Why would you be hand-maintaining most of this software in the first place? Why not standardize on a distro or two that have auto-update functionality and use this to update via cron job against a local repository?
Why wouldn't IBM contribute to the Darwin core if they were finding the Darwin core useful for their own purposes? This saves them the trouble of having to fork the Darwin core. The point is that Apple still has to contribute enough proprietary code on top of the public base to make anyone care enough to pay Apple (since the free stuff is out there for, um, free).
Apple could have just as easily based their entire system on a Linux kernel and GNU software, couldn't they? They wrote their own GUI toolkits and desktop environment software that don't depend on any type of library that is normally under GPL on a GNU/Linux system, right? So if they had used Linux in Mac OS X would that have immediately have driven all of their competitors to some other OS?
Heck, the GPL is the best thing Microsoft has in its arsenal against Free Software, since BSD-ish licenses and the public domain simply lack the kind of "viral" qualities inherent in the GPL. As long as people are releasing code with a "viral" license, MS can propagate FUD about the license. I suspect that if the GPL were ever found unenforceable, most software authors who want to write public code would just switch to a BSD license or the public domain. Sure, this doesn't insist on a "share-and-share-alike" culture, but look at the BSDs. Have they been run out of existence by Mac OS X?
As long as the free software (both beer and speech, yo) exists, no corporate entity is going to be able to simply pull the free stuff, make some trivial changes and then get rich off the new software. They are going to have to add serious value, as Apple did with both Darwin and their Cocoa-or-whatever-it's-called GUI.
Bzzt! It has not been proven at all that the code was infringing. SGI removed it because it posed a potential problem. And really, they said it was maybe 200 lines in millions of lines of code--and it was not essential code. That hardly makes a case for serious damage awards to SCO. Those 200 lines of code can hardly have been the linchpin holding together the rest of the OS, in either the case of Linux, or in the case of whatever Unix it is SCO claims to hold rights to. I fail to see how that code therefore impedes the market for the original in any meaningful way. You forget that copyright is not an absolute right, Fair Use allows for many exceptions.
And in this case, I'd say 200 lines almost sounds like a mistake more than an intentional pattern of abuse. But to award some damages, how about 200 dollars for every 1,000,000 dollars that SGI made off the products that included this code-- that would be proportional to the value added by this code. So, max, SCO makes a few thousand dollars. Big win.
The only thing insane and bizarre is that on the one hand you are talking about "successfully penetrat[ing] the desktop market" but you seem to think that is a reasonable goal for those not working at commercial Linux companies. I should think that for the guy(s) who make these individual programs that their own goal would be to make their program the best it can be-- why should they care about Linux On The Desktop(tm)? Insofar as merging with other projects or working together makes sense for these individuals, that's great, but unless you are going to give them a financial incentive to work together, I see no reason to expect them to do so just because you think there's some sort of "market" to "penetrate".
You can't copyright a company name or a domain name. Just FYI.
Personally, I think this phenomenon falls under the auspices of two adages: know what you're agreeing to and don't put all your eggs in one basket. If the terms of service for this registration did not specify an owner for the domain, or explicitly made the ISP the owner, then he's screwed. The WHOIS record for this domain looks like a person owns it. I don't see why the registrar wouldn't accept changes from him provided he can authenticate. Then there's the problem with one-stop shopping like this. It may look like a great deal, but it seems to me you (more often than not) end up with these kinds of problems. The Happy Meal sounds like a great deal, because it is-- for McDonald's.
Re:What about other software?
on
Mplayer Revisited
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're kidding, right? The only people who should be making any effort to make the end user experience "care free" in the way you describe are the commercial distros. Nobody makes this kind bullshit argument in any other field of endeavor. Do you ever see suggestions that Target should only carry one brand of toothpaste because consumers would find it too difficult to choose between Colgate and Crest? Hell, there's even a whole category of product devoted to people who can't make up their minds: the Variety Pack!
I mean, at StarROMs. Obviously it violates copyright law for classicgaming to distribute without a license, but I would also agree that the law is off-balance.
Sig note: AFAICT, it's "thoughtcrime" or maybe "crimethink"-- in fact, that both of them appear in the Newspeak dictionary indicates that one or the other can probably be eliminated. And "doubleplusungood" is one word, I think.
(And no, I will not be editing sigs written in High Elvish or Klingon. I've sunk low enough already, thanks.)
When you get the slowdown note from Slashdot.... leave the page where it is. Wait. Hit reload. Answer "Retry" to "repost form data" or whatever that dialog says.
but IMHO the way you knock the 800 pound gorilla out of the tree (MS) is with at least a 400 pound gorilla.
And here I thought the best way was a well aimed projectile.
If Microsoft is an 800 pound gorilla, then Red Hat is a fruit fly. MSFT has a market cap of 301 billion dollars. RHAT has a market cap of 1.75 million dollars. MSFT is 172,000 times larger than RHAT in this sense. Or maybe we should compare annual sales revenues (MSFT = 354 * RHAT). Or number of employees (MSFT = 99 * RHAT). Even on this last most favorable measure, RHAT is a ring-tailed lemur compared to the Microsoft gorilla. BTW, most gorillas weigh under 400 pounds.:)
(none of this should be construed as criticism of or dislike for RHAT, I'm a huge fan and shareholder-- I cannot say the same about MSFT)
So what you're saying is that it's easier to pay one's mortgage if one is unemployed and making $0/hr, than if one is employed and making $6/hr? Especially when you consider that the people most likely to move into the more lucrative store manager roles are people who start on the line, I'd say being too haughty about the pay is a bad idea. Not that you'd catch me working in a Mickey D's restaurant.
BTW, unemployed techies may want to take a look at mcdonalds.com's "careers" page. They have four postings for IT professionals (one of the few types of postings they do have)... I'm sure those jobs pay more than $6/hr.
As to the article in question: what a load. I'm employed but I haven't woken up to an alarm clock in years. Nor have I found that employment and beards are antithetical. Nor have I had any real difficulty avoiding the telemarketers. Not even going to touch the gratuitous Bush-bashing (which, while I share the sentiment, I don't see how it relates at all).
This then assumes that its owners are non-management funders.
Wrong. A great number of privately held corporations are actively managed by one or more shareholders. Indeed, it is also the case that with public corporations that persons holding large numbers of shares would be likely candidates for the Board. But even so, every shareholder is a "manager" in the sense that they have input into the overall direction of the corporation.
Not that this invalidates your overall argument. It's obvious that if the main goal were not to generate a financial return on investment that a corporation is a lesser vehicle than a not-for-profit structure. So the choice to use a corporate structure would imply that profit was a goal of the enterprise. I suppose you could ask whether the goal of making a profit was ethical, but that's a whole separate question. And I think most reasonable people would say that if a company performed its operations in an ethical manner, then the profits were ethical. And vice versa.
So how is this better than XML (or YAML or even tab-delimited files) where you could easily make a DTD for Amazon purchases such that something like <purchase buyer="ichimunki"><book isbn="12345"/></purchase> then becomes a valid stream that you could send to them by any means you like (email to xml-orders@amazon.com, ftp://orders.amazon.com/incoming/, http://orders.amazon.com/incoming/, etc)? Things like ISBNs are already well defined with their own syntaxes, so what problem do we have that this solves?
So when Dean provided health care for all those Vermont kids, did that mean that working parents no longer had to pay premiums for their children's health care? Or did it mean that parents who didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay premiums got them paid for with tax money?
And what is a "middle of the road" stance on road building? One that expects that the users of the roads will pay for them from fees directly related to the roads (i.e. license fees, gas taxes, etc) and not from general tax funds?
Why not an incremental approach? Make a style sheet. Identify your classes and elements and stuff. Then as you work with parts of the page(s), change them over to the new form. They may not look any different, but at least you will be laying the groundwork for the next step. Then, once you have maximized this phase, you can start to look at a way to incrementally reduce dependencies on table-based layouts or whatever. Just a thought. The problem, of course, is that you have to be in there actively working on the code anyway. The benefit is that you can stop any time and probably end up better off than you were at the outset.
So, essentially, this solves a problem that doesn't exist, and in a way that sounds like it could create new problems.
Consider that normally the protocal segment of a URI means something about the protocol. http: indicates use of HTTP methods for passing messages. ftp:, gopher:, mailto:, file:, etc:... same thing. Info tells me nothing (ironically) about how to communicate with the resource, unless they are planning to define this further it's a useless idea. It also tells me nothing about what type of info
I get no sense of what this accomplishes that URLs (and appropriate server-side scripts) like http://loc.info/LC1234/ or http://ddc.info/515.1212/ do not. In these cases the server can return information via HTTP that corresponds to the identifiers "LC1234" or "515.1212".
Slashdot Mirror
You argued against the GPL and for BSD.
No. I did not.
Why would you be hand-maintaining most of this software in the first place? Why not standardize on a distro or two that have auto-update functionality and use this to update via cron job against a local repository?
Why wouldn't IBM contribute to the Darwin core if they were finding the Darwin core useful for their own purposes? This saves them the trouble of having to fork the Darwin core. The point is that Apple still has to contribute enough proprietary code on top of the public base to make anyone care enough to pay Apple (since the free stuff is out there for, um, free).
Apple could have just as easily based their entire system on a Linux kernel and GNU software, couldn't they? They wrote their own GUI toolkits and desktop environment software that don't depend on any type of library that is normally under GPL on a GNU/Linux system, right? So if they had used Linux in Mac OS X would that have immediately have driven all of their competitors to some other OS?
Heck, the GPL is the best thing Microsoft has in its arsenal against Free Software, since BSD-ish licenses and the public domain simply lack the kind of "viral" qualities inherent in the GPL. As long as people are releasing code with a "viral" license, MS can propagate FUD about the license. I suspect that if the GPL were ever found unenforceable, most software authors who want to write public code would just switch to a BSD license or the public domain. Sure, this doesn't insist on a "share-and-share-alike" culture, but look at the BSDs. Have they been run out of existence by Mac OS X?
As long as the free software (both beer and speech, yo) exists, no corporate entity is going to be able to simply pull the free stuff, make some trivial changes and then get rich off the new software. They are going to have to add serious value, as Apple did with both Darwin and their Cocoa-or-whatever-it's-called GUI.
How often does it crash? More or less often than sshd?
Bzzt! It has not been proven at all that the code was infringing. SGI removed it because it posed a potential problem. And really, they said it was maybe 200 lines in millions of lines of code--and it was not essential code. That hardly makes a case for serious damage awards to SCO. Those 200 lines of code can hardly have been the linchpin holding together the rest of the OS, in either the case of Linux, or in the case of whatever Unix it is SCO claims to hold rights to. I fail to see how that code therefore impedes the market for the original in any meaningful way. You forget that copyright is not an absolute right, Fair Use allows for many exceptions.
And in this case, I'd say 200 lines almost sounds like a mistake more than an intentional pattern of abuse. But to award some damages, how about 200 dollars for every 1,000,000 dollars that SGI made off the products that included this code-- that would be proportional to the value added by this code. So, max, SCO makes a few thousand dollars. Big win.
The only thing insane and bizarre is that on the one hand you are talking about "successfully penetrat[ing] the desktop market" but you seem to think that is a reasonable goal for those not working at commercial Linux companies. I should think that for the guy(s) who make these individual programs that their own goal would be to make their program the best it can be-- why should they care about Linux On The Desktop(tm)? Insofar as merging with other projects or working together makes sense for these individuals, that's great, but unless you are going to give them a financial incentive to work together, I see no reason to expect them to do so just because you think there's some sort of "market" to "penetrate".
You can't copyright a company name or a domain name. Just FYI.
Personally, I think this phenomenon falls under the auspices of two adages: know what you're agreeing to and don't put all your eggs in one basket. If the terms of service for this registration did not specify an owner for the domain, or explicitly made the ISP the owner, then he's screwed. The WHOIS record for this domain looks like a person owns it. I don't see why the registrar wouldn't accept changes from him provided he can authenticate. Then there's the problem with one-stop shopping like this. It may look like a great deal, but it seems to me you (more often than not) end up with these kinds of problems. The Happy Meal sounds like a great deal, because it is-- for McDonald's.
You're kidding, right? The only people who should be making any effort to make the end user experience "care free" in the way you describe are the commercial distros. Nobody makes this kind bullshit argument in any other field of endeavor. Do you ever see suggestions that Target should only carry one brand of toothpaste because consumers would find it too difficult to choose between Colgate and Crest? Hell, there's even a whole category of product devoted to people who can't make up their minds: the Variety Pack!
Huh? I've seen and used a VHS VCR that would play back videos at double-speed or faster and pitch adjust the audio output.
Do you have links to reports of any of these "raids" performed by "law enforcement officers"?
I mean, at StarROMs. Obviously it violates copyright law for classicgaming to distribute without a license, but I would also agree that the law is off-balance.
Considering that all they have is Atari games, I think your worries are a bit misplaced.
George Orwell on Newspeak.
Sig note: AFAICT, it's "thoughtcrime" or maybe "crimethink"-- in fact, that both of them appear in the Newspeak dictionary indicates that one or the other can probably be eliminated. And "doubleplusungood" is one word, I think.
(And no, I will not be editing sigs written in High Elvish or Klingon. I've sunk low enough already, thanks.)
When you get the slowdown note from Slashdot.... leave the page where it is. Wait. Hit reload. Answer "Retry" to "repost form data" or whatever that dialog says.
but IMHO the way you knock the 800 pound gorilla out of the tree (MS) is with at least a 400 pound gorilla.
:)
And here I thought the best way was a well aimed projectile.
If Microsoft is an 800 pound gorilla, then Red Hat is a fruit fly. MSFT has a market cap of 301 billion dollars. RHAT has a market cap of 1.75 million dollars. MSFT is 172,000 times larger than RHAT in this sense. Or maybe we should compare annual sales revenues (MSFT = 354 * RHAT). Or number of employees (MSFT = 99 * RHAT). Even on this last most favorable measure, RHAT is a ring-tailed lemur compared to the Microsoft gorilla. BTW, most gorillas weigh under 400 pounds.
(none of this should be construed as criticism of or dislike for RHAT, I'm a huge fan and shareholder-- I cannot say the same about MSFT)
So what you're saying is that it's easier to pay one's mortgage if one is unemployed and making $0/hr, than if one is employed and making $6/hr? Especially when you consider that the people most likely to move into the more lucrative store manager roles are people who start on the line, I'd say being too haughty about the pay is a bad idea. Not that you'd catch me working in a Mickey D's restaurant.
BTW, unemployed techies may want to take a look at mcdonalds.com's "careers" page. They have four postings for IT professionals (one of the few types of postings they do have)... I'm sure those jobs pay more than $6/hr.
As to the article in question: what a load. I'm employed but I haven't woken up to an alarm clock in years. Nor have I found that employment and beards are antithetical. Nor have I had any real difficulty avoiding the telemarketers. Not even going to touch the gratuitous Bush-bashing (which, while I share the sentiment, I don't see how it relates at all).
This then assumes that its owners are non-management funders.
Wrong. A great number of privately held corporations are actively managed by one or more shareholders. Indeed, it is also the case that with public corporations that persons holding large numbers of shares would be likely candidates for the Board. But even so, every shareholder is a "manager" in the sense that they have input into the overall direction of the corporation.
Not that this invalidates your overall argument. It's obvious that if the main goal were not to generate a financial return on investment that a corporation is a lesser vehicle than a not-for-profit structure. So the choice to use a corporate structure would imply that profit was a goal of the enterprise. I suppose you could ask whether the goal of making a profit was ethical, but that's a whole separate question. And I think most reasonable people would say that if a company performed its operations in an ethical manner, then the profits were ethical. And vice versa.
So how is this better than XML (or YAML or even tab-delimited files) where you could easily make a DTD for Amazon purchases such that something like <purchase buyer="ichimunki"><book isbn="12345" /></purchase> then becomes a valid stream that you could send to them by any means you like (email to xml-orders@amazon.com, ftp://orders.amazon.com/incoming/, http://orders.amazon.com/incoming/, etc)? Things like ISBNs are already well defined with their own syntaxes, so what problem do we have that this solves?
I'm sorry. I don't see the techie, nerd, geek, IT, whatever connection here. Not a bit. At all. Remotely even hardly resembling maybe.
So when Dean provided health care for all those Vermont kids, did that mean that working parents no longer had to pay premiums for their children's health care? Or did it mean that parents who didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay premiums got them paid for with tax money?
And what is a "middle of the road" stance on road building? One that expects that the users of the roads will pay for them from fees directly related to the roads (i.e. license fees, gas taxes, etc) and not from general tax funds?
You're right. I did get that wrong, but mostly because I'm not sure what problem we have now that this solves.
Why not an incremental approach? Make a style sheet. Identify your classes and elements and stuff. Then as you work with parts of the page(s), change them over to the new form. They may not look any different, but at least you will be laying the groundwork for the next step. Then, once you have maximized this phase, you can start to look at a way to incrementally reduce dependencies on table-based layouts or whatever. Just a thought. The problem, of course, is that you have to be in there actively working on the code anyway. The benefit is that you can stop any time and probably end up better off than you were at the outset.
So, essentially, this solves a problem that doesn't exist, and in a way that sounds like it could create new problems.
... same thing. Info tells me nothing (ironically) about how to communicate with the resource, unless they are planning to define this further it's a useless idea. It also tells me nothing about what type of info
Consider that normally the protocal segment of a URI means something about the protocol. http: indicates use of HTTP methods for passing messages. ftp:, gopher:, mailto:, file:, etc:
I get no sense of what this accomplishes that URLs (and appropriate server-side scripts) like http://loc.info/LC1234/ or http://ddc.info/515.1212/ do not. In these cases the server can return information via HTTP that corresponds to the identifiers "LC1234" or "515.1212".