The dot.coms are gone, but they left us one legacy. That's the idea that those who write websites are developers. If that's true, then they should start treating their websites as software engineering projects.
Software engineering in a nutshell:
1) Analysis. What are your project requirements? Who is your market? What are their needs? If it's not addressed here it shouldn't be in the final website. If your site is going to adhere to web standards, req them here. If it's going to support specific browsers instead, req it here and say why.
2) Design. Before you write one byte of HTML or PHP you need to get the design down on paper. Document all pages, modules, classes, databases, interfaces, etc., before you move on to the next step.
3) Coding. This is more than just knowing your language. Code review. Unit testing. Etc.
4) Verification and Validation. No go an test your website. Does it meet all requirements? Does it work for the Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera? Does it work on a monochrome monitor, or for Lynx? If not you had better have that in the requirements. Without looking at any of the design or code, a tester should be able to formally validate the website.
5) Maintenance. You may actually get bug reports! Fix them when you do and don't just tell the reporter to get a bigger monitor, switch to a different OS, or to use a different browser.
6) Repeat. Websites are dynamic beasties. Much more so than applications. Go all the way back to step one.
Re:though the suggestions might be usefull...
on
Homepage Usability
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are obsessed with old standards and old browsers.
Yeah right. Like I'm supposed to guess what browser you designed your website for before I go visit it. Any worthwhile standard is an old standard.
No, the boss will look at reputation first. Redhat has a reputation for shipping bleeding/untested software. Like all reputations it ain't 100% accurate but has some basis in fact.
Work with OS/400 or even a commerical Unix for awhile and you'll soon find out that most of Enterpriseness is political.
"Enterprise" is different than the "corporate desktop". Politics is primarily to blame for keeping Linux off the corporate desktop. But it has little to do with it not being Enterprise Ready.
I hear your cry, and I have shouted it myself before. All commercial software should have a warranty, even open source commercial software. My toaster has a warranty. My coffee pot has a warranty. My car, stereo and carpet have warranties. Even my RAM has a warranty. Why not my software?
I don't expect hobbyist, academic or non-profit software to have warranties (such as Linux), but I do expect all software that I purchase to have one (like the Redhat distribution of Linux). It doesn't have to be a fancy warranty, but it should be more than "we disclaim all merchantability even though we put a price sticker on it like it was". Don't claim that your software is usable then disclaim fitness for use. That's borderline fraud.
a CA appeals court has issued a ruling that says that typical messages posted to internet message boards... are framed as opinions and not as statements of fact.
Using a "looser" licence may help the adoption rate, initially, but you run the signifigant risk of having one of these adopters modify the code and refuse to fold those modifications back into the main tree. Once you have done that, then the project has forked, and it's whole purpose (a common standard that is sure to work anywhere) has been compromised.
You are making the assumption that forking is bad and that keeping everything in one source tree is good. I'll argue the opposite. The ability to fork is a Good Thing(tm). Show me a software project that is not allowed to fork and you'll be showing me a proprietary software project.
FreeBSD and NetBSD forked off of 386BSD because the latter project had stagnated under its maintainer. OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD because of a difference in goals. None of the non-free forks of the BSD code base (SunOS, BSDi, Darwin, etc) has harmed any of these projects, and there is ample evidence that cross pollination occurs even there.
RMS makes an argument that software should be free because its nature allows it to be exactly copied without harming the original. If that is true, then what harm can come of the original if someone forks the codebase? What harm can come of the original if someone creates a proprietary derivative? None!
Both copyleft and unrestricted licenses have their place in the development world. Copyleft is great if the author wishes to retain ownership of the software while pretending to not own it. Unrestriced licenses, on the other hand, are great if you merely want to share your code with other people.
It's a boring wednesday, so I'll feed the trolls since they're so funny swinging on their branches in their tiny cages.
With the death of Walnut Creek CD Rom, the last significant commercial player in the BSD field died. The BSD license is partly to blame.
Walnut Creek was a distributor of other people's software. Among their offerings were GPL Slackware, BSDL FreeBSD, and a shitload of proprietary shareware CDs. The BSD license wasn't a part of their business model. BSD licensed code was a part of their infrastructure, and if I'm not mistaken, their FreeBSD based ftp server still holds a record.
Walnut Creek CDROM went out of business because their services were no longer needed. They made money by selling CDROMs, and the more people with access to the internet and especially broadband, the less profitable they became. At one time the only way I could get Slackware or FreeBSD was by paying $39.95 to Walnut Creek. Now all I have to do is spend two hours of download time and I can burn off as many copies as I want. The *only* reason I kept Slackware and FreeBSD subscriptions going was because I wanted to support those projects financially.
One of the reasons BSD is struggling is because the license does nothing to restrict code hoarding, while also not encouraging code sharing.
BSD is struggling? Hah! To the contrary, it seems that the Great WindRiver Dumping of FreeBSD was the best thing that ever happened to the project. The world now knows that FreeBSD isn't dependent upon commercial sponsorship, and it has become much more viable.
FreeBSD 4.4 came out only a couple of months ago. OpenBSD 3.0 came out this week. NetBSD now runs on the PS/2. These are vibrant and growing projects.
There is not social agenda attached to the BSD license. You take that as being a negative, but to a lot of people that's a positive. There is a time and a place to preach, pontificate, argue, and try to change the world. For many of us, a software distribution is not that time or place.
The BSD license is about what the author has done with the software, not what he or she wants you or anyone else to do with the software.
The saddest irony is that the BSD license was entirely accidental, it was not intended to be a "philosophy".
That's the best part about it! You don't have to read a political diatribe at the beginning of the license. You aren't required to redistribute social opinions contrary to your own. It's politically neutral. That may offend you, but for many people in the Open Source world, it's a breath of fresh air.
The developers/owners of proprietary software wouldn't even exist in a copyright-free / patent-free world.
Oh yeah they would. Although this as blasphemy according to the Church of Saint iGNUtious, common sense and a tiny bit of legal analysis says that proprietary software can exist in a world without intellectual property. It will be harder to "protect" and may be rarer, but it will still be there. See my previous message for a link to an article on IP in an anarchist society.
That can also be said of developing recipes and telling good jokes. Neither of those are subject to intellectual property law.
Go take any recipe or joke book on the shelves of B&N, scan it, and post it on the web. Lawyers will be talking to you within 24 hours.
if there's a need, someone will pay for the service in advance. If no one does, then there's no need.
True enough, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Your typical service is not unlimited or indefinite. Take your bookkeeper as an example. Let's say you pay him $1,000 for his services. That $1,000 covers *you* for a *limited* amount of time. No one else is able to use that same bookkeeper without also paying. You can't use that same bookkeeper in the future without paying again.
Software doesn't work that way. You pay a consultant $1,000 for a program and without some notion of software ownership, everyone in the world can get that program for free. I won't argue whether that's good or bad, just that you can't compare development to other kinds of services.
I didn't describe the FSF as communist. The closest I came as "anarcho-socialist". For those not in the know, anarcho-socialism is a socialist society based on volunteerism as opposed to state coercion. That describes the GPL to a tee. The software belongs to the community but no one is forced to join the community. The only catch is that it uses state coercion (copyright law) to define the community borders, rather like anarcho-socialist communes using property law to define the boundaries of their property-less enclave.
Contract law won't help you, either, since code "in the wild" can be used by individuals who haven't explicitly entered into a contract.
The goal of the FSF is very much to increase individual rights
That may be the goal, but the means to it place the needs of the community over the needs of the individual. It's very much like socialism (albeit an anarcho-socialism): the code belongs to the community.
Remember, it's the beneficiaries of copyright and patent law who are asking for state-sponsored support, not the other way around.
Yeah, sort of like the dearth of Linux related stories at daemonnews. Surfing through the BSD oriented sites you would get the impression that Linux must be dying.
From www.opensource.org: The advertising clause in the license appearing on BSD Unix files was officially rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22 1999. He states that clause 3 is "hereby deleted in its entirety."
Microsoft is not good for the consumer, yet they're parading themselves around like the consumer is on THEIR side.
What planet do you live on? On this planet, the consumer *is* on Microsoft's side. They have chosen to use Microsoft products. They know other operating systems exist but they have not chosen them. They know other office suites and word processors exist but they have not chosen them. They know other browsers exist but they have not chosen them.
You can't say it's because Microsoft products are preinstalled and that it's too hard for the consumer to get rid of them. Netscape used to be preinstalled and people got rid of it for Explorer. Smartsuite used to be preinstalled and people got rid of it for MSOffice. Offer a computer with Linux/KDE/StarOffice preinstalled and people will wipe the drives and install Windows/MSOffice.
Unlike other well known monopolies (your local telco, cableco, utility), Microsoft is not a monopoly by government charter, but by consumer charter.
I am a free software developer, quite a lot of people use my software, and it is easy to donate money to me via paypal or ask me to make an enhancement for money, or hire me. I explicitly say this on my webpage. Nobody ever has, and I don't really expect them to.
I hear you! I have a home brewing program that is quite popular in it's admittedly limited market. My documentation clearly says that monetary payment is not required, but that donations of homebrew (or even pictures of homebrew) created with the program will spur further development. To date I have received one bottle of homebrew and one picture of homebrew. If I was counting on monetary renumeration to pay my rent I would be living under the nearest overpass.
That said, I am not doing this as a way to make a living. I'm not stupid. This is my hobby. I have received code contributions and many thank you notes. This all makes it worthwhile.
Okay, so you now have one million non-paying customers versus one thousand non-paying customers. I would rather have the latter because I am making the same amount of money with a fraction of the support headache.
On the other side represented by the communal approach, participating in open source projects provides intangible or non-monetary benefits.
So how do I put Turkey on the table this Thursday using only intangible or non-monetary benefits? If there's nothing to sell then nobody will be giving you money in exchange for it. You might as well take up RMS on his advice and be a waiter and write code on weekends.
Open Source makes an awesome avocation, but I see very few people making a successful vocation out of it. Certainly some do, but they are the exceptions.
Hah! I guess you believed that line the VCs told you while they picked your pockets clean.
History proves the statistics: the vast majority of new business will not be around in five years. They make a good showing but can't sustain it in the long run.
Chasing after stock prices is a losing proposition. People forget that last year and dumped a whole bunch of money into a lot of losing propositions. Then they realized their mistake and sold, sold, sold. It doesn't take a genius to know why.
A stock a simple a share in a company. You own a piece of the company. It doesn't generate you any revenue. If the company is profitable it may offer you regular dividends. If you have stock in such a company (otherwise known as old boring brick-and-mortor companies) then hold on to the stock even if the price drops. On the other hand if the company is not profitable then don't even bother with it. The only way you'll make money is to sell the stock, driving the price down. Thus the more money people make on a stock the less viable the company becomes.
Take a look at the hottest stock of last century: IBM. Given the opportunity to purchase IBM stock in 1901 would you have done it? Looking at just the stock price though, you would have been much better off earning interest at a bank. Nobody ever made much money off of the IBM stock price. But a lot of people made money off of the dividends.
Next time you want to buy some stock in an Open Source company, ask yourself if the company is going to be around in five years. We all know that Open Source is going to be around in five years, but you're not buying stock in Open Source, you're buying stock in a specific Open Source company. If you can't envision that company becoming an old boring brick-and-mortor, then don't bother. Otherwise you're just trying to outguess the rest of the market.
I believe that it wouldn't be a "big" problem, as everything would eventually route around it. Things like this have happened before to tiny nodes, and there's no reason to think that major nodes would be different. That's why I think the major problem with a Mae West outage (of any cause) would be with all the colocated servers.
Slashdot Mirror
The dot.coms are gone, but they left us one legacy. That's the idea that those who write websites are developers. If that's true, then they should start treating their websites as software engineering projects.
Software engineering in a nutshell:
1) Analysis. What are your project requirements? Who is your market? What are their needs? If it's not addressed here it shouldn't be in the final website. If your site is going to adhere to web standards, req them here. If it's going to support specific browsers instead, req it here and say why.
2) Design. Before you write one byte of HTML or PHP you need to get the design down on paper. Document all pages, modules, classes, databases, interfaces, etc., before you move on to the next step.
3) Coding. This is more than just knowing your language. Code review. Unit testing. Etc.
4) Verification and Validation. No go an test your website. Does it meet all requirements? Does it work for the Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera? Does it work on a monochrome monitor, or for Lynx? If not you had better have that in the requirements. Without looking at any of the design or code, a tester should be able to formally validate the website.
5) Maintenance. You may actually get bug reports! Fix them when you do and don't just tell the reporter to get a bigger monitor, switch to a different OS, or to use a different browser.
6) Repeat. Websites are dynamic beasties. Much more so than applications. Go all the way back to step one.
are obsessed with old standards and old browsers.
Yeah right. Like I'm supposed to guess what browser you designed your website for before I go visit it. Any worthwhile standard is an old standard.
No, the boss will look at reputation first. Redhat has a reputation for shipping bleeding/untested software. Like all reputations it ain't 100% accurate but has some basis in fact.
Work with OS/400 or even a commerical Unix for awhile and you'll soon find out that most of Enterpriseness is political.
"Enterprise" is different than the "corporate desktop". Politics is primarily to blame for keeping Linux off the corporate desktop. But it has little to do with it not being Enterprise Ready.
I hear your cry, and I have shouted it myself before. All commercial software should have a warranty, even open source commercial software. My toaster has a warranty. My coffee pot has a warranty. My car, stereo and carpet have warranties. Even my RAM has a warranty. Why not my software?
I don't expect hobbyist, academic or non-profit software to have warranties (such as Linux), but I do expect all software that I purchase to have one (like the Redhat distribution of Linux). It doesn't have to be a fancy warranty, but it should be more than "we disclaim all merchantability even though we put a price sticker on it like it was". Don't claim that your software is usable then disclaim fitness for use. That's borderline fraud.
a CA appeals court has issued a ruling that says that typical messages posted to internet message boards ... are framed as opinions and not as statements of fact.
Duh!
Using a "looser" licence may help the adoption rate, initially, but you run the signifigant risk of having one of these adopters modify the code and refuse to fold those modifications back into the main tree. Once you have done that, then the project has forked, and it's whole purpose (a common standard that is sure to work anywhere) has been compromised.
You are making the assumption that forking is bad and that keeping everything in one source tree is good. I'll argue the opposite. The ability to fork is a Good Thing(tm). Show me a software project that is not allowed to fork and you'll be showing me a proprietary software project.
FreeBSD and NetBSD forked off of 386BSD because the latter project had stagnated under its maintainer. OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD because of a difference in goals. None of the non-free forks of the BSD code base (SunOS, BSDi, Darwin, etc) has harmed any of these projects, and there is ample evidence that cross pollination occurs even there.
RMS makes an argument that software should be free because its nature allows it to be exactly copied without harming the original. If that is true, then what harm can come of the original if someone forks the codebase? What harm can come of the original if someone creates a proprietary derivative? None!
Both copyleft and unrestricted licenses have their place in the development world. Copyleft is great if the author wishes to retain ownership of the software while pretending to not own it. Unrestriced licenses, on the other hand, are great if you merely want to share your code with other people.
It's a boring wednesday, so I'll feed the trolls since they're so funny swinging on their branches in their tiny cages.
With the death of Walnut Creek CD Rom, the last significant commercial player in the BSD field died. The BSD license is partly to blame.
Walnut Creek was a distributor of other people's software. Among their offerings were GPL Slackware, BSDL FreeBSD, and a shitload of proprietary shareware CDs. The BSD license wasn't a part of their business model. BSD licensed code was a part of their infrastructure, and if I'm not mistaken, their FreeBSD based ftp server still holds a record.
Walnut Creek CDROM went out of business because their services were no longer needed. They made money by selling CDROMs, and the more people with access to the internet and especially broadband, the less profitable they became. At one time the only way I could get Slackware or FreeBSD was by paying $39.95 to Walnut Creek. Now all I have to do is spend two hours of download time and I can burn off as many copies as I want. The *only* reason I kept Slackware and FreeBSD subscriptions going was because I wanted to support those projects financially.
One of the reasons BSD is struggling is because the license does nothing to restrict code hoarding, while also not encouraging code sharing.
BSD is struggling? Hah! To the contrary, it seems that the Great WindRiver Dumping of FreeBSD was the best thing that ever happened to the project. The world now knows that FreeBSD isn't dependent upon commercial sponsorship, and it has become much more viable.
FreeBSD 4.4 came out only a couple of months ago. OpenBSD 3.0 came out this week. NetBSD now runs on the PS/2. These are vibrant and growing projects.
There is not social agenda attached to the BSD license. You take that as being a negative, but to a lot of people that's a positive. There is a time and a place to preach, pontificate, argue, and try to change the world. For many of us, a software distribution is not that time or place.
The BSD license is about what the author has done with the software, not what he or she wants you or anyone else to do with the software.
The saddest irony is that the BSD license was entirely accidental, it was not intended to be a "philosophy".
That's the best part about it! You don't have to read a political diatribe at the beginning of the license. You aren't required to redistribute social opinions contrary to your own. It's politically neutral. That may offend you, but for many people in the Open Source world, it's a breath of fresh air.
You haven't mentioned the lesser GPL at all, for some reason.
That's because the Library GPL is a sticky wicket when it comes to embedded software.
The developers/owners of proprietary software wouldn't even exist in a copyright-free / patent-free world.
Oh yeah they would. Although this as blasphemy according to the Church of Saint iGNUtious, common sense and a tiny bit of legal analysis says that proprietary software can exist in a world without intellectual property. It will be harder to "protect" and may be rarer, but it will still be there. See my previous message for a link to an article on IP in an anarchist society.
That can also be said of developing recipes and telling good jokes. Neither of those are subject to intellectual property law.
Go take any recipe or joke book on the shelves of B&N, scan it, and post it on the web. Lawyers will be talking to you within 24 hours.
if there's a need, someone will pay for the service in advance. If no one does, then there's no need.
True enough, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Your typical service is not unlimited or indefinite. Take your bookkeeper as an example. Let's say you pay him $1,000 for his services. That $1,000 covers *you* for a *limited* amount of time. No one else is able to use that same bookkeeper without also paying. You can't use that same bookkeeper in the future without paying again.
Software doesn't work that way. You pay a consultant $1,000 for a program and without some notion of software ownership, everyone in the world can get that program for free. I won't argue whether that's good or bad, just that you can't compare development to other kinds of services.
I didn't describe the FSF as communist. The closest I came as "anarcho-socialist". For those not in the know, anarcho-socialism is a socialist society based on volunteerism as opposed to state coercion. That describes the GPL to a tee. The software belongs to the community but no one is forced to join the community. The only catch is that it uses state coercion (copyright law) to define the community borders, rather like anarcho-socialist communes using property law to define the boundaries of their property-less enclave.
Contract law won't help you, either, since code "in the wild" can be used by individuals who haven't explicitly entered into a contract.
Check out "Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts", an excellent discussion of IP in an anarcho-capitalist society. It addresses your "wild" code.
When I'm in an idealist mode I'm an anarchist.
When I'm in a realist mode I'm a conservative.
But I tell everyone that I'm a libertarian.
The goal of the FSF is very much to increase individual rights
That may be the goal, but the means to it place the needs of the community over the needs of the individual. It's very much like socialism (albeit an anarcho-socialism): the code belongs to the community.
Remember, it's the beneficiaries of copyright and patent law who are asking for state-sponsored support, not the other way around.
That would be fascism, not socialism.
There are some licenses that sort of do what you want, but not quite. Look at the QPL and MPL.
Yeah, sort of like the dearth of Linux related stories at daemonnews. Surfing through the BSD oriented sites you would get the impression that Linux must be dying.
Bzzzrtt! Get with the program...
From www.opensource.org: The advertising clause in the license appearing on BSD Unix files was officially rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22 1999. He states that clause 3 is "hereby deleted in its entirety."
Microsoft is not good for the consumer, yet they're parading themselves around like the consumer is on THEIR side.
What planet do you live on? On this planet, the consumer *is* on Microsoft's side. They have chosen to use Microsoft products. They know other operating systems exist but they have not chosen them. They know other office suites and word processors exist but they have not chosen them. They know other browsers exist but they have not chosen them.
You can't say it's because Microsoft products are preinstalled and that it's too hard for the consumer to get rid of them. Netscape used to be preinstalled and people got rid of it for Explorer. Smartsuite used to be preinstalled and people got rid of it for MSOffice. Offer a computer with Linux/KDE/StarOffice preinstalled and people will wipe the drives and install Windows/MSOffice.
Unlike other well known monopolies (your local telco, cableco, utility), Microsoft is not a monopoly by government charter, but by consumer charter.
I am a free software developer, quite a lot of people use my software, and it is easy to donate money to me via paypal or ask me to make an enhancement for money, or hire me. I explicitly say this on my webpage. Nobody ever has, and I don't really expect them to.
I hear you! I have a home brewing program that is quite popular in it's admittedly limited market. My documentation clearly says that monetary payment is not required, but that donations of homebrew (or even pictures of homebrew) created with the program will spur further development. To date I have received one bottle of homebrew and one picture of homebrew. If I was counting on monetary renumeration to pay my rent I would be living under the nearest overpass.
That said, I am not doing this as a way to make a living. I'm not stupid. This is my hobby. I have received code contributions and many thank you notes. This all makes it worthwhile.
Okay, so you now have one million non-paying customers versus one thousand non-paying customers. I would rather have the latter because I am making the same amount of money with a fraction of the support headache.
On the other side represented by the communal approach, participating in open source projects provides intangible or non-monetary benefits.
So how do I put Turkey on the table this Thursday using only intangible or non-monetary benefits? If there's nothing to sell then nobody will be giving you money in exchange for it. You might as well take up RMS on his advice and be a waiter and write code on weekends.
Open Source makes an awesome avocation, but I see very few people making a successful vocation out of it. Certainly some do, but they are the exceptions.
Hah! I guess you believed that line the VCs told you while they picked your pockets clean.
History proves the statistics: the vast majority of new business will not be around in five years. They make a good showing but can't sustain it in the long run.
Chasing after stock prices is a losing proposition. People forget that last year and dumped a whole bunch of money into a lot of losing propositions. Then they realized their mistake and sold, sold, sold. It doesn't take a genius to know why.
A stock a simple a share in a company. You own a piece of the company. It doesn't generate you any revenue. If the company is profitable it may offer you regular dividends. If you have stock in such a company (otherwise known as old boring brick-and-mortor companies) then hold on to the stock even if the price drops. On the other hand if the company is not profitable then don't even bother with it. The only way you'll make money is to sell the stock, driving the price down. Thus the more money people make on a stock the less viable the company becomes.
Take a look at the hottest stock of last century: IBM. Given the opportunity to purchase IBM stock in 1901 would you have done it? Looking at just the stock price though, you would have been much better off earning interest at a bank. Nobody ever made much money off of the IBM stock price. But a lot of people made money off of the dividends.
Next time you want to buy some stock in an Open Source company, ask yourself if the company is going to be around in five years. We all know that Open Source is going to be around in five years, but you're not buying stock in Open Source, you're buying stock in a specific Open Source company. If you can't envision that company becoming an old boring brick-and-mortor, then don't bother. Otherwise you're just trying to outguess the rest of the market.
I believe that it wouldn't be a "big" problem, as everything would eventually route around it. Things like this have happened before to tiny nodes, and there's no reason to think that major nodes would be different. That's why I think the major problem with a Mae West outage (of any cause) would be with all the colocated servers.
But I don't want cheeese... I can't eat cheeese... How can you eat cheeese when the corporate masters won't let you get pr0n for freee...
sniffle sniffle