Chickens coming home to roost
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Mundie Responds
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· Score: 2
The main "point" being made here is that protection of intellectual property is crucial for continued creation and economic growth and that the creation of free software jeopardizes that protection.
Now, of course that's absurd. If I create some software and allow it to be freely redistributed, how does that jeopardize Metallica's ownership of "Hit The Lights" or Microsoft's ownership of Excel?
It doesn't, except that over the last few years the attackers of intellectual property have managed to entangle themselves with the "Open Source Movement." We're pro-Napster - we're the Open Source Movement! We're opposed to drug patents - we're the Open Source Movement! We're going to create and distribute desktop themes cloning Apple's industrial design - we're the Open Source Movement!
People like that have used the generosity of others as a justification for their own greed and contempt for creation. And the "Open Source Movement" -- most prominently Rob and the Slashdot editors -- encouraged them. I criticize Bruce Perens with some frequency but he was the one prominent figure to protest.
Good point and all... but how exactly do you save money by buy a SECOND CPU that the OS (Mac OS 9) doesn't even see... won't single proc mac's or an OS that could use them be cheaper?
An AC already said this but to make the point at +1 -- MacOS has (kind of) supported extra processors for years, I think since System 7. It requires a system extension and only affects apps that are coded to take advantage of it, but it does work pretty effectively. Photoshop and other CPU-intensive apps generally can use it and I'm sure the software used here can, too.
Re Sleepycat and Digital Creations and others: I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to turn a profit on making free software. But the fact that it can be done is a long way from proving that it's a superior business model, as the Open Source evangelists have been asserting. Do you think Microsoft really ought to be adopting Sleepycat's model?
Re Cygnus: See above. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Cygnus' revenue come from proprietary extensions to gcc?
Re Red Hat: I know Red Hat employs Alan Cox and supports a lot of other development, including RPM and GTK. But they're still fundamentally repackaging and selling other peoples' work. They're not CheapBytes but they're hardly earning a living from the code they write.
Re Prosa, Cybersource and O'Reilly: Again, they make money by supporting products they don't actually make. In fact, RMS denounced O'Reilly for profiting from free software by selling "unfree" books.
I dont know if the few hundred thousand web hosting companies in existance would agree that Open Source makes for a lousy business model.
I don't follow you. Do you mean because they use Apache? That's great for them but I don't see where that has anything do with the question of how best to run a software maker.
Microsoft deceptively compares Open Source to failed dot-com business models. Perhaps they misunderstand the term Free Software. Remember that Free refers to liberty, not price. The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
Huh? What's happened to all the theology about the distinctions between Open Source and Free Software? The two seem to be used interchangeably. (Maybe RMS was so pleased they said "GNU/Linux" that he let that one slide.) But that slight of hand is important here. They counter the attack on "Open Source" with something about "Free Software" and then jump back to the "business model of Open Source." And then back to Linux (which was largely created before anyone with an "Open Source business model" got involved) and then on to the GPL.
Now, I thought the most insightful part of Mundie's speech was the analogy of free software companies to dot-coms. Both had schemes where they would give away the uniquely valuable things they created (services, content, software) and make money from tangential activities (ads, selling information, stuffed monkeys). Both had plans that seemed awfully silly once the avalanche of clueless money stopped. Sorry, guys, Santa Claus has moved on. People will still make and give away free software but continuing to insist that it's the most sensible way to run a software business is starting to look pretty threadbare.
Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?...
Honestly, these Microsoft speeches are really a windfall for open-source advocacy windbags. They're so utterly foolish that responding is like shooting fish in a barrel. (I'm talking about the "Open source destroys intellectual property!" stuff, not the part about it making for a lousy business model, which happens to be entirely true.) The Eric Raymond / Bruce Perens line went over as long as nobody had actually put their theories to the test, but it must be a tough sell to convince companies to follow Netscape* and Eazel into oblivion.
* Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
So, this "backdoor" turns out to be a year old story that wasn't even true in the first place.
Can we at least salvage a little bit of fairness by giving Hairy Potter the (Score:5, Funny) he deserves? I just sprayed Diet Coke through my nose onto my keyboard while reading that.
Like if you are old enough to spell a swear, you don't know what the word sounds like?
I dunno -- remember Jamie's article about the kids who screwed up the output of fortune to HTML and put the words "I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded" on their web site? Where Jamie was irate that the police asked them some questions before realizing it was a misunderstanding and dropping the matter? Where Jamie and one boy's father were claiming that the kids now have a "police record" (absolutely false, according to the usual understanding of that term)?
In the course of showing what obviously angelic youngsters these are, Jamie writes: ..whose domain name contained the school's name and the Fword. This is a word, by the way, which G. obviously typed in to register the domain but which he was too polite to use over the phone. By the time we hung up, he had me embarrassed for saying it.
Uh, yeah. The owner of fuckwestbeverlyhigh.com is a candidate to replace Miss Manners.
I submitted a bug report (carefully noting Mr. Anonymous Coward's contribution). We'll see if the Konqueror guys fix khtml before Mozilla fixes their site.
For those who aren't going to read the article, it's not what you expect. (Or what the submitter seems to think.) It has little to do with patent and IP issues and what there is seems misguided to me. The "open-source" hook comes from the idea that between the availability of genomic information, public access to that information and the standardization of techniques, molecular biology and bioengineering is going to become accessible to the home hacker.
I've seen the speculation before, and it's never seemed too likely to me. For one thing, the costs are different. Once you buy a computer, some O'Reilly books and maybe a compiler, you can code pretty much for free. Molecular biology, at least in the foreseeable future, requires a steady stream of spending on reagents. More importantly, what are people going to do? It's true that the techniques of PCR, DNA cloning and transformation are straightforward. But coming up with useful projects requires a deep knowledge of the field you're going to work in, far beyond what a coder needs to write a web browser or wedding planning software.
The whole thing had a talking-so-far-in-the-future-that-it's-impossible- to-critique quality that characterizes most of the writing about nanotechnology. Sure enough, the article notes "In some ways, this scheme sounds a bit like Eric Drexler's nanotechnological assemblers, except that we already have functional nanotechnology--it's called biology."
I say it's all hot air but I'm eager to see some teenager prove me wrong.
To clarify: I'm not one of the people who posted thinking this was a fake story. I was thinking 'joke' from the moment I saw the humor icon. And, yes, this is a pretty ludicrous product. I'm just saying I reread it a couple of times just to make sure it wasn't a joke and I'm not surprised others were entirely fooled.
But then, what about a system that stores your display preferences (brightness. contrast, resolution) and automatically applies them whenever you use a computer (cell phone, PDA, ATM, food replicator). It's a lousy business plan for a startup but it might not be such a crazy thing to fold into.NET (Hailstorm, SOAP, XML-RPC, that Sun thing the name of which I forget). I'm already expecting Slashdot coverage of the Dave Winer article where he complains that MS is doing it all the wrong way, instead of the right way, the Dave Winer way.
Now let's get back to news of real businesses, like making a file manager for Gnome, giving it away but expecting to make money from providing add-on services and then blowing all your $13 million in funding on buying press coverage so you run out of money months before you could possibly start generating revenue.
Can you hear it? That's the collective ignorant outcry of a hundred thousand geeks who can make a Linux box fly but can't recognize satire when they read it.
I have to confess -- I read the story a couple of times before concluding it was a joke. Not because I can't recognize satire, or notice the humor icon on the story, but because there's little here that's obviously unrealistic.
The deranged business plan, the interview questions, the godawful management, executives landing in jail -- this sounds exactly like one of those sob-stories Salon is always running. Actually, if you combine Eazel and Ximian's business models, LinuxCare's management and the Red Hat and VA IPO's, you'd have a similar story.
Now, if the interview question had used goats instead of sheep, and the word "goat" had been linked, I'd have caught on quicker.;-)
Well, the question is if unverified memo is news, or should we presume unverified memos as fake until proven otherwise? Of course, presuming all unverified memos as true is lunacy as well.
I'd say that if you feel compelled to throw in phrases like "supposedly leaked" and "Even if the memo is fake," you might want to reconsider running the story at all. That goes double if you're Michael Sims and the story is bogus enough to jolt even your unusually low journalistic standards.
I mean, it's one thing if the tip comes from someone like Eric Raymond who, bonehead though he may be, has a track record of receiving real information. But what the hell is Betanews?
It takes exceptional qualities to step outside the box in this regard, and suspend judgement on someone you hate; and to get all the facts, despite the FUD.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd call that a minimum standard of intellectual honesty and fairness, not "exceptional."
I am no longer the richest man in the world. What should we do?
If I may provide a little Slashback -- the Sunday Times report that Gates has dropped to second place was completely inaccurate. It ascribed all of Sam Walton's inheritance to one son instead of splitting it across his four kids and widow. (Details here)
But what is the long term effects of adding mitochondria? After all in humans having too many or too little chromosomes can lead to Down Syndrome.
Gene and chromosome copy number is much more sensitive and tightly controlled than mitochondria number. I doubt if extra mitochondria have much effect.
Anyway, there probably won't be any long-term issue there because whatever mechanism controls mitochondrial growth should maintain the usual number in the children.
Everybody always says Courtney Love defended Napster in that speech. Here's what she actually said:
This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today.
I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'.
I'd be curious to see how articulate she is speaking off the cuff. I remember here, when this came out, everyone was going on about how much smarter she is than Lars Ulrich - like you can compare the text of a prepared speech written by who knows who with the raw transcript of an interview where Timothy (IIRC) left in every last "ummm" and "fuck."
As far as I can see, this is effectively an attack by Red Hat on shareware developers and companies. What I don't get is what consumers could demand under the warranty. IE crashes in the Ars Technica forums. Do I get my nothing back?
Not to flame, but that's not what the article says:
But there was confusion over whether that could be interpreted to mean proprietary software that for whatever reason isn't purchased, Barve says, so the new bill gives the exemption only to software that has its source code freely available and that allows unlimited copies to be made.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:(apples != oranges) || (apples != apples)
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MS VP Speech Online
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· Score: 1
Although I loved the bullet points...
Dude, you should see me with PowerPoint!;-)
That makes no sense.. If it frequently creates better software than the alternatives and it is beneficial to both the developer and the end user, it would seem as though it is actually a better development model.
Well, it clearly is a viable method. I don't know if it's obvious that it's generally the best way. Anyway, that's not crucial to my point.
I've never even heard point four argued... I've seen it argued that it is a viable business model, but that's different than superiority
Eric Raymond has been arguing for years that doing otherwise is suicidal. Slashdot doctrine for years has been that it is superior. The speech is saying that creating free software is a lousy way to run a business. I agree and so far no one has demonstrated otherwise. (Repackaging or installing Linux doesn't count.)
Copyrights and patents are evil, but only if left unchecked.
I agree. So do CmdrTaco and Hemos, although you'd never know that by reading their site. Like I replied to someone else, the vast majority of free software creators feel the same way. It's Michael, Jon Katz and the other leeches who use free software to justify their mentality that they're entititled to everything for free.
That's precisely my point! The "Information wants to be free!" crowd has shoved its way onto the Free Software/Open Source bandwagon. (RMS, of course, has earned his seat.) Like I said, the overwhelming majority of the people who actually do the work have little sympathy for the 2600 mindset. Linus, for example, works for a company with a tremendous emphasis on patents.
In ESR's editorial on this very speech he warned that he would try to group OSS, Napster, and software piracy under the same heading.
Yes, but what makes it easy for them is that Taco and his staff have spent years jumbling Linux, Napster, cracking, filterware, Aqua themes, Lego and Jar Jar Binks into one fuzzy "movement". Bruce Perens was the one person who prominently spoke out against it.
For me, the bottom line is I'm going to go home and code for fun. I don't see anything in this speech that makes me question that. What I do see criticizes my quitting my day job to make to start a software firm that makes money by selling stuffed monkeys (I agree) and criticizes Jon Katz's using my generosity to justify illegal MP3 distribution by his kiddie fans (I again agree).
I don't know how much I actually find objectionable here. It seems to me the "Open Source Movement" has at least five intermingled arguments:
1: Free software solutions are frequently a better alternative to the proprietary alternatives.
2: Both users and devlopers benefit from access to source.
3: Community development is a superior method of development.
4: "Open Source" development is a superior way to run a profitable software business.
5: Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all evil. I should be able to do anything I want.
To my mind, #1 and #2 are clearly true. Proponents of #'s 3, 4 and 5 love to piggyback their ideas on the success of Linux, Apache and FreeBSD, without any real justification. Yes, Linux has shown that community development works. It hasn't proven it superior. There's no a priori reason to think that giving away source is a sound business decision, and the people who have tried have hardly convinced me. (Red Hat sells code mostly written by others and now has cut their losses to the point that they round off to zero? Wow!!) And the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality not only isn't proven by the fact that Linux is good, it's laughable to most of the developers actually creating free software.
It seems to me this speech is mostly targeting arguments #4 and 5. I'm inclined to agree with Microsoft and my objection is with the people who invoke Perl and BSd to defend Eazel and Napster.
I don't know how much I actually find objectionable here. It seems to me the "Open Source Movement" has at least five intermingled arguments:
1: Free software solutions are frequently a better alternative to the proprietary alternatives.
2: Both users and devlopers benefit from access to source.
3: Community development is a superior method of development.
4: "Open Source" development is a superior way to run a profitable software business.
5: Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all evil. I should be able to do anything I want.
To my mind, #1 and #2 are clearly true. Proponents of #'s 3, 4 and 5 love to piggyback their ideas on the success of Linux, Apache and FreeBSD, without any real justification. Yes, Linux has shown that community development works. It hasn't proven it superior. There's no a priori reason to think that giving away source is a sound business decision, and the people who have tried have hardly convinced me. (Red Hat sells code mostly written by others and now has cut their losses to the point that they round off to zero? Wow!!) And the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality not only isn't proven by the fact that Linux is good, it's laughable to most of the developers actually creating free software.
It seems to me this speech is mostly targeting arguments #4 and 5. I'm inclined to agree with Microsoft and my objection is with the people who invoke Perl and BSD to defend Eazel and Napster.
This is some seriously irresponsible journalism. 1 system caught on fire. That's it. Because of this one system overheating Dell is recalling hundreds of thousands of batteries. We should be applauding a company that is willing to do this without waffleing around like say firestone on thier tires.
Hey, Apple has been taking a beating for years over their alleged combustible notebooks, also the fault of an outside vendor, also recalled responsibly -- and in that case, there were zero real-world cases of fires.
Hmm, I've been spending a lot of time defending Apple around here for the last couple of days.;-) Fact is, though, that while there is plenty to dislike about the company, they also take a beating for things where they genuinely deserve praise, like their contributions to free software and their innovative, top-quality (if expensive) hardware.
What, specifically, does this have to do with Apple?
Actually, Apple is including a lot of GPL software in the OS X developer tools CD. And they're in full compliance with the GPL, and going far, far beyond the requirements of the BSD licensed code in Darwin.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, of course that's absurd. If I create some software and allow it to be freely redistributed, how does that jeopardize Metallica's ownership of "Hit The Lights" or Microsoft's ownership of Excel?
It doesn't, except that over the last few years the attackers of intellectual property have managed to entangle themselves with the "Open Source Movement." We're pro-Napster - we're the Open Source Movement! We're opposed to drug patents - we're the Open Source Movement! We're going to create and distribute desktop themes cloning Apple's industrial design - we're the Open Source Movement!
People like that have used the generosity of others as a justification for their own greed and contempt for creation. And the "Open Source Movement" -- most prominently Rob and the Slashdot editors -- encouraged them. I criticize Bruce Perens with some frequency but he was the one prominent figure to protest.
And now the chickens are coming home to roost...
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An AC already said this but to make the point at +1 -- MacOS has (kind of) supported extra processors for years, I think since System 7. It requires a system extension and only affects apps that are coded to take advantage of it, but it does work pretty effectively. Photoshop and other CPU-intensive apps generally can use it and I'm sure the software used here can, too.
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Re Cygnus: See above. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Cygnus' revenue come from proprietary extensions to gcc?
Re Red Hat: I know Red Hat employs Alan Cox and supports a lot of other development, including RPM and GTK. But they're still fundamentally repackaging and selling other peoples' work. They're not CheapBytes but they're hardly earning a living from the code they write.
Re Prosa, Cybersource and O'Reilly: Again, they make money by supporting products they don't actually make. In fact, RMS denounced O'Reilly for profiting from free software by selling "unfree" books.
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I don't follow you. Do you mean because they use Apache? That's great for them but I don't see where that has anything do with the question of how best to run a software maker.
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Microsoft deceptively compares Open Source to failed dot-com business models. Perhaps they misunderstand the term Free Software. Remember that Free refers to liberty, not price. The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
Huh? What's happened to all the theology about the distinctions between Open Source and Free Software? The two seem to be used interchangeably. (Maybe RMS was so pleased they said "GNU/Linux" that he let that one slide.) But that slight of hand is important here. They counter the attack on "Open Source" with something about "Free Software" and then jump back to the "business model of Open Source." And then back to Linux (which was largely created before anyone with an "Open Source business model" got involved) and then on to the GPL.
Now, I thought the most insightful part of Mundie's speech was the analogy of free software companies to dot-coms. Both had schemes where they would give away the uniquely valuable things they created (services, content, software) and make money from tangential activities (ads, selling information, stuffed monkeys). Both had plans that seemed awfully silly once the avalanche of clueless money stopped. Sorry, guys, Santa Claus has moved on. People will still make and give away free software but continuing to insist that it's the most sensible way to run a software business is starting to look pretty threadbare.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie
Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?...
Honestly, these Microsoft speeches are really a windfall for open-source advocacy windbags. They're so utterly foolish that responding is like shooting fish in a barrel. (I'm talking about the "Open source destroys intellectual property!" stuff, not the part about it making for a lousy business model, which happens to be entirely true.) The Eric Raymond / Bruce Perens line went over as long as nobody had actually put their theories to the test, but it must be a tough sell to convince companies to follow Netscape* and Eazel into oblivion.
* Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
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Can we at least salvage a little bit of fairness by giving Hairy Potter the (Score:5, Funny) he deserves? I just sprayed Diet Coke through my nose onto my keyboard while reading that.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I dunno -- remember Jamie's article about the kids who screwed up the output of fortune to HTML and put the words "I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded" on their web site? Where Jamie was irate that the police asked them some questions before realizing it was a misunderstanding and dropping the matter? Where Jamie and one boy's father were claiming that the kids now have a "police record" (absolutely false, according to the usual understanding of that term)?
In the course of showing what obviously angelic youngsters these are, Jamie writes:
..whose domain name contained the school's name and the Fword. This is a word, by the way, which G. obviously typed in to register the domain but which he was too polite to use over the phone. By the time we hung up, he had me embarrassed for saying it.
Uh, yeah. The owner of fuckwestbeverlyhigh.com is a candidate to replace Miss Manners.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
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I've seen the speculation before, and it's never seemed too likely to me. For one thing, the costs are different. Once you buy a computer, some O'Reilly books and maybe a compiler, you can code pretty much for free. Molecular biology, at least in the foreseeable future, requires a steady stream of spending on reagents. More importantly, what are people going to do? It's true that the techniques of PCR, DNA cloning and transformation are straightforward. But coming up with useful projects requires a deep knowledge of the field you're going to work in, far beyond what a coder needs to write a web browser or wedding planning software.
The whole thing had a talking-so-far-in-the-future-that-it's-impossible- to-critique quality that characterizes most of the writing about nanotechnology. Sure enough, the article notes "In some ways, this scheme sounds a bit like Eric Drexler's nanotechnological assemblers, except that we already have functional nanotechnology--it's called biology."
I say it's all hot air but I'm eager to see some teenager prove me wrong.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
But then, what about a system that stores your display preferences (brightness. contrast, resolution) and automatically applies them whenever you use a computer (cell phone, PDA, ATM, food replicator). It's a lousy business plan for a startup but it might not be such a crazy thing to fold into .NET (Hailstorm, SOAP, XML-RPC, that Sun thing the name of which I forget). I'm already expecting Slashdot coverage of the Dave Winer article where he complains that MS is doing it all the wrong way, instead of the right way, the Dave Winer way.
Now let's get back to news of real businesses, like making a file manager for Gnome, giving it away but expecting to make money from providing add-on services and then blowing all your $13 million in funding on buying press coverage so you run out of money months before you could possibly start generating revenue.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I have to confess -- I read the story a couple of times before concluding it was a joke. Not because I can't recognize satire, or notice the humor icon on the story, but because there's little here that's obviously unrealistic.
The deranged business plan, the interview questions, the godawful management, executives landing in jail -- this sounds exactly like one of those sob-stories Salon is always running. Actually, if you combine Eazel and Ximian's business models, LinuxCare's management and the Red Hat and VA IPO's, you'd have a similar story.
Now, if the interview question had used goats instead of sheep, and the word "goat" had been linked, I'd have caught on quicker. ;-)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I'd say that if you feel compelled to throw in phrases like "supposedly leaked" and "Even if the memo is fake," you might want to reconsider running the story at all. That goes double if you're Michael Sims and the story is bogus enough to jolt even your unusually low journalistic standards.
I mean, it's one thing if the tip comes from someone like Eric Raymond who, bonehead though he may be, has a track record of receiving real information. But what the hell is Betanews?
It takes exceptional qualities to step outside the box in this regard, and suspend judgement on someone you hate; and to get all the facts, despite the FUD.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd call that a minimum standard of intellectual honesty and fairness, not "exceptional."
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
If I may provide a little Slashback -- the Sunday Times report that Gates has dropped to second place was completely inaccurate. It ascribed all of Sam Walton's inheritance to one son instead of splitting it across his four kids and widow. (Details here)
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Gene and chromosome copy number is much more sensitive and tightly controlled than mitochondria number. I doubt if extra mitochondria have much effect.
Anyway, there probably won't be any long-term issue there because whatever mechanism controls mitochondrial growth should maintain the usual number in the children.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today.
I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'.
I'd be curious to see how articulate she is speaking off the cuff. I remember here, when this came out, everyone was going on about how much smarter she is than Lars Ulrich - like you can compare the text of a prepared speech written by who knows who with the raw transcript of an interview where Timothy (IIRC) left in every last "ummm" and "fuck."
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This warranty has nothing to do with compensation for "damage caused." (See the text here - section 403.)
As far as I can see, this is effectively an attack by Red Hat on shareware developers and companies. What I don't get is what consumers could demand under the warranty. IE crashes in the Ars Technica forums. Do I get my nothing back?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
But there was confusion over whether that could be interpreted to mean proprietary software that for whatever reason isn't purchased, Barve says, so the new bill gives the exemption only to software that has its source code freely available and that allows unlimited copies to be made.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Dude, you should see me with PowerPoint! ;-)
That makes no sense.. If it frequently creates better software than the alternatives and it is beneficial to both the developer and the end user, it would seem as though it is actually a better development model.
Well, it clearly is a viable method. I don't know if it's obvious that it's generally the best way. Anyway, that's not crucial to my point.
I've never even heard point four argued... I've seen it argued that it is a viable business model, but that's different than superiority
Eric Raymond has been arguing for years that doing otherwise is suicidal. Slashdot doctrine for years has been that it is superior. The speech is saying that creating free software is a lousy way to run a business. I agree and so far no one has demonstrated otherwise. (Repackaging or installing Linux doesn't count.)
Copyrights and patents are evil, but only if left unchecked.
I agree. So do CmdrTaco and Hemos, although you'd never know that by reading their site. Like I replied to someone else, the vast majority of free software creators feel the same way. It's Michael, Jon Katz and the other leeches who use free software to justify their mentality that they're entititled to everything for free.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
In ESR's editorial on this very speech he warned that he would try to group OSS, Napster, and software piracy under the same heading.
Yes, but what makes it easy for them is that Taco and his staff have spent years jumbling Linux, Napster, cracking, filterware, Aqua themes, Lego and Jar Jar Binks into one fuzzy "movement". Bruce Perens was the one person who prominently spoke out against it.
For me, the bottom line is I'm going to go home and code for fun. I don't see anything in this speech that makes me question that. What I do see criticizes my quitting my day job to make to start a software firm that makes money by selling stuffed monkeys (I agree) and criticizes Jon Katz's using my generosity to justify illegal MP3 distribution by his kiddie fans (I again agree).
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
To my mind, #1 and #2 are clearly true. Proponents of #'s 3, 4 and 5 love to piggyback their ideas on the success of Linux, Apache and FreeBSD, without any real justification. Yes, Linux has shown that community development works. It hasn't proven it superior. There's no a priori reason to think that giving away source is a sound business decision, and the people who have tried have hardly convinced me. (Red Hat sells code mostly written by others and now has cut their losses to the point that they round off to zero? Wow!!) And the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality not only isn't proven by the fact that Linux is good, it's laughable to most of the developers actually creating free software.
It seems to me this speech is mostly targeting arguments #4 and 5. I'm inclined to agree with Microsoft and my objection is with the people who invoke Perl and BSd to defend Eazel and Napster.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
To my mind, #1 and #2 are clearly true. Proponents of #'s 3, 4 and 5 love to piggyback their ideas on the success of Linux, Apache and FreeBSD, without any real justification. Yes, Linux has shown that community development works. It hasn't proven it superior. There's no a priori reason to think that giving away source is a sound business decision, and the people who have tried have hardly convinced me. (Red Hat sells code mostly written by others and now has cut their losses to the point that they round off to zero? Wow!!) And the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality not only isn't proven by the fact that Linux is good, it's laughable to most of the developers actually creating free software.
It seems to me this speech is mostly targeting arguments #4 and 5. I'm inclined to agree with Microsoft and my objection is with the people who invoke Perl and BSD to defend Eazel and Napster.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Hey, Apple has been taking a beating for years over their alleged combustible notebooks, also the fault of an outside vendor, also recalled responsibly -- and in that case, there were zero real-world cases of fires.
Hmm, I've been spending a lot of time defending Apple around here for the last couple of days. ;-) Fact is, though, that while there is plenty to dislike about the company, they also take a beating for things where they genuinely deserve praise, like their contributions to free software and their innovative, top-quality (if expensive) hardware.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Actually, Apple is including a lot of GPL software in the OS X developer tools CD. And they're in full compliance with the GPL, and going far, far beyond the requirements of the BSD licensed code in Darwin.
The bullshit you read here notwithstanding.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.