I am not so sure you can not do that with Troll Tec's Qt licence. Why not firing an email to them asking them if you can?
Once again Norway is not Redmond. Even if the licence would not cover what you want to do, I am certain they would not bother you if you don't plan to sell your embedded system big time. In the latter case it may just seem fair to give them a little margin on your profit.
It is good that the Open Source Community can afford to develop two desktop environments, so that the best technology for a specific purpose can be picked.
Are we talking about the same Gates?
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
Do you mean this Bill Gates persona? The perhaps most hated man on the Web?
The fact that he is admired by others does not diminish the hate he instills in many people.
Do not get me wrong, I do not hate him. He is just not particularly important to my life. But I would not want to be in his shoes. I do not like the prospect of being bombarded with a cake when I show up somewhere (like it happened to him in Brussel).
Now would i love to be in Linus shoes? Hell, yes, people love him for good reasons.
Things like this make OpenSource look bad.
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
Not at all, if the people discussing these questions maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect. These questions have to be addressed in a constructive and thoughtfull way. Just to drive this message home: These things have to be discussed in a mature way, and not on the level things are usally "discussed" on/.
I still don't like their selling scheme though, since it is a breach of the nice academic tradition to publish your results freely. Being a german government sponsered institute their results should be free for academic and non-commercial usage. Heck, even the 100% commercial StarDivision Inc. allows free-usage of their OfficeSuit for those purposes.
I asked the same thing earlier, I don't undertsand how Frauenhoffer can have a patent on this.
They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
I can see that the original code is not GNU protected. In my experience in Europe we are less aware of how necessary that is, because companies in general do not tend to act so agressive i.e. they aren't that sue-happy as in the US. It is kind of ironic: in a more "socialistic" Europe the awarness to defend our open-source freedom is less keen than in an agressivly capitalistic USA.
They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
I don't know if you'll see this, since this topic has scrolled...but just in case:-)
Well, i saw it and appreciate the answers. Now of course I don't know if you will read it. Anyway I guess we are the last to post new messages to this threat:-)
Interestingly enough your answers highlights the amazing cultural difference, that I perceive between Europe and the US. Let's take the first question. In most European countries prisons are designed to reintegrate people into society. That means for example you offer them the possibility to get an education in the prison. This idea is generally accepted and believe it or not works reasonably well. Of course you will also find criminals who stay criminal, but to my knowledge it fares statistically far better than the US prison system. Statistical results of the justice system are the benchmarks for European politicians. For me it is very alien to mix religion with that issue. I can just assume that on the other hand this rather emotionally detached result oriented approach to "engineer" a justice system must sound very alien to most Americans.
To my knowledge their is no statistically significant study that shows that death penalty reduces the number of capital crime. Interestingly enough there is a study showing that the capital crime rate in Canada actually dropped after abolishing the death penalty.
Regarding the Clinton issue: I can see your legal standpoint. I am in no position to make a judgment if those offense were for real or not. You said he lied under oath, well if that is a fact he should be convicted for it. Most Europeans simply do not understand why these trials were not put on hold until he is out of office, because the performance of the government is regarded as having the higher priority than private trials. Of course you say it has been proofed that he is a rapist. I did not follow that whole affair to closely, but I can not recall that he forced anybody to have sex. But perhaps we have a different definition of rape.
If you made a survey in Europe regarding the question:
Does a politicians sexual appetite influence your voting decision?
You will find that a vast majority of people would answer you with a puzzled "No". Puzzled because that question does not even make a lot of sense to them. They might ask you: Do you mean that he/she has a very active sex live with different partners? If you answer "Yes" you might end up with a minority of people saying "Yes, that influences my decision because such a lifestyle is cool."
I assume that my positions seem rather strange to you, so you might doubt that a majority of Europeans feel so differently. There is nothing i can do to "proof" this without major sociological research (which i believe exists, but its not my specialty - coding is more fun). Perhaps a longer stay in Europe would give you the same impression in terms how much European political and every-day culture differs from the US.
Fair enough Europeans are fairly ethnocentric too.
Here's a tip: don't go home yet. You don't understand American culture yet.
somehow contradicts the standard
Go away silly troll.
You can never understand a culture completely anyway, especially none as rich as the American. So I will go home this year anyway.
The religious folk didn't get "shipped" here; they fled here to escape your "philosophically enlightened" European governments.
I am aware of this. But I don't think there ever was an enlightened government - at least not to my knowledge would be nice though, wouldn't it?
Anyway the European governments at that time were certainly happy to get rid of people they perceived as potential trouble makers.
We are grateful beyond measure that your "philosophical Enlightenment" didn't arrive here in quite the same way it did in, say, France, where thousands went to the guillotine for the sake of this "Enlightened Philosophy."
No, i am not going to make a cheap reply in the technological advance of execution machines. I mean we know that the US always has the top of the line stuff.
For the record too, I think it ought to be said that Europeans weren't exactly innocent in the slave trade (lest you think that a uniquely American vice).
Look this is not for the record. It is not for saying yeah, we are so much greater because of ***bluberbluber --- fill in the space ***
I am just wondering why the political culture in this country differs so much from Europe. For example: Why do people believe religiously in the death penalty? Why is the sexual life of a politician more important than his legislative record? I try to understand this, and I am not claiming that i've got an compelling answer. You are more than welcome to enlighten me if you think you've got an answer.
When you speak of unhealthy nationalism -- let me make sure I understand. Do you mean the sort of "unhealthy nationalism" that is destroying Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Herzegovina, etc. right now? Sorry, no. We don't have any of that here (and yes, I wish we would keep our noses out your European problems. We have enough of our own).
Well, are you sure you don't have any of this? Nationalism and racism are an attitude, war is the most radical outcome. Many of what i see here worries me.
I enjoyed reading a sensible, moderated and balanced statement here, no matter of pro or contra Gore. It is embarrassing to witness the poor quality of political "discussion" here. I am European - currently studying in the US. My reason to come here was to learn more about the culture of this country and to better understand it. I also tried to understand why it has such a crappy foreign policy. Well, now i know the political culture of this country. To be precise the lovely WHITE political culture of this country. Its plain scary.
I think its funny that most of the stuff that people outside of this country love about the US has BLACK roots. Especially the music.
I do not exactly know what's gone wrong with the white American culture, after all they all are European descendants. Is it because Europe shipped all the religious fanatics to this continent? Is it because the philosophical Enlightenment movement never got a stronghold in the US? Or did the US just retain the unhealthy nationalism that burned Europe in the first half of this century? Hopefully the demographics in the US shift fast enough (I am talking decades here) to prevent the worst.
You mentioned Hitler. Well the interesting thing in WWII is that many ordinary not necessarily evil German men committed horrible crimes just because they were ordered to do so. There was an interesting psychological experiment done in the US in the 60s were men from the street were asked to participate in an experiment. They were told they had to reinforce the learning of another man by giving him an electrical shock when ever he makes a mistake in answering a question about something he was supposed to memorize. All participants were told before the experiment that shocks over 100V can be potentially deadly. During the experiment an instructor told them to increase the voltage. All participants followed the order. Many went until the very end of the scale. None stopped even when the bonded "learner" begged them to. The "learner" was of course an actor, but the participants did not know. I saw the footage once on public TV. It was scary.
Why do I tell that here? Well, if you ever saw an organizational chart of the government structure of the 3. Reich you notice it has a superficial similarity to a company.
You are certainly right that companies are not inherently bad, but they are not inherently good either, and a bad boss might make you do bad things. How much do you compromise before you walk out? How much do you have to compromise because you need to earn the food on the table and can not walk out?
I think the discussion clearly uncovered that the difference between biotech and IT is the fact that the latter is clearly intangible, whereas hands-on biotech research needs capital intensive facilities. But the ideas - the algorithms how to produce what - are intangible. That is what bothers me: Until the beginning of this century all research was either government sponsored or private leisure of wealthy individuals (with notable exception of Edison, Tesla, perhaps a couple more). X-rays were discovered in Germany by Roentgen who did not even understood why he should patent this discovery when somebody asked him about it. When the first antibiotics was discovered by chance in France the findings were published immediately. The scientists weren't in it for the money, but the recognition. Just as your average Gnome or KDE developer is in it for the recognition. And though there is no money involved we certainly see a lot of competition going on there.
FallLine was pointing out that the market resource allocation based on financial analysis is more efficient than government sponsoring. I tend to believe that this is correct for most material, scarce resources. I just don't see why a financial analysts should be more qualified in assessing the chances of a researcher to succeed than a government agency which decides - for example - based on a peer review process.
What bothers me even more is the fact that while a researcher works in this company he can not disclose his information to another scientist somewhere else. He can not ask for advice if he has to uncover any specific knowledge. He might end up in a dead end just because he can not publish his results.
That is of course true. I just picked that example to emphasize the moral dilemma.
Copyleft works for IT because you just need a computer and internet access to produce and share good code. If state of the art laboratories were comparably cheap as a PC, copyright on biotech would be really ugly.
R&D is treated as sunk cost by a firm. Afterwards the finance people will maximize the cash inflow, the longer the better. That means the price the world has to pay for the product is completely unrelated to the effort for R&D once the product is ready.
The more I think about RMS argument the more I think he has a point. The ethical problem with intellectual property is just not that apparent with IT. Consider biotechnology. Just imagine a firm controlled the intellectual property to cure AIDS. They'd maximize profit. The first world is paying like crazy and the third world victims are even to poor to afford a bullet to shoot themselves.
The idea of a Norwegian company taking over the world is pretty strange. On the other hand perhaps not for somebody who only knows the American business culture. I know both and have to report that the US business culture seems to me very aggressive very marketing and finance driven. A business culture that tries to get as much money as possible for as little offered value as possible. In Europe I see more emphasize on a good vendor customer relationship. Something I call "white" marketing as opposed to the M$ fud and vaporware approach as a perfect example for "black" marketing.
Rest assured Norway/Trolltec != Redmond/M$
The license issue is important, and Gnome did a great job straightening Trolltec out, but the real danger to Linux is black marketing. It worries me that Gnome broke with the long standing tradition in the free software world of honoring only a rock solid product as 1.0 version. This smells of black marketing. I was using Linux when it was still a 0.9xxx version and it worked flawlessly, gees I preferred it to the Sun I had at work. I hope the licensees are strong enough to protect Linux from being perverted by black marketing, but courts work slowly, and the IT world changes rapidly.
Does anybody knows if there ever was a successful court ruling regarding a GPL or other open source licensees violation?
Outsourcing means that they can discontinue support anytime. It would have been more convincing if they committed an internal division for that support. But at this time they do not seem to think that there is a need for them to acquire Linux expertise in-house.
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I am not so sure you can not do that with Troll Tec's Qt licence. Why not firing an email to them asking them if you can?
Once again Norway is not Redmond. Even if the licence would not cover what you want to do, I am certain they would not bother you if you don't plan to sell your embedded system big time. In the latter case it may just seem fair to give them a little margin on your profit.
It is good that the Open Source Community can afford to develop two desktop environments, so that the best technology for a specific purpose can be picked.
Do you mean this Bill Gates persona? The perhaps most hated man on the Web?
The fact that he is admired by others does not diminish the hate he instills in many people.
Do not get me wrong, I do not hate him. He is just not particularly important to my life. But I would not want to be in his shoes. I do not like the prospect of being bombarded with a cake when I show up somewhere (like it happened to him in Brussel).
Now would i love to be in Linus shoes? Hell, yes, people love him for good reasons.
Not at all, if the people discussing these questions maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect. These questions have to be addressed in a constructive and thoughtfull way. Just to drive this message home: These things have to be discussed in a mature way, and not on the level things are usally "discussed" on /.
I still don't like their selling scheme though, since it is a breach of the nice academic tradition to publish your results freely. Being a german government sponsered institute their results should be free for academic and non-commercial usage. Heck, even the 100% commercial StarDivision Inc. allows free-usage of their OfficeSuit for those purposes.
I asked the same thing earlier, I don't undertsand how Frauenhoffer can have a patent on this.
They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
I can see that the original code is not GNU protected. In my experience in Europe we are less aware of how necessary that is, because companies in general do not tend to act so agressive i.e. they aren't that sue-happy as in the US. It is kind of ironic: in a more "socialistic" Europe the awarness to defend our open-source freedom is less keen than in an agressivly capitalistic USA.
How can Frauenhoffer have a patent on this?
They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
I don't know if you'll see this, since this topic has scrolled...but just in case :-)
:-)
Well, i saw it and appreciate the answers. Now of course I don't know if you will read it. Anyway I
guess we are the last to post new messages to this threat
Interestingly enough your answers highlights the amazing cultural difference, that I perceive between
Europe and the US. Let's take the first question. In most European countries prisons are
designed to reintegrate people into society. That means for example you offer them the
possibility to get an education in the prison. This idea is generally accepted and believe it or not
works reasonably well. Of course you will also find criminals who stay criminal, but to my
knowledge it fares statistically far better than the US prison system. Statistical results of
the justice system are the benchmarks for European politicians. For me it is very alien to mix
religion with that issue. I can just assume that on the other hand this rather emotionally detached
result oriented approach to "engineer" a justice system must sound very alien to most Americans.
To my knowledge their is no statistically significant study that shows that death penalty reduces the
number of capital crime. Interestingly enough there is a study showing that the capital crime rate in
Canada actually dropped after abolishing the death penalty.
Regarding the Clinton issue: I can see your legal standpoint. I am in no position to make a
judgment if those offense were for real or not. You said he lied under oath, well if that is a fact he
should be convicted for it. Most Europeans simply do not understand why these trials were not put
on hold until he is out of office, because the performance of the government is regarded as having
the higher priority than private trials. Of course you say it has been proofed that he is a rapist. I did
not follow that whole affair to closely, but I can not recall that he forced anybody to have sex. But
perhaps we have a different definition of rape.
If you made a survey in Europe regarding the question:
Does a politicians sexual appetite influence your voting decision?
You will find that a vast majority of people would answer you with a puzzled "No". Puzzled
because that question does not even make a lot of sense to them. They might ask you: Do you
mean that he/she has a very active sex live with different partners? If you answer "Yes" you might
end up with a minority of people saying "Yes, that influences my decision because such a lifestyle is
cool."
I assume that my positions seem rather strange to you, so you might doubt that a majority of
Europeans feel so differently. There is nothing i can do to "proof" this without major sociological
research (which i believe exists, but its not my specialty - coding is more fun). Perhaps a longer stay
in Europe would give you the same impression in terms how much European political and every-day
culture differs from the US.
Why not grilling all prospective candidates on their stance on the use of cryptography and lame software patents?
Then give your vote to whomever has some decent ideas how to deal with those issues.
Just my 2 cents of wisdom, I can't vote for any of them anyway.
Fair enough Europeans are fairly ethnocentric too.
Here's a tip: don't go home yet. You don't understand American culture yet.
somehow contradicts the standard
Go away silly troll.
You can never understand a culture completely anyway, especially none as rich as the American. So I will go home this year anyway.
The religious folk didn't get "shipped" here; they fled here to escape your "philosophically enlightened" European governments.
I am aware of this. But I don't think there ever was an enlightened government - at least not to my knowledge would be nice though, wouldn't it?
Anyway the European governments at that time were certainly happy to get rid of people they perceived as potential trouble makers.
We are grateful beyond measure that your "philosophical Enlightenment" didn't arrive here in quite the same way it did in, say, France, where thousands went to the guillotine for the sake of this "Enlightened Philosophy."
No, i am not going to make a cheap reply in the technological advance of execution machines. I mean we know that the US always has the top of the line stuff.
For the record too, I think it ought to be said that Europeans weren't exactly innocent in the slave trade (lest you think that a uniquely American vice).
Look this is not for the record. It is not for saying yeah, we are so much greater because of ***bluberbluber --- fill in the space ***
I am just wondering why the political culture in this country differs so much from Europe. For example: Why do people believe religiously in the death penalty? Why is the sexual life of a politician more important than his legislative record? I try to understand this, and I am not claiming that i've got an compelling answer. You are more than welcome to enlighten me if you think you've got an answer.
When you speak of unhealthy nationalism -- let me make sure I understand. Do you mean the sort of "unhealthy nationalism" that is destroying Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Herzegovina, etc. right now? Sorry, no. We don't have any of that here (and yes, I wish we would keep our noses out your European problems. We have enough of our own).
Well, are you sure you don't have any of this? Nationalism and racism are an attitude, war is the most radical outcome. Many of what i see here worries me.
I enjoyed reading a sensible, moderated and balanced statement here, no matter of pro or contra Gore. It is embarrassing to witness the poor quality of political "discussion" here. I am European - currently studying in the US. My reason to come here was to learn more about the culture of this country and to better understand it. I also tried to understand why it has such a crappy foreign policy. Well, now i know the political culture of this country. To be precise the lovely WHITE political culture of this country. Its plain scary.
I think its funny that most of the stuff that people outside of this country love about the US has BLACK roots. Especially the music.
I do not exactly know what's gone wrong with the white American culture, after all they all are European descendants. Is it because Europe shipped all the religious fanatics to this continent? Is it because the philosophical Enlightenment movement never got a stronghold in the US? Or did the US just retain the unhealthy nationalism that burned Europe in the first half of this century? Hopefully the demographics in the US shift fast enough (I am talking decades here) to prevent the worst.
You mentioned Hitler. Well the interesting thing in WWII is that many ordinary not necessarily
evil German men committed horrible crimes just because they were ordered to do so. There was an
interesting psychological experiment done in the US in the 60s were men from the street were asked
to participate in an experiment. They were told they had to reinforce the learning of another man
by giving him an electrical shock when ever he makes a mistake in answering a question about
something he was supposed to memorize. All participants were told before the experiment that
shocks over 100V can be potentially deadly. During the experiment an instructor told them to
increase the voltage. All participants followed the order. Many went until the very end of the
scale. None stopped even when the bonded "learner" begged them to. The "learner" was of
course an actor, but the participants did not know. I saw the footage once on public TV. It
was scary.
Why do I tell that here? Well, if you ever saw an organizational chart of the government structure
of the 3. Reich you notice it has a superficial similarity to a company.
You are certainly right that companies are not inherently bad, but they are not inherently good
either, and a bad boss might make you do bad things. How much do you compromise before you
walk out? How much do you have to compromise because you need to earn the food on the table
and can not walk out?
I think the discussion clearly uncovered that the difference between biotech and IT is the fact
that the latter is clearly intangible, whereas hands-on biotech research needs capital intensive facilities. But the ideas - the algorithms how to produce what - are intangible. That is what bothers me: Until the beginning of this century all research was either government sponsored or private leisure of wealthy individuals (with notable exception of Edison, Tesla, perhaps a couple more). X-rays were discovered in Germany by Roentgen who did not even understood why he should patent this discovery when somebody asked him about it. When the first antibiotics was discovered by chance in France the findings were published immediately. The scientists weren't in it for the money, but the recognition. Just as your average Gnome or KDE developer is in it for the recognition. And though there is no money involved we certainly see a lot of competition going on there.
FallLine was pointing out that the market resource allocation based on financial analysis is more efficient than government sponsoring. I tend to believe that this is correct for most material, scarce resources. I just don't see why a financial analysts should be more qualified in assessing the chances of a researcher to succeed than a government agency which decides - for example - based on a peer review process.
What bothers me even more is the fact that while a researcher works in this company he can not disclose his information to another scientist somewhere else. He can not ask for advice if he has to uncover any specific knowledge. He might end up in a dead end just because he can not publish his results.
That is of course true. I just picked that example to emphasize the moral dilemma.
Copyleft works for IT because you just need a computer and internet access to produce and share good code. If state of the art
laboratories were comparably cheap as a PC, copyright on biotech would be really ugly.
R&D is treated as sunk cost by a firm. Afterwards the finance people will maximize the cash inflow, the longer the better. That means the
price the world has to pay for the product is completely unrelated to the effort for R&D once the product is ready.
The more I think about RMS argument the more I think he has a point. The ethical problem with intellectual property is just not that
apparent with IT. Consider biotechnology. Just imagine a firm controlled the intellectual property to cure AIDS. They'd maximize profit.
The first world is paying like crazy and the third world victims are even to poor to afford a bullet to shoot themselves.
Do not fear the trolls.
The idea of a Norwegian company taking over the world is pretty strange. On the other hand perhaps not for somebody who only knows
the American business culture. I know both and have to report that the US business culture seems to me very aggressive very marketing
and finance driven. A business culture that tries to get as much money as possible for as little offered value as possible. In Europe I see
more emphasize on a good vendor customer relationship. Something I call "white" marketing as opposed to the M$ fud and vaporware
approach as a perfect example for "black" marketing.
Rest assured Norway/Trolltec != Redmond/M$
The license issue is important, and Gnome did a great job straightening Trolltec out, but the real danger to Linux is black marketing. It
worries me that Gnome broke with the long standing tradition in the free software world of honoring only a rock solid product as 1.0
version. This smells of black marketing. I was using Linux when it was still a 0.9xxx version and it worked flawlessly, gees I preferred it to
the Sun I had at work. I hope the licensees are strong enough to protect Linux from being perverted by black marketing, but courts work
slowly, and the IT world changes rapidly.
Does anybody knows if there ever was a successful court ruling regarding a GPL or other open source licensees violation?
Outsourcing means that they can discontinue support anytime. It would have been more convincing if they committed an internal division for that support. But at this time they do not seem to think that there is a need for them to acquire Linux expertise in-house.