Any individual participates in the community for two essential reasons: to get cool software and for personal reputation enhancement. While a lot of hay has been made about the second reason, the first is the crucial one.
Central to the first reason is that everyone who enhances the system "gives back" to it. Otherwise, the community members see themselves as "suckers" and the community disintegrates. As a side effect, the particular product usually loses its momentum, and the product dies. For an example, check out the story about the Mosaic browser.
(BTW, ESR acknowledges this, too. Remember the "scratch an itch" part?)
Thus the reason for my question about the superiority of the GPL. Care must be taken that companies don't "kill the goose that lays the golden egg". The GPL effectively does that.
As I see it, there are (at least) two types of open-source companies.
The first would include companies like Red Hat and LinuxCare. These are companies whose business model does not depend on proprietary software at all; their entire product is open.
The second includes companies like Scriptics and Sendmail. These companies base their business on proprietary extensions to free products - "better" versions of the free stuff.
Of course, no one can object to the first kind of company (unless you believe making money is itself evil). The second kind is a little harder to deal with, because it involves taking the hard work of the community and making money off of it without giving anything back - not in a money sense, but in the sense of giving back their improvements for the community to use.
The real gray area, in this case, involves companies like ActiveState and Cygnus. They sell proprietary software, but as separate add-ons to the free tools, not strictly as enhancements. In addition, like Red Hat, they donate much time and effort into free improvements to the free tools, keeping the proprietary parts of their effort as separate as they can.
As an example, ActiveState distributes and does lots of work on Perl for Win32, and distributes it under Perl's original licenses - free for any use, full source included. They also distribute some add-ons as "free beer" which help integrate Perl better into the Windows environment. Finally, they sell proprietary extensions to Perl: a GUI debugger for Windows and a "mod_perl"-like extension for IIS.
I think I feel better about this method of extending free software for money than the Scriptics/Sendmail way. It isn't as "exploitative"; you're really making your money off your own code, not other people's code.
Is it a coincidence that Scriptics-style companies tend to grow out of projects under a BSD/X license, while ActiveState/Cygnus companies (as well as, obviously, Red Hat-style companies) tend to grow out of GPL projects? Is this more evidence of the superiority of the GPL?
(Also: did you notice which prominent open-source project he didn't mention that doesn't have a company egging on its success? Hint: it's even more successful than all the rest, and it's the software that's feeding you these pages.:-)
The latter half of the article discusses the Perens/Raymond split. After doing an OK job of describing some of the concerns, they say something like this (paraphrased):
"Free software advocates and open source advocates both are careful to differentiate the movements. Free software is software distributed at no charge, while open source software is software that can be sold, but for which the source code must remain public."
Lest there be any doubt, the list of "free software" advocates (remember the above definition) includes RMS, the FSF, and Perens.
That has got to be the funniest screw-up I've read in a while. The implication from the article is that RMS and Perens are opposed to GPL-style software!
MP3 the format may or may not have a future. There are better compression formats, after all. Any freely available, easy to use, and high performance format could easily supplant MP3 the format.
But MP3 the movement (what other name could we use? the "digital music revolution"?), whatever format it champions, isn't going away anytime soon.
I think this guy's "problem" (he may be doing it on purpose) is that he's confusing the two. Just because MP4 or AAC or MS Media Player 4 or RealPlayer G2 or whatever can compress files better than MP3 doesn't mean that people are going to stop distributing music freely over the Internet through places like MP3.com.
I think he'd rather people did stop exchanging full music files over the Internet, so people like him could make money on pay-per-view or SDMI or whatever, and he's trying to tie the future of the digital music culture to the fate of the MP3 format (at least in the eyes of the press).
That's true. The problem is that you've paid Microsoft for the privilege of using the software. If you can't use the software for whatever reason (such as not agreeing to the license), they have to give you a refund.
If MS forces you to pay the money, even if you don't agree to the license, then the contract is coerced. That means that the contract is no longer valid.
You are correct in that copyright still applies. However, the provisions in the EULA go way beyond copyright; the provisions include things like no disassembly, no reverse-engineering, can only use on the computer you bought it with, etc. And nothing in copyright law says that, once you've bought and paid for a copy and possess it, that you can't use it. You can't copy it, of course, but you can use it on a single machine. And decompile it, and disassemble it, and reverse-engineer it, and remove it from one computer and reinstall it on another, etc.
Dealers may say you paid nothing for it.
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That would be great, except that's not what the OEMs are doing.
When you buy a system, you get something that says, "You need to agree to this contract in order to use the software contained within. If you don't agree, return the software for a refund."
If the OEM says you can get a refund, then you can get a refund. Period. If the OEM wants to say that the software inside is free, then they should have the EULA changed to reflect that the software is free and they are not entitled to a refund if they don't use it.
I don't know, however, what impact that would have on other legal issues. I would expect that calling the OS a zero-cost bundle could get MS and the vendors into a heap of legal trouble, especially since the vendors aren't buying, say, BeOS and bundling it for free, or just shipping Linux for the same that they paid for it (nothing).
But with the wording of the EULA as it is, there's no mistaking it. The OS is part of the cost of the system, and you can get a refund for the OS if you choose not to use it.
Interestingly, if you don't have a choice - say, the vendors refuse to refund the money and MS does as well - then it's possible that the license is coerced, since you are forced to pay for a product and agree to a license. In that case, the license is null and void.
I wrote up a several-page treatise on the flaws and errors in his paper, but it appears Kragen beat me to the punch.
(Good job, BTW: you caught some I missed.)
For the sake of completeness, here are some he missed:
On page one, Linux has already failed the acid test of crossing from early adoption to mainstream acceptance, but on page two, Linux is still considered to be in the "free-growth" stage. Which is it?
He compares the entire Windows NT development group and the code they manage to the Linux kernel team only, attributing to it the task of managing all of Linux. By extrapolating his numbers to all the projects represented by a typical Linux distro, you get as many as 160,000 developers represented.
Did you know Linux was losing market share? "Linux is still Unix, and Unix is losing market share, therefore Linux is losing market share, and Microsoft would never support a shrinking market." That gem is on page 4. Someone needs to go tell IDC.
If anyone's interested, I can post the paper somewhere.
Here we have a magazine with such a clue, they distribute their articles in PDF format (making it harder to read and limiting their ability to make money from banner ads) and require people to log in to read their stuff ("go away, new customers! we don't want you around!").
And we have their "think tank" consultant from the "Technology Assessment Group" (translation: we can't do it, so we slam everyone who can).
Even as a columnist, he seems to be lacking on the competence curve. With all the bad spelling ("Torvold"??), erroneous facts (best video support outside Win9x, and a preferred platform for new advances in wireless LAN technology), distortions (the "defect density" BS), bad math (Linux has three times the developers per line of code that NT has, even given his questionable stats, and Linux is undersupported?), and outright lies (Apache "losing the performance battle to IIS"), it's hard to imagine that he even did any research, much less deliver any thoughtful conclusions. The majority of the article is a dissertation on his own theories of how the software market works (all delivered without a single cite or bibliographic reference); thus, when Linux violates some of his "basic principles", it's no wonder that it comes up short in his "analysis".
If it weren't for the fact that this article isn't likely to be thrown on my desk as Exhibit A why someone shouldn't use Linux, I wouldn't even waste my time on it.
...must be really chummy. That CNN article was so incredibly biased, I'm amazed that it wasn't labeled "editorial".
The faux pas was glossed, Boies was slurred, while Allchin's testimony was reported as fact. They didn't mention that Allchin conceded the government's points about the video being fake. And, they trumpeted some more "evidence" that everyone in the world is just jumpin' for joy that IE is integrated with Windows 98.
Well I use GNOME... but it's (not) slow as fsck
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Harmony project Dead?
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Not for me. And I run on a slower system than you: a P133, 64MB RAM. I use Enlightenment, have two panels, and lots of applets. I've run StarOffice and Netscape at the same time as well, and not felt too bad - although I wouldn't recommend playing MP3s at the same time unless you have a Rio.:-)
Part of it is tuning. I've found that sound support is a CPU hog. But, one click in the control center and that's no longer a problem.
I've also got it on my laptops: a P90, 16MB RAM, and a 486/66, 16MB RAM. You definitely feel the lag, but it's still usable.
(Once, for a demo at a users' group meeting, I had both KDE and GNOME running on separate X sessions on the 486 laptop. If you want to know lag, that's one good way to get real familiar with it.:-)
You know, I had these files I was trying to delete. So I go and "rm -rf" the directory, and all of a sudden, all these.html and.gif files appear. Out of curiosity, I checked it out with a browser. Gosh! My files had all been automatically converted into a DHTML-enabled Web site, complete with ActiveX(tm)(r)(etc) applets! Gee, I thought rm was for deleting files! Well, duh!
:-):-):-)
Here's a hint, oh clueless one: If I want to delete files, I'll use Windows Explorer. If I want to write Web pages, I'll use FrontPage (err... maybe not). I (should) no more expect FrontPage to delete my hard disk than I should expect Windows Explorer to write my Web site for me.
Who needs software with "features" like that? Is this an example of Microsoft "innovation"? "FrontPage 2000, now with disk partitioning software and the revolutionary ActiveFormat(tm)(r)(etc) control built in!"
Oh, and before you reply, mentally count out a list of popular development tools that give you the "convenience" of project deletion from the hard disk besides FrontPage. I'm sure even you can count that high.
The Qube has a 150MHz MIPS chip in it, and the NetWinder has a 275MHz StrongARM. The Qube has a backup system (backup to workstation disk), while the NetWinder doesn't (at least, not that they mention). The Qube has a PCI slot and one 10MB Ethernet interface; the NetWinder has no slots, but lots of different interfaces (parallel & serial ports, sound, video). You can have a local console on the NetWinder, but not on the Qube.
It seems that the Qube is more aligned towards the thin server market; the NetWinder is more general-purpose. The Qube is also cheaper, which is a major factor at this price point, and the feature set seems better thought out. OTOH, the NetWinder is faster, more expandable, more flexible, with better power requirements.
I'd give the edge here to the Qube. The lack of a bundled backup strategy and the higher price are the two deciding factors. Fortunately, both are easily fixable.
...but the GNU operating system was first conceived in 1983, as the crowning achievment of the GNU project. So, yes, RMS did think of it first - when Linus was still in grade school.
Not to slam on Linus; he did come up with mostly the same idea independently. It's yet another case of "great minds think alike". But Linux is possible today because of the pioneering work done by RMS & Co.
HURD was supposed to be the last step in the progression, but for some reason the project faltered. Linus and Linux stepped in to fill that last gap, such that Linux (or, at least, Debian GNU/Linux) is the fulfillment of that goal.
The RealPlayer for Linux is available for free (beer-style) from Real Networks. Any Linux user should be able to get a hold of the player and hear it if they want.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confused as to how the community works.
Any individual participates in the community for two essential reasons: to get cool software and for personal reputation enhancement. While a lot of hay has been made about the second reason, the first is the crucial one.
Central to the first reason is that everyone who enhances the system "gives back" to it. Otherwise, the community members see themselves as "suckers" and the community disintegrates. As a side effect, the particular product usually loses its momentum, and the product dies. For an example, check out the story about the Mosaic browser.
(BTW, ESR acknowledges this, too. Remember the "scratch an itch" part?)
Thus the reason for my question about the superiority of the GPL. Care must be taken that companies don't "kill the goose that lays the golden egg". The GPL effectively does that.
As I see it, there are (at least) two types of open-source companies.
:-)
The first would include companies like Red Hat and LinuxCare. These are companies whose business model does not depend on proprietary software at all; their entire product is open.
The second includes companies like Scriptics and Sendmail. These companies base their business on proprietary extensions to free products - "better" versions of the free stuff.
Of course, no one can object to the first kind of company (unless you believe making money is itself evil). The second kind is a little harder to deal with, because it involves taking the hard work of the community and making money off of it without giving anything back - not in a money sense, but in the sense of giving back their improvements for the community to use.
The real gray area, in this case, involves companies like ActiveState and Cygnus. They sell proprietary software, but as separate add-ons to the free tools, not strictly as enhancements. In addition, like Red Hat, they donate much time and effort into free improvements to the free tools, keeping the proprietary parts of their effort as separate as they can.
As an example, ActiveState distributes and does lots of work on Perl for Win32, and distributes it under Perl's original licenses - free for any use, full source included. They also distribute some add-ons as "free beer" which help integrate Perl better into the Windows environment. Finally, they sell proprietary extensions to Perl: a GUI debugger for Windows and a "mod_perl"-like extension for IIS.
I think I feel better about this method of extending free software for money than the Scriptics/Sendmail way. It isn't as "exploitative"; you're really making your money off your own code, not other people's code.
Is it a coincidence that Scriptics-style companies tend to grow out of projects under a BSD/X license, while ActiveState/Cygnus companies (as well as, obviously, Red Hat-style companies) tend to grow out of GPL projects? Is this more evidence of the superiority of the GPL?
(Also: did you notice which prominent open-source project he didn't mention that doesn't have a company egging on its success? Hint: it's even more successful than all the rest, and it's the software that's feeding you these pages.
Did anyone else notice Wired's big screw-up?
The latter half of the article discusses the Perens/Raymond split. After doing an OK job of describing some of the concerns, they say something like this (paraphrased):
"Free software advocates and open source advocates both are careful to differentiate the movements. Free software is software distributed at no charge, while open source software is software that can be sold, but for which the source code must remain public."
Lest there be any doubt, the list of "free software" advocates (remember the above definition) includes RMS, the FSF, and Perens.
That has got to be the funniest screw-up I've read in a while. The implication from the article is that RMS and Perens are opposed to GPL-style software!
[obligatory clue stick reference deleted]
MP3 the format may or may not have a future. There are better compression formats, after all. Any freely available, easy to use, and high performance format could easily supplant MP3 the format.
But MP3 the movement (what other name could we use? the "digital music revolution"?), whatever format it champions, isn't going away anytime soon.
I think this guy's "problem" (he may be doing it on purpose) is that he's confusing the two. Just because MP4 or AAC or MS Media Player 4 or RealPlayer G2 or whatever can compress files better than MP3 doesn't mean that people are going to stop distributing music freely over the Internet through places like MP3.com.
I think he'd rather people did stop exchanging full music files over the Internet, so people like him could make money on pay-per-view or SDMI or whatever, and he's trying to tie the future of the digital music culture to the fate of the MP3 format (at least in the eyes of the press).
That's true. The problem is that you've paid Microsoft for the privilege of using the software. If you can't use the software for whatever reason (such as not agreeing to the license), they have to give you a refund.
If MS forces you to pay the money, even if you don't agree to the license, then the contract is coerced. That means that the contract is no longer valid.
You are correct in that copyright still applies. However, the provisions in the EULA go way beyond copyright; the provisions include things like no disassembly, no reverse-engineering, can only use on the computer you bought it with, etc. And nothing in copyright law says that, once you've bought and paid for a copy and possess it, that you can't use it. You can't copy it, of course, but you can use it on a single machine. And decompile it, and disassemble it, and reverse-engineer it, and remove it from one computer and reinstall it on another, etc.
That would be great, except that's not what the OEMs are doing.
When you buy a system, you get something that says, "You need to agree to this contract in order to use the software contained within. If you don't agree, return the software for a refund."
If the OEM says you can get a refund, then you can get a refund. Period. If the OEM wants to say that the software inside is free, then they should have the EULA changed to reflect that the software is free and they are not entitled to a refund if they don't use it.
I don't know, however, what impact that would have on other legal issues. I would expect that calling the OS a zero-cost bundle could get MS and the vendors into a heap of legal trouble, especially since the vendors aren't buying, say, BeOS and bundling it for free, or just shipping Linux for the same that they paid for it (nothing).
But with the wording of the EULA as it is, there's no mistaking it. The OS is part of the cost of the system, and you can get a refund for the OS if you choose not to use it.
Interestingly, if you don't have a choice - say, the vendors refuse to refund the money and MS does as well - then it's possible that the license is coerced, since you are forced to pay for a product and agree to a license. In that case, the license is null and void.
I wrote up a several-page treatise on the flaws and errors in his paper, but it appears Kragen beat me to the punch.
(Good job, BTW: you caught some I missed.)
For the sake of completeness, here are some he missed:
On page one, Linux has already failed the acid test of crossing from early adoption to mainstream acceptance, but on page two, Linux is still considered to be in the "free-growth" stage. Which is it?
He compares the entire Windows NT development group and the code they manage to the Linux kernel team only, attributing to it the task of managing all of Linux. By extrapolating his numbers to all the projects represented by a typical Linux distro, you get as many as 160,000 developers represented.
Did you know Linux was losing market share? "Linux is still Unix, and Unix is losing market share, therefore Linux is losing market share, and Microsoft would never support a shrinking market." That gem is on page 4. Someone needs to go tell IDC.
If anyone's interested, I can post the paper somewhere.
Here we have a magazine with such a clue, they distribute their articles in PDF format (making it harder to read and limiting their ability to make money from banner ads) and require people to log in to read their stuff ("go away, new customers! we don't want you around!").
And we have their "think tank" consultant from the "Technology Assessment Group" (translation: we can't do it, so we slam everyone who can).
Even as a columnist, he seems to be lacking on the competence curve. With all the bad spelling ("Torvold"??), erroneous facts (best video support outside Win9x, and a preferred platform for new advances in wireless LAN technology), distortions (the "defect density" BS), bad math (Linux has three times the developers per line of code that NT has, even given his questionable stats, and Linux is undersupported?), and outright lies (Apache "losing the performance battle to IIS"), it's hard to imagine that he even did any research, much less deliver any thoughtful conclusions. The majority of the article is a dissertation on his own theories of how the software market works (all delivered without a single cite or bibliographic reference); thus, when Linux violates some of his "basic principles", it's no wonder that it comes up short in his "analysis".
If it weren't for the fact that this article isn't likely to be thrown on my desk as Exhibit A why someone shouldn't use Linux, I wouldn't even waste my time on it.
Let me be the first, then, to congratulate Sprint for having a clue.
If we're going to slam Sprint based on an anonymous rumor, then shouldn't we be just as quick to praise them for a non-anonymous one?
...must be really chummy. That CNN article was so incredibly biased, I'm amazed that it wasn't labeled "editorial".
The faux pas was glossed, Boies was slurred, while Allchin's testimony was reported as fact. They didn't mention that Allchin conceded the government's points about the video being fake. And, they trumpeted some more "evidence" that everyone in the world is just jumpin' for joy that IE is integrated with Windows 98.
Not for me. And I run on a slower system than you: a P133, 64MB RAM. I use Enlightenment, have two panels, and lots of applets. I've run StarOffice and Netscape at the same time as well, and not felt too bad - although I wouldn't recommend playing MP3s at the same time unless you have a Rio. :-)
:-)
Part of it is tuning. I've found that sound support is a CPU hog. But, one click in the control center and that's no longer a problem.
I've also got it on my laptops: a P90, 16MB RAM, and a 486/66, 16MB RAM. You definitely feel the lag, but it's still usable.
(Once, for a demo at a users' group meeting, I had both KDE and GNOME running on separate X sessions on the 486 laptop. If you want to know lag, that's one good way to get real familiar with it.
You know, I had these files I was trying to delete. So I go and "rm -rf" the directory, and all of a sudden, all these .html and .gif files appear. Out of curiosity, I checked it out with a browser. Gosh! My files had all been automatically converted into a DHTML-enabled Web site, complete with ActiveX(tm)(r)(etc) applets! Gee, I thought rm was for deleting files! Well, duh!
:-) :-)
:-)
Here's a hint, oh clueless one: If I want to delete files, I'll use Windows Explorer. If I want to write Web pages, I'll use FrontPage (err... maybe not). I (should) no more expect FrontPage to delete my hard disk than I should expect Windows Explorer to write my Web site for me.
Who needs software with "features" like that? Is this an example of Microsoft "innovation"? "FrontPage 2000, now with disk partitioning software and the revolutionary ActiveFormat(tm)(r)(etc) control built in!"
Oh, and before you reply, mentally count out a list of popular development tools that give you the "convenience" of project deletion from the hard disk besides FrontPage. I'm sure even you can count that high.
Hmm...
Cobalt Qube 2700WG, 32MB RAM, 6 GB disk: $1449
Corel NetWinder GS, 32MB RAM, 6 GB disk: $1839
The Qube has a 150MHz MIPS chip in it, and the NetWinder has a 275MHz StrongARM. The Qube has a backup system (backup to workstation disk), while the NetWinder doesn't (at least, not that they mention). The Qube has a PCI slot and one 10MB Ethernet interface; the NetWinder has no slots, but lots of different interfaces (parallel & serial ports, sound, video). You can have a local console on the NetWinder, but not on the Qube.
It seems that the Qube is more aligned towards the thin server market; the NetWinder is more general-purpose. The Qube is also cheaper, which is a major factor at this price point, and the feature set seems better thought out. OTOH, the NetWinder is faster, more expandable, more flexible, with better power requirements.
I'd give the edge here to the Qube. The lack of a bundled backup strategy and the higher price are the two deciding factors. Fortunately, both are easily fixable.
...but the GNU operating system was first conceived in 1983, as the crowning achievment of the GNU project. So, yes, RMS did think of it first - when Linus was still in grade school.
Not to slam on Linus; he did come up with mostly the same idea independently. It's yet another case of "great minds think alike". But Linux is possible today because of the pioneering work done by RMS & Co.
HURD was supposed to be the last step in the progression, but for some reason the project faltered. Linus and Linux stepped in to fill that last gap, such that Linux (or, at least, Debian GNU/Linux) is the fulfillment of that goal.
The RealPlayer for Linux is available for free (beer-style) from Real Networks. Any Linux user should be able to get a hold of the player and hear it if they want.