actually jQuery is a great example. Microsoft recently integrated it into Visual Studio - which wouldn't have been possible if it had been released under the GPL since they added intellisense support and integration into ASP.NET.
So out of all of those frameworks, which together cover the vast majority of web applications and web services being built today, not a single one of them is GPL only.
So web projects are very much trending away from the GPL - and the reason why is what I discussed in this thread previously ie. allowing companies who build on top of these products more flexibility. The developers, by choosing a more permissive license, have elected more flexibility for users, and thus potentially more popularity, over a sharing restriction.
That is my point. Those who have no intention of releasing code are not going to regardless of what the license says.
When you have a party that derives code but then becomes uncooperative, what value do they add to the community in any case?
The key benefit of open source is that with an efficient ecosystem of code production and maintenance, developers have a readily accessible repository of code that solves known common problems.
This code can be used so that wheels are not re-invented, and so that businesses become more efficient by instead focusing on 'differential' aspects of their service or product offerings rather than plumbing code.
Since Linux, operating systems are now commoditized, and companies such as Google and Amazon have gone on to use this 'plumbing' to build great services. Without open source, both companies would have spent an extra 5-10 years on development, and likely would never have existed.
The problem now is that the FSF looked at all these companies with billion dollar valuations who were all built on open source plumbing code and decided that it wasn't fair - so they are trying to put an end to it with GPLv3 and the new services provisions.
These new forces being applied to what is an extremely efficient ecosystem of code sharing will completely break apart open source as we know it. The next Google or Amazon will have to look at either other commercial solutions, or more liberally licensed plumbing code in order to build their services platforms.
Forced sharing is simply another restrictive force in the economics of open code. Companies will be a lot less likely to contribute and a lot less likely to participate in this environment if they are restricted in what they can do with the code they have built on open code.
I can name dozens of examples, and more recently they have mostly been with more liberal licenses.
The key question is, does enforcing sharing in the license actually provide for a better overall open source ecosystem.
From my experience, the answer is no - because the downside of having companies not wanting to touch GPL'd code for fear of legal challenge and problems *FAR* outweighs the potential benefits of having those companies contribute resources with more liberal licensed code.
Overall, I find that companies are *more likely* to contribute or to allow developers who work for them to contribute code if the license is a simple, more liberal license.
ie. the parameters of a BSD or MIT license are much easier to understand, and the decision making within a company is easier - especially considering that the driving force for wanting to share code usually comes from the bottom-up, ie. from developers themselves.
The theoretical question here is - would the top 10 GPL'd projects have been more or less successful if they were released under a more liberal open source license that didn't enforce sharing?
I want the people who extend my software to give their extensions to the world to share, the same way I gave them my original program. So, my payback for writing Open Source is that my software drives a further increase in the amount of available Open Source software, beyond my individual contribution.
Has anybody ever proven this?
ie. has it ever been proven that attaching a 'must share' clause to a license (ie. GPL vs BSD) actually results in more people sharing code.
I am inclined to think and believe, based on experience, that it does not. Those who share are likely to share regardless of license, ditto to those who take your code and improve it with no intention of sharing.
Just how much does 'sharing' contribute to open source anyway, considering that all the top projects are tightly controlled by a small number of lead developers who hold the keys to commitments and in accepting patches. Code being shared will likely just go unnoticed anyway.
So, after 10 years, has anyone proven that the GPL works?
All you guys posting jokes, do me a favor. Bookmark this page, then when you grow up - say in 5 or 10 years, however long it takes you, come back to this thread and read what you wrote. You will then notice, like the rest of us reading this now, that you are all completely insensitive dicks..
a data centre, wine cellar, rave club or fifties theme park.
Yes, a rave club. With 60 miles of roads we could almost fit all the ravers down there.. and keep them there.
Customs Minister Chris Ellison will meet software developers and industry groups tomorrow after finding persistent bugs in the latest version of the Australian Customs Service's ambitious new import and export system.
Most of version 3 of the system was delivered to developers last week for testing, but problems have persisted. "Customs is burning money like it is going out of style," one developer told Next.
The Customs Office and it's IT outsourcing arrangements have previously been the subject of a senate enquiry, lets hope that they get nothing less again this time around and the people responsible are bought to account. One thing I did notice is that not a single article reports on who the developers behind the project are. My knowledge is that Computer Associates have slowly started taking over things from EDS at customs - can anyone confirm?
This sector is really interesting and heating up. Skype is not a standard, so Skype can only talk to Skype and they are trying to create their own version of what they consider internet telephony to be, a bit like MSN in the early days of the net. What the potential valuations of Skype do not look into are what they actually offer. Some here have already pointed out that free messenger services such as MSN and Yahoo! already offer voice, at better quality, so what is it that skype does other than link phone numbers to skype usernames? This is a perfect scenario for an open source application to make use of an open standard such as SIP (Which is compatible with a lot of hardware, and existing voip networks) and to create a multi-platform consumer product that provides zero lock-in (as skype does).
These telephony apps are the browsers for the voice internet, so nothing less than a full browser war would be expected. Hence the reason why incompatible applications such as skype will die away as newer and better open source applications that can inter-operate are released and taken up. I would even speculate that a voip client ('browser') would be much easier to develop than an open source web browser, and I think it is high time that the open source crowds jumps in to promote and develop the alternatives to these nasty commercial applications.
This is not a story
on
Shopping Online
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Is it just me, or does this 'story' from 'a reader' reak of being an advertisement? Note that half of the links have referrer information in them, obviously to rake up some $ for OSTG:
First http://ostg.pricegrabber.com/ (ostg sub-domain), then http://www.tigerdirect.com/indexus.asp?SRCCODE=SLA SHX, then a blatant plug for thinkgeek (a major source of revenue for LNUX). Should slashdot not disclose if they are affiliated in any way with all links? What is the purpose of the pricegrabber.com sub-domain, and the SRCCODE in the tigerdirect link?
Other problems with Kyoto are governments mis-calculating their emissions and sending their countries into the red, with a devestating effect on their economies. Take for example New Zealand, whos govermnet originally predicted a $500 Million windfall from Kyoto due to reduced emissions, but last week the news broke that their calculations were wrong and instead their Kyoto bill wil come to $1 Billion. It is big news over in New Zealand, with the federal budget now in negative territory before it and the government are re-evaluating their Kyoto commitment. They are now looking at increasing corporate taxes to pay the Kyoto bill, leaving many unhappy. Many European nations are now in the same boat.
Bigger news on this front would be the Nuclear Fusion reactor Being built in France, and China announcing the next day that they will also be building a Fusion reactor. Clean energy? Not for at least another decade..
Well, benefit in the sense that the chances that a Claria under Microsoft will continue carrying on installing and promoting the crap software they have is zero. I dont really care about how they will use it with MSN since I am not a user.
Microsoft buying Claria has nothing to do with Gator, spyware, blocking popups (oh my). What they are after is Gain, which is a Claria product. The reason why? Might have something to do with Gain being the most advanced targeted advertising system on earth. Think about it, Microsoft want to extend MSN and have it compete with Google. The main Google attraction at the moment is the advertising model, you get specific ads, and retailers can tailer their ads to only the users who want to see them. For Microsoft to get here, they can either try to re-produce such a system themselves, or go and buy the *best* system for targeted advertising that exists at the moment, so they go to Claria! The net result is that MSN offers extremely targeted advertising, much better than what Google can offer, which increases the value of the ads meaning less ads are required! Quiet the opposite of the scenarios being discussed here thus far. From the Gain site:
GAIN Network advertising programs can generate click-through rates 20 to 40 times higher than traditional banner ads, because through GAIN, advertisers can reach consumers across the Web, at exactly the right time in their buying cycle.
Taking into account buying cycles for ads? Unheard of anywhere else (many other features such as this that Google currently can not match). The one disadvantage that Gain does have is that it installes software (smileys, free screensavers etc.) that are used to collect the information to tailor the ads. What Microsoft will have to do instead is use their MSN services (Hotmail, MSN messenger etc.) to get this data from the users. By extending the collection of data across the whole MSN install base, the value of reaching this network for advertises is orders of magnitude larger than anything else
End result? We all benefit.. MSN gets better advertisements, and if they follow Google's lead site owners will be able to integrate this technology into their own sites, and at the same time they drop all the crap that Claria used to carry because Microsoft will use their own software to track what ads it should send you.
Microsoft buying Claria has nothing to do with Gator. What they are after is Gain, which is a Claria product. The reason why? Might have something to do with Gain being the most advanced targeted advertising system on earth. Think about it, Microsoft want to extend MSN and have it compete with Google. The main Google attraction at the moment is the advertising model, you get specific ads, and retailers can tailer their ads to only the users who want to see them. For Microsoft to get here, they can either try to re-produce such a system themselves, or go and buy the *best* system for targeted advertising that exists at the moment, so they go to Claria!
The net result is that MSN offers extremely targeted advertising, much better than what Google can offer, which increases the value of the ads meaning less ads are required! Quiet the opposite of the scenarios being discussed here thus far.
From the Gain site:
GAIN Network advertising programs can generate click-through rates 20 to 40 times higher than traditional banner ads, because through GAIN, advertisers can reach consumers across the Web, at exactly the right time in their buying cycle.
Taking into account buying cycles for ads? Unheard of anywhere else (many other features such as this that Google currently can not match). The one disadvantage that Gain does have is that it installes software (smileys, free screensavers etc.) that are used to collect the information to tailor the ads. What Microsoft will have to do instead is use their MSN services (Hotmail, MSN messenger etc.) to get this data from the users. By extending the collection of data across the whole MSN install base, the value of reaching this network for advertises is orders of magnitude larger than anything else.
The laws prohibiting marijuana were lobbied for in the 20's and 30's by "yellow journalists". These were newspaper men who sold large quanitites of newspapers and had large stakes in wood pulp based newsprint.
Yellow Journalists is the name given to early tabloid journalists who worked with Pulitzers New York Globe newspaper, which is seen to be the first tabloid paper which reported sensational entertainment stories as opposed to straight out news. Hertz did not have much of a stake in logging rights and paper manufacture, he controlled a large stake (60%) of the steel industry. Hemp does not compete with steel:)
While it is true that business did play a part in banning hemp, it was more to do with concern for productivity and social morals than anything else. To those pointing out the fact that alcohol is legal, you must remember that at the time it was not, and it took a lot of effort and loss of control of the black market to bring it back to being legal again. From what I know, most Americans at the time agreed with prohibition, as well as the banning of hemp.
They are not even an open source or linux company anymore, even the CEO said so. If you look into the financial reports, most of their income is from advertising on OSDN, and merchandise. The fact that their results and stock price fluctuates at christmas shopping time (thinkgeek sales) demonstrates just how much they are not and open source of linux company any more.
But Open Source Software just wasn't meant to make money. Thats why a lot of these VCs are misguided and investing on hype, not based on purely business potential factors.
When I see those kinds of numbers, I can't help but wonder what in hell happened to make the project fail.
Easy. They produced something that people didnt want to pay for. And that is more likely to happen with open source since cost is the main attraction factor.
It can launch sattelites, it can put people and large payloads into orbit and it is magnitudes cheaper. Admit it - the Russian system is a lot more efficient than the NASA system, NASA is clinging to the shuttle. Oh - and I would like to see a reference to the Russian system being 'crappier'.
Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.
The Russians would just build a Hubble that worked, a bit like the pencil story
Why are these companies always portrayed in a negative light with the assumption that they are bad? I see nothing wrong with Gratis - they are filling a need for the companies that are willing to pay up to $60 per lead. Gratis meet all their obligations to both clients and referred customers for their clients. Why must everyone then assume that they are somehow evil? They have made a lot of money doing what they do, and a lot of people have received iPods for their efforts - the owners are even willing to have their full names published in the NYT which shows that they have nothing to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
It has already overtaken when it comes to open source web applications and frameworks. See my other comment: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1129863&cid=26875795
actually jQuery is a great example. Microsoft recently integrated it into Visual Studio - which wouldn't have been possible if it had been released under the GPL since they added intellisense support and integration into ASP.NET.
That might be right, because Freshmeat is mostly desktop applications and small utilities.
If you look at more recent projects, especially web-related projects (such as web frameworks) there is an increasing trend towards more permissive licenses. Looking at frameworks (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_application_frameworks):
RubyOnRails: MIT
Django: MIT
CakePHP: MIT
Codeigniter: BSD
Zend Framework: BSD
Symfony: MIT
Turbogears: MIT & LGPL
jQuery: MIT & GPL
Dojo: Academic free
Prototype: MIT
Script.aculo.us: MIT
Y! UI: BSD
All the apache javaEE projects: Apache
Out of the top projects on GitHub, I could only count two that were GPL'd: http://github.com/popular/forked
So out of all of those frameworks, which together cover the vast majority of web applications and web services being built today, not a single one of them is GPL only.
So web projects are very much trending away from the GPL - and the reason why is what I discussed in this thread previously ie. allowing companies who build on top of these products more flexibility. The developers, by choosing a more permissive license, have elected more flexibility for users, and thus potentially more popularity, over a sharing restriction.
That is my point. Those who have no intention of releasing code are not going to regardless of what the license says.
When you have a party that derives code but then becomes uncooperative, what value do they add to the community in any case?
The key benefit of open source is that with an efficient ecosystem of code production and maintenance, developers have a readily accessible repository of code that solves known common problems.
This code can be used so that wheels are not re-invented, and so that businesses become more efficient by instead focusing on 'differential' aspects of their service or product offerings rather than plumbing code.
Since Linux, operating systems are now commoditized, and companies such as Google and Amazon have gone on to use this 'plumbing' to build great services. Without open source, both companies would have spent an extra 5-10 years on development, and likely would never have existed.
The problem now is that the FSF looked at all these companies with billion dollar valuations who were all built on open source plumbing code and decided that it wasn't fair - so they are trying to put an end to it with GPLv3 and the new services provisions.
These new forces being applied to what is an extremely efficient ecosystem of code sharing will completely break apart open source as we know it. The next Google or Amazon will have to look at either other commercial solutions, or more liberally licensed plumbing code in order to build their services platforms.
Forced sharing is simply another restrictive force in the economics of open code. Companies will be a lot less likely to contribute and a lot less likely to participate in this environment if they are restricted in what they can do with the code they have built on open code.
I can name dozens of examples, and more recently they have mostly been with more liberal licenses.
The key question is, does enforcing sharing in the license actually provide for a better overall open source ecosystem.
From my experience, the answer is no - because the downside of having companies not wanting to touch GPL'd code for fear of legal challenge and problems *FAR* outweighs the potential benefits of having those companies contribute resources with more liberal licensed code.
Overall, I find that companies are *more likely* to contribute or to allow developers who work for them to contribute code if the license is a simple, more liberal license.
ie. the parameters of a BSD or MIT license are much easier to understand, and the decision making within a company is easier - especially considering that the driving force for wanting to share code usually comes from the bottom-up, ie. from developers themselves.
The theoretical question here is - would the top 10 GPL'd projects have been more or less successful if they were released under a more liberal open source license that didn't enforce sharing?
Has anybody ever proven this?
ie. has it ever been proven that attaching a 'must share' clause to a license (ie. GPL vs BSD) actually results in more people sharing code.
I am inclined to think and believe, based on experience, that it does not. Those who share are likely to share regardless of license, ditto to those who take your code and improve it with no intention of sharing.
Just how much does 'sharing' contribute to open source anyway, considering that all the top projects are tightly controlled by a small number of lead developers who hold the keys to commitments and in accepting patches. Code being shared will likely just go unnoticed anyway.
So, after 10 years, has anyone proven that the GPL works?
All you guys posting jokes, do me a favor. Bookmark this page, then when you grow up - say in 5 or 10 years, however long it takes you, come back to this thread and read what you wrote. You will then notice, like the rest of us reading this now, that you are all completely insensitive dicks..
a data centre, wine cellar, rave club or fifties theme park. Yes, a rave club. With 60 miles of roads we could almost fit all the ravers down there.. and keep them there.
CMR is a Web-based model..
This sounds like a job for RubyOnRails!:
"Done in 10% of the time it takes a consortium of 4 large global companies to do government funded situps!"
</sarcasm>Forget that ... how about a robot that just boils an egg?
This sector is really interesting and heating up. Skype is not a standard, so Skype can only talk to Skype and they are trying to create their own version of what they consider internet telephony to be, a bit like MSN in the early days of the net. What the potential valuations of Skype do not look into are what they actually offer. Some here have already pointed out that free messenger services such as MSN and Yahoo! already offer voice, at better quality, so what is it that skype does other than link phone numbers to skype usernames? This is a perfect scenario for an open source application to make use of an open standard such as SIP (Which is compatible with a lot of hardware, and existing voip networks) and to create a multi-platform consumer product that provides zero lock-in (as skype does).
These telephony apps are the browsers for the voice internet, so nothing less than a full browser war would be expected. Hence the reason why incompatible applications such as skype will die away as newer and better open source applications that can inter-operate are released and taken up. I would even speculate that a voip client ('browser') would be much easier to develop than an open source web browser, and I think it is high time that the open source crowds jumps in to promote and develop the alternatives to these nasty commercial applications.
I have expanded on this with more information and links in a weblog post about Kyoto and its effects on economies, plus fusion as a saviour.
First http://ostg.pricegrabber.com/ (ostg sub-domain), then http://www.tigerdirect.com/indexus.asp?SRCCODE=SLA SHX, then a blatant plug for thinkgeek (a major source of revenue for LNUX). Should slashdot not disclose if they are affiliated in any way with all links? What is the purpose of the pricegrabber.com sub-domain, and the SRCCODE in the tigerdirect link?
Bigger news on this front would be the Nuclear Fusion reactor Being built in France, and China announcing the next day that they will also be building a Fusion reactor. Clean energy? Not for at least another decade..
Well, benefit in the sense that the chances that a Claria under Microsoft will continue carrying on installing and promoting the crap software they have is zero. I dont really care about how they will use it with MSN since I am not a user.
Microsoft buying Claria has nothing to do with Gator, spyware, blocking popups (oh my). What they are after is Gain, which is a Claria product. The reason why? Might have something to do with Gain being the most advanced targeted advertising system on earth. Think about it, Microsoft want to extend MSN and have it compete with Google. The main Google attraction at the moment is the advertising model, you get specific ads, and retailers can tailer their ads to only the users who want to see them. For Microsoft to get here, they can either try to re-produce such a system themselves, or go and buy the *best* system for targeted advertising that exists at the moment, so they go to Claria! The net result is that MSN offers extremely targeted advertising, much better than what Google can offer, which increases the value of the ads meaning less ads are required! Quiet the opposite of the scenarios being discussed here thus far. From the Gain site:
Taking into account buying cycles for ads? Unheard of anywhere else (many other features such as this that Google currently can not match). The one disadvantage that Gain does have is that it installes software (smileys, free screensavers etc.) that are used to collect the information to tailor the ads. What Microsoft will have to do instead is use their MSN services (Hotmail, MSN messenger etc.) to get this data from the users. By extending the collection of data across the whole MSN install base, the value of reaching this network for advertises is orders of magnitude larger than anything else
End result? We all benefit.. MSN gets better advertisements, and if they follow Google's lead site owners will be able to integrate this technology into their own sites, and at the same time they drop all the crap that Claria used to carry because Microsoft will use their own software to track what ads it should send you.
And I have replied to the wrong thread.. these things happen when you have >20 tabs open :)
While it is true that business did play a part in banning hemp, it was more to do with concern for productivity and social morals than anything else. To those pointing out the fact that alcohol is legal, you must remember that at the time it was not, and it took a lot of effort and loss of control of the black market to bring it back to being legal again. From what I know, most Americans at the time agreed with prohibition, as well as the banning of hemp.
--
weblog at www.perfected.org
They are not even an open source or linux company anymore, even the CEO said so. If you look into the financial reports, most of their income is from advertising on OSDN, and merchandise. The fact that their results and stock price fluctuates at christmas shopping time (thinkgeek sales) demonstrates just how much they are not and open source of linux company any more.
But Open Source Software just wasn't meant to make money. Thats why a lot of these VCs are misguided and investing on hype, not based on purely business potential factors.
More comments here: Venture Capital Targets Open Source
When I see those kinds of numbers, I can't help but wonder what in hell happened to make the project fail.
Easy. They produced something that people didnt want to pay for. And that is more likely to happen with open source since cost is the main attraction factor.
It can launch sattelites, it can put people and large payloads into orbit and it is magnitudes cheaper. Admit it - the Russian system is a lot more efficient than the NASA system, NASA is clinging to the shuttle. Oh - and I would like to see a reference to the Russian system being 'crappier'.
Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.
The Russians would just build a Hubble that worked, a bit like the pencil story
Why are these companies always portrayed in a negative light with the assumption that they are bad? I see nothing wrong with Gratis - they are filling a need for the companies that are willing to pay up to $60 per lead. Gratis meet all their obligations to both clients and referred customers for their clients. Why must everyone then assume that they are somehow evil? They have made a lot of money doing what they do, and a lot of people have received iPods for their efforts - the owners are even willing to have their full names published in the NYT which shows that they have nothing to hide.