that he is a "senior analyst at Lyra Research", unless there's some patent issue not mentioned?)
The Redmond, Wash. giant is promising that client-side software will be available with Windows 2000, Held said.
Whenever that is.
If this is something worth doing (and I can see some business uses, although as others here have said, this is the sort of thing some of us have been doing for years with lpd), we could have a linux client (and server, for printers directly connected to the linux box) in a couple of days. (Probably a Windows client too, for that matter. Almost worth doing to provide Yet Another reason not to buy Win2K.)
"Eventually, if you had a printer that is IPP compliant, that printer will have a Web address and anyone around the world who can get on the Internet can print to that URL," said Robert Palmer,
Porting a large app optimized for a unix environment to Windows is no piece of cake, you're fighting the OS the whole time. So that's worth charging for.
Further and more, the users of your Windows version are going to place far more demands on you for support than would unix/linux users. Even if it's officially an unsupported product, that doesn't stop the deluge of e-mails and phone calls asking questions - you still have to read them/answer the phone even if all you're going to say is "it's unsupported".
People charge money based in part on the irritation factor associated with what they're doing. Low irritation, low/no cost (unix). High irritation, high cost (Windows).
That Windows users have already demonstrated themselves to be suckers enough to pay higher prices for software just makes it easier.
One of the first wearables
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 1
I recall reading a book about one of the first wearable computers, twenty or so years ago.
A vest contained the cpu board, power supply, etc. worn under the clothes. Input was via toe switches concealed in the shoes, output was a series of LEDs hidden in the frame of a pair of glasses (visible to the wearer). It was used to count cards in casino blackjack games in Vegas.
At least until the casino owners caught on.
lots of vertical specific use
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 1
Exactly.
Some other examples - - telephone lineman reviewing a schematic while up on the pole - firefighter checking floor plans while clearing a building
And on more recreational note: - checking a map while riding a bike, or hiking (especially coupled to a GPS receiver)
The head-mounted display doesn't have to look geeky (although that look might be a plus to some). With appropriate lenses and fiber optics the imaging electronics could be hidden and the display projected onto the back of a sunglass lens, for example.
Read Michael Crichton's "Terminal Man"
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 1
But forget the movie.
The premise is a little different - the guy isn't wired to the net, but has a chip implanted to stop his epileptic seizures before they start.
Open/closed issues aside (because there's Lesstif), what exactly is wrong with Motif?
The times I've seen people here rant against it, it's always wonderfully objective and highly technical arguments like "Motif is like a stinky dead fish".
Back when WW I (widget war I) was ongoing, I like OpenLook better, but Xol and Xm both build on Xt so converting from one to the other wasn't that big a deal. (WW II is Qt vs GTK, I guess). But I haven't heard any complaints that don't amount to "its big and complicated, too hard for li'l ol' me to understand because it's nothing like MFC".
So really, what can you do in Qt or GTK[+] that you can't do in Motif? (Hmm, themes maybe. Yawn.)
I take it, then, that you think that the next gosh-wow software project that nearly everyone will want to use should be released under a binary only, pay-per-copy license rather than the NCL?
But most people who write free software can't feed their kids off the proceeds, because there aren't any. (At least, not the kind you can exchange for groceries and a place to live.)
For most folks who contribute free software, it's a hobby, or something their boss doesn't mind as long as they get their real work done.
Nobody's going to get rich writing NCL'd code, either, but the prospect of getting a piece of the action if somebody else decides to sell it will certainly make it easier to, say, justify to the wife when she asks why you're spending all that time in front of the computer.
Assuming you, Larry, and Bob are all considered "contributers" to the code (the license seems to exempt simple ports etc from that category), then the three of you elect a "steward" for SuperWidget 1.0 for the purposes of the license negotiations with Will. Will pays the money to the steward who then divvies it up amongst the three of you (presumably, according to whatever agreement the three of you already came up with for sharing revenue).
Will only has to negotiate with one person, so from that point of view businesses won't have a problem with it. Whether the project breaks down over infighting over who gets how much is another question, and that's the weakness I see in the license. You'd need to have some sort of covenant amongst the developers agreed upon ahead of time (and which new contributers would need to agree to) for the project to work.
Not quite the free and easy world of BSD, or even GPL, but it might encourage those who have kids to feed. And SuperWidget 1.0 becomes GPL'd two years down the road anyway.
(That two years may seem like a long wait for projects that are in the "release early and often" development stage, but isn't too bad for more mature products.)
Because you raise some red herrings, and it answers some of your legitimate questions.
It clearly does not "disregard the role of unpaid collaborator". Depending on how the steward chooses to divvy up the money (if any), the all collaborators are paid. If not, the collaborators are free to choose a new steward who will divvy up the money they way they want it divvied. (Although the exact details of this seem to me one of the weaker areas of the license.)
You ask "who decides how much each developer gets?" The license answers this very clearly: the steward, who is elected by the developers.
Take the Linus/Linux example which you raise. If Linus (as steward) chose to keep all the money himself, no doubt an election for a new steward would quickly occur. The new steward might decide that Linus gets no more money, since his contribution in terms of lines of code is small compared to the total size.
Of course, the details on a project with that many contributors gets hairy very quickly, which is why I think this is the real weakness of the license. But that's a detail.
If you're going to attack this license, read it and attack it on its real flaws, not on some strawmen you conjure up. A license something like this can significantly add to the availabilty of free software, by encouraging those who would not release under GPL or BSD. Let's fix its real flaws, instead of wasting breath on imagined ones.
If I'm selling software, I still have to compete against distributors who charge $0 for the software. Customers would have no more reason to buy from me under this license than they would under the GPL.
This is true. However, this situation doesn't seem to bother Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, etc, who are all competing against potential distributors who could charge $0. It would of course be a factor in negotiating the payments to the software author(s).
This license will have very little, if any, negative effect on the supply of GPL'd software from those already writing GPL'd software.
It will have a positive effect (how big remains to be seen) on the supply of (ultimately) GPL'd software from those currently not writing GPL'd software because they can't afford to (or think they can't). It might, for example, encourage some shareware authors to release source.
There are a class of programmers out there who have no problem giving software away, but do have a problem with other people making money off the software they gave away.
Software licensed under the NCL may be freely given away, but if you want to make a profit off of redistributing it, you owe the author(s) a piece of the action. How big a piece is subject to negotiation.
Given the folks here who've griped about Red Hat, et al. making some bucks off of free software, I'd think this license pretty popular. Not, of course, to the strange idealists who seem to think that software development is a Holy Cause and don't want it tainted by anybody making any money (ugh, root of all evil, don't you know) from it.
You can always release it under a free license later
True, but buyers/users of your software have no guarantee that you will. The advantage of NCL is that it spells out precisely when the software will become totally free (ie, two years after release).
There are advantages here: the fiscal incentive to create new/better software remains, yet there's a cap so that what might otherwise be kept closed and proprietary forever will become open.
Sure, there'll still be always-closed software, and GPL'd software, but at the margins this sort of license should increase the total supply of free software.
(Not that the license doesn't have its problems -- the details of stewardship might stand some refinement.)
Actually Microsoft makes slightly more money from its OS products than from Office, according to a chart I saw recently (somewhere online, forget where, sorry). Both account for >45% of total revenues, the other few percent being miscellaneous other stuff.
This being the case, it isn't hard to see why Microsoft's sheer (if concealed) terror at the prospect of losing OS revenues to Linux. It would be utter fiscal irresponsibility -- of the sort that makes for stockholder lawsuits -- to not have a backup plan to launch Office for Linux if/when that shift to Linux really starts to eat into OS revenues.
However, Microsoft can certainly afford to port it but never release it if that suits them. Right now the FUDmeisters probably figure that rumors of Office for Linux will hurt Windows sales more than it will hurt sales of Corel, StarOffice, Applix, etc, so they're in "official disavowal" mode. As Linux share increases, that will change, and MS will shift into "announcing vaporware" mode. If Linux plateaus out and Win2000 takes off (hah!), then officially Office for Linux will never have existed.
You may have more knowledge of American cultural history than whatever cretins you work with, but you're certainly humor-deficient. And far too sensitive -- nothing in my original comment was intended as a personal attack. Perhaps hypersensitivity goes with pretentiousness.
Oh, and as for email addresses, I get plenty of spam as it is, thanks very much. Are you too cowardly to say in public something you wanted to email in private?
While no cash may have changed hands, the article makes it clear that H-P is supplying hardware. IRS accounting rules aside, that looks like a capital investment to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is the only company that is consistently being degraded.
Nonsense. That might happen occasionally, but Illiad's portrayal of Microsoft is usually pretty accurate.
I'd be more impressed if they offered large sums of money. I mean, how much is it costing them to ship a bunch of their own software? FedEx charges are probably more than what the box, manual and CD-ROM cost.
(I'm always bemused when I see big headlines about some multimillion dollar donation MS or Gates has made to some organization or school, where most of that is in software. Yeah, they donate a few bucks worth of CDs and claim a few thousand worth (at retail) of donation.)
If you read the report from which these numbers were taken, they acknowledge that yes, their total survey numbers were skewed by the slashdot effect.
However, they were snapshotting the data at regular intervals and could tell from the server logs when the slashdot effect started to kick in, so they threw out the survey responses after that point. Which is why they analyzed 1999 responses (the first 1999) rather than the >5000 (or whatever) they actually got.
Note that these data are from an NT oriented site, and they were originally expecting the results to show a lot less Linux use.
No, it's just that the significance of Microsoft using Solaris of all things is much greater than that it's a unix. It's Sun's unix, and Microsoft hates Sun.
That they're using Solaris is especially telling to the audience of this piece. The use of FreeBSD may be of interest to us, but mentioning it to the PHB's just dilutes the impact.
Here's the URL of the doc that maps the IPP to LPD protocol:
ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ ipp/new_PRO/ipp-lpd-981116.txt
There are some differences. LPD has a few features IPP doesn't (some of them outdated), and IPP supports things LPD doesn't.
Microsoft holds the final key for implementation of direct printing over the Web.
"The real bottleneck is Microsoft," Held said. "You need software on your computer that will allow you to select and talk to a destination device."
Yes, but why does that have to be Microsoft software? (Held's ignorance here is appalling, given that he is a "senior analyst at Lyra Research", unless there's some patent issue not mentioned?)
The Redmond, Wash. giant is promising that client-side software will be available with Windows 2000, Held said.
Whenever that is.
If this is something worth doing (and I can see some business uses, although as others here have said, this is the sort of thing some of us have been doing for years with lpd), we could have a linux client (and server, for printers directly connected to the linux box) in a couple of days.
(Probably a Windows client too, for that matter. Almost worth doing to provide Yet Another reason not to buy Win2K.)
"Eventually, if you had a printer that is IPP
compliant, that printer will have a Web address and anyone around the world who can get on the Internet can print to that URL," said Robert Palmer,
And he says this like it's a good thing.
Yet another protocol to filter at the firewall.
Porting a large app optimized for a unix environment to Windows is no piece of cake, you're fighting the OS the whole time. So that's worth charging for.
Further and more, the users of your Windows version are going to place far more demands on you for support than would unix/linux users. Even if it's officially an unsupported product, that doesn't stop the deluge of e-mails and phone calls asking questions - you still have to read them/answer the phone even if all you're going to say is "it's unsupported".
People charge money based in part on the irritation factor associated with what they're doing. Low irritation, low/no cost (unix). High irritation, high cost (Windows).
That Windows users have already demonstrated themselves to be suckers enough to pay higher prices for software just makes it easier.
I recall reading a book about one of the first wearable computers, twenty or so years ago.
A vest contained the cpu board, power supply, etc. worn under the clothes. Input was via toe switches concealed in the shoes, output was a series of LEDs hidden in the frame of a pair of glasses (visible to the wearer). It was used to count cards in casino blackjack games in Vegas.
At least until the casino owners caught on.
Exactly.
Some other examples -
- telephone lineman reviewing a schematic while up on the pole
- firefighter checking floor plans while clearing a building
And on more recreational note:
- checking a map while riding a bike, or
hiking (especially coupled to a GPS receiver)
The head-mounted display doesn't have to look geeky (although that look might be a plus to some). With appropriate lenses and fiber optics the imaging electronics could be hidden and the display projected onto the back of a sunglass lens, for example.
But forget the movie.
The premise is a little different - the guy isn't wired to the net, but has a chip implanted to stop his epileptic seizures before they start.
It doesn't quite work out that way...
Open/closed issues aside (because there's Lesstif), what exactly is wrong with Motif?
The times I've seen people here rant against it, it's always wonderfully objective and highly technical arguments like "Motif is like a stinky dead fish".
Back when WW I (widget war I) was ongoing, I like OpenLook better, but Xol and Xm both build on Xt so converting from one to the other wasn't that big a deal. (WW II is Qt vs GTK, I guess). But I haven't heard any complaints that don't amount to "its big and complicated, too hard for li'l ol' me to understand because it's nothing like MFC".
So really, what can you do in Qt or GTK[+] that you can't do in Motif? (Hmm, themes maybe. Yawn.)
Since I live in (well, near) Denver. But $500 is a bit steep even by today's ticket prices.
:-)
Tell ya what -- any of you out-of-towners who are coming in to see it: spring for my ticket and I'll let you sleep on my couch.
I take it, then, that you think that the next gosh-wow software project that nearly everyone will want to use should be released under a binary only, pay-per-copy license rather than the NCL?
If you say so.
Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
But most people who write free software can't feed their kids off the proceeds, because there aren't any. (At least, not the kind you can exchange for groceries and a place to live.)
For most folks who contribute free software, it's a hobby, or something their boss doesn't mind as long as they get their real work done.
Nobody's going to get rich writing NCL'd code, either, but the prospect of getting a piece of the action if somebody else decides to sell it will certainly make it easier to, say, justify to the wife when she asks why you're spending all that time in front of the computer.
Assuming you, Larry, and Bob are all considered "contributers" to the code (the license seems to exempt simple ports etc from that category), then the three of you elect a "steward" for SuperWidget 1.0 for the purposes of the license negotiations with Will. Will pays the money to the steward who then divvies it up amongst the three of you (presumably, according to whatever agreement the three of you already came up with for sharing revenue).
Will only has to negotiate with one person, so from that point of view businesses won't have a problem with it. Whether the project breaks down over infighting over who gets how much is another question, and that's the weakness I see in the license. You'd need to have some sort of covenant amongst the developers agreed upon ahead of time (and which new contributers would need to agree to) for the project to work.
Not quite the free and easy world of BSD, or even GPL, but it might encourage those who have kids to feed. And SuperWidget 1.0 becomes GPL'd two years down the road anyway.
(That two years may seem like a long wait for projects that are in the "release early and often" development stage, but isn't too bad for more mature products.)
Because you raise some red herrings, and it answers some of your legitimate questions.
It clearly does not "disregard the role of unpaid collaborator". Depending on how the steward chooses to divvy up the money (if any), the all collaborators are paid. If not, the collaborators are free to choose a new steward who will divvy up the money they way they want it divvied. (Although the exact details of this seem to me one of the weaker areas of the license.)
You ask "who decides how much each developer gets?" The license answers this very clearly: the steward, who is elected by the developers.
Take the Linus/Linux example which you raise. If Linus (as steward) chose to keep all the money himself, no doubt an election for a new steward would quickly occur. The new steward might decide that Linus gets no more money, since his contribution in terms of lines of code is small compared to the total size.
Of course, the details on a project with that many contributors gets hairy very quickly, which is why I think this is the real weakness of the license. But that's a detail.
If you're going to attack this license, read it and attack it on its real flaws, not on some strawmen you conjure up. A license something like this can significantly add to the availabilty of free software, by encouraging those who would not release under GPL or BSD. Let's fix its real flaws, instead of wasting breath on imagined ones.
-- Al
If I'm selling software, I still have to compete against distributors who charge $0 for the software. Customers would have no more reason to buy from me under this license than they would under the GPL.
This is true. However, this situation doesn't seem to bother Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, etc, who are all competing against potential distributors who could charge $0. It would of course be a factor in negotiating the payments to the software author(s).
Exactly!
This license will have very little, if any, negative effect on the supply of GPL'd software from those already writing GPL'd software.
It will have a positive effect (how big remains to be seen) on the supply of (ultimately) GPL'd software from those currently not writing GPL'd software because they can't afford to (or think they can't). It might, for example, encourage some shareware authors to release source.
No, the Aladdin license is a "free-beer" license. You're explicity forbidden from making money by reselling it or any derived work.
The NCL license provides for (re)selling, so long as the original author(s) is(are) compensated.
(The GPL, of course, provides for (re)selling without any compensation to the authors, as long as source is made available.)
There are a class of programmers out there who have no problem giving software away, but do have a problem with other people making money off the software they gave away.
Software licensed under the NCL may be freely given away, but if you want to make a profit off of redistributing it, you owe the author(s) a piece of the action. How big a piece is subject to negotiation.
Given the folks here who've griped about Red Hat, et al. making some bucks off of free software, I'd think this license pretty popular. Not, of course, to the strange idealists who seem to think that software development is a Holy Cause and don't want it tainted by anybody making any money (ugh, root of all evil, don't you know) from it.
You can always release it under a free license later
True, but buyers/users of your software have no guarantee that you will. The advantage of NCL is that it spells out precisely when the software will become totally free (ie, two years after release).
There are advantages here: the fiscal incentive to create new/better software remains, yet there's a cap so that what might otherwise be kept closed and proprietary forever will become open.
Sure, there'll still be always-closed software, and GPL'd software, but at the margins this sort of license should increase the total supply of free software.
(Not that the license doesn't have its problems -- the details of stewardship might stand some refinement.)
Actually Microsoft makes slightly more money from its OS products than from Office, according to a chart I saw recently (somewhere online, forget where, sorry). Both account for >45% of total revenues, the other few percent being miscellaneous other stuff.
This being the case, it isn't hard to see why Microsoft's sheer (if concealed) terror at the prospect of losing OS revenues to Linux. It would be utter fiscal irresponsibility -- of the sort that makes for stockholder lawsuits -- to not have a backup plan to launch Office for Linux if/when that shift to Linux really starts to eat into OS revenues.
However, Microsoft can certainly afford to port it but never release it if that suits them. Right now the FUDmeisters probably figure that rumors of Office for Linux will hurt Windows sales more than it will hurt sales of Corel, StarOffice, Applix, etc, so they're in "official disavowal" mode. As Linux share increases, that will change, and MS will shift into "announcing vaporware" mode. If Linux plateaus out and Win2000 takes off (hah!), then officially Office for Linux will never have existed.
You may have more knowledge of American cultural history than whatever cretins you work with, but you're certainly humor-deficient. And far too sensitive -- nothing in my original comment was intended as a personal attack. Perhaps hypersensitivity goes with pretentiousness.
Oh, and as for email addresses, I get plenty of spam as it is, thanks very much. Are you too cowardly to say in public something you wanted to email in private?
While no cash may have changed hands, the article makes it clear that H-P is supplying hardware. IRS accounting rules aside, that looks like a capital investment to me.