"Once published, GPL code cannot be re-closed. If any code was lifted from another GPL project, the copyright holder of THAT code may be owed damages for any attempt to do so."
This is plainly untrue. If you do not believe this then I suggest that you have a look at history. GPL can be closed very easily, it the person who released it in the first place had no right to do so. It would appear that this is the case here. The original GPL was invalid, since the person who released it was not the copyright holder, even if he was the author.
This has happened before. Some GNU code has had to be pulled for instance, because companies claimed rights to parts of it. I believe this happened to one particular version of Emacs for instance.
Its one of the reason that GNU insist on copyright waivers from authors of much of the software they release. As well as signing your copyright to GNU, you have to get your employer to say that they waive any rights that they have to the copyright.
It's a hard assed policy on behalf of GNU. But there is a reason for it. This example is one of them.
Outsourcing is no magic wand. Some one has still
got to write the software, and some one has still got to do the research. In the case of all research requirements analysis is extremely hard. If you knew what you required from the software in advance, then it probably wouldn't be research!
But yes there are lots of computer scientists in bioinformatics these days. Its a hybrid discipline. Even though my origins are as a bench biologists I consider myself to be a computer scientist at least in part these days, as well as a programmer.
Research code is often a little flaky. We are not writing finished products to sell to people. We are writing code to do research!
"The problem with doing OO is it requires you to understand software engineering. Biologists are
probably more interested in crunching their numbers than in good OO design. Or am I wrong?"
It depends what you want to do. If you are writing a few hundred lines of code, then good software enginnering is not that important. Nowadays biologists and bioinformaticts are writing very large code bases, to do very complex tasks. Under these circumstances software engineering becomes necessary.
Programming is not my area of research. Nor is enginnering, or architecture. It is however my plumbers spanner. Of course us biologists are learning how to do, and in many cases how to do it very well.
Because bioinformatics grew out of a bunch of people writing small tools, to do small things. After a while we had a whole load of small tools doing small things, and we wanted to stick them together. So we write small perl scripts to tie them together. Perl is very good at this. Unfortunately it tends to also hide the fact that if we had written some decent libraries in the first place, we wouldn't have need to stick bits together with perl.
Bioinformatics is in a mess, and its slowly crawling out of it. To be honest, I think that the last thing that we need is more biologists with a working knowledge of perl.
"It seems like some of these scientists are getting really good at it, using OO and everything. "
Really, what actually using OO?
The reality is that if you can work out how a cell works, its easy to write computer programs. The problem is that too many people feel that because its easy to write programs, its also easy to write programs well. Which is why we are in such a mess now.
I think the fundamental problem is here, is that the travel companies make things so complex, in terms of fairs, and the various restrictions they place on you. If you combine several forms of transport, and worse international travel things multiple towards madness rapidly.
So for instance I got a ticket from a travel agent the other day, for a train from Manchester to Cambridge. Total cost...over 200 pounds! Madness. Obviously I sent it back. The insanity is such that even the travel agents get confused.
Consumer choice sounds like a good thing, and it is in some ways. But choosing can be very difficult. And when its NP-complete choosing with knowledge can be nearly impossible.
"I should have thought so. Not even our government would be stupid enough to create a law to impede the courts being presented with important
evidence;)"
It was the "open court" bit that I was wondering about. The judge might look at the evidence in closed session.
Of course the company would have had to justify keeping the data in the first place, which is another issue!
"Re-read the articles. Lindows was forced to disclose the information during the discovery process because Microsoft thought that information
would be of use to prove the case belongs in Washington."
Thats how I read the original article, but not how I read the post from the CEO on at the head of this thread.
Its an interesting point actually. I don't know what would happen in the UK, in the knowledge of the data protection act. Could a judge force a company to reveal information in open court that would normally come under the data protection act? If they did what restrictions would there be on third party bodies using this information.
At this point my knowledge of law fails me. It would be an interesting to find out.
"Here in the UK we have a law called the Data Protection Act, which means that all data that a company has on you they must take "reasonable" steps to protect it. "
No it doesn't.
This is one of the issues that might have turned into a trade dispute between the US and EU. The EU places a restriction on transfering personal data outside of the EU. It can only go to those places with laws on data protection which are as strong as those in the EU. Which currently the EU claims the US does not fulfil. At one stage the US government was arguing that this was a trade barrier and should be removed. Nowadays there is the "safe harbour" framework, which provides US companies with the ability to sign up to extra legal requirements, that then allows them to deal with personal data from the EU. Or at least this is how I understand it.
I didn't have particularly strong views on this before this issue. But it seems to me that Lindows have disclosed these emails because they could use it in their case, rather than because they were forced to by judicial order. In the UK I think that its pretty clear that this would be illegal. For instance my employer can not even put my email address onto the web without my explicit permission (implied permission is not enough). To make this clear this is the email that my employer has given me.
I think in light of this case I would now consider myself to be a tentative supporter of the Safe Harbour. I certainly will be a lot more wary of given out my details to companies based in the US in future, and will only channel them through agencies based in the EU.
"Why would anybody who came up with an innovative application release it only for Linux? Linux is
always going to be playing catch up, it doesn't have the monster market share and so things are going to be developed for Windows first. "
I think you making a fundamental mistake here. Clearly people do produce applications for linux, or indeed other unix platforms. There are plenty of them around after all.
The mistake is that you are assuming that all application developers are aiming at a wide market. Whilst it may be true that M$ want everyone to use word, its untrue of 99% of applications which are developed. Most applications are written for a small market base, for people with very specific requirements.
So for instance if I was writing music software I would probably write for the Mac, because thats what most musicians use. Myself I'm a bioinformatician, and most of use some form of Unix. Hence linux is my main platform both for development, and my main target platform. There is nothing particularly religious about this. Unix is a better platform for our needs, and linux is useful because the hardware is dirty cheap.
What the article is talking about is not actually innovating applications, he is talking about high volume, "killer applications". More or less by definition by the time something turns into a high volume killer app, it will have lost most of its innovation, and will be using something that has gone before.
"Every French and Swiss person legally has to have a national ID card and carry it with them at all times, on pain of arrest. "
Yes. And everytime the police want to up their arrest statistics they just pop down to the local swimming baths and nick everybody in sight.
Phil
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
"Rather, it is people who understand the science who should keep an eye on what the corporations are doing. "
The difficulty here is of course that many of those who understand the science the best have to fight for funding from a pool much of which comes from these companies. There is a clear conflict of interest.
The second point is simpler, and one which is made abundantely clear by the article. Even scientists can not "keep an eye" on someone unless they know what they are doing. In this case, and in many others, a large corporation supressed information that it knew would damage it.
I am afraid that there is democracy, and there is corporate confidentiality. The two conflict, however you look at it.
Phil
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
"Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware
that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the
"sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds."
Single sex sterility IS hereditary however. The best known example is the Texas cytoplasm which was allowed the spread of the corn blight in the 60's. This is a warning against monoculture rather than anything else!
However the use of single sex sterility, or in animals skewed sex ratio's has been posited as a means of pest control several times. Although it sounds unlikely these genes can under many circumstances resulting in a population of one, or large of one sex, which obviously results in a reduction of the population size very quickly.
"I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector."
Firstly its not just your government spending money on this. A lot of it came from other governments. Indeed in Europe a large amount of the money came from the Welcome trust. Certainly it's this group that has spent a lot of the money going on decoding the genome, and providing base line annotation.
Secondly its not clear that the private sector could do this. Although they have been involved late in the day, they were not when the early pioneering work which has made this possible, from Fred Sangers original work on sequencing technology, to all the mapping efforts, cloning techniques and so on. This of course includes most of the work that was done by Venter before Celera came into being.
And third are you really suggesting that as soon as any company opens up, that the government should immediately shut down all resources that they are providing for a specific project.
And finally of course the data which has been produced from the "public sector" (much of the funding for which has not come from your, or indeed any government), has been released freely into the public domain. In other words the rights are not owned by the government.
Its easy to come out with a knee jerk libertarian "the free market can do anything" response to things. The reality is that it can't, and often doesn't. There is a big role for people doing things in other ways. Science in particular benefits from this. Its much easier to advance if you don't have to read pages of NDA's for every single piece of data that you need. And if the free software/open source community does not show you that, then what will.
"he did state that he learned perl in a couple weeks without much programming background. "
Well I'm a self taught programmer as well, even though I work in a CS dept!
Its one of the reasons that I don't like Perl. I haven't grown up being to remember all the obscure syntatic elements, and whether I am using an array, or a scalar reference to an array, or whatever. I like the compiler to know this stuff, and check that I have it right!
"most people in Eastern Europe do not consider Marxism to " add valuable insight" into
anything. "
It depends what you mean when you say "Marxism" of course. I think its fairly easy to argue that the communist bloc overturned more or less every principle of Marxism as time moved on, even while they claimed to adhere to it.
Its certainly the case that most of the Europe countries has an an expressedly Marxist party involved in politics somewhere. And most of them have a more reformist socialist, or social democratic party which at one stage or another have run the country. These parties were all informed by Marx's diagnosis of politics when he was writing, even though they denied his revolutionary prognosis.
Like my original post my assertion here is that whether or not you agree with Marxism is entirely secondly to issue of whether its valuable and interesting to read. I would say that even Mein Kampf is worth reading. Although its provides less abstraction than Marx's work, and gives less of insight into modern politics, its provides a definite insight into the meaning of hate. This might be depressing, but it's definately useful.
"If you don't like it don't use it but don't flame people who do."
I think that you are making a big assumption here. I suspect that a lot of people who dislike perl are those who have to use it. I'm writing in perl at the moment because I need some libraries written in it. It would take too long to recode these in a language that I like, so I am using perl.
"Try it before you knock it. "
Same assumption here I think. Many who knock perl have already tried it.
I'm not particularly religous about perl. I would just rather avoid when I can. Every computing langauge is of course a compromise, but for me many of the compromises that perl makes are in the wrong place. In particular I would say the syntax is horrible, or at least very complex. The "more than one way" philosphopy I find annoying. My experience is that perl code from different authors tends to be highly idiomatic. Its object orientation appears to me to be rather poor. You can't for instance define a interface contract (I'm sorry but "read the documentation" just doesn't cut the mustard for me). And finally its poorly typed. So its not openly declared what types a method or function takes, nor what types they return. At least not without reading either the documentation (if that exists, and its correct), or the implementation (which is not reliable if you are trying to address a common interface.
Now of course perl has its strengths. Its text processing is powerful (I've done a lot of text processing in Java for instance. Bad trip). It can be very quick to write (although I find this becomes less true as code gets more complex). CPAN is a fantastic resource (and a curse! Its why I writing perl at the moment).
Personally I wouldn't get attached too much to any language. You can write long programs in it, you can maintain it, and you can use it in teams. But to my mind this is indeed where perl is weak.
"So if I disagree that this is in any way enlightening, that makes me non-free thinking and
jingoistic? "
I think he was saying that if you jingoistic you won't like the article. Liking an article, finding it thought provoking, is of course different from agreeing with it.
The point is that the article uses the word "Marxist". Time and again on slashdot, if you use this word you get flamed to hell, mostly I have to say from US readers, because of the particular view of Marxism that is widely held over there. In most of Europe Marxism is a part of political scene, and adds valuable insight into our understanding. This is true whether or not you agree with Marxism.
"That may not be socialism in the way the term is commonly used, but it's socialism in the sense that it's the opposite of a free market. "
I think that you are very confused over what the terms "socialist", "free market" and "capitalist" mean. You certainly seem to have got them confused here.
Socialism is about control of the fruits of production by those who are the means of production. Capitalism is about control of the fruits of production, by those who own the means of production. The free market is about free movement of capital, and nothing else. To have capital you of course require strong property laws. IPR is just one example of this.
"Free bread and vegetables would change the world. Free steel would change the world. Free software?"
I'm not so sure about this. Which market is worth more, the steel market or the software market. I would hazard a guess at the latter. Whether or not I am correct, they are certainly comparable.
I think that the thrust of the argument here is not that free software will change the world, but that the ideas that come out of it may. Personally I agree with you that its a little insular, and I doubt that it will. But who knows, its certainly an interesting movement, and stranger things have happened.
"Without the GNU project it would still be open source and would still thrive. "
Difficult to say really. Without the GNU project most linux systems around would be unusable, and barely functional. Whether someone else would have code replacements is an open question.
"It's because the GNU is a leech on the computer world and can't get their own OS working that GNU openly endorsed linux. "
I think that RMS's renaming to "GNU/Linux" is really flogging a dead horse. However he is entirely correct in pointing out that Linux is a kernal only. As I remember it Linus' first test that it was working was to stick bash on it, which is of course gnu software.
GNU might be considered to be a leech, but its a strange leech, as large amounts of the software that I use every day were written by the Gnu project, from my editor, to my shell, and most of the basic commands that I use.
"Yup, righto that's $5K American dollars for FREE software... "
Yes. Its free if you want it that way, and 5k dollars if you want to spend it. If you don't then you can download it, and build it for all the platforms for free.
The GNU project has to live in this world. This means that they need money to run their servers, provide their network plug, and pay for some of their programmers. It offers distributions and manuals as a good way of making this money. You can always make their products at no cost if you choose.
"Technology doesn't change the world, people change the world. Or insert any similar one-liner of your choice. "
But technology can impact on the way that people change the world. Tom Paine had a massive impact on society. But he was only able to do this because of the cheap printing press, and because enough people in the working classes could read. He only managed to survive as long as he did, because he could get out of Britian to France, when his live was threatened here, and out of France to the US when his it was threatened there.
The idea that the internet was going to change the world was nieve. You can use it to distribute information pushing for change, or venerating the status quo. But it has changed the world in some ways. It has enabled those who are seeking to change the world to comminicate around the world easily, for instance. We can talk to students in Indonesia now, we can see what the multinationals are doing more easily.
As Katz says its not clear yet what impact the internet is going to have. Only time will tell. After all it took 100 years for the true impact of Paine to become clear.
It makes me wonder how you cope with any network
latency. I'm not sure what level of delay can be coped with. I did some rough testing the other day, and I know that I can hear differences of 50ms in the placement of the note very easily. I never got round to testing it below this point.
All of this places a practical limit on the distance that the musicians can be apart. Under the circumstances I wonder what advantages this has over a fairly standard jack plug....
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's after mid-day (at least where I am), which means the joke is on the original poster....
Phil
"Once published, GPL code cannot be re-closed. If any code was lifted from another GPL project, the copyright holder of THAT code may be owed damages for any attempt to do so."
This is plainly untrue. If you do not believe this then I suggest that you have a look at history. GPL can be closed very easily, it the person who released it in the first place had no right to do so. It would appear that this is the case here. The original GPL was invalid, since the person who released it was not the copyright holder, even if he was the author.
This has happened before. Some GNU code has had to be pulled for instance, because companies claimed rights to parts of it. I believe this happened to one particular version of Emacs for instance.
Its one of the reason that GNU insist on copyright waivers from authors of much of the software they release. As well as signing your copyright to GNU, you have to get your employer to say that they waive any rights that they have to the copyright.
It's a hard assed policy on behalf of GNU. But there is a reason for it. This example is one of them.
Phil
Outsourcing is no magic wand. Some one has still
got to write the software, and some one has still got to do the research. In the case of all research requirements analysis is extremely hard. If you knew what you required from the software in advance, then it probably wouldn't be research!
But yes there are lots of computer scientists in bioinformatics these days. Its a hybrid discipline. Even though my origins are as a bench biologists I consider myself to be a computer scientist at least in part these days, as well as a programmer.
Research code is often a little flaky. We are not writing finished products to sell to people. We are writing code to do research!
Phil
"The problem with doing OO is it requires you to understand software engineering. Biologists are
probably more interested in crunching their numbers than in good OO design. Or am I wrong?"
It depends what you want to do. If you are writing a few hundred lines of code, then good software enginnering is not that important. Nowadays biologists and bioinformaticts are writing very large code bases, to do very complex tasks. Under these circumstances software engineering becomes necessary.
Programming is not my area of research. Nor is enginnering, or architecture. It is however my plumbers spanner. Of course us biologists are learning how to do, and in many cases how to do it very well.
Phil
Because bioinformatics grew out of a bunch of people writing small tools, to do small things. After a while we had a whole load of small tools doing small things, and we wanted to stick them together. So we write small perl scripts to tie them together. Perl is very good at this. Unfortunately it tends to also hide the fact that if we had written some decent libraries in the first place, we wouldn't have need to stick bits together with perl.
Bioinformatics is in a mess, and its slowly crawling out of it. To be honest, I think that the last thing that we need is more biologists with a working knowledge of perl.
"It seems like some of these scientists are getting really good at it, using OO and everything. "
Really, what actually using OO?
The reality is that if you can work out how a cell works, its easy to write computer programs. The problem is that too many people feel that because its easy to write programs, its also easy to write programs well. Which is why we are in such a mess now.
Phil
I think the fundamental problem is here, is that the travel companies make things so complex, in terms of fairs, and the various restrictions they place on you. If you combine several forms of transport, and worse international travel things multiple towards madness rapidly.
So for instance I got a ticket from a travel agent the other day, for a train from Manchester to Cambridge. Total cost...over 200 pounds! Madness. Obviously I sent it back. The insanity is such that even the travel agents get confused.
Consumer choice sounds like a good thing, and it is in some ways. But choosing can be very difficult. And when its NP-complete choosing with knowledge can be nearly impossible.
Phil
"I should have thought so. Not even our government would be stupid enough to create a law to impede the courts being presented with important ;)"
evidence
It was the "open court" bit that I was wondering about. The judge might look at the evidence in closed session.
Of course the company would have had to justify keeping the data in the first place, which is another issue!
Phil
"Re-read the articles. Lindows was forced to disclose the information during the discovery process because Microsoft thought that information
would be of use to prove the case belongs in Washington."
Thats how I read the original article, but not how I read the post from the CEO on at the head of this thread.
Its an interesting point actually. I don't know what would happen in the UK, in the knowledge of the data protection act. Could a judge force a company to reveal information in open court that would normally come under the data protection act? If they did what restrictions would there be on third party bodies using this information.
At this point my knowledge of law fails me. It would be an interesting to find out.
Phil
"Here in the UK we have a law called the Data Protection Act, which means that all data that a company has on you they must take "reasonable" steps to protect it. "
No it doesn't.
This is one of the issues that might have turned into a trade dispute between the US and EU. The EU places a restriction on transfering personal data outside of the EU. It can only go to those places with laws on data protection which are as strong as those in the EU. Which currently the EU claims the US does not fulfil. At one stage the US government was arguing that this was a trade barrier and should be removed. Nowadays there is the "safe harbour" framework, which provides US companies with the ability to sign up to extra legal requirements, that then allows them to deal with personal data from the EU. Or at least this is how I understand it.
I didn't have particularly strong views on this before this issue. But it seems to me that Lindows have disclosed these emails because they could use it in their case, rather than because they were forced to by judicial order. In the UK I think that its pretty clear that this would be illegal. For instance my employer can not even put my email address onto the web without my explicit permission (implied permission is not enough). To make this clear this is the email that my employer has given me.
I think in light of this case I would now consider myself to be a tentative supporter of the Safe Harbour. I certainly will be a lot more wary of given out my details to companies based in the US in future, and will only channel them through agencies based in the EU.
Phil
"Why would anybody who came up with an innovative application release it only for Linux? Linux is
always going to be playing catch up, it doesn't have the monster market share and so things are going to be developed for Windows first. "
I think you making a fundamental mistake here. Clearly people do produce applications for linux, or indeed other unix platforms. There are plenty of them around after all.
The mistake is that you are assuming that all application developers are aiming at a wide market. Whilst it may be true that M$ want everyone to use word, its untrue of 99% of applications which are developed. Most applications are written for a small market base, for people with very specific requirements.
So for instance if I was writing music software I would probably write for the Mac, because thats what most musicians use. Myself I'm a bioinformatician, and most of use some form of Unix. Hence linux is my main platform both for development, and my main target platform. There is nothing particularly religious about this. Unix is a better platform for our needs, and linux is useful because the hardware is dirty cheap.
What the article is talking about is not actually innovating applications, he is talking about high volume, "killer applications". More or less by definition by the time something turns into a high volume killer app, it will have lost most of its innovation, and will be using something that has gone before.
Phil
"Every French and Swiss person legally has to have a national ID card and carry it with them at all times, on pain of arrest. "
Yes. And everytime the police want to up their arrest statistics they just pop down to the local swimming baths and nick everybody in sight.
Phil
"Rather, it is people who understand the science who should keep an eye on what the corporations are doing. "
The difficulty here is of course that many of those who understand the science the best have to fight for funding from a pool much of which comes from these companies. There is a clear conflict of interest.
The second point is simpler, and one which is made abundantely clear by the article. Even scientists can not "keep an eye" on someone unless they know what they are doing. In this case, and in many others, a large corporation supressed information that it knew would damage it.
I am afraid that there is democracy, and there is corporate confidentiality. The two conflict, however you look at it.
Phil
"Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware
that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the
"sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds."
Single sex sterility IS hereditary however. The best known example is the Texas cytoplasm which was allowed the spread of the corn blight in the 60's. This is a warning against monoculture rather than anything else!
However the use of single sex sterility, or in animals skewed sex ratio's has been posited as a means of pest control several times. Although it sounds unlikely these genes can under many circumstances resulting in a population of one, or large of one sex, which obviously results in a reduction of the population size very quickly.
Phil
"I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector."
Firstly its not just your government spending money on this. A lot of it came from other governments. Indeed in Europe a large amount of the money came from the Welcome trust. Certainly it's this group that has spent a lot of the money going on decoding the genome, and providing base line annotation.
Secondly its not clear that the private sector could do this. Although they have been involved late in the day, they were not when the early pioneering work which has made this possible, from Fred Sangers original work on sequencing technology, to all the mapping efforts, cloning techniques and so on. This of course includes most of the work that was done by Venter before Celera came into being.
And third are you really suggesting that as soon as any company opens up, that the government should immediately shut down all resources that they are providing for a specific project.
And finally of course the data which has been produced from the "public sector" (much of the funding for which has not come from your, or indeed any government), has been released freely into the public domain. In other words the rights are not owned by the government.
Its easy to come out with a knee jerk libertarian "the free market can do anything" response to things. The reality is that it can't, and often doesn't. There is a big role for people doing things in other ways. Science in particular benefits from this. Its much easier to advance if you don't have to read pages of NDA's for every single piece of data that you need. And if the free software/open source community does not show you that, then what will.
Phil
"he did state that he learned perl in a couple weeks without much programming background. "
Well I'm a self taught programmer as well, even though I work in a CS dept!
Its one of the reasons that I don't like Perl. I haven't grown up being to remember all the obscure syntatic elements, and whether I am using an array, or a scalar reference to an array, or whatever. I like the compiler to know this stuff, and check that I have it right!
Call me a wimp if you like!
Phil
"most people in Eastern Europe do not consider Marxism to " add valuable insight" into
anything. "
It depends what you mean when you say "Marxism" of course. I think its fairly easy to argue that the communist bloc overturned more or less every principle of Marxism as time moved on, even while they claimed to adhere to it.
Its certainly the case that most of the Europe countries has an an expressedly Marxist party involved in politics somewhere. And most of them have a more reformist socialist, or social democratic party which at one stage or another have run the country. These parties were all informed by Marx's diagnosis of politics when he was writing, even though they denied his revolutionary prognosis.
Like my original post my assertion here is that whether or not you agree with Marxism is entirely secondly to issue of whether its valuable and interesting to read. I would say that even Mein Kampf is worth reading. Although its provides less abstraction than Marx's work, and gives less of insight into modern politics, its provides a definite insight into the meaning of hate. This might be depressing, but it's definately useful.
Phil
"If you don't like it don't use it but don't flame people who do."
I think that you are making a big assumption here. I suspect that a lot of people who dislike perl are those who have to use it. I'm writing in perl at the moment because I need some libraries written in it. It would take too long to recode these in a language that I like, so I am using perl.
"Try it before you knock it. "
Same assumption here I think. Many who knock perl have already tried it.
I'm not particularly religous about perl. I would just rather avoid when I can. Every computing langauge is of course a compromise, but for me many of the compromises that perl makes are in the wrong place. In particular I would say the syntax is horrible, or at least very complex. The "more than one way" philosphopy I find annoying. My experience is that perl code from different authors tends to be highly idiomatic. Its object orientation appears to me to be rather poor. You can't for instance define a interface contract (I'm sorry but "read the documentation" just doesn't cut the mustard for me). And finally its poorly typed. So its not openly declared what types a method or function takes, nor what types they return. At least not without reading either the documentation (if that exists, and its correct), or the implementation (which is not reliable if you are trying to address a common interface.
Now of course perl has its strengths. Its text processing is powerful (I've done a lot of text processing in Java for instance. Bad trip). It can be very quick to write (although I find this becomes less true as code gets more complex). CPAN is a fantastic resource (and a curse! Its why I writing perl at the moment).
Personally I wouldn't get attached too much to any language. You can write long programs in it, you can maintain it, and you can use it in teams. But to my mind this is indeed where perl is weak.
You will note that this is not a flame...
Phil
"So if I disagree that this is in any way enlightening, that makes me non-free thinking and
jingoistic? "
I think he was saying that if you jingoistic you won't like the article. Liking an article, finding it thought provoking, is of course different from agreeing with it.
The point is that the article uses the word "Marxist". Time and again on slashdot, if you use this word you get flamed to hell, mostly I have to say from US readers, because of the particular view of Marxism that is widely held over there. In most of Europe Marxism is a part of political scene, and adds valuable insight into our understanding. This is true whether or not you agree with Marxism.
Phil
"That may not be socialism in the way the term is commonly used, but it's socialism in the sense that it's the opposite of a free market. "
I think that you are very confused over what the terms "socialist", "free market" and "capitalist" mean. You certainly seem to have got them confused here.
Socialism is about control of the fruits of production by those who are the means of production. Capitalism is about control of the fruits of production, by those who own the means of production. The free market is about free movement of capital, and nothing else. To have capital you of course require strong property laws. IPR is just one example of this.
Phil
"Free bread and vegetables would change the world. Free steel would change the world. Free software?"
I'm not so sure about this. Which market is worth more, the steel market or the software market. I would hazard a guess at the latter. Whether or not I am correct, they are certainly comparable.
I think that the thrust of the argument here is not that free software will change the world, but that the ideas that come out of it may. Personally I agree with you that its a little insular, and I doubt that it will. But who knows, its certainly an interesting movement, and stranger things have happened.
Phil
"Without the GNU project it would still be open source and would still thrive. "
... "
Difficult to say really. Without the GNU project most linux systems around would be unusable, and barely functional. Whether someone else would have code replacements is an open question.
"It's because the GNU is a leech on the computer world and can't get their own OS working that GNU openly endorsed linux. "
I think that RMS's renaming to "GNU/Linux" is really flogging a dead horse. However he is entirely correct in pointing out that Linux is a kernal only. As I remember it Linus' first test that it was working was to stick bash on it, which is of course gnu software.
GNU might be considered to be a leech, but its a strange leech, as large amounts of the software that I use every day were written by the Gnu project, from my editor, to my shell, and most of the basic commands that I use.
"Yup, righto that's $5K American dollars for FREE software
Yes. Its free if you want it that way, and 5k dollars if you want to spend it. If you don't then you can download it, and build it for all the platforms for free.
The GNU project has to live in this world. This means that they need money to run their servers, provide their network plug, and pay for some of their programmers. It offers distributions and manuals as a good way of making this money. You can always make their products at no cost if you choose.
Phil
"Technology doesn't change the world, people change the world. Or insert any similar one-liner of your choice. "
But technology can impact on the way that people change the world. Tom Paine had a massive impact on society. But he was only able to do this because of the cheap printing press, and because enough people in the working classes could read. He only managed to survive as long as he did, because he could get out of Britian to France, when his live was threatened here, and out of France to the US when his it was threatened there.
The idea that the internet was going to change the world was nieve. You can use it to distribute information pushing for change, or venerating the status quo. But it has changed the world in some ways. It has enabled those who are seeking to change the world to comminicate around the world easily, for instance. We can talk to students in Indonesia now, we can see what the multinationals are doing more easily.
As Katz says its not clear yet what impact the internet is going to have. Only time will tell. After all it took 100 years for the true impact of Paine to become clear.
Phil
"Why not go for the real thing is you can?"
Because the real thing has distinct problems associated with it. Valves break, wear out, take time to warm up, are expensive.
Phil
"That's what evolution is all about: survival of the fittest (and mankind is obviously part of the environment)."
Its normal to distinguish between "the environment" and "mankind". Hence "artificial" as opposed to "natural" selection.
Phil
It makes me wonder how you cope with any network
latency. I'm not sure what level of delay can be coped with. I did some rough testing the other day, and I know that I can hear differences of 50ms in the placement of the note very easily. I never got round to testing it below this point.
All of this places a practical limit on the distance that the musicians can be apart. Under the circumstances I wonder what advantages this has over a fairly standard jack plug....
Phil