I agree. Artificial Intelligence has, since its creation, been plagued by grandiose, unsubstantiated claims. This is understandable -- computers able to pass the Turing Test really would be a major step forward, and journalists and theorists get excited about what they could do. But building Yet Another Supercomputer probably isn't going to get us there; at least, building them in the past for these exact purposes haven't gotten us there.
As far as supercomputing goes, it sounds like they're building some cool machines, able to do some cool number crunching. That is how other journalists have spun the story; they were wise enough not to hype their chickens prior to hatching.
1) I agree that the Ewoks were less intrusive than Jar-Jar. However, a friend of mine once said that ROTJ would have been infinitely more believable if it had featured about ten minutes of nothing but storm troopers pointing their blasters at the ground, calmly shooting Ewoks as methodically as a nail gun operator putting up vinyl siding.
2) DiCaprio did not-that-bad of an acting job in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, although playing Darth Vader is a bit different than playing a retarded kid. (Wait a second...Jake Lloyd...I retract that statement.)
3) Many Batman fans were livid when they first heard that Michael Keaton would be cast in Burton's film. They wanted Sly Stallone or someone similar. Keaton worked in the role, though, because he was a versatile actor who could play sinister characters.
People generally don't purchase NT Server to run apps; if they wanted that, they'd save money by buying NT Workstation instead.
Take NT Server and boil away all the OS stuff, leaving the features that people buy NT Server for. *THAT* is what Samba is a clone of. Remove these features from NT Server, and you're left with NT Workstation. Samba is a slimmed-down, versatile, modular (daemonic), open-source clone of NT Server.
My phys-lexia might be a problem here, but since all the water will freeze, no unremovable water layer should form. (Right?) Ice floats in water because ice gets air bubbles trapped in it; possibly some other structural thing accounts for this (any physicists reading?).
So the real question here is whether ice will float in oil; assuming ice floats in water because of air bubbles, ice should also float in oil.
elflord> What do you mean by "require open elflord> standards" ? I don't see why MS shouldn't elflord> be allowed to invent their own elflord> networking protocols, etc. On the other elflord> hand, asking them to document their elflord> networking protocols is more reasonable.
I interpret it as the latter.
What is needed is not the crippling of Microsoft, either by breaking them up or by forcing them to comply with some arbitrary protocols. What is needed is the opening-up of Microsoft's code *just enough* to allow competition.
elflord> Sure, and forcing them to release all elflord> their products under the GPL will also elflord> make it easier for the open source elflord> community to compete. I think a lot of elflord> slashdot readers aren't really interested elflord> in a fair outcome- they are more elflord> interested in propping up open source. elflord> Personally, I'd rather see open source elflord> win on its merits.
I think most of them are interested in allowing competition, open-sourced or otherwise. Also, keep in mind that there already is an open-source clone of NT Server. It's called "Samba". The Samba developers have had to reverse-engineer a lot of the more well-guarded NT Server APIs. Opening up NT's APIs would level the playing field between NT Server and Samba (and also the million closed-source SMB server programs out there). It would force NT Server to win or lose "on its merits", not the obscurity of its protocols.
I agree. While, on one hand, I think the only reason MS did any of this was to try and corrupt Java, the ability of alternate developers to extend and embrace software -- especially when making free alternatives -- is valuable.
Also, there is a danger in the anti-MS sentiment of giving an underdog proprietary software company an unfair advantage over the computer industry. Both Sun and Apple have tried to do some evil, closed things, and perhaps they self-justified it by perceiving themselves as underdogs. Microsoft was the underdog once, when Big Blue was the major computer monopoly. Much of why MS is still evil today has to do with its residual hyper-paranoid, struggle-for-the-top mentality.
No, it's not. According to the BNF in K&Rv2, a statement is either followed by a semicolon or enclosed in parentheses (with a few other variants). What you have is a logical-OR-expression (most specifically), i.e. an expression (most generally). Also, I don't think the first character of valid identifiers can be digits, and "2 b" doesn't mean anything. "2*b || !2*b That is the expression" would be more accurate. (Correct me if I am wrong on these points.)]
If your software really is useful, I'd speculate that you would have more long-term success with open-sourced software than anything else, and that the GPL would be most successful of all. Free software tends to get used by a lot of people; the more people use your software, the better off you are in the long run. Consider that companies who own their programs and code have been hiring old COBOL coders like mad for Y2K stuff; what's important isn't controlling the code, what's important is being recognized as somebody who can do nontrivial things with the code. Make it free, get it out there, you'll do well.
Re:Problems with the new setup
on
Slashdot Notes
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· Score: 2
1) Moderators already "waste" their points on these. "First Posts" go down almost as soon as they go up, in my humble experience.
2) I'm just speculating, but maybe this is to counteract any other moderators trying to promote the post. Kind of like giving someone multiple life sentences to eliminate hope for a parole. (This would, of course, depend on whether the internal score variable can go below -1.)
3) I agree, although "off-topic" is not too bad of a catch-all category. I have the feeling that these moderation descriptions are going to be like options in the slashdot polls -- everyone will always be mad that there aren't more.
While we're nitpicking, I'd like it if there could be a list of the adjectives, instead of just the latest one, or whatever, displayed. A post could, in theory, be insightful, offtopic, informative, and flamebait all at the same time. (IMHO, the Linus Torvalds essay in Open Sources meets all of these descriptions at various points.)
Okay, someone actually sent me email on this, apparently still not understanding what Fisher meant in the quote. So just to spell it out, when she said "Boba Fett could see all the way to florida", she meant "Boba Fett could see my pubic hair under the metal bikini." The interview is here, the quote is on the second page.
Well, I guess the only real working example (unless someone has read those Sith comic books I remember hearing about somewhere) is Vader and Palpatine. There Vader was the apprentice to Palpatine's mastery, although he could have done plenty of evil without Palpatine. If Vader, Palpatine, and Luke had all gone to the dark side, and if one of the three had died, then the master/apprentice relationship could still have continued.
The Samba documentation will tell you that a Samba box can act as a PDC (which you need if you want NT-style centralized password verification, which is by default on for NT clients), but it is unsupported and undocumented.
I spent a lot of time banging my head against this with Samba, trying to figure out how to get it done, without really knowing the intricacies of NT administration. My boss had little sympathy: "Just tell it to do password verification" he would sneer, thinking to himself: Fuckin' dumbass.
Then my boss and I went to LWCE (the first one), and heard a talk by the main Samba guy. He talked about the great lengths MS has gone through to keep the password verification APIs secret. The Samba guy had gone to Microsoft conferences, had met with one of the head NT server guys at MS, had tried unsuccessfuly to get answers out of him. The MS guy had turned red and scampered out of the room. (Well, that might have been exaggeration.) MS has put a lot of effort into obfuscating things so that no one else on the planet can make a replacement NT server (because competition in unamerican). This has made it really really difficult for the Samba folks to make effective password verification routines. (BTW, my boss ate his words for thinking I was an idiot for not getting PDC stuff running.)
So the long and short of this is, if you want to do password verification for NT clients, you'll have to keep around a spare dinky little NT server box to verify passwords.
Hopefully people will flame me, saying "You idiot! It's easy to set up a Samba PDC!" But unless they actually POST HOW TO DO IT (hint), kindly redirect them to/dev/fuckingdie.
The master/apprentice thing only applies to the dark jedi. There are master/apprentice relationships with the light jedi as well, but not to the exclusivity of all else. Dark jedi will kill off all others until only two remain, a master and an apprentice.
The metal bikini Leia wore in ROTJ didn't -- being metal -- hug the body. Boba Fett stood behind her in the Jabba scenes (where she had to recline, chained up, in front of Jabba...where's that VCR?) and, as Carrie Fisher euphamized in Newsweek, "he could see all the way to Florida."
Good ideas; I hadn't considered some of those cloning possibilities.
4. Sidious is not a Sith. Or were you referring to something else?
6. Dark Jedi (including force-trained Sith) tend to kill each other off until only two remain, the master and apprentice. If a third Jedi either persuasion shows up, one or more of the three must die, so that either the master/apprentice relationship is continued or only the light Jedi remains (as in ROTJ).
1) The only Star Wars movie that stands on its own two feet is ANH. The others are fundamentally an extension of that movie, which is a really well-told story. Even ESB, good as it is, needs the movie before and the move after to really be good, to really be explicated.
2) ANH had real urgency to the story -- the Empire was basically invincible and evil, and had almost won. ("We have the readouts of the Death Star; several people died to bring us this information.") There was a real urgency to it -- everything was *almost* lost forever. TPM starts out with everything (basically) happy and nice. The only really bad thing with the action in the movie is that Naboo might be destroyed. Oh no -- Jar-Jar and all his kind are eliminated! Cry me a river. So TPM just didn't have the same urgency that ANH had. However, there was one really dire plot point in the movie: "Oh shit, the Sith are back."
3) The sword fighting was better than in any of the other movies. The classic trilogy had Jedi vs. Jedi swordfighting, which was a lot like samurai fighting. The style done by Darth Maul (and it pisses me off that he died; they better make another one of him in the Clone Wars) was closer to, say, the Kung Fu / Tae Kwon Do / Jeet Kune Do / whatever styles (i.e., it involved kicking). Very very cool.
4) The four-way orgy involving Darth Sidious, Senator Palpatine, Queen Amidala, and Queen Amidala's handmaiden was EXCELLENT! The classic trilogy was really lacking in the hardcode sex department. (Although according to that Newsweek Carrie Fisher interview, Boba Fett "could see all the way to Florida" in the Tatooine scenes of ROTJ.)
I think TPM was consciously made overly light and cheery, because the other two movies will have to be dark and brooding. Vader's story is a fall from grace -- he's got to start out good and pure to have a fall. I'm *really* looking forward to episodes 2 & 3.
tony@work> How could they do that? I proposed one tony@work> method: create a version of MS-Office tony@work> that will only run when a specific tony@work> library is installed, and make that tony@work> library available only with MS-Linux. tony@work> Since it is not part of the kernel, tony@work> they wouldn't have to release it as tony@work> free software.
IIRC, GNU (w/ HURD) will (does?) only allow libre drivers. Does it have the same requirement for libraries? Perhaps RMS could just say "nothing proprietary may run on GNU at all, ever."
This doesn't necessarily affect the Linux crowd (since Linux does, and will, tolerate proprietary software), but if all becomes embraced and extended in the Linux arena, moving to GNU wouldn't be that big of a jump. [This assumes, of course, that requirements on "no GNU distributions with proprietary stuff" could hold up in court.]
But then again, would the "tying" thing really matter? Sure, most offices try to standardize on one OS (and thus probably one distro), but savvy users can get away with reinstalling a free distro, and avoiding use of non-free apps. (But then, goes the counter-argument, what if lots of proprietary stuff is tied together, so that MS-Word for Linux will only talk to MS-DNS for Linux routed through Windows NT Server for Linux...boy, proprietary software really is a trap.)
I guess the only real solution is to 1) Teach people that being fucked over by the Man is bad, and 2) Teach people that the Man will only fuck them over if they let him. Don't buy proprietary OSes, try to talk your boss out of (perhaps unwittingly) standardizing on proprietary software.
Re:Feature set only omits one thing for me ...
on
AbiWord 0.7 release
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· Score: 2
LizardKing> Personally I hope that if AbiWord does LizardKing> start to have more esoteric features, LizardKing> that the developers come up with a LizardKing> simple plugin module that makes all LizardKing> such addons optional.
The even cooler thing is that such a plugin structure would allow non-Abisource folks to write their own plugins and distribute them on, say, freshmeat. Abiword could end up, over time, being more featureful than MS-Word, and yet not truly be bloatware because those features would be optional. They'd also be likely to be more stable than Word's esoteric functions, because each plugin would (in theory) have a different maintainer (not unlike Debian structure). (Although a database of extraneous Word macros may exist somewhere, I don't know.)
Why did MS give away IE? So that it could (in theory) gain market share and get rid of the competition. The price could then be jacked up to a keen US$50 per copy or so. As long as a lot of people use Abiword, it doesn't *really* matter if they pay for a copy. By virtue of having written the product, the Abisoft folks will be the most qualified to go in and add stuff to Abiword or Abioffice or Abiwhatever. They'll control the growth and direction of a widely-used piece of software. There's gads of money to be made in a situation like that. Mindshare pays off in the long run.
"Freax" was his original name. I suppose "Linux" is less awkward, although it is routinely mispronounced. Still it's not like "UNIX" or "LISP" are really sexy, go-get-'em names either, and those have done pretty well.
There was a company in Australia who suggested a similar license; there was an old slashdot article on it.
One thing which I didn't see pointed out then, but which I think also applies to your license idea, is what the Securities and Exchanges Commission (or the analogue in your nation, the SEC is a US organization) would say about it. Specifically, this license model could, I hypothesize, be turned into a pyramid scheme. Assuming that every programmer who adds code to a program is entitled to a piece of the money from a given end user, a pyramid payment structure could be built.
There are legal pyramid structures in business (e.g., Amway, although they were investigated for being a pyramid scheme -- apparently they got off); the critereon is that you have a "real" product. So assuming you can convince a judge that this is a real-life piece of software, you should be okay. Anyway, something think about (IMHO IANAL B/F/F).
Re:Am I getting paranoid ?
on
Distro News
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· Score: 1
People should be able to do both. Windows has little flexibility, but can be set up to do standard things out of the box. J. Random Homeuser can get ppp working quickly, can get netscape up and running, and happily be browsing for pr0n and waReZ without having to think. UNIX has a lot of flexibility, but you have to learn about stuff to use it.
Mitch Kapor wrote an essay on this, circa 1990. He said that the holy grail of OS interfaces would be an "onion skin" design. That is, the OS gets increasingly more complex and powerful as you peel off the layers. So someone like a CEO, who simply cannot afford to waste time learning DNS setup, can fill out some idiotic wizard to get things working and move on. But a sysadmin could take that same system and turn it into a name server. To be a truly good OS, I think you need to have both of those options. As GNOME / KDE / Whatever get more advanced, this is becoming a reality.
TV was a "free" version of the movies. Did it destroy the film industry? No -- it just changed the film industry. Instead of pushing double-features with newsreels and cartoons (providing evening-long entertainment that could be gotten from TV), it had to start pushing relatively short movies that attracted large audiences.
That said, there's still a need for major labels, and will always be. If I'm a musician, I don't want to have to deal with setting up recording studio time, or merchandising, or setting up promotions, or shooting music videos, or all that other crap. I want to have somebody do all that stuff *for* me, to buy me coke, and give me a limo, and hand me empty whiskey bottles to hurl at my fellow band members.
Plus, people are still going to buy records, just as they buy software CD-ROMs today. Who wants to sit and download the white album? People thought the Internet would make books obselete, and that hasn't happened. Physical media is just too damn convenient.
What about contact lenses, especially the colored ones that cover up the iris? Will the blind, or those with otherwise funky eyes, have some alternate way to get cash from these machines? (I didn't see anything on the page about this.)
If these things were cheap, they'd make sweet peripherals. No chance of people finding out your password when all passwords are replaced by eye scans.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Artificial Intelligence has, since its creation, been plagued by grandiose, unsubstantiated claims. This is understandable -- computers able to pass the Turing Test really would be a major step forward, and journalists and theorists get excited about what they could do. But building Yet Another Supercomputer probably isn't going to get us there; at least, building them in the past for these exact purposes haven't gotten us there.
As far as supercomputing goes, it sounds like they're building some cool machines, able to do some cool number crunching. That is how other journalists have spun the story; they were wise enough not to hype their chickens prior to hatching.
1) I agree that the Ewoks were less intrusive than Jar-Jar. However, a friend of mine once said that ROTJ would have been infinitely more believable if it had featured about ten minutes of nothing but storm troopers pointing their blasters at the ground, calmly shooting Ewoks as methodically as a nail gun operator putting up vinyl siding.
2) DiCaprio did not-that-bad of an acting job in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, although playing Darth Vader is a bit different than playing a retarded kid. (Wait a second...Jake Lloyd...I retract that statement.)
3) Many Batman fans were livid when they first heard that Michael Keaton would be cast in Burton's film. They wanted Sly Stallone or someone similar. Keaton worked in the role, though, because he was a versatile actor who could play sinister characters.
People generally don't purchase NT Server to run apps; if they wanted that, they'd save money by buying NT Workstation instead.
Take NT Server and boil away all the OS stuff, leaving the features that people buy NT Server for. *THAT* is what Samba is a clone of. Remove these features from NT Server, and you're left with NT Workstation. Samba is a slimmed-down, versatile, modular (daemonic), open-source clone of NT Server.
My phys-lexia might be a problem here, but since all the water will freeze, no unremovable water layer should form. (Right?) Ice floats in water because ice gets air bubbles trapped in it; possibly some other structural thing accounts for this (any physicists reading?).
So the real question here is whether ice will float in oil; assuming ice floats in water because of air bubbles, ice should also float in oil.
elflord> What do you mean by "require open
elflord> standards" ? I don't see why MS shouldn't
elflord> be allowed to invent their own
elflord> networking protocols, etc. On the other
elflord> hand, asking them to document their
elflord> networking protocols is more reasonable.
I interpret it as the latter.
What is needed is not the crippling of Microsoft, either by breaking them up or by forcing them to comply with some arbitrary protocols. What is needed is the opening-up of Microsoft's code *just enough* to allow competition.
elflord> Sure, and forcing them to release all
elflord> their products under the GPL will also
elflord> make it easier for the open source
elflord> community to compete. I think a lot of
elflord> slashdot readers aren't really interested
elflord> in a fair outcome- they are more
elflord> interested in propping up open source.
elflord> Personally, I'd rather see open source
elflord> win on its merits.
I think most of them are interested in allowing competition, open-sourced or otherwise. Also, keep in mind that there already is an open-source clone of NT Server. It's called "Samba". The Samba developers have had to reverse-engineer a lot of the more well-guarded NT Server APIs. Opening up NT's APIs would level the playing field between NT Server and Samba (and also the million closed-source SMB server programs out there). It would force NT Server to win or lose "on its merits", not the obscurity of its protocols.
I agree. While, on one hand, I think the only reason MS did any of this was to try and corrupt Java, the ability of alternate developers to extend and embrace software -- especially when making free alternatives -- is valuable.
Also, there is a danger in the anti-MS sentiment of giving an underdog proprietary software company an unfair advantage over the computer industry. Both Sun and Apple have tried to do some evil, closed things, and perhaps they self-justified it by perceiving themselves as underdogs. Microsoft was the underdog once, when Big Blue was the major computer monopoly. Much of why MS is still evil today has to do with its residual hyper-paranoid, struggle-for-the-top mentality.
[First a little geekiness:
Lando> 2b || !2b That is the statement
No, it's not. According to the BNF in K&Rv2, a statement is either followed by a semicolon or enclosed in parentheses (with a few other variants). What you have is a logical-OR-expression (most specifically), i.e. an expression (most generally). Also, I don't think the first character of valid identifiers can be digits, and "2 b" doesn't mean anything. "2*b || !2*b That is the expression" would be more accurate. (Correct me if I am wrong on these points.)]
If your software really is useful, I'd speculate that you would have more long-term success with open-sourced software than anything else, and that the GPL would be most successful of all. Free software tends to get used by a lot of people; the more people use your software, the better off you are in the long run. Consider that companies who own their programs and code have been hiring old COBOL coders like mad for Y2K stuff; what's important isn't controlling the code, what's important is being recognized as somebody who can do nontrivial things with the code. Make it free, get it out there, you'll do well.
1) Moderators already "waste" their points on these. "First Posts" go down almost as soon as they go up, in my humble experience.
2) I'm just speculating, but maybe this is to counteract any other moderators trying to promote the post. Kind of like giving someone multiple life sentences to eliminate hope for a parole. (This would, of course, depend on whether the internal score variable can go below -1.)
3) I agree, although "off-topic" is not too bad of a catch-all category. I have the feeling that these moderation descriptions are going to be like options in the slashdot polls -- everyone will always be mad that there aren't more.
While we're nitpicking, I'd like it if there could be a list of the adjectives, instead of just the latest one, or whatever, displayed. A post could, in theory, be insightful, offtopic, informative, and flamebait all at the same time. (IMHO, the Linus Torvalds essay in Open Sources meets all of these descriptions at various points.)
Okay, someone actually sent me email on this, apparently still not understanding what Fisher meant in the quote. So just to spell it out, when she said "Boba Fett could see all the way to florida", she meant "Boba Fett could see my pubic hair under the metal bikini." The interview is here, the quote is on the second page.
Well, I guess the only real working example (unless someone has read those Sith comic books I remember hearing about somewhere) is Vader and Palpatine. There Vader was the apprentice to Palpatine's mastery, although he could have done plenty of evil without Palpatine. If Vader, Palpatine, and Luke had all gone to the dark side, and if one of the three had died, then the master/apprentice relationship could still have continued.
The Samba documentation will tell you that a Samba box can act as a PDC (which you need if you want NT-style centralized password verification, which is by default on for NT clients), but it is unsupported and undocumented.
/dev/fuckingdie.
I spent a lot of time banging my head against this with Samba, trying to figure out how to get it done, without really knowing the intricacies of NT administration. My boss had little sympathy: "Just tell it to do password verification" he would sneer, thinking to himself: Fuckin' dumbass.
Then my boss and I went to LWCE (the first one), and heard a talk by the main Samba guy. He talked about the great lengths MS has gone through to keep the password verification APIs secret. The Samba guy had gone to Microsoft conferences, had met with one of the head NT server guys at MS, had tried unsuccessfuly to get answers out of him. The MS guy had turned red and scampered out of the room. (Well, that might have been exaggeration.) MS has put a lot of effort into obfuscating things so that no one else on the planet can make a replacement NT server (because competition in unamerican). This has made it really really difficult for the Samba folks to make effective password verification routines. (BTW, my boss ate his words for thinking I was an idiot for not getting PDC stuff running.)
So the long and short of this is, if you want to do password verification for NT clients, you'll have to keep around a spare dinky little NT server box to verify passwords.
Hopefully people will flame me, saying "You idiot! It's easy to set up a Samba PDC!" But unless they actually POST HOW TO DO IT (hint), kindly redirect them to
The master/apprentice thing only applies to the dark jedi. There are master/apprentice relationships with the light jedi as well, but not to the exclusivity of all else. Dark jedi will kill off all others until only two remain, a master and an apprentice.
The metal bikini Leia wore in ROTJ didn't -- being metal -- hug the body. Boba Fett stood behind her in the Jabba scenes (where she had to recline, chained up, in front of Jabba...where's that VCR?) and, as Carrie Fisher euphamized in Newsweek, "he could see all the way to Florida."
Good ideas; I hadn't considered some of those cloning possibilities.
4. Sidious is not a Sith. Or were you referring to something else?
6. Dark Jedi (including force-trained Sith) tend to kill each other off until only two remain, the master and apprentice. If a third Jedi either persuasion shows up, one or more of the three must die, so that either the master/apprentice relationship is continued or only the light Jedi remains (as in ROTJ).
Okay, here's what I think, if anybody cares.
1) The only Star Wars movie that stands on its own two feet is ANH. The others are fundamentally an extension of that movie, which is a really well-told story. Even ESB, good as it is, needs the movie before and the move after to really be good, to really be explicated.
2) ANH had real urgency to the story -- the Empire was basically invincible and evil, and had almost won. ("We have the readouts of the Death Star; several people died to bring us this information.") There was a real urgency to it -- everything was *almost* lost forever. TPM starts out with everything (basically) happy and nice. The only really bad thing with the action in the movie is that Naboo might be destroyed. Oh no -- Jar-Jar and all his kind are eliminated! Cry me a river. So TPM just didn't have the same urgency that ANH had. However, there was one really dire plot point in the movie: "Oh shit, the Sith are back."
3) The sword fighting was better than in any of the other movies. The classic trilogy had Jedi vs. Jedi swordfighting, which was a lot like samurai fighting. The style done by Darth Maul (and it pisses me off that he died; they better make another one of him in the Clone Wars) was closer to, say, the Kung Fu / Tae Kwon Do / Jeet Kune Do / whatever styles (i.e., it involved kicking). Very very cool.
4) The four-way orgy involving Darth Sidious, Senator Palpatine, Queen Amidala, and Queen Amidala's handmaiden was EXCELLENT! The classic trilogy was really lacking in the hardcode sex department. (Although according to that Newsweek Carrie Fisher interview, Boba Fett "could see all the way to Florida" in the Tatooine scenes of ROTJ.)
I think TPM was consciously made overly light and cheery, because the other two movies will have to be dark and brooding. Vader's story is a fall from grace -- he's got to start out good and pure to have a fall. I'm *really* looking forward to episodes 2 & 3.
tony@work> How could they do that? I proposed one
tony@work> method: create a version of MS-Office
tony@work> that will only run when a specific
tony@work> library is installed, and make that
tony@work> library available only with MS-Linux.
tony@work> Since it is not part of the kernel,
tony@work> they wouldn't have to release it as
tony@work> free software.
IIRC, GNU (w/ HURD) will (does?) only allow libre drivers. Does it have the same requirement for libraries? Perhaps RMS could just say "nothing proprietary may run on GNU at all, ever."
This doesn't necessarily affect the Linux crowd (since Linux does, and will, tolerate proprietary software), but if all becomes embraced and extended in the Linux arena, moving to GNU wouldn't be that big of a jump. [This assumes, of course, that requirements on "no GNU distributions with proprietary stuff" could hold up in court.]
But then again, would the "tying" thing really matter? Sure, most offices try to standardize on one OS (and thus probably one distro), but savvy users can get away with reinstalling a free distro, and avoiding use of non-free apps. (But then, goes the counter-argument, what if lots of proprietary stuff is tied together, so that MS-Word for Linux will only talk to MS-DNS for Linux routed through Windows NT Server for Linux...boy, proprietary software really is a trap.)
I guess the only real solution is to 1) Teach people that being fucked over by the Man is bad, and 2) Teach people that the Man will only fuck them over if they let him. Don't buy proprietary OSes, try to talk your boss out of (perhaps unwittingly) standardizing on proprietary software.
LizardKing> Personally I hope that if AbiWord does
LizardKing> start to have more esoteric features,
LizardKing> that the developers come up with a
LizardKing> simple plugin module that makes all
LizardKing> such addons optional.
The even cooler thing is that such a plugin structure would allow non-Abisource folks to write their own plugins and distribute them on, say, freshmeat. Abiword could end up, over time, being more featureful than MS-Word, and yet not truly be bloatware because those features would be optional. They'd also be likely to be more stable than Word's esoteric functions, because each plugin would (in theory) have a different maintainer (not unlike Debian structure). (Although a database of extraneous Word macros may exist somewhere, I don't know.)
Why did MS give away IE? So that it could (in theory) gain market share and get rid of the competition. The price could then be jacked up to a keen US$50 per copy or so. As long as a lot of people use Abiword, it doesn't *really* matter if they pay for a copy. By virtue of having written the product, the Abisoft folks will be the most qualified to go in and add stuff to Abiword or Abioffice or Abiwhatever. They'll control the growth and direction of a widely-used piece of software. There's gads of money to be made in a situation like that. Mindshare pays off in the long run.
Okay, that hit a little too close to home.
... pant]
[pant
[pauses to sip a "shasta" and chew a penguin mint]
All right, I'm better now.
6. GNU v0.9
7. Lignux
8. Microsoft Windux (streak-free!)
9. Sweet Nasty Monkey Love v2.2.7
"Freax" was his original name. I suppose "Linux" is less awkward, although it is routinely mispronounced. Still it's not like "UNIX" or "LISP" are really sexy, go-get-'em names either, and those have done pretty well.
There was a company in Australia who suggested a similar license; there was an old slashdot article on it.
One thing which I didn't see pointed out then, but which I think also applies to your license idea, is what the Securities and Exchanges Commission (or the analogue in your nation, the SEC is a US organization) would say about it. Specifically, this license model could, I hypothesize, be turned into a pyramid scheme. Assuming that every programmer who adds code to a program is entitled to a piece of the money from a given end user, a pyramid payment structure could be built.
There are legal pyramid structures in business (e.g., Amway, although they were investigated for being a pyramid scheme -- apparently they got off); the critereon is that you have a "real" product. So assuming you can convince a judge that this is a real-life piece of software, you should be okay. Anyway, something think about (IMHO IANAL B/F/F).
People should be able to do both. Windows has little flexibility, but can be set up to do standard things out of the box. J. Random Homeuser can get ppp working quickly, can get netscape up and running, and happily be browsing for pr0n and waReZ without having to think. UNIX has a lot of flexibility, but you have to learn about stuff to use it.
Mitch Kapor wrote an essay on this, circa 1990. He said that the holy grail of OS interfaces would be an "onion skin" design. That is, the OS gets increasingly more complex and powerful as you peel off the layers. So someone like a CEO, who simply cannot afford to waste time learning DNS setup, can fill out some idiotic wizard to get things working and move on. But a sysadmin could take that same system and turn it into a name server. To be a truly good OS, I think you need to have both of those options. As GNOME / KDE / Whatever get more advanced, this is becoming a reality.
TV was a "free" version of the movies. Did it destroy the film industry? No -- it just changed the film industry. Instead of pushing double-features with newsreels and cartoons (providing evening-long entertainment that could be gotten from TV), it had to start pushing relatively short movies that attracted large audiences.
That said, there's still a need for major labels, and will always be. If I'm a musician, I don't want to have to deal with setting up recording studio time, or merchandising, or setting up promotions, or shooting music videos, or all that other crap. I want to have somebody do all that stuff *for* me, to buy me coke, and give me a limo, and hand me empty whiskey bottles to hurl at my fellow band members.
Plus, people are still going to buy records, just as they buy software CD-ROMs today. Who wants to sit and download the white album? People thought the Internet would make books obselete, and that hasn't happened. Physical media is just too damn convenient.
What about contact lenses, especially the colored ones that cover up the iris? Will the blind, or those with otherwise funky eyes, have some alternate way to get cash from these machines? (I didn't see anything on the page about this.)
If these things were cheap, they'd make sweet peripherals. No chance of people finding out your password when all passwords are replaced by eye scans.