What you're describing is what Microsoft calls "Shared Source." You want your customers to have access to your source code for their benefit, but you don't want them distributing either source or binary to anyone else.
When you think about it, providing the source code to your customers without the right to share it with others is little different from what you're already doing - providing binaries without the right to share them. You're still asserting your copyright - you would just be providing a bit more copyrighted material.
If you want to create a community around your product's source code, you have to figure out a way for your customers to have the freedom to discuss the code on forums, mailing lists, etc., without your code escaping to the world at large. You could explicitly allow customers to discuss the code on YOUR forum, which they only get access to by being a customer.
If you agree that forums suck, then give your customers access to a private github or gitlab with your source code in it. They could make issues and merge requests, and thereby communicate with each other and with you about the code. Let them make branches, but don't let them touch your branches.
I suggest not providing source to your free (as in beer) users. Make access to the source one of the perks of being a paying customer.
As someone who sits in a lot of interviews and makes hiring recommendations, I find polished, personal side projects very compelling. If you have a recent tech project that you started on your own, for your own benefit or amusement, that demonstrates multiple technical proficiencies, then I start paying closer attention. When it's just your project, I know that you aren't trying to take credit for someone else's work, and anything cool or impressive in the project proves your initiative and value.
I won't be installing Android on my TouchPad for one simple reason - that would be a downgrade. WebOS is much more pleasant to use than Android; it's better thought through, easier to configure, and easier to manage open apps. If I ever have to install Android on my TouchPad, perhaps because of a glaring security hole in WebOS that won't get fixed, it will be a very, very sad day.
I found myself nodding with agreement to most of these points as well. Linux developers will do much, much better in all markets if they address these complaints. However, some of the the points are false or exaggerated for effect.
For example:
2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.
Completely untrue.GTK and Qt are two rare libraries with strict backwards-compatibility rules. It's most of the other libraries on the Linux desktop which break backwards compatibility. The latest versions of GTK+2 and Qt4 will run applications written against GTK+2.0 and Qt4.0 perfectly.
I also wouldn't call the Win32 API "good". Standardized, yes. Good, no. Anyone who's ever tried to write raw Win32 GUI apps knows what I'm talking about. And if you don't use Win32 directly, then you don't have a standard. Which would you prefer? MFC? ATL? Windows.Forms? Avalon?
5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.
Completely untrue. Yes, fewer commercial games appear for Linux, but fewer commercial games appear for the Mac, too, and no one says the Mac is not ready for the desktop. For commercial games, there's all of the Unreal Tournament games, all of the Quake games, all of the Doom games, all of the Descent games, as well as community ports of Duke Nukem 3D, the Serious Sam games, and countless others.
Aside from the commercial titles, the games that ship with either KDE or Gnome are as good or better than the games that ship with Windows, and 90% of the PC population only plays those games. (KNetWalk is a great game that would sap millions of hours of productivity from the world if it shipped with Windows.)
You can have a ridiculous amount of fun on Linux with console emulators. There are great clones of other games too, such as FreeCiv and LinCity.
Finally, it's not fair to discount the games that you can play with Wine. I purchased and played Half-Life 2 from start to finish on Linux, and it worked perfectly. I didn't miss Windows one bit.
12. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.).
And what security model would the complainer prefer? Yes, sudo can be circumvented by social engineering, and Mac OS X basically uses sudo to do admin tasks. On Windows, you don't need to do any social engineering to circumvent the "run-as-admin-by-default" policy.
Redhat-based distros have lots of protection against keyloggers, viruses, and break-ins because SELinux is turned on by default.
I sympathize with the fatigue many people are feeling with the "my console's wang is bigger than your console's wang" flamewars, and I agree that better games often have little to do with graphics horsepower.
However, it's important to realize that most great games take full advantage of the hardware they run on, and therefore they are limited by their hardware. The parent post mentions the SNES generation, so I'll use that as my example.
The SNES had the best sound hardware of its generation, which made the excellent music that accompanied Final Fantasy IV-VI possible. It had excellent sprite rotation and scaling capabilities, which were used as an integral part of gameplay in even the first batch of games, including Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings.
Want more proof how much the raw hardware matters? Some of the best games on the SNES required expensive co-processors in the game cartridges. Starfox has a RISC processor on board that's at least as fast as the CPU in the SNES. Similarly, Super Mario Kart was only possible due to the DSP chip it included.
This approach was possible back in the cartridge era, but it's impossible to do in the modern day. You can't put accelerators on a DVD. All of the hardware has to already be in the console.
What the telcos don't want you to realize is that they are already paid for the use of their wires on a per-packet basis by the owners of the routers that connect to them! Everybody but the consumer pays for the bandwidth they actually use. Today, if an ISP starts sucking down lots of bandwidth because its customers are watching HD TV, the ISP has to shoulder the larger bandwidth bill from the telco. They then pass the costs along to the customers who are using the most bandwidth.
Google and Joe Webclicker are NOT the telcos' customers! They already pay their ISPs for service. Nobody is getting a free ride.
The market should drive this process! ISPs that want more bandwidth (so they can deliver hi-def video to their customers) will look for the most bandwidth at the lowest price, and the backbones compete to upgrade their networks so that those ISPs sign up with them.
Why won't anyone stand up in Congress and say, "but Mr. Verizon, Mr. AT&T, aren't you just trying to charge twice for the same service?"
Yet I can't do anything when a company produces software that exposes my online banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare, because I've agreed a license that removes such liability.
That's exactly what you've done when you agree to a license from Microsoft. From the Windows XP Home EULA, with caps removed to get past lameness filter:
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall Microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, punitive, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure ot meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence...
and so on and so on.
With this amount of legal protection, I feel completely safe using Microsoft products!
Since it shares manufacturing/fabrication capability with IBM, it has run into many of the same manufacturing and supply problems as IBM.
Completely false. AMD has two fabrication facilities of its own: Fab 25 in Texas and Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany, with Fab 36 (adjacent to Fab 30) due to come online this year.
Perhaps you were thinking of the tech-sharing deal AMD and IBM made?
Forget security, what about innocent mistakes? Sure, if you're running a desktop box with no other users, you're less likely to succumb to local exploits or DoS attacks. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop a misbehaving program from accidentally fork-bombing the system, and it doesn't stop you from typing a stupid line into your shell. Even experienced administrators occasionally make typos. You don't want one of those typos bringing down the system, if you can help it!
The allergen is not in the cat hair. Cats generate a protein called Fel d-I in their skin that many humans are allergic to. Male cats make more allergen than female cats. My parents keep a female cat in the house as a pet and a male cat in the garage as a mouser, and I've found that cat sensitive people are far more aggravated by the male than the female . .. and there's a joke in that last sentence somewhere, I'm sure.:-)
An open, documented piece of graphics hardware has tremendous commercial potential, and would see considerable use in price-sensitive markets. Such a design would succeed not because geeks buy FPGAs and burn the design onto it, but rather because chipset vendors and embedded systems designers could simply use the "open, standard" video card implementation and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Once the 2D core has been proven commercially, the companies that use it will be interested in adding features such as 3D acceleration. Then we'll see the combination of volunteer and professional collaboration we're so familiar with in the F/OSS world.
How about getting rid of plane food, since in the slight chance you get a bad batch, the entire crew can get diarrhea and not be able to land the plane.
OMG! I totally saw a documentary where this happened! The disease the crew got was terrible! The Physician Dr. Rumack described it this way:
"It starts with a slight fever and dryness of the throat. When the virus penetrates the red blood cells, the victim becomes dizzy, begins to experience an itchy rash, then the poison goes to work on the central nervous system, severe muscle spasms followed by the inevitable grueling. At this point, the entire digestive system collapses accompanied by uncontrollable flatulence... until finally, the poor bastard is reduced to a quivering wasted piece of jelly."
Attndnt : Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit... Striker : The cockpit... what is it? Attndnt : It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important now.
From what I think I understand... sound processing is all about integers.
In your CD player, maybe. CDs represent audio using 16-bit integer samples. Currently, professional audio is often recorded at 24 bit integer, and then immediately converted to 32 bit floating point.
32-bit FP audio has a much larger dynamic range. If you use a 16-bit audio stream, raising the volume can cause clipping (if the values exceed 2^15), and lowering the volume will lose information (the same information is represented using fewer possible values). If you use a 32-bit FP stream, changing the volume is simple: just multiply the sample by the scalar.
The human eye pretty much stops distinguishing framerate past 30 fps
Just as an example, try visually comparing GoldenEye 007 on the N64 to James Bond 007: NightFire on the GameCube. GoldenEye runs at 20-30 fps, while NightFire runs at a solid 60 fps. Then tell me that your eyes don't see the difference in smoothness and responsiveness. The reason our eyes don't have a problem with 24 fps film is because movies have lots of motion blur! Video games have no motion blur at all, unless you're playing a PS2, in which case everything is blurry.
"Pretend love?" You must be watching the porn where "I love you" wouldn't trash the fantasy of the target demographic. Oh wait. There is no such thing, unless you're counting daytime soaps, which children aren't restricted from watching.
For the younger crowd, there's a rating system in place. If mommy buys Hitman: Contracts or Vice City for little johnny (even after reading the rating for it) -- and continues to let the PS2/TV/Internet babysit the child, I believe no law can help that "family."
Exactly. The "impressionable" age for kids is definitely before adolescence, and pre-adolescents do not have the money to buy expensive video games. Therefore, unless they have an older sibling who plays games, the only way kids get their hands on violent video games is if their parents buy them.
I've seen this very phenomenon first hand. I helped a neighborhood family with their computers, and I witnessed the youngest of 4, a six year-old, playing GTA3 on the PS2.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're describing is what Microsoft calls "Shared Source." You want your customers to have access to your source code for their benefit, but you don't want them distributing either source or binary to anyone else.
When you think about it, providing the source code to your customers without the right to share it with others is little different from what you're already doing - providing binaries without the right to share them. You're still asserting your copyright - you would just be providing a bit more copyrighted material.
If you want to create a community around your product's source code, you have to figure out a way for your customers to have the freedom to discuss the code on forums, mailing lists, etc., without your code escaping to the world at large. You could explicitly allow customers to discuss the code on YOUR forum, which they only get access to by being a customer.
If you agree that forums suck, then give your customers access to a private github or gitlab with your source code in it. They could make issues and merge requests, and thereby communicate with each other and with you about the code. Let them make branches, but don't let them touch your branches.
I suggest not providing source to your free (as in beer) users. Make access to the source one of the perks of being a paying customer.
That didn't take long. It's already sold out.
Stories like this make me wonder if anyone in Korea refuses to use a desktop or laptop because they have fans in them.
As someone who sits in a lot of interviews and makes hiring recommendations, I find polished, personal side projects very compelling. If you have a recent tech project that you started on your own, for your own benefit or amusement, that demonstrates multiple technical proficiencies, then I start paying closer attention. When it's just your project, I know that you aren't trying to take credit for someone else's work, and anything cool or impressive in the project proves your initiative and value.
I won't be installing Android on my TouchPad for one simple reason - that would be a downgrade. WebOS is much more pleasant to use than Android; it's better thought through, easier to configure, and easier to manage open apps. If I ever have to install Android on my TouchPad, perhaps because of a glaring security hole in WebOS that won't get fixed, it will be a very, very sad day.
I found myself nodding with agreement to most of these points as well. Linux developers will do much, much better in all markets if they address these complaints. However, some of the the points are false or exaggerated for effect.
For example:
Completely untrue.GTK and Qt are two rare libraries with strict backwards-compatibility rules. It's most of the other libraries on the Linux desktop which break backwards compatibility. The latest versions of GTK+2 and Qt4 will run applications written against GTK+2.0 and Qt4.0 perfectly.
I also wouldn't call the Win32 API "good". Standardized, yes. Good, no. Anyone who's ever tried to write raw Win32 GUI apps knows what I'm talking about. And if you don't use Win32 directly, then you don't have a standard. Which would you prefer? MFC? ATL? Windows.Forms? Avalon?
Completely untrue. Yes, fewer commercial games appear for Linux, but fewer commercial games appear for the Mac, too, and no one says the Mac is not ready for the desktop. For commercial games, there's all of the Unreal Tournament games, all of the Quake games, all of the Doom games, all of the Descent games, as well as community ports of Duke Nukem 3D, the Serious Sam games, and countless others.
Aside from the commercial titles, the games that ship with either KDE or Gnome are as good or better than the games that ship with Windows, and 90% of the PC population only plays those games. (KNetWalk is a great game that would sap millions of hours of productivity from the world if it shipped with Windows.)
You can have a ridiculous amount of fun on Linux with console emulators. There are great clones of other games too, such as FreeCiv and LinCity.
Finally, it's not fair to discount the games that you can play with Wine. I purchased and played Half-Life 2 from start to finish on Linux, and it worked perfectly. I didn't miss Windows one bit.
And what security model would the complainer prefer? Yes, sudo can be circumvented by social engineering, and Mac OS X basically uses sudo to do admin tasks. On Windows, you don't need to do any social engineering to circumvent the "run-as-admin-by-default" policy.
Redhat-based distros have lots of protection against keyloggers, viruses, and break-ins because SELinux is turned on by default.
I sympathize with the fatigue many people are feeling with the "my console's wang is bigger than your console's wang" flamewars, and I agree that better games often have little to do with graphics horsepower.
However, it's important to realize that most great games take full advantage of the hardware they run on, and therefore they are limited by their hardware. The parent post mentions the SNES generation, so I'll use that as my example.
The SNES had the best sound hardware of its generation, which made the excellent music that accompanied Final Fantasy IV-VI possible. It had excellent sprite rotation and scaling capabilities, which were used as an integral part of gameplay in even the first batch of games, including Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings.
Want more proof how much the raw hardware matters? Some of the best games on the SNES required expensive co-processors in the game cartridges. Starfox has a RISC processor on board that's at least as fast as the CPU in the SNES. Similarly, Super Mario Kart was only possible due to the DSP chip it included.
This approach was possible back in the cartridge era, but it's impossible to do in the modern day. You can't put accelerators on a DVD. All of the hardware has to already be in the console.
By the sound of it, the company is performing a 360 helicopter jam with our voting rights.
What the telcos don't want you to realize is that they are already paid for the use of their wires on a per-packet basis by the owners of the routers that connect to them! Everybody but the consumer pays for the bandwidth they actually use. Today, if an ISP starts sucking down lots of bandwidth because its customers are watching HD TV, the ISP has to shoulder the larger bandwidth bill from the telco. They then pass the costs along to the customers who are using the most bandwidth.
Google and Joe Webclicker are NOT the telcos' customers! They already pay their ISPs for service. Nobody is getting a free ride.
The market should drive this process! ISPs that want more bandwidth (so they can deliver hi-def video to their customers) will look for the most bandwidth at the lowest price, and the backbones compete to upgrade their networks so that those ISPs sign up with them.
Why won't anyone stand up in Congress and say, "but Mr. Verizon, Mr. AT&T, aren't you just trying to charge twice for the same service?"
Maybe if they hosted the blog on the PVR, the blog would still be up.
From the Windows XP Home EULA, with caps removed to get past lameness filter: and so on and so on.
With this amount of legal protection, I feel completely safe using Microsoft products!
Perhaps you were thinking of the tech-sharing deal AMD and IBM made?
The American flag has 13 stripes, not 12. Both the top and bottom stripes are red.
Did anyone else also misread the headline as:
Effects of China's Software Piracy on World Economy?
Forget security, what about innocent mistakes? Sure, if you're running a desktop box with no other users, you're less likely to succumb to local exploits or DoS attacks. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop a misbehaving program from accidentally fork-bombing the system, and it doesn't stop you from typing a stupid line into your shell.
Even experienced administrators occasionally make typos. You don't want one of those typos bringing down the system, if you can help it!
The allergen is not in the cat hair. Cats generate a protein called Fel d-I in their skin that many humans are allergic to. . :-)
Male cats make more allergen than female cats. My parents keep a female cat in the house as a pet and a male cat in the garage as a mouser, and I've found that cat sensitive people are far more aggravated by the male than the female . .
and there's a joke in that last sentence somewhere, I'm sure.
An open, documented piece of graphics hardware has tremendous commercial potential, and would see considerable use in price-sensitive markets. Such a design would succeed not because geeks buy FPGAs and burn the design onto it, but rather because chipset vendors and embedded systems designers could simply use the "open, standard" video card implementation and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Once the 2D core has been proven commercially, the companies that use it will be interested in adding features such as 3D acceleration. Then we'll see the combination of volunteer and professional collaboration we're so familiar with in the F/OSS world.
I think you mean the site has been slash-dot-dot-dotted.
"It starts with a slight fever and dryness of the throat. When the virus penetrates the red blood cells, the victim becomes dizzy, begins to experience an itchy rash, then the poison goes to work on the central nervous system, severe muscle spasms followed by the inevitable grueling. At this point, the entire digestive system collapses accompanied by uncontrollable flatulence... until finally, the poor bastard is reduced to a quivering wasted piece of jelly."
Attndnt : Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit
Striker : The cockpit
Attndnt : It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important now.
32-bit FP audio has a much larger dynamic range. If you use a 16-bit audio stream, raising the volume can cause clipping (if the values exceed 2^15), and lowering the volume will lose information (the same information is represented using fewer possible values). If you use a 32-bit FP stream, changing the volume is simple: just multiply the sample by the scalar.
The reason our eyes don't have a problem with 24 fps film is because movies have lots of motion blur! Video games have no motion blur at all, unless you're playing a PS2, in which case everything is blurry.
"Pretend love?" You must be watching the porn where "I love you" wouldn't trash the fantasy of the target demographic.
Oh wait. There is no such thing, unless you're counting daytime soaps, which children aren't restricted from watching.
I've seen this very phenomenon first hand. I helped a neighborhood family with their computers, and I witnessed the youngest of 4, a six year-old, playing GTA3 on the PS2.