I know that's not what he wanted, I'm saying he should have just given it away, unadulterated. Of course he can do whatever he pleases, I just don't see that his current licensing scheme is all that helpful to anyone. It's not really "open source" either, I don't think.
"...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)"
I have to emphatically disagree. The rise and fall of a software product's success has far more to do with market dynamics, marketing itself, business decisions, and any variety of other dynamics than it does software quality or the usefulness of source code to the community.
Yes, but he should have just used the BSD license, of course. "This software is free; do what you want with it, anything at all." GPL software is _not_ free.
You appear to be asserting that the GPL can somehow deny Bram his authority as copyright holder to do this..
In some ways, it might, as it could be argued that the reverse license of contributors to the original source are likewise covered by the GPL, effectively taking the work out of the original author's hands by virtue of having accepted patches. Unraveling this would be nightmarish.
However, this colicensing thing has never been tested in court that I know of, and IIRC has fairly weak legal precendent. The original author holds quite a bit of power.
Moreover, as a matter of practice if voluntary contributors don't actually write up some kind of _license_, it could be easily argued that the submissions were a gift. This would be especially problematic if the overall original work _registered_ their copyright, but the contributor never registered theirs. Unraveling that would be a near legal impossibility.
Fortunately the free software movement is filled up with friendly people who avoid predatory behavior like this.
It's funny. With all these naysayers who say they only want ONE branch, you have to begin to wonder what the benefits of open source are really supposed to be to them. The ability to grab source and create an improvement is the heart and soul of open source. If you don't like that, do yourself a favor and run windows. Or something.
The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL
Most classic inventions weren't really invented the first time by their so-called "inventors," but rather were popularized by them. Inventions which fail in one culture are often later reinvented in another where they finally capture the public eye for whatever reason. One culture might regard an invention as a curio, the next adopts it and it changes the world. Go figure.
It's bizarre and perverse, but I'm failing to see how sex with animals always involves cruelty. I'm quite sure your Great Dane would happily hump your girlfriend. LOL.
At his ripe young age, it's more likely that he's simply self-absorbed and convincing himself that every little gesture or sour face someone makes because of their ulcer somehow applies to him.
I suppose one could always hire some P.I.s and sic them on various Intel executives. When the inevitable photographs of some of these guys cheating on their wives come around -- and believe me, they will -- make sure to distribute the photos far and wide.
[tech industry workers]Might as well visit and work somewhere else for at least a few years and see how other peoples live. We reward the wrong people here
Yes, but the U.S. tech sector pays more than almost any other tech sector in any country in the world.
Actually, it's perfectly legal to make copies of music (tho' not software) and to give it away to your friends.
Not when your "friends" are a thousand people on usenet and you're running the Napster client in share mode. Whether or not this constitutes a criminal violation is only a small technicality of Title 18 of the federal code, which can and will be revised if necessary. And in any case, it's still a civil violation. Whether or not "civil violation" satisfies your own interpretation of illegal for you is your business and just semantics in any case.
It's the same situation where 30% of the population uses illegal drugs
A minor correction: _has used_. As in, "at one time in their life". Having looked at the demographic data, I believe that it's not true that 30% of the population are active illegal drug users, even on an occasional basis.
You need to stop and read up on entrapment, as opposed to your urban-legend-esque opinion of what it might be. Entrapment simply doesn't work the way that you think it does. Making known the presence of a criminal opportunity doesn't qualify as entrapment. Get it through your head.
Right. Having had a cognitive engineering course with Dr. Norman himself, I can tell you the basic procedure that's considered best practice for getting past this problem:
Simply reintroduce your interface to new users all the time and quietly record what it is they do. Occasionally ask questions but provide now helpful hints. It requires a great deal of patience.
Note that I'm saying that you should frequently exclude anyone familiar with the software. No programmers, designers, even expert users from the customer base. As long as the domain itself isn't one that requires an understanding of some specific subject matter (e.g., your program is for some technical subject), you're better off just taking random Joe Blow's off the street and throwing them at the software.
This obviously has limitations in some contexts, but that's neither here nor there.
Some measurements of IQ use a standard deviation of about ~25, while most of the rest use 15. This means that an IQ of 150 or an IQ of 130 can be basically the same, depending on the test used to determine the IQ score. You correctly beelined in on percentile, which is what actually provides IQ as a test with any of its meaningfulness. It doesn't so much as test your intelligence, but rather how intelligent you are relative to the rest of the population.
Jeez, man, jump on down off your high horse. I don't belive you have an IQ of 150, and I am positive that the average computer programmer doesn't.
IQ is most often measured with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. On this scale, your average physician and your average attorney have an IQ of about 115.
This is obvious self-selection bias. The overall groups have a tendency to select out individuals with lower IQs through exclusionary pressures such as the grades required for medschool/lawschool, the difficulty of passing the courses, and the difficulty of completing the professional examinations required to enter the career.
Note that I'm not making any definite remark on the IQ of the average software guy. I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. While the pressures aren't as formalized, one doesn't tend to go into this field and get a computer science degree without already being fairly exceptional.
The other poster's remarks that programmer's are likely generally smarter on average than the general population are most certainly correct.
I'm sure you and I believe that to be true, but the evidence seems to demostrate the opposite: we try to make easy software, but we continuously fail. It is perhaps because, as Alan Cooper said in his book, programmers make rotten designers for end-users. We see things differently and in different ways than the average user.
I am sure you are right. There is a certain myopia that comes with being close to a problem. Due to the proximity of the programmer to the program he's working on, it all seems quite familiar and intuitive. The failure of this assumption can be seen even as one programmer introduces a solution to another, where the second person thinks it's not at all "intuitive," in spite of themselves being a programmer.
So while I would agree with your assessment that programmers are a different breed than ordinary users, there's more to it than that. It's the general problem of a creator always being conceptually familiar with what they create. They don't face their own newness all at once, but instead get to develop it in their head over time. Only later when new people see the solution will the problems with this readily make themselves known.
It seems to me that article indeed speaks about network that has high latency but high bandwidth with some loss.
You are almost certainly correct. Similar technologies that I've looked at in the past expand individual packet sizes by about 20% in order to do forward error correction and thereby save on NACK/resends. This becomes particularly valuable when latencies are long, of course, which is what you guessed the application is for.
What's not said here is how much of the perceived problem they described is really just a problem with TCP/IP windowing. When effective bandwidth drops to a few percent of the channel bandwidth, this is almost always because the TCP/IP window buffer has been overrun.
This, of course, is particularly noticeable on high bandwidth, very high latency networks of the type you see on some satellites.
Actually, it isn't. You'd have to very clearly understand the lingo and be an apriori member of the community to be looking for something like what you just wrote.
However, if the authorities start locking up everyone that tapes a copy of Survivor, you will hear a mass outcry. Voters will tell the politicians "change the law, or we give your job to someone that will".
Yes, but this argument is a straw man. You're not going to see any significant public sympathy or mass outcry for someone who electronically distributes copies of Survivor on the internet. This is an activity which the general public accepts as wrong. They're engaging in it because they have no current fear of being caught. When they begin to realize that the government might be listening to their transmissions, they will stop or at a minimum it will be driven into a deep and esoteric underground where the activity is a much smaller percentage. This last would accomplish the objectives.
As far as your criticism of my observations of the future, you should consider that it isn't a random-assed guess. I am observing current trends, what is already happening. You can see the pressure at the government levels perculating even now. This will mean more of the same, at least in the short run. Why?
I'm sure there's a fine line between generating awareness amongst criminals and talking them into criminal behavior. If you really must know the intricacies of the law regarding police sting operations, I suppose you'll have to ask a lawyer. All I myself know for certain is the catch phrase "creating an opportunity does not constitute entrapment". At a guess, as long as the trolling for criminals technique does not involve personalizing the opportunity for the criminal, it will not satisfy the basis for entrapment. For that matter, brace yourself: the very notion of entrapment has weakened considerably over the years. For the most part, the People, the courts, and the justice system support sting operations.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that's not what he wanted, I'm saying he should have just given it away, unadulterated. Of course he can do whatever he pleases, I just don't see that his current licensing scheme is all that helpful to anyone. It's not really "open source" either, I don't think.
C//
"...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)"
I have to emphatically disagree. The rise and fall of a software product's success has far more to do with market dynamics, marketing itself, business decisions, and any variety of other dynamics than it does software quality or the usefulness of source code to the community.
C//
Yes, but he should have just used the BSD license, of course. "This software is free; do what you want with it, anything at all." GPL software is _not_ free.
C//
You appear to be asserting that the GPL can somehow deny Bram his authority as copyright holder to do this..
In some ways, it might, as it could be argued that the reverse license of contributors to the original source are likewise covered by the GPL, effectively taking the work out of the original author's hands by virtue of having accepted patches. Unraveling this would be nightmarish.
However, this colicensing thing has never been tested in court that I know of, and IIRC has fairly weak legal precendent. The original author holds quite a bit of power.
Moreover, as a matter of practice if voluntary contributors don't actually write up some kind of _license_, it could be easily argued that the submissions were a gift. This would be especially problematic if the overall original work _registered_ their copyright, but the contributor never registered theirs. Unraveling that would be a near legal impossibility.
Fortunately the free software movement is filled up with friendly people who avoid predatory behavior like this.
C//
It's funny. With all these naysayers who say they only want ONE branch, you have to begin to wonder what the benefits of open source are really supposed to be to them. The ability to grab source and create an improvement is the heart and soul of open source. If you don't like that, do yourself a favor and run windows. Or something.
C//
The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL
Most classic inventions weren't really invented the first time by their so-called "inventors," but rather were popularized by them. Inventions which fail in one culture are often later reinvented in another where they finally capture the public eye for whatever reason. One culture might regard an invention as a curio, the next adopts it and it changes the world. Go figure.
C//
It's bizarre and perverse, but I'm failing to see how sex with animals always involves cruelty. I'm quite sure your Great Dane would happily hump your girlfriend. LOL.
C//
By the way, here's a really frightening picture: Imagine how these know-it-all, my-boss-hates-me-because-I'm-so-smart goobers interact with girls....
No fair. You should have warned me so that I didn't have coke in my mouth. Now I have to wipe my monitor.
C//
At his ripe young age, it's more likely that he's simply self-absorbed and convincing himself that every little gesture or sour face someone makes because of their ulcer somehow applies to him.
C//
I suppose one could always hire some P.I.s and sic them on various Intel executives. When the inevitable photographs of some of these guys cheating on their wives come around -- and believe me, they will -- make sure to distribute the photos far and wide.
Spying goes both ways. LOL.
C//
[tech industry workers]Might as well visit and work somewhere else for at least a few years and see how other peoples live. We reward the wrong people here
Yes, but the U.S. tech sector pays more than almost any other tech sector in any country in the world.
C//
Actually, it's perfectly legal to make copies of music (tho' not software) and to give it away to your friends.
Not when your "friends" are a thousand people on usenet and you're running the Napster client in share mode. Whether or not this constitutes a criminal violation is only a small technicality of Title 18 of the federal code, which can and will be revised if necessary. And in any case, it's still a civil violation. Whether or not "civil violation" satisfies your own interpretation of illegal for you is your business and just semantics in any case.
C//
It's the same situation where 30% of the population uses illegal drugs
A minor correction: _has used_. As in, "at one time in their life". Having looked at the demographic data, I believe that it's not true that 30% of the population are active illegal drug users, even on an occasional basis.
C//
And if you just applied the patch because "they never break anything"...for your sake, I hope your resume is up to date
:)
That's what I was trying to say, but was just too lazy to type.
C//
Am I going to go tell the CIO of a Fortune 500 company that some hack coder added something to the kernel that screwed us?
If you want to lie to him through ommission by neglecting to tell him you applied an unknown kernel patch, sure.
>:)
You need to stop and read up on entrapment, as opposed to your urban-legend-esque opinion of what it might be. Entrapment simply doesn't work the way that you think it does. Making known the presence of a criminal opportunity doesn't qualify as entrapment. Get it through your head.
Right. Having had a cognitive engineering course with Dr. Norman himself, I can tell you the basic procedure that's considered best practice for getting past this problem:
Simply reintroduce your interface to new users all the time and quietly record what it is they do. Occasionally ask questions but provide now helpful hints. It requires a great deal of patience.
Note that I'm saying that you should frequently exclude anyone familiar with the software. No programmers, designers, even expert users from the customer base. As long as the domain itself isn't one that requires an understanding of some specific subject matter (e.g., your program is for some technical subject), you're better off just taking random Joe Blow's off the street and throwing them at the software.
This obviously has limitations in some contexts, but that's neither here nor there.
C//
but tends to be in the 130+ range on most scales
Some measurements of IQ use a standard deviation of about ~25, while most of the rest use 15. This means that an IQ of 150 or an IQ of 130 can be basically the same, depending on the test used to determine the IQ score. You correctly beelined in on percentile, which is what actually provides IQ as a test with any of its meaningfulness. It doesn't so much as test your intelligence, but rather how intelligent you are relative to the rest of the population.
C//
Jeez, man, jump on down off your high horse. I don't belive you have an IQ of 150, and I am positive that the average computer programmer doesn't.
IQ is most often measured with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. On this scale, your average physician and your average attorney have an IQ of about 115.
This is obvious self-selection bias. The overall groups have a tendency to select out individuals with lower IQs through exclusionary pressures such as the grades required for medschool/lawschool, the difficulty of passing the courses, and the difficulty of completing the professional examinations required to enter the career.
Note that I'm not making any definite remark on the IQ of the average software guy. I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. While the pressures aren't as formalized, one doesn't tend to go into this field and get a computer science degree without already being fairly exceptional.
The other poster's remarks that programmer's are likely generally smarter on average than the general population are most certainly correct.
C//
I'm sure you and I believe that to be true, but the evidence seems to demostrate the opposite: we try to make easy software, but we continuously fail. It is perhaps because, as Alan Cooper said in his book, programmers make rotten designers for end-users. We see things differently and in different ways than the average user.
I am sure you are right. There is a certain myopia that comes with being close to a problem. Due to the proximity of the programmer to the program he's working on, it all seems quite familiar and intuitive. The failure of this assumption can be seen even as one programmer introduces a solution to another, where the second person thinks it's not at all "intuitive," in spite of themselves being a programmer.
So while I would agree with your assessment that programmers are a different breed than ordinary users, there's more to it than that. It's the general problem of a creator always being conceptually familiar with what they create. They don't face their own newness all at once, but instead get to develop it in their head over time. Only later when new people see the solution will the problems with this readily make themselves known.
C//
It seems to me that article indeed speaks about network that has high latency but high bandwidth with some loss.
You are almost certainly correct. Similar technologies that I've looked at in the past expand individual packet sizes by about 20% in order to do forward error correction and thereby save on NACK/resends. This becomes particularly valuable when latencies are long, of course, which is what you guessed the application is for.
What's not said here is how much of the perceived problem they described is really just a problem with TCP/IP windowing. When effective bandwidth drops to a few percent of the channel bandwidth, this is almost always because the TCP/IP window buffer has been overrun.
This, of course, is particularly noticeable on high bandwidth, very high latency networks of the type you see on some satellites.
C//
Actually, it isn't. You'd have to very clearly understand the lingo and be an apriori member of the community to be looking for something like what you just wrote.
C//
However, if the authorities start locking up everyone that tapes a copy of Survivor, you will hear a mass outcry. Voters will tell the politicians "change the law, or we give your job to someone that will".
Yes, but this argument is a straw man. You're not going to see any significant public sympathy or mass outcry for someone who electronically distributes copies of Survivor on the internet. This is an activity which the general public accepts as wrong. They're engaging in it because they have no current fear of being caught. When they begin to realize that the government might be listening to their transmissions, they will stop or at a minimum it will be driven into a deep and esoteric underground where the activity is a much smaller percentage. This last would accomplish the objectives.
As far as your criticism of my observations of the future, you should consider that it isn't a random-assed guess. I am observing current trends, what is already happening. You can see the pressure at the government levels perculating even now. This will mean more of the same, at least in the short run. Why?
IT'S IN MOTION NOW.
C//
What we have here is a situation where an economically competitive market exists, but is being officially suppressed by government fiat.
This has ALWAYS been true of intellectual property law.
C//
I'm sure there's a fine line between generating awareness amongst criminals and talking them into criminal behavior. If you really must know the intricacies of the law regarding police sting operations, I suppose you'll have to ask a lawyer. All I myself know for certain is the catch phrase "creating an opportunity does not constitute entrapment". At a guess, as long as the trolling for criminals technique does not involve personalizing the opportunity for the criminal, it will not satisfy the basis for entrapment. For that matter, brace yourself: the very notion of entrapment has weakened considerably over the years. For the most part, the People, the courts, and the justice system support sting operations.
C//