I think the author of the post you replied to originally didn't actually intend to be taken seriously. As such, I'm assuming that you're simply playing along and not really expecting there to be a project in existence such as the one he mentioned (except maybe for DVL). That's why I left this aside and focused on what I percieved to be the crucial part of your comment ("Is that a tragedy of the Microsoft-ocracy keeping the world closed for users?"), where the reasoning is IMO lacking.
But addressing that other part of your point: Commercial FOSS and proprietary software have similar user friendliness. Likewise, hobbyist FOSS and closed share/freeware apps both often a hassle. Developer attitudes are about the same (my view after having worked 2 jobs as proprietary and now commercial FOSS developer), it depends on whether you have first line support and sales in between. Being allowed to look inside is certainly no impediment, the problem is closed-source copyright licenses: can't publish any modifications, even though you can make them privately while infringing on the EULA (which is legally shaky anyway) since nobody knows at that point. If we're going by examples, I wouldn't call Ubuntu less user friendly than Windows 8, and the random hobbled together CMS on SourceForge is no more a pain in the ass than the proprietary Contrexx* (terrible experience it was... of course, there are good both FOSS and proprietary CMSs). I agree that some projects are annoying to get running, for me there are clearly more on the FOSS side, but then again I've tried out _way_ more of those, since I don't go shopping for dozens of randomly picked software packages and closed freeware is somewhat scarce on my system of choice.
But returning: as already said, even though only few choose to disassemble their Ford, the important part is that it stays _not_ forbidden, independent of the users inclination to actually exercise the option. In the software world on the other hand, we sadly have that situation, which is where I'm having trouble with the analogy.
* a rare case of proprietary "but the source is visible" software, not Free, nor anywhere near OSI approved, but they keep calling their license "Open Source"
If we make hurting people and destroying their property illegal, we can abolish every and all traffic laws. After all, if people obey the law and simply don't hurt anybody, there will be no deaths on the road even without speed limits, regulations on right of way, car safety standards, etc, because the "no killing allowed" law will somehow magically trigger and make the other laws redundant.
I don't get that car analogy.There is a difference between technically being able to acquire all tools and knowhow to replace any particular part on my car (=FOSS)... and being strictly forbidden by the manufacturer to open the hood, being threatened with legal action if I pay some independent expert to peek inside and being told it's all "for my best" (=proprietary software).
I'm allowed to disassemble my Ford (though few choose to), but not my copy of Photoshop.
This particular terminology is System/Kernel, and a not at all exhaustive overview would be: GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu,...) GNU/Hurd (Debian has one such distribution, Arch has another called "Arch Hurd") GNU/kBSD (Debian has one, [0]) GNU/ON (Illumian, a Debian+Solaris kernel distro)
GNU/BSD or GNU/Solaris would be somewhat more like GNU/GNU, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
[0] They call it "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD", as it uses the FreeBSD kernel, which isn't actually called "kBSD" or "kFreeBSD" but has no distinct name, as it's not Mach anymore, but simply "the kernel of FreeBSD"
"Just" a microkernel is fairly straightforward to build if you have a bit of experience. I could make a simple one in two afternoons.
Microkernel OSs with a very limited feature set and somewhat OK-ish performance are feasible, as shown by e.g. velOSity and embedded realtime systems like QNX.
Microkernel OSs that can be used for general purpose computing and offer a nonvanishing fraction of the performance of Linux, XNU or NT are... well, the development times of the L4 family, Hurd (OK, this one has other roadblocks), Sawmill etc. show how hard it is. There have been quite a bunch of microkernel research projects (by at least IBM and Microsoft for what I know, plus the usual bunch of universities), and there has been renewed interest lately. In the future it might come down to "your hardware is fast enough that a performance hit of, say, 50% doesn't matter, and the added stability, security and MUCH simpler life for developers that interact with the lower parts of the system are worth it".
People who think that criminals will give up the guns they possess are very silly. People who think that other people actually think that are just as silly.
The vast majority of the criminal population is made out of folks with low educational backgrounds, who have social problems and/or are desperate. Those citizens have an above-average chance of doing something we consider criminal, and the availability of guns while they're a "normal guy" will influence their readiness for violence, self-assessment (respectively overconfidence) and scale of the crime. But everybody has some of that chance, and heck, if you take the time to actually look at the fates of those people, you'll realise that it could be your neighbour or parents the day after tomorrow, if their life takes a harsh turn tomorrow. In general people first have access to guns, and then become criminals, not the black-and-white "this person was born a criminal and will therefore go and get a gun no matter the legal availability".
The point to take home is that reducing availability and propagation of firearms will undeniably result in fewer criminals with firearms. This has been shown in most modern democracies, the main question is how big this reduction is in practice and how it weighs against the (mainly USA-specific) "guns for liberty from an oppressive government" concept.
Flash, Noscript and Adblock have been available in 64bit browsers for "ages". I've been using Firefox exclusively compiled to 64bit for 3-4 years now (the default in the Debian sid repo) and never had came across incompatible plugin after they released Flash for 64bit. Though... I need only around 15 plugins, so heavier user may have a legitimate reason to use a 32bit browser.
Could you point out some of the plugins that actually don't support a 64bit binary? Windows is 64bit per default now too, isn't it... so you'd expect vendors to keep up.
If software isn't important enough for someone to at least maintain a shared copy of somewhere, why should I care that it goes away? Somone selling software that does something similar must be better enough that folks are willing to pay for the difference.
I guess one might care because it may be a useful tool in the future or because of its cultural/technical/educational value, similar to "abandoned treasures" in other genres. But folks paying for the difference may be doing so because a) of awareness/marketing (see those repackaged LibreOffice sales) and b) it's 1% better (the improved part) than the original, yet the seller is entitled to 100% of the revenue.
It's not the end of days or anything like that, but thinking about how to improve our society, you see how this might be a bone of contention. I.e. codebases getting less attention than they "deserve" just because some company decided that it's "better" (and here it comes: yes/maybe for them, but no in general) to keep their changes secret and crowd out the original.
If it's under the GPL then it won't be in the private code anyhow, so no loss. If it's under BSD, then the BSD author is fine with it. So there's no real problem. Just folk getting their panties in a bunch because other folks didn't agree with them on a license philosophy. Enough that in this case, they falsely claim the BSD software isn't open source.
The modern 2/3-BSDL is FOSS by pretty much any widespread definition and has been declared as such by virtually all relevant institutions... there's nutjobs everywhere claiming strange things.
I've released enough code under the Apache License myself (besides proprietary, GPL, and some BSDL contributions) and most small scripts go as WTFPL, and I've never berated anyone for choosing BSDL (it's their code and they can go proprietary if they want). But I can easily explain why I'd choose another license for a particular project, and IMO BSDL is rarely the most fitting, if they share my values.
Also keep in mind that fighting (and I mean actually fighting) because "I like this concept and you don't so you're wrong and you must like it too" is something we've been doing for millenia, thus it's fair to say a "sense of mission" is human nature.
It's because of different standards. In the FOSS world, an unmaintained project is considered dead, gets removed from the repositories and people are very hesitant to download and install it. On Windows, I've seen folks running some installer from 2004, which always makes me cringe a little, but they simply shrug it off with "I need that functionality" and everything's fine.
Note that code which hasn't changed for a decade can be perfectly "fresh" if there is a maintainer who checks compatibility with newer systems and "guarantees" security bugfixes in case they are needed.
With source code, the count of current monthly contributions matters, and with BSD licenses, you run the "danger" of those contributions migrating out of the open source space. Of course the original source stays open, but if a proprietary derivative is more active, in some way (it's all perception, really) this makes the original less desirable, similar to stale applications described above. It often coincides with the loss of the maintainer.
Every government official who behaves like a rattlesnake should be relieved of his duties on the spot. If this isn't the case, then Swartz did his part* and we need MUCH more of that. Your government is supposed to represent the people, and if it doesn't, why the hell don't you replace them? It's not like you don't have the power (as opposed to infringing on the rights of individuals or corporations, as they are private entities), that's the very purpose of a democracy!
And don't give me that lethargic-public crap, this case should serve to rally every starry-eyed idealist into kicking the hornets nest harder (it's not supposed to be there in the first place). This is the way res publica works, and many a disobedient citizen has paid dearly for his ideals, but it's the most direct way to make a difference.
* arguably paying with your life can be considered too costly, so he may not have done it "well", but he did more than most in our time.
Mint is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the DistroWatch niche. And as with all vocal minorities, they try to claim that their anecdotal evidence is generisable.
If asked to estimate, I'd say Ubuntu has roughly two orders of magnitude the install base of Mint. Similar to C vs Objective C, the latter is more popular ("hip", "in",...) but will need a very long time to reach the amount of distribution of the former, if ever. There is no noticeable corporate pick up on Mint (if you go by the quite numerous Canonical press releases about Ubuntu contracts, coprorate deployment ranges in the hundreds of thousands... and probably a bit more we don't hear from). Educational institutions (in my country, we had a wide survey recently, but not recorded by Canonical as we don't use their support) are using Ubuntu first, Fedora/Red Hat second and then some few Debian and Suse. No mention of Mint.
Yes, may early adopters and disgruntled techies are switching to Mint (among others), and I myself have moved to Debian for my private usage... so if this trend keeps up, this might be a good indicator what the "next Ubuntu" will be. BUT that doesn't mean that Mint is anywhere near Ubuntu right now, nor that they will catch up if Ubuntu really manages to pull of that "unified device experience for the masses" plan they are aiming for (which would net the much more newcomers than leaving folks).
Privacy is only dead to those who have given up on it, e.g. you.
While the current technical possibilities make it easy for some entities to invade your privacy, it is not a technical question at all. Popularise and pass laws (remember that democracy thingie...) that punish someone who violates your expectation of privacy. I know this sounds outlandish over there, because it probably is, but where I live (Switzerland) both the government and companies have to tread very carefully with peoples data. For example Google got tons of flak (it was quite a fight for them, and the aftermath is still ongoing) for Streetview _after_ they blurred faces, numbers and all those measures that made it "acceptable" in the USA.
We look with shock and awe at things like your sex offender databases, and again, even if my internet provider can technically easily bring up a list of all my "naughty visits", they wouldn't dare even giving the impression that someone got it through them.
Let me be a little more clear here. France's government didn't sponsor the telecommunication network. It got in the way. You don't see the vibrant telecommunication market that would have existed, if it weren't for the various monopolies (far from just being in France) that occupied that sector for so long.
No company in 19th century France was insane enough to make that kind of investment (for governments different rules apply because they don't have the same goals as companies). So if the government didn't sponsor or "get in the way of" the French telecom network, it would at most exist on a much smaller and fragmented scale. I don't know of any example that shows otherwise. Look, I'm really willing to admit it's possible if you show it to me, but so far this "vibrant private infrastructure" being built to the same scale, level of quality and accessibility without government investment is just pure wishful thinking with no basis in reality (or history).
The reason we're privatising stuff after investment is that a) private is better at driving maintenance costs of existing infrastructure down, b) nepotism, acute budget needs and similar ("politics"), c) ideology and particular interests.
Basically the government writes off an investment and gives it to the society (= the companies, that's the way we do it... giving one stock paper to every citizen would be historically strange) because that is it's purpose. It can go well (e.g. German Telecom) or badly (British railway).
Opportunity cost is most notable for being nearly invisible. It's hard to miss what you didn't know you could have had.
And it's easy to conjure up a paradise, like with communism;).
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs,...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
Which one? I see three up there, companies, governmental organizations, and non profits that have to do that. Fan clubs and teaching classes have to do at least a modest degree of that, or they lose membership.
Non-profits by definition don't fit the "... profit by selling..." you have quoted me on. Governments don't have market share like companies (since it's "always 100%"), have no workable concept of monetary profit (it's not a goal), there is no product in the classical sense and comparing citizens with customers is pointless: they can't take their business elsewhere, except for emigration (which is unrealistic on a market wide scale because of language/culture/financial/social/etc. barriers, save for a war or similar); they drive down prices (mostly taxes) via voting/petitioning/lobbying instead of lower demand (or market forces); modelling voters by economic agent-based frameworks requires completely changing the conditions; etc.
Example time again: a company CEO could be just as well called a "teacher" who imparts a certain amount of "knowledge" at the end of the month on his "students" for solving "homework", who in turn use it to "share those insights" with their landlord so he lets them stay in their flat.
This school-company model can be made to match a lot of company properties, but like the company-government model, it has a few obvious mismatches: the purpose of education vs. vocation is the most important IMO. These mismatches are a good indicator of the nonsense you get when trying to cross-apply strategies, like calling a "students" (employees) parents if he behaves badly.
The thing about so-called "company metrics" is that most of the metrics are near universal and apply to a wide variety of groups. Basically, if you spend money for a reason, through careful choices can spend that money in a more useful way, and have a significant enough organization or possible benefits that the effort is worthwhile, then you can benefit from many of these metrics.
Company metrics like market share? Quarterly revenue? Profit? Market positioning? ROI on monetisable properties? Customer lock-in (or the currently fashionable euphemism)? No, these do not universally apply to groups within a population, but the comment I originally replied to was going along these lines.
Bookkeeping? Planning? Logic? Yes, but these aren't company-specific.
You really shouldn't apply strategies geared for companies and thus terminlogy (since the meaning is bound in practice) to government, because it explicitly doesn't have to "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service".
They did fully open source WebOS, and the sourcecode you downloaded to your hard drive stays GPL. However, they own the copyright on all code and can freely choose whatever license they want at any point. If it's proprietary, you are not allowed to download it from their webpage again and redistribute it freely, even though you already have exact copy of that very same code. The changes you make to your GPL piece of code stay GPLd and you can publish them to the public for comment/usage/improvement/distribution. The changes to LGs proprietary piece of code stay proprietary, thus the code bases diverge with time.
One policy many FOSS projects have (e.g. the Linux kernel) is to spread copyright over many different contributors such that no single entity can take control of it and try any shenanigans (or at least has to buy up every single copyright). But also note that we don't know even know yet if LG is going to relicense the code to something proprietary or keep it open.
The "can and should" are implied by us wanting our activities to be useful. It's worth remembering here that "company metrics" are really about doing things, for example, the generic activity of spending money. Since companies and governments do a lot of similar activities, the metrics apply just as well to either.
The "can and should" are implied by knowing only how to use a hammer and thus declaring every problem a nail.
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs,...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
I know an upper management guy of a small company who is an amateur kids hockey trainer. He tried to run his team like a company for a while, including structure and terminology... needless to say, he later declared it a bad idea. Same goes for government.
But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government?
France, for example. The label, "sponsoring" implies that the wide broadband infrastructure wouldn't be there without sponsorship. But France has both strong private providers and a decent customer base, willing to pay. That's what you need.
Yep, this is pretty much what "sponsoring" implies. I don't think it's realistic for companies to build up a nationwide infrastructure, and I'm honestly not aware of any case this has happened. This is because doing so doesn't suit their reason for existance (= own profit with at most a few decades years ROI) while it suits that of a government (whose "ROI" isn't profit but a happy population). Of course we get the case where government jointly builds infrastructure with some company, which is why I said "sponsored" and not "built".
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
I think you don't get it. Companies are just groupings of people to achieve certain goals, just like a government. Sure, they aren't identical, but one would have to be rather foolish, such as you are in your post above, to fail to realize that the differences aren't that significant.
You missed to provide what you understand to be a company. For example, a government is a group of people that... [see my previous comment], and a company (corporation, firm,...) is a legal entity (not necessarily group of people) that exists to generate profit.
Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.
The government has a budget just like a company. It has very similar limits though being generally more power, the limits of a government can be stretched in various ways that a company is unable to do, such as consistently lose money until the heat death of the universe.
The difference (reasons we have them for) is quite essential, which is what I've tried to highlight. The fact that "laws" for the one lead to strange effects (perpetual consistent money loss, like you say) when applied to the other shows that doing this is not meaningful.
However, with people from this mindset having a very strong influence in our society (look at the share of economists and law folks in politics), the idea to run a government like a company has been shoehorned into what nowadays many people see as the default.
Nonsense. There's nothing in the definition of either "competition", "market", or many other economic terms that is somehow solely restricted to "companies". Economics has such a high profile in politics because at some point you need to prioritize and pay for what you do and what you want. That process of allocating resources to match desires is the heart of economics. It's something that applies to governments and societies, just as it does to the business.
Again, the notion of economic competition doesn't make sense in a government... for starters, there's only a single entity of it, and it can create monopolies at will (a power agreed on by the population), bend the rules, etc. A government doesn't compete in an economy against the companies because they have completely different goals.
A government can define a market, set the framework and do all the important bits required for the well being of its population. But if it (or rather the people) decides that every house should have access to water, and thus starts a nationwide plumbing project, then the water providing companies that were making money off of water transport up to this point may get trouble meeting their bottom line... they may try and make profit elsewhere. The important bit to note here is that the government didn't outcompete them, because its goal isn't profit, but simply took a measure to improve the quality of life of the people, regardless of market dynamics, "outside" of this part of the market economy.
Sure the government has a budget, but then again, I do too. It also has a shopping list (like I do for groceries, just a bit bigger). Silliness aside, having a spreadsheet with planned proceeds and expenses has little to do with market rules.
Obviously, you can't use more of a resource than you have (with money, keep debts in mind), but efficient allocation of resources (a definition of economics that I like, but it's by far not the full story) per se still has nothing to do with "competition" or a "customer base".
Government should be another tool, just like a market. When it is elevated above that, then it becomes more important than the society it is attached to.
Since the government should be all about the society, it can't become "more important" unless something went wrong (corruption, dictatorship, etc.). Econ
Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...
You're completely right when talking about market dynamics, but consider the reason for the existence of a (modern western) government: it's funded in order to bring benefits to the population in ways a smaller group or an individual can't, i.e. large scale infrastructure, standards (there is no case of actually working privatised food safety regulation, and there probably never will be), modern arms defense, etc. Notions like "competition" and "market" (and pricing, profit, etc..) make no sense at all, that's just economists (who have a lot of spotlight nowadays) superimposing their limited model on a much more general construct that has a different purpose from a company. As an aside: governments that turn a profit are doing it wrong and should be replaced.
Yes, economy is important, but the economy should be a tool of the government (and thus obviously in the service of the population), not vice versa (like the current USA). There is no point in having a free market by and in itself. It's like the large scale version of owning a domestic animal: the market is supposed to benefit the population as much as possible, and if it doesn't do a good enough job, well... there's the birch. The problem of the USA is not "too much/little free market/competition/...", but a corrupt government that is owned by the economy. That last part should be fixed.
Precisely because not everybody and their grandmother knows how to do it, this is an issue. If everybody and their grandmother made the informed decision to send all their computer contents to Amazon with every search, this would be perfectly fine with RMS. But they are not informed (which is why we need the outcry) and usually don't know how to turn it off even if they could google it (which is why it needs to be off by default)... I mean, do you see _your_ grandmother googling how to edit privacy settings on her computer (assuming you currently have a grandmother and she owns a computer)?
Don't worry, enough people are reading it. Noone responded so far, but that's not the point: the most useful thing is probably for you to talk about it, coping and such.
I'm really sorry for you, and I wish the things that happened to you didn't. But (here's the but): from your story, I'm not sure this guy did anything illegal at any point. Morally he's a douchebag, but it's not against the law to be an asshole. It's not illegal to be in a relationship where one side is overbearingly dominant and takes way more than it gives.
There's a reason we don't regulate emotional relationships. It's not illegal to cheat on your spouse, and from what I'm reading, I assume you think it should be. Still most people have the basic attitude that leads to viewing cheating as something that shouldn't be criminalised (me too btw).
Likewise it's not illegal to overinflate yourself just to get a woman into bed, or to keep trying unless he is stopped by things the law says are not allowed. You said you gave him (weak?) signs, but then went along. "Actions say more than words" plus his wishful thinking: "you don't say OK to having sex in order to not appear as a slut, but play along because you want it"... quite common in men, and I think sex is the expected result. He failed to be a gentleman - not illegal. But rape by definition is... what now?
I don't want to say that it's your own fault, or that you had it coming, because you clearly are the victim of an asshole. Still I have to kinda say that you could have simply walked out of it if you wanted... that's because I can't imagine my neighbour literally pissing over me and me being OK with it (=in my actions) but not really (=in my mind). I'd kick his ass.
If this were my basic attitude, I'd think that it's a problem with myself. Maybe because I'm not a woman (here we go with sexism again:\ but men and women are obviously different), and I don't think you should "attack" yourself.
But if I were your "purely-legal-and-not-at-all-moral lawyer", based on your actions I'd have a hard time finding something to fault that guy for.
I've had requests where it wasn't possible to add some feature with the current application architecture. You may call it bad design (it wasn't me ^^), and the stupid version of "is it possible?" happens more often, but sometimes you just have to answer with a no.
If you want to argue that it is possible to write a new application from scratch that supports this particular feature, then yes, it's just a matter of time and money, but this is just theoretical and usually not what people mean by requesting a feature addition to a tool they use.
THIS. This is exactly the problem.
I don't go into a Young Fundamental Christian Females meeting, acting all Casanova and handing them How-to-be-sexy pamphlets.
YOU don't go to Defcon without any appreciable technical skills* (but lots of social skills nobody cares for), handing out dating advice.
* Pardon me if you got actual technical skills, just substitute for most of those particular women. They haven't.
I respect the vast majority of women in "normal life". But when I go to Defcon, I simply look down on anyone who wants to play but lacks the skillset. I don't look down on them as human beings, but as nerds. This is completely independent on gender, race, etc.
The point that does make a difference with gender however is that men don't usually provoke a (sometimes quite strong) desire in me to have sex with them. Women do, they know it, and that's all fine and nice as long as they don't stampede into a culture they don't understand, can't contribute to but are still welcome because I can't completely turn off the sex appeal. Men who can't keep up with us simply get laughed out of the room. Nontechnical women can stay because of that desperate hope...
I don't know what the motivation of those women is... hang out with the "cool nerds", have a "good time" without regard for the other attendees, make money (there's a few prostitutes), or simply go there for no good reason and then be proud of showing their ignorance when talking to people... but extremely few could make me believe that they actually want to learn about electronics or coding. (this is different from those women who are already capable, as most of them have my greatest respect and get treated as buddies)
So we have a mixture of me looking down upon those "dummies", their demand for some kind of recognition I can't fathom what it is, and me being sexually attracted to them, which is their only non-negative point in the specific environment of a hacker conference.
Most directions are pointing downhill from here, and while I agree that it should never amount to violence and the like, it's the women who come there with expectations of dating behaviour that are the problem.
(thinking about ticking that anonymous button right now, but hey, that's my opinion even though it seems to be unpopular... basically I'm telling you that your whole posting is irrelevant because hacker conferences is where we do away with that dating stuff)
As concluded in my other reply, my point is that you're not less safe with Google just because they don't give you unlimited insurance. Yet your comment tried to claim that. Hence the strawman.
Contribution & steering is another topic, but we can discuss that too. You deposit 2000 right now at MPEG-LA. Will anyone care at all about your opinion? Of course not.
Hmm, not sure where you want to go with this, as your comment doesn't particularly refute any of my points. Doesn't matter, I don't think you're going to reply, seeing how this is a tad old and you don't have actual arguments anyway;)
Fanboy,
OK, I'm guilty of starting the previous comment with a teaser myself... but care to elaborate? Prepending disclaimers to everything is cumbersome, but here you go: I'm not affiliated with Google, don't have a particular interest in seeing them dominate or anything like that. I do like pointing out obvious nonsense on the internet:> What is it you're a fanboy for?
Seriously, Google starting to charge for VP8 at some point is about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office.
Look at the political and corporate landscape of 20 years ago and see how many ways you can begin the sentence, "...then seemed about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office." It takes a teenager, or someone with a teenage mindset, to look so much in the here and now.
Well, I'm obviously too young (but teenager? not so much) to have had a good overview over the corporate landscape of 20 years ago... but I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft is as likely to opensource their products now as they were then. Besides, even just 5 or so years are half an eternity in tech, and I think my point holds pretty well for such time scales.
The other "as likely as..." things? Well, people claiming this for Linux (server), laptops, Myspace (later Facebook) just lack foresight.;P
Also, Windows source code. "I meant open in precisely the way I want it to be open." Of course you did.
I was just using the common knowledge standard definition. Or would you seriously claim here and now, on a tech site, that the Windows source code is open source? And then you talk about "open exactly as I want it"...
Also, of course Google hasn't promised a blanko cheque for every user of VP8. MPEG-LA hasn't done it either for h264.
Which, after a long and complicated series of technical legal arguments, allows us to conclude that you're no safer with one than the other.
Exactly what I tried to conclude. You're not less safe with Google just because they don't give you unlimited insurance.
Seriously, Google starting to charge for VP8 at some point is about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office.
And comparing them to crack dealers? What's with all that hate? Got fired by Google?
Also, of course Google hasn't promised a blanko cheque for every user of VP8. MPEG-LA hasn't done it either for h264. No other tech company has ever done anything like that.
It's batshit crazy to expect something such a thing, and bringing it up in and argument only serves as strawman.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the author of the post you replied to originally didn't actually intend to be taken seriously. As such, I'm assuming that you're simply playing along and not really expecting there to be a project in existence such as the one he mentioned (except maybe for DVL).
That's why I left this aside and focused on what I percieved to be the crucial part of your comment ("Is that a tragedy of the Microsoft-ocracy keeping the world closed for users?"), where the reasoning is IMO lacking.
But addressing that other part of your point: Commercial FOSS and proprietary software have similar user friendliness. Likewise, hobbyist FOSS and closed share/freeware apps both often a hassle. Developer attitudes are about the same (my view after having worked 2 jobs as proprietary and now commercial FOSS developer), it depends on whether you have first line support and sales in between. Being allowed to look inside is certainly no impediment, the problem is closed-source copyright licenses: can't publish any modifications, even though you can make them privately while infringing on the EULA (which is legally shaky anyway) since nobody knows at that point.
If we're going by examples, I wouldn't call Ubuntu less user friendly than Windows 8, and the random hobbled together CMS on SourceForge is no more a pain in the ass than the proprietary Contrexx* (terrible experience it was... of course, there are good both FOSS and proprietary CMSs). I agree that some projects are annoying to get running, for me there are clearly more on the FOSS side, but then again I've tried out _way_ more of those, since I don't go shopping for dozens of randomly picked software packages and closed freeware is somewhat scarce on my system of choice.
But returning: as already said, even though only few choose to disassemble their Ford, the important part is that it stays _not_ forbidden, independent of the users inclination to actually exercise the option. In the software world on the other hand, we sadly have that situation, which is where I'm having trouble with the analogy.
* a rare case of proprietary "but the source is visible" software, not Free, nor anywhere near OSI approved, but they keep calling their license "Open Source"
This is a fairly naive view.
If we make hurting people and destroying their property illegal, we can abolish every and all traffic laws. After all, if people obey the law and simply don't hurt anybody, there will be no deaths on the road even without speed limits, regulations on right of way, car safety standards, etc, because the "no killing allowed" law will somehow magically trigger and make the other laws redundant.
I don't get that car analogy.There is a difference between technically being able to acquire all tools and knowhow to replace any particular part on my car (=FOSS)... and being strictly forbidden by the manufacturer to open the hood, being threatened with legal action if I pay some independent expert to peek inside and being told it's all "for my best" (=proprietary software).
I'm allowed to disassemble my Ford (though few choose to), but not my copy of Photoshop.
This particular terminology is System/Kernel, and a not at all exhaustive overview would be: ...)
GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu,
GNU/Hurd (Debian has one such distribution, Arch has another called "Arch Hurd")
GNU/kBSD (Debian has one, [0])
GNU/ON (Illumian, a Debian+Solaris kernel distro)
GNU/BSD or GNU/Solaris would be somewhat more like GNU/GNU, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
[0] They call it "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD", as it uses the FreeBSD kernel, which isn't actually called "kBSD" or "kFreeBSD" but has no distinct name, as it's not Mach anymore, but simply "the kernel of FreeBSD"
"Just" a microkernel is fairly straightforward to build if you have a bit of experience. I could make a simple one in two afternoons.
Microkernel OSs with a very limited feature set and somewhat OK-ish performance are feasible, as shown by e.g. velOSity and embedded realtime systems like QNX.
Microkernel OSs that can be used for general purpose computing and offer a nonvanishing fraction of the performance of Linux, XNU or NT are ... well, the development times of the L4 family, Hurd (OK, this one has other roadblocks), Sawmill etc. show how hard it is.
There have been quite a bunch of microkernel research projects (by at least IBM and Microsoft for what I know, plus the usual bunch of universities), and there has been renewed interest lately. In the future it might come down to "your hardware is fast enough that a performance hit of, say, 50% doesn't matter, and the added stability, security and MUCH simpler life for developers that interact with the lower parts of the system are worth it".
People who think that criminals will give up the guns they possess are very silly. People who think that other people actually think that are just as silly.
The vast majority of the criminal population is made out of folks with low educational backgrounds, who have social problems and/or are desperate. Those citizens have an above-average chance of doing something we consider criminal, and the availability of guns while they're a "normal guy" will influence their readiness for violence, self-assessment (respectively overconfidence) and scale of the crime. But everybody has some of that chance, and heck, if you take the time to actually look at the fates of those people, you'll realise that it could be your neighbour or parents the day after tomorrow, if their life takes a harsh turn tomorrow.
In general people first have access to guns, and then become criminals, not the black-and-white "this person was born a criminal and will therefore go and get a gun no matter the legal availability".
The point to take home is that reducing availability and propagation of firearms will undeniably result in fewer criminals with firearms. This has been shown in most modern democracies, the main question is how big this reduction is in practice and how it weighs against the (mainly USA-specific) "guns for liberty from an oppressive government" concept.
Flash, Noscript and Adblock have been available in 64bit browsers for "ages".
I've been using Firefox exclusively compiled to 64bit for 3-4 years now (the default in the Debian sid repo) and never had came across incompatible plugin after they released Flash for 64bit. Though... I need only around 15 plugins, so heavier user may have a legitimate reason to use a 32bit browser.
Could you point out some of the plugins that actually don't support a 64bit binary? Windows is 64bit per default now too, isn't it... so you'd expect vendors to keep up.
If software isn't important enough for someone to at least maintain a shared copy of somewhere, why should I care that it goes away? Somone selling software that does something similar must be better enough that folks are willing to pay for the difference.
I guess one might care because it may be a useful tool in the future or because of its cultural/technical/educational value, similar to "abandoned treasures" in other genres. But folks paying for the difference may be doing so because a) of awareness/marketing (see those repackaged LibreOffice sales) and b) it's 1% better (the improved part) than the original, yet the seller is entitled to 100% of the revenue.
It's not the end of days or anything like that, but thinking about how to improve our society, you see how this might be a bone of contention. I.e. codebases getting less attention than they "deserve" just because some company decided that it's "better" (and here it comes: yes/maybe for them, but no in general) to keep their changes secret and crowd out the original.
If it's under the GPL then it won't be in the private code anyhow, so no loss. If it's under BSD, then the BSD author is fine with it. So there's no real problem. Just folk getting their panties in a bunch because other folks didn't agree with them on a license philosophy. Enough that in this case, they falsely claim the BSD software isn't open source.
The modern 2/3-BSDL is FOSS by pretty much any widespread definition and has been declared as such by virtually all relevant institutions... there's nutjobs everywhere claiming strange things.
I've released enough code under the Apache License myself (besides proprietary, GPL, and some BSDL contributions) and most small scripts go as WTFPL, and I've never berated anyone for choosing BSDL (it's their code and they can go proprietary if they want). But I can easily explain why I'd choose another license for a particular project, and IMO BSDL is rarely the most fitting, if they share my values.
Also keep in mind that fighting (and I mean actually fighting) because "I like this concept and you don't so you're wrong and you must like it too" is something we've been doing for millenia, thus it's fair to say a "sense of mission" is human nature.
It's because of different standards. In the FOSS world, an unmaintained project is considered dead, gets removed from the repositories and people are very hesitant to download and install it. On Windows, I've seen folks running some installer from 2004, which always makes me cringe a little, but they simply shrug it off with "I need that functionality" and everything's fine.
Note that code which hasn't changed for a decade can be perfectly "fresh" if there is a maintainer who checks compatibility with newer systems and "guarantees" security bugfixes in case they are needed.
With source code, the count of current monthly contributions matters, and with BSD licenses, you run the "danger" of those contributions migrating out of the open source space. Of course the original source stays open, but if a proprietary derivative is more active, in some way (it's all perception, really) this makes the original less desirable, similar to stale applications described above. It often coincides with the loss of the maintainer.
Every government official who behaves like a rattlesnake should be relieved of his duties on the spot. If this isn't the case, then Swartz did his part* and we need MUCH more of that. Your government is supposed to represent the people, and if it doesn't, why the hell don't you replace them? It's not like you don't have the power (as opposed to infringing on the rights of individuals or corporations, as they are private entities), that's the very purpose of a democracy!
And don't give me that lethargic-public crap, this case should serve to rally every starry-eyed idealist into kicking the hornets nest harder (it's not supposed to be there in the first place). This is the way res publica works, and many a disobedient citizen has paid dearly for his ideals, but it's the most direct way to make a difference.
* arguably paying with your life can be considered too costly, so he may not have done it "well", but he did more than most in our time.
Mint is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the DistroWatch niche. And as with all vocal minorities, they try to claim that their anecdotal evidence is generisable.
If asked to estimate, I'd say Ubuntu has roughly two orders of magnitude the install base of Mint. Similar to C vs Objective C, the latter is more popular ("hip", "in", ...) but will need a very long time to reach the amount of distribution of the former, if ever. There is no noticeable corporate pick up on Mint (if you go by the quite numerous Canonical press releases about Ubuntu contracts, coprorate deployment ranges in the hundreds of thousands... and probably a bit more we don't hear from). Educational institutions (in my country, we had a wide survey recently, but not recorded by Canonical as we don't use their support) are using Ubuntu first, Fedora/Red Hat second and then some few Debian and Suse. No mention of Mint.
Yes, may early adopters and disgruntled techies are switching to Mint (among others), and I myself have moved to Debian for my private usage... so if this trend keeps up, this might be a good indicator what the "next Ubuntu" will be. BUT that doesn't mean that Mint is anywhere near Ubuntu right now, nor that they will catch up if Ubuntu really manages to pull of that "unified device experience for the masses" plan they are aiming for (which would net the much more newcomers than leaving folks).
Privacy is only dead to those who have given up on it, e.g. you.
While the current technical possibilities make it easy for some entities to invade your privacy, it is not a technical question at all. Popularise and pass laws (remember that democracy thingie...) that punish someone who violates your expectation of privacy. I know this sounds outlandish over there, because it probably is, but where I live (Switzerland) both the government and companies have to tread very carefully with peoples data. For example Google got tons of flak (it was quite a fight for them, and the aftermath is still ongoing) for Streetview _after_ they blurred faces, numbers and all those measures that made it "acceptable" in the USA.
We look with shock and awe at things like your sex offender databases, and again, even if my internet provider can technically easily bring up a list of all my "naughty visits", they wouldn't dare even giving the impression that someone got it through them.
Let me be a little more clear here. France's government didn't sponsor the telecommunication network. It got in the way. You don't see the vibrant telecommunication market that would have existed, if it weren't for the various monopolies (far from just being in France) that occupied that sector for so long.
No company in 19th century France was insane enough to make that kind of investment (for governments different rules apply because they don't have the same goals as companies). So if the government didn't sponsor or "get in the way of" the French telecom network, it would at most exist on a much smaller and fragmented scale. I don't know of any example that shows otherwise. Look, I'm really willing to admit it's possible if you show it to me, but so far this "vibrant private infrastructure" being built to the same scale, level of quality and accessibility without government investment is just pure wishful thinking with no basis in reality (or history).
The reason we're privatising stuff after investment is that a) private is better at driving maintenance costs of existing infrastructure down, b) nepotism, acute budget needs and similar ("politics"), c) ideology and particular interests.
Basically the government writes off an investment and gives it to the society (= the companies, that's the way we do it... giving one stock paper to every citizen would be historically strange) because that is it's purpose. It can go well (e.g. German Telecom) or badly (British railway).
Opportunity cost is most notable for being nearly invisible. It's hard to miss what you didn't know you could have had.
And it's easy to conjure up a paradise, like with communism ;).
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs, ...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
Which one? I see three up there, companies, governmental organizations, and non profits that have to do that. Fan clubs and teaching classes have to do at least a modest degree of that, or they lose membership.
Non-profits by definition don't fit the "... profit by selling ..." you have quoted me on.
Governments don't have market share like companies (since it's "always 100%"), have no workable concept of monetary profit (it's not a goal), there is no product in the classical sense and comparing citizens with customers is pointless: they can't take their business elsewhere, except for emigration (which is unrealistic on a market wide scale because of language/culture/financial/social/etc. barriers, save for a war or similar); they drive down prices (mostly taxes) via voting/petitioning/lobbying instead of lower demand (or market forces); modelling voters by economic agent-based frameworks requires completely changing the conditions; etc.
Example time again: a company CEO could be just as well called a "teacher" who imparts a certain amount of "knowledge" at the end of the month on his "students" for solving "homework", who in turn use it to "share those insights" with their landlord so he lets them stay in their flat.
This school-company model can be made to match a lot of company properties, but like the company-government model, it has a few obvious mismatches: the purpose of education vs. vocation is the most important IMO.
These mismatches are a good indicator of the nonsense you get when trying to cross-apply strategies, like calling a "students" (employees) parents if he behaves badly.
The thing about so-called "company metrics" is that most of the metrics are near universal and apply to a wide variety of groups. Basically, if you spend money for a reason, through careful choices can spend that money in a more useful way, and have a significant enough organization or possible benefits that the effort is worthwhile, then you can benefit from many of these metrics.
Company metrics like market share? Quarterly revenue? Profit? Market positioning? ROI on monetisable properties? Customer lock-in (or the currently fashionable euphemism)? No, these do not universally apply to groups within a population, but the comment I originally replied to was going along these lines.
Bookkeeping? Planning? Logic? Yes, but these aren't company-specific.
You really shouldn't apply strategies geared for companies and thus terminlogy (since the meaning is bound in practice) to government, because it explicitly doesn't have to "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service".
They did fully open source WebOS, and the sourcecode you downloaded to your hard drive stays GPL.
However, they own the copyright on all code and can freely choose whatever license they want at any point. If it's proprietary, you are not allowed to download it from their webpage again and redistribute it freely, even though you already have exact copy of that very same code. The changes you make to your GPL piece of code stay GPLd and you can publish them to the public for comment/usage/improvement/distribution. The changes to LGs proprietary piece of code stay proprietary, thus the code bases diverge with time.
One policy many FOSS projects have (e.g. the Linux kernel) is to spread copyright over many different contributors such that no single entity can take control of it and try any shenanigans (or at least has to buy up every single copyright).
But also note that we don't know even know yet if LG is going to relicense the code to something proprietary or keep it open.
The "can and should" are implied by us wanting our activities to be useful. It's worth remembering here that "company metrics" are really about doing things, for example, the generic activity of spending money. Since companies and governments do a lot of similar activities, the metrics apply just as well to either.
The "can and should" are implied by knowing only how to use a hammer and thus declaring every problem a nail.
In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs, ...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.
I know an upper management guy of a small company who is an amateur kids hockey trainer. He tried to run his team like a company for a while, including structure and terminology... needless to say, he later declared it a bad idea. Same goes for government.
But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government?
France, for example. The label, "sponsoring" implies that the wide broadband infrastructure wouldn't be there without sponsorship. But France has both strong private providers and a decent customer base, willing to pay. That's what you need.
Yep, this is pretty much what "sponsoring" implies. I don't think it's realistic for companies to build up a nationwide infrastructure, and I'm honestly not aware of any case this has happened. This is because doing so doesn't suit their reason for existance (= own profit with at most a few decades years ROI) while it suits that of a government (whose "ROI" isn't profit but a happy population). Of course we get the case where government jointly builds infrastructure with some company, which is why I said "sponsored" and not "built".
The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).
I think you don't get it. Companies are just groupings of people to achieve certain goals, just like a government. Sure, they aren't identical, but one would have to be rather foolish, such as you are in your post above, to fail to realize that the differences aren't that significant.
You missed to provide what you understand to be a company. For example, a government is a group of people that ... [see my previous comment], and a company (corporation, firm, ...) is a legal entity (not necessarily group of people) that exists to generate profit.
Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.
The government has a budget just like a company. It has very similar limits though being generally more power, the limits of a government can be stretched in various ways that a company is unable to do, such as consistently lose money until the heat death of the universe.
The difference (reasons we have them for) is quite essential, which is what I've tried to highlight. The fact that "laws" for the one lead to strange effects (perpetual consistent money loss, like you say) when applied to the other shows that doing this is not meaningful.
However, with people from this mindset having a very strong influence in our society (look at the share of economists and law folks in politics), the idea to run a government like a company has been shoehorned into what nowadays many people see as the default.
Nonsense. There's nothing in the definition of either "competition", "market", or many other economic terms that is somehow solely restricted to "companies". Economics has such a high profile in politics because at some point you need to prioritize and pay for what you do and what you want. That process of allocating resources to match desires is the heart of economics. It's something that applies to governments and societies, just as it does to the business.
Again, the notion of economic competition doesn't make sense in a government... for starters, there's only a single entity of it, and it can create monopolies at will (a power agreed on by the population), bend the rules, etc. A government doesn't compete in an economy against the companies because they have completely different goals.
A government can define a market, set the framework and do all the important bits required for the well being of its population. But if it (or rather the people) decides that every house should have access to water, and thus starts a nationwide plumbing project, then the water providing companies that were making money off of water transport up to this point may get trouble meeting their bottom line... they may try and make profit elsewhere. The important bit to note here is that the government didn't outcompete them, because its goal isn't profit, but simply took a measure to improve the quality of life of the people, regardless of market dynamics, "outside" of this part of the market economy.
Sure the government has a budget, but then again, I do too. It also has a shopping list (like I do for groceries, just a bit bigger). Silliness aside, having a spreadsheet with planned proceeds and expenses has little to do with market rules.
Obviously, you can't use more of a resource than you have (with money, keep debts in mind), but efficient allocation of resources (a definition of economics that I like, but it's by far not the full story) per se still has nothing to do with "competition" or a "customer base".
Government should be another tool, just like a market. When it is elevated above that, then it becomes more important than the society it is attached to.
Since the government should be all about the society, it can't become "more important" unless something went wrong (corruption, dictatorship, etc.). Econ
Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...
You're completely right when talking about market dynamics, but consider the reason for the existence of a (modern western) government: it's funded in order to bring benefits to the population in ways a smaller group or an individual can't, i.e. large scale infrastructure, standards (there is no case of actually working privatised food safety regulation, and there probably never will be), modern arms defense, etc.
Notions like "competition" and "market" (and pricing, profit, etc..) make no sense at all, that's just economists (who have a lot of spotlight nowadays) superimposing their limited model on a much more general construct that has a different purpose from a company.
As an aside: governments that turn a profit are doing it wrong and should be replaced.
Yes, economy is important, but the economy should be a tool of the government (and thus obviously in the service of the population), not vice versa (like the current USA).
There is no point in having a free market by and in itself. It's like the large scale version of owning a domestic animal: the market is supposed to benefit the population as much as possible, and if it doesn't do a good enough job, well... there's the birch.
The problem of the USA is not "too much/little free market/competition/...", but a corrupt government that is owned by the economy. That last part should be fixed.
Precisely because not everybody and their grandmother knows how to do it, this is an issue. If everybody and their grandmother made the informed decision to send all their computer contents to Amazon with every search, this would be perfectly fine with RMS. But they are not informed (which is why we need the outcry) and usually don't know how to turn it off even if they could google it (which is why it needs to be off by default) ... I mean, do you see _your_ grandmother googling how to edit privacy settings on her computer (assuming you currently have a grandmother and she owns a computer)?
Don't worry, enough people are reading it. Noone responded so far, but that's not the point: the most useful thing is probably for you to talk about it, coping and such.
... quite common in men, and I think sex is the expected result. He failed to be a gentleman - not illegal. But rape by definition is... what now?
:\ but men and women are obviously different), and I don't think you should "attack" yourself.
I'm really sorry for you, and I wish the things that happened to you didn't. But (here's the but): from your story, I'm not sure this guy did anything illegal at any point. Morally he's a douchebag, but it's not against the law to be an asshole. It's not illegal to be in a relationship where one side is overbearingly dominant and takes way more than it gives.
There's a reason we don't regulate emotional relationships. It's not illegal to cheat on your spouse, and from what I'm reading, I assume you think it should be. Still most people have the basic attitude that leads to viewing cheating as something that shouldn't be criminalised (me too btw).
Likewise it's not illegal to overinflate yourself just to get a woman into bed, or to keep trying unless he is stopped by things the law says are not allowed. You said you gave him (weak?) signs, but then went along. "Actions say more than words" plus his wishful thinking: "you don't say OK to having sex in order to not appear as a slut, but play along because you want it"
I don't want to say that it's your own fault, or that you had it coming, because you clearly are the victim of an asshole. Still I have to kinda say that you could have simply walked out of it if you wanted... that's because I can't imagine my neighbour literally pissing over me and me being OK with it (=in my actions) but not really (=in my mind). I'd kick his ass.
If this were my basic attitude, I'd think that it's a problem with myself. Maybe because I'm not a woman (here we go with sexism again
But if I were your "purely-legal-and-not-at-all-moral lawyer", based on your actions I'd have a hard time finding something to fault that guy for.
I've had requests where it wasn't possible to add some feature with the current application architecture. You may call it bad design (it wasn't me ^^), and the stupid version of "is it possible?" happens more often, but sometimes you just have to answer with a no.
If you want to argue that it is possible to write a new application from scratch that supports this particular feature, then yes, it's just a matter of time and money, but this is just theoretical and usually not what people mean by requesting a feature addition to a tool they use.
THIS. This is exactly the problem. I don't go into a Young Fundamental Christian Females meeting, acting all Casanova and handing them How-to-be-sexy pamphlets.
YOU don't go to Defcon without any appreciable technical skills* (but lots of social skills nobody cares for), handing out dating advice.
* Pardon me if you got actual technical skills, just substitute for most of those particular women. They haven't.
I respect the vast majority of women in "normal life". But when I go to Defcon, I simply look down on anyone who wants to play but lacks the skillset. I don't look down on them as human beings, but as nerds. This is completely independent on gender, race, etc.
The point that does make a difference with gender however is that men don't usually provoke a (sometimes quite strong) desire in me to have sex with them. Women do, they know it, and that's all fine and nice as long as they don't stampede into a culture they don't understand, can't contribute to but are still welcome because I can't completely turn off the sex appeal. Men who can't keep up with us simply get laughed out of the room. Nontechnical women can stay because of that desperate hope...
I don't know what the motivation of those women is... hang out with the "cool nerds", have a "good time" without regard for the other attendees, make money (there's a few prostitutes), or simply go there for no good reason and then be proud of showing their ignorance when talking to people... but extremely few could make me believe that they actually want to learn about electronics or coding. (this is different from those women who are already capable, as most of them have my greatest respect and get treated as buddies)
So we have a mixture of me looking down upon those "dummies", their demand for some kind of recognition I can't fathom what it is, and me being sexually attracted to them, which is their only non-negative point in the specific environment of a hacker conference.
Most directions are pointing downhill from here, and while I agree that it should never amount to violence and the like, it's the women who come there with expectations of dating behaviour that are the problem.
(thinking about ticking that anonymous button right now, but hey, that's my opinion even though it seems to be unpopular... basically I'm telling you that your whole posting is irrelevant because hacker conferences is where we do away with that dating stuff)
As concluded in my other reply, my point is that you're not less safe with Google just because they don't give you unlimited insurance.
Yet your comment tried to claim that. Hence the strawman.
Contribution & steering is another topic, but we can discuss that too.
You deposit 2000 right now at MPEG-LA. Will anyone care at all about your opinion? Of course not.
Hmm, not sure where you want to go with this, as your comment doesn't particularly refute any of my points. Doesn't matter, I don't think you're going to reply, seeing how this is a tad old and you don't have actual arguments anyway ;)
Fanboy,
OK, I'm guilty of starting the previous comment with a teaser myself... but care to elaborate? :>
Prepending disclaimers to everything is cumbersome, but here you go: I'm not affiliated with Google, don't have a particular interest in seeing them dominate or anything like that. I do like pointing out obvious nonsense on the internet
What is it you're a fanboy for?
Seriously, Google starting to charge for VP8 at some point is about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office.
Look at the political and corporate landscape of 20 years ago and see how many ways you can begin the sentence, "...then seemed about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office." It takes a teenager, or someone with a teenage mindset, to look so much in the here and now.
Well, I'm obviously too young (but teenager? not so much) to have had a good overview over the corporate landscape of 20 years ago... but I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft is as likely to opensource their products now as they were then.
Besides, even just 5 or so years are half an eternity in tech, and I think my point holds pretty well for such time scales.
The other "as likely as..." things? Well, people claiming this for Linux (server), laptops, Myspace (later Facebook) just lack foresight. ;P
Also, Windows source code. "I meant open in precisely the way I want it to be open." Of course you did.
I was just using the common knowledge standard definition. Or would you seriously claim here and now, on a tech site, that the Windows source code is open source? And then you talk about "open exactly as I want it"...
Also, of course Google hasn't promised a blanko cheque for every user of VP8. MPEG-LA hasn't done it either for h264.
Which, after a long and complicated series of technical legal arguments, allows us to conclude that you're no safer with one than the other.
Exactly what I tried to conclude. You're not less safe with Google just because they don't give you unlimited insurance.
You deserve -1 Troll.
Seriously, Google starting to charge for VP8 at some point is about as likely as Microsoft opensourcing their most recent Windows and Office.
And comparing them to crack dealers? What's with all that hate? Got fired by Google?
Also, of course Google hasn't promised a blanko cheque for every user of VP8. MPEG-LA hasn't done it either for h264. No other tech company has ever done anything like that.
It's batshit crazy to expect something such a thing, and bringing it up in and argument only serves as strawman.