Canonical is making it available, not "Ubuntu". They do lots of things without consulting the philosophy or community. But these repos don't come by default in Ubuntu that you get via ship-it or the store. They come from vendors who very much want to ship their software by default with Dell and so on. An apt repo offers a good way to integrate their work, regardless of Liberation.
But I don't mind. If Canonical can raise funds to hire free software hackers by simply distributing Symphony, thats a win in my book. Or if they need to host a repo to get a hardware vendor on board with Ubuntu pre-installed, fine. By doing this they'll certainly have an ear to talk to about the advantages of the GPL, and have a leg up if at some point the software does become Liberated. We still have OpenOffice.org, so its not like DFSG advocates are without recourse.
I try to look at Canonical as an example of the ways contracting companies might make money working on Debian.
mpt is hired by Canonical to do exactly this. A few years ago he wrote a brief summary of what he thought was wrong, and cataloged the resulting progress in the next release. This is a guy who knows how to do that. I do agree that he'd be better served by writing to the public more than once a year though.
The fix to this is to discover some low cost usability techniques. Open Source is entirely open, and sacrificing that profit motive introduces all kinds of innovations elsewhere. Bittorrent, git and ohloh and Coverity as applied to OSS are all based on the free access modification and distribution of source code.
As for Sveasoft, perhaps their business model was destined to fail (or perhaps not succeed wildly). Taking GPL'd code and charging per unit is bound to fail, because it translates what should be a fixed cost into a marginal cost. Sveasoft should be offering companies like Linksys consulting advice, but I don't see why Linksys needs it. They're happy with the uniform interface, and know how to put together the firmware in the first place. If Sveasoft was anything more than a guy living on a remote Sweedish island, working alone to resell other people's work, he'd probably have a successful OSS software consulting business by now.
May I offer you a simple suggestion? If you don't want people to think you're the kind of person who sees conspiracies everywhere, examine your language. "Darkside" suggests there's a large group of people out to conspire against you. It also reeks of internet conspiracy theorist jargon.
Moreover, assuming bad faith from everyone is paranoid, unconstructive and completely anti "open source."
The point of the article isn't that puzzle games don't exist, they just aren't mainstream anymore
What the hell does mainstream mean, if Professor Layton, advertised on the divider panels when you walk into Walmart doesn't qualify? This whole article is bullshit and equates "adventure game" with puzzle. It is well known that adventure gaming killed itself.
So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.
Of course, the font engines that render your papers might have a different view on the importance of calculative geometry. In my humble opinion, the far greater crime is that geometry is used in many public schools as the math course you learn proofs in. Except you don't learn anything relevant to proof theory except syllogisms: "Well, this triangle is congruent to this other triangle because of Side Angle Side theorem."
Proof by contradiction is a hell of a lot more interesting and I don't recall ever using it, even though I did ALL the time in math and CS courses.
Thats why I said you need a change in culture. Instead of building a pile of patches that nobody can review and dumping it in later, merge branches often. I can't say I know which system is best, but making branching painful because merges might be painful is cutting off the nose to spite the face. Make an effort to think about this, and make it clear what needs to be done.
If you've got five programmers in a room, maybe the only VCS feature you want is revision history. If you scale it up to cubicle farms, you need the same discipline those same five guys had, and tools to make it as painless as possible. If you have 30 feature branches that never pull from each other until the end, that's just stupid and your project manager has failed. Telling me you need to optimize for stupid project managers reeks of fail as well.
Branching is never "hard enough" the trouble always comes in the form of merges. Ideally, merges would be easy and you wouldn't care about how hard branching should be. Of course, prolific branching requires a completely different attitude to development, with integrated patch review, short lived branches and constant communication.
What I don't see, is how that translates into "hard for people in the same office" or "trying to collaborate tightly". I can't think of a better description of tight collaboration than I just gave above.
Well conferring with an Ubuntu developer I know, he suggested you should look at Debian Science and Debian SciComp, if you think there's too many packages and too few people for specialists. They seem to be quite healthy. You might ask them why the Debian gfortran package is described as a f95 compiler if you believe that it's not. And take a look around while you're there -- you might discover Debian is more substantial than you thought.
How long ago was that? My undergraduate program did the same thing, and it felt bogus at the time. OO demands a working knowledge of algorithms. If you don't yet innately understand for loops and sorting, building an OO bubblesort is worthless.
The problem with local investigation of upgrade quality is that dumb ideas spread locally;)
I.e. one guy tells a friend about a package, and its upgrade is broken. Perhaps it was a third party package containing the old artwork and themes without setting up dpkg-diverts correctly. Or maybe one guy sets up everyone's computer in the office, and uses Automatix every time. It's hard for me to say who's fault it is or debug the past.
Run of the mill GPS is accurate to about 10 meters. You can get a better measurement if you have radio reception from terrestial GPS as well; down to a couple meters. I haven't looked at the court records to see whether the GPS is accurate enough to eliminate the difference in speeds reported. Its possible he only exceeded the limit briefly, say 5 seconds, before he slowed down for the sirens etc, so you have to do differentials on position for speed, and it gets ugly.
The reason I don't like DRM or SIM-locks is that they restrict my choices, and that most consumers aren't informed enough about it. Meanwhile vendors do their hardest to walk the line between lying and describing their product in the best possible light. In the case of SIM-locking, it actively impedes competition. If cellular provider A is advertising phones for 15 dollars with a SIM-lock disclosed in small print, and company B is advertising cellular phones has to find some way to compete or lose customers. They can't lure provider A's existing customers away, because they're contracted. They could try not selling phones just SIM cards and service accounts, but you'd lose a large market who doesn't have a phone or know where to get one. Meanwhile, cell phone manufacturer C can't even compete with cell phone manufacturer D on obvious product features because provider A and friends want to exploit their contracted customer base.
Finally some consumers that are informed simply come to me asking how to hack it out. Rather than make a visible choice that might affect the market, they choose to spend as little as possible and ignore the contract, law and ethics. It's nice that technology can undo some of the damage, but a) it's an arms race, b) it drives otherwise legitimate use underground c) visible progress is impeded.
Microsoft did build that monopoly, the one that IBM refused to. It helps that Bill's family was a part of the regional business elite: his mother knew an executive of IBM because he guy served as part of the United Way board she chaired, and mentioned her son's business. Clearly Bill had the business sense and moxie to be born into the biggest lawfirm in Seattle.
An IT department shouldn't be billing the company for a profit. If it costs your company 100 dollars to image a machine once, you're in a world of hurt.
But the GPL at its core involves a third party, in what is otherwise a contract between two individuals. The copyright holder and those who would modify it (Affero basically removes the distribution clause in a world full of webservers running code users never otherwise see). But the copyright holder is deliberately sacrificing self-interest for this third party, the public. It could have stated that any changes must be made available to the copyright holder, something several upstreams bitch about, but instead it simply asks that source is given to users and anyone who asks.
Why then, would a rational, self interested libertarian start a GPL project? I can understand the desire for source code exchange in kind (a great barter that the IRS can't estimate). But you don't need GPL for that, and the GPL protects source code in ways that protects the public interest (access), which I've always assumed is something libertarians weren't interested in.
Many Slashdotters are strongly freedom-oriented. They tend to like free software and civil liberties
I'd really love to hear why the hell libertarians, a group strongly in favorite of private property rights and a small government, like GNU, an organization dedicated to creating a public interest in software. Even if you argue that copyright is bogus, GNU is trying to compel people to disclose source code and give universal access. Good examples of this would be the Tivoisation clause in GPLv3, or the Affero public license.
As best I can tell, libertarians prefer the "free" part a bit more than the "liberated" part of Free software.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you gonna go? It's not like France is going to host you as some bullshit political refugee in a system you refuse to participate in.
Canonical is making it available, not "Ubuntu". They do lots of things without consulting the philosophy or community. But these repos don't come by default in Ubuntu that you get via ship-it or the store. They come from vendors who very much want to ship their software by default with Dell and so on. An apt repo offers a good way to integrate their work, regardless of Liberation.
But I don't mind. If Canonical can raise funds to hire free software hackers by simply distributing Symphony, thats a win in my book. Or if they need to host a repo to get a hardware vendor on board with Ubuntu pre-installed, fine. By doing this they'll certainly have an ear to talk to about the advantages of the GPL, and have a leg up if at some point the software does become Liberated. We still have OpenOffice.org, so its not like DFSG advocates are without recourse.
I try to look at Canonical as an example of the ways contracting companies might make money working on Debian.
mpt is hired by Canonical to do exactly this. A few years ago he wrote a brief summary of what he thought was wrong, and cataloged the resulting progress in the next release. This is a guy who knows how to do that. I do agree that he'd be better served by writing to the public more than once a year though.
The fix to this is to discover some low cost usability techniques. Open Source is entirely open, and sacrificing that profit motive introduces all kinds of innovations elsewhere. Bittorrent, git and ohloh and Coverity as applied to OSS are all based on the free access modification and distribution of source code.
As for Sveasoft, perhaps their business model was destined to fail (or perhaps not succeed wildly). Taking GPL'd code and charging per unit is bound to fail, because it translates what should be a fixed cost into a marginal cost. Sveasoft should be offering companies like Linksys consulting advice, but I don't see why Linksys needs it. They're happy with the uniform interface, and know how to put together the firmware in the first place. If Sveasoft was anything more than a guy living on a remote Sweedish island, working alone to resell other people's work, he'd probably have a successful OSS software consulting business by now.
OSS people did start an enterprise OS, they just called it "Solaris".
Maybe. I'd heard calls to make scientists into rockstars, but never rockstars into scientists!
May I offer you a simple suggestion? If you don't want people to think you're the kind of person who sees conspiracies everywhere, examine your language. "Darkside" suggests there's a large group of people out to conspire against you. It also reeks of internet conspiracy theorist jargon.
Moreover, assuming bad faith from everyone is paranoid, unconstructive and completely anti "open source."
What the hell does mainstream mean, if Professor Layton, advertised on the divider panels when you walk into Walmart doesn't qualify? This whole article is bullshit and equates "adventure game" with puzzle. It is well known that adventure gaming killed itself.
Of course, the font engines that render your papers might have a different view on the importance of calculative geometry. In my humble opinion, the far greater crime is that geometry is used in many public schools as the math course you learn proofs in. Except you don't learn anything relevant to proof theory except syllogisms: "Well, this triangle is congruent to this other triangle because of Side Angle Side theorem."
Proof by contradiction is a hell of a lot more interesting and I don't recall ever using it, even though I did ALL the time in math and CS courses.
Thats why I said you need a change in culture. Instead of building a pile of patches that nobody can review and dumping it in later, merge branches often. I can't say I know which system is best, but making branching painful because merges might be painful is cutting off the nose to spite the face. Make an effort to think about this, and make it clear what needs to be done.
If you've got five programmers in a room, maybe the only VCS feature you want is revision history. If you scale it up to cubicle farms, you need the same discipline those same five guys had, and tools to make it as painless as possible. If you have 30 feature branches that never pull from each other until the end, that's just stupid and your project manager has failed. Telling me you need to optimize for stupid project managers reeks of fail as well.
Branching is never "hard enough" the trouble always comes in the form of merges. Ideally, merges would be easy and you wouldn't care about how hard branching should be. Of course, prolific branching requires a completely different attitude to development, with integrated patch review, short lived branches and constant communication.
What I don't see, is how that translates into "hard for people in the same office" or "trying to collaborate tightly". I can't think of a better description of tight collaboration than I just gave above.
Well conferring with an Ubuntu developer I know, he suggested you should look at Debian Science and Debian SciComp, if you think there's too many packages and too few people for specialists. They seem to be quite healthy. You might ask them why the Debian gfortran package is described as a f95 compiler if you believe that it's not. And take a look around while you're there -- you might discover Debian is more substantial than you thought.
How long ago was that? My undergraduate program did the same thing, and it felt bogus at the time. OO demands a working knowledge of algorithms. If you don't yet innately understand for loops and sorting, building an OO bubblesort is worthless.
You have confused me:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=erlang
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/gfortran
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/atlas3-base
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?ordering=normal;archive=0;dist=unstable;repeatmerged=1;src=hdf5 reports no bugs of any kind reported -- You should send bugmail requesting the new release of HDF5 if it really is stable.
(Mumps is missing, but I really wouldn't say I was missing it.)
Debian is renowned for its breadth of packaging; just how did you go about looking through all 16 thousand packages?
The problem with local investigation of upgrade quality is that dumb ideas spread locally ;)
I.e. one guy tells a friend about a package, and its upgrade is broken. Perhaps it was a third party package containing the old artwork and themes without setting up dpkg-diverts correctly. Or maybe one guy sets up everyone's computer in the office, and uses Automatix every time. It's hard for me to say who's fault it is or debug the past.
Run of the mill GPS is accurate to about 10 meters. You can get a better measurement if you have radio reception from terrestial GPS as well; down to a couple meters. I haven't looked at the court records to see whether the GPS is accurate enough to eliminate the difference in speeds reported. Its possible he only exceeded the limit briefly, say 5 seconds, before he slowed down for the sirens etc, so you have to do differentials on position for speed, and it gets ugly.
Has anyone actually seen these in the wild? It's been suggested, and I'm told it's an urban legend.
In other words: PICS OR BS!
The reason I don't like DRM or SIM-locks is that they restrict my choices, and that most consumers aren't informed enough about it. Meanwhile vendors do their hardest to walk the line between lying and describing their product in the best possible light. In the case of SIM-locking, it actively impedes competition. If cellular provider A is advertising phones for 15 dollars with a SIM-lock disclosed in small print, and company B is advertising cellular phones has to find some way to compete or lose customers. They can't lure provider A's existing customers away, because they're contracted. They could try not selling phones just SIM cards and service accounts, but you'd lose a large market who doesn't have a phone or know where to get one. Meanwhile, cell phone manufacturer C can't even compete with cell phone manufacturer D on obvious product features because provider A and friends want to exploit their contracted customer base.
Finally some consumers that are informed simply come to me asking how to hack it out. Rather than make a visible choice that might affect the market, they choose to spend as little as possible and ignore the contract, law and ethics. It's nice that technology can undo some of the damage, but a) it's an arms race, b) it drives otherwise legitimate use underground c) visible progress is impeded.
I don't think I'll be as quick to loudly decry reiserFS's filesystem design, at least.
You realize that the netbook remix at this point consists of like five packages added onto Ubuntu in a PPA?
Source code?
Microsoft did build that monopoly, the one that IBM refused to. It helps that Bill's family was a part of the regional business elite: his mother knew an executive of IBM because he guy served as part of the United Way board she chaired, and mentioned her son's business. Clearly Bill had the business sense and moxie to be born into the biggest lawfirm in Seattle.
An IT department shouldn't be billing the company for a profit. If it costs your company 100 dollars to image a machine once, you're in a world of hurt.
But the GPL at its core involves a third party, in what is otherwise a contract between two individuals. The copyright holder and those who would modify it (Affero basically removes the distribution clause in a world full of webservers running code users never otherwise see). But the copyright holder is deliberately sacrificing self-interest for this third party, the public. It could have stated that any changes must be made available to the copyright holder, something several upstreams bitch about, but instead it simply asks that source is given to users and anyone who asks.
Why then, would a rational, self interested libertarian start a GPL project? I can understand the desire for source code exchange in kind (a great barter that the IRS can't estimate). But you don't need GPL for that, and the GPL protects source code in ways that protects the public interest (access), which I've always assumed is something libertarians weren't interested in.
I'd really love to hear why the hell libertarians, a group strongly in favorite of private property rights and a small government, like GNU, an organization dedicated to creating a public interest in software. Even if you argue that copyright is bogus, GNU is trying to compel people to disclose source code and give universal access. Good examples of this would be the Tivoisation clause in GPLv3, or the Affero public license.
As best I can tell, libertarians prefer the "free" part a bit more than the "liberated" part of Free software.