All you need to accomplish that is put a provision in your license that says "For non-commercial use only. If you want to include this in a commercial product contact me."
Us programers have been doing this for 20+ years. It's nothing new.
Brett is absolutely correct in his analysis of the GPL. I don't understand why some people continue to grasp for straws in support of Stallman.
KVM's are reliable enough for servers, but VNC is?
Get real.
We use KVM's in our data center and they are very reliable. Compaq also makes a very nice TFT flat screen monitor that folds up and slides into the rack such that the whole solution takes up very little rack real estate.
I don't want to say you are wrong because that is harsh. But I think you are seeing things from a different perspective.
First of all, in terms of OS/2 usage while there were very few individuals using it, unlike Linux... There were many companies using it, unlike Linux.
Many Fortune 500 companies were using OS/2 for their desktops and some of their servers(although Netware was far more popular). I worked at Lutheran Brotherhood for a time and we had OS/2 running on about 1,200 desktops in our company.
I had colleagues who worked for First Bank(now USBank) who had OS/2 running on many thousands of desktops(I'd guess somwhere around 10,000 or more). Other colleagues at American Express, etc were also using OS/2 in various parts of their companies.
OS/2 did have a huge groundswell of usage between about 1992 and 1996 in corporate America. A much larger groundswell of usage than Linux has ever enjoyed.
Microsoft pulled out of OS/2 back in the late 1980s, this was long before OS/2 truly became popular. That had very little to do with OS/2 decline, except that part of OS/2s features were Windows compatibility and it made it harder for IBM because MS was improving their own products at a very rapid pace and made it difficult to license the code to IBM.
But I think that was partly IBM's fault as well. They did not work to improve the UI to OS/2 and did not provide much to the development environment, so there was generally a lack of decent OS/2 software such that people relied on the Windows compatibility too much.
After the release of Windows 95 there was less motivation to use OS/2 by many people. Windows 95 was a better product than OS/2 from a user/support point of view. It was much easier to configure networking, supported a wider range of hardware and the users liked the UI better.
So in reality there had been a lot of OS/2 support up until 1996 or so. It was in 1996 that the tide turned after Microsoft released their product. But the media still spoke of OS/2 as being a serious competitor because the Team OS/2 zealots were out there making it look like there was a lot of support when there was not.
At infoworld anyway when the zealots were caught red handed stuffing the ballot boxes of the product awards, there seemed to be a huge backlash against further OS/2 coverage.
Yes, Linux has been built up from a grass roots effort, which is exactly similar to Team OS/2 not having commercial support. The resulting zealotry does not lend well because it creates an illusion of false support for a product.
Market share illusions are bad, companies prefer to deal with reality.
This is how the OS/2 zealots screwed themselves. By spreading the word to go and pack the ballot boxes on polls.
Culminating in the Infoworld product of the year award for 1996 fiasco.
And guess what? After the media finally realized that there was no real interest in OS/2, it was mostly fake interest from zealots packing ballot boxes... They stopped reporting on OS/2.
Do yourself a favor, if you happen to come across a poll then vote. Otherwise don't go publicizing it with "Everybody go vote!"
Idiots... This is one of the more irresponsible things I've seen on slashdot, not surprising it came from Roblimo either.
Why are you fighting a war? I just want software that doesn't suck, and so does your wife Trish. In your arrogance did you think that the competition would never improve? Did you think that computing technology would remain as it was 3 years ago?
Wait one bloody minute... You've got a e-commerce solution running over a serial cable against a Access database and you're wondering why it's unstable? It has nothing to do with Linux vs. NT it has everything to do with your application architects being idiots.
The deal with a multi-person cooperative effort is that no one person holds the copyright any longer.
Linus essentially no longer holds the copyright to Linux fully because much of the work has been contributed by others.
In order to change the license, one would have to notify and obtain approval from all copyright holders, or remove their code from the project.
I think it's horribly unethical, because when I contribute code to a project it is done under the rules defined by the license the project exists in at the date of my submission.
I don't think the public money aspect is important.
The issue I have with an open source project suddenly changing licensing schemes, especially one which has been around for a long time is...
Did you bother to ask *EVERYBODY* who had contributed to the project since it started?
Let's say I have the open source project called 'widget', and it's released under an older typical open-source license which is BSD style with a clause for non-commercial use only.
Joe, and George, and Susie all contribute to the project at various points. Joe writes a major part of the project, and then gets a new job and disappears.
A few years later George suggests they change the license to GPL so that they can get slashdot.org to post articles about the widget project.
Can they do this? Without Joe's permission? I don't believe they can.
If you can do this, without getting the consent of every single developer who ever touched the code... Then I can also take the Linux kernel and rerelease it under a SCSL without getting anybody's permission.
I'm sorry, but having used GRASS and having spent 4 years working with Arc/Info.
No comparison... GRASS does not have a chance.
Yes, GRASS is fairly popular with the government and university segments because the licensing for Arc/Info is rather expensive. But Arc does so much more...
It's funny. This mediocre product mentions that it's now under the GPL and slashdot goes hyper for it.
you wrote: "If Linux's success thus far is any indication, true open source will gradually win out over any closed source solutiuon in the corporate IT world as it has already for individual hackers."
I agree, but I don't think I agree for the same reason.
What Sun is offering is 'open source' software.
The GPL/Linux community does not agree because it is not given away for free. There in lies the important distinction.
Bill Joy makes a number of very valid arguments. Personally I agree with him and his motives.
As far as this claim that Sun is only doing this so they can get others to fix their bugs for them...
Who cares?
I as a consumer welcome this. If I find a bug in the widget module, and I have the source code... I can fix the bug!
I can then share my bugfix back with Sun who will incorporate it into the next release of the program. Then when we get the upgrade to the next release, not only do we get my bug fix, we get the bug fixes from thousands of other customers, along with new functionality from Sun's programmers.
That's a win-win situation for me. As a corporate IT shop, I don't want to have to maintain our core infrastructure software. It's hard enough for me to maintain my own custom business software.
That's why I am paying Sun for their software.
Ohwell. It seems the Linux community does a lot of foot stamping and screaming whenever someone suggests that their model doesn't suit business needs. So be it, but I think Sun has the right idea here.
Internet bandwidth costs money. Distribution media costs money.
Perhaps you meant to say "low cost"?
As far as your other claims. I as an individual have certain skills and certain things which I enjoy doing.
Yes I can do tech-support for software, I've done it in the past. But you know what? I FUCKING HATE DOING IT!
I prefer to create, and that is a skill that I have and in our world if people find my skills worthwhile they will pay me money.
I don't think I need to get used to your new world order because I don't see any great inherent benefit from it. It doesn't benefit me, it doesn't benefit my company, it doesn't benefit mankind.
Sure it benefits you because you can get everything for free. But why should I be forced to give away my labor just because you are a cheapskate?
I think Bill Joy has the right idea here. If the APIs are open, and if the source code is open to review, everybody benefits.
You wrote: -- The GPL explicitly permits you do do this, just so long as you don't restrict the purchaser's freedom. There's nothing in the GPL that is inherently "anti-sell". --
This is a conflicting statement. The GPL is "anti-sell" by relation to what you call not restricting the purchser's freedom.
If you GPL something, and then sell it to me. I am not allowed to redistribute it.
How do you make money if you sell one copy and everybody else gives it away?
Look at RedHat and Cheapbytes.com. And before you even say that RedHat is successful... Have they even made a profit yet?
The GPL works for you,that's fine. Perhaps you prefer being a waiter and programming in your spare time. But not everybody feels the same way, and I believe Sun's license is an attempt to meet the needs of their customers.
I've been looking at potentially buying a PDA myself. The main reason is to help organize my workload.
But the secondary reason is to have something to play with.
The Palm is cheap and it works.
The WinCE devices are more expensive, more powerful, and much cooler to play with.
Thus personally I think it would be cool to have a WinCE device. Somehow the appeal of being able to play Doom and MP3's on a PDA does something for me.
But in the real world, we go back to my initial desire to simply have something to keep track of my workload. And for that the Palm is simply much better suited. The display can be read outdoors, the applications are much simpler and easier to use.
And it costs about half what a CE device would run, along with being smaller.
And that is why the Palm computers sell, and the WinCE ones do not.
The PDA market is a fickle one. It's been around for over 10 years already, and the only successful entry in that time has been the Palm.
I just don't think having the source code to the OS is the issue. Sure then maybe WinCE might appeal to a small niche of developers. But the device still won't have the mass appeal that the Palm has.
I'm not sure I agree that the current United States computer prosperity is entirely due to crackers.
Crackers are certainly very interesting as they come in many shapes and sizes, but do they provide any real value to the computer industry?
When was the last time you were up at 3am working on some interesting problem and said "Man, I could really use a cracker about now"?
Now I realize that Keebler's would very much like you to believe that they rule the world by holding the reigns on the saltine monopoly.
But come on... let's get real here.
The real powers are Hostess and Coca-Cola. As long as they have hold of the distribution of Twinkies and Coke, they control the main source of energy behind the entire Internet revolution.
And I notice that the DOJ is doing nothing about this!!!!
Right from the article:... "He should have told us," Simon Hakim, a Temple University economist, said when told yesterday of the financing. "I would not have participated if I had known. It's not right to use people as a vehicle for special interests."
Which indicates that the study was no way biased by Microsoft's funding of the published results.
I also agree with the last comment in the article about the DOJ trial being used by Netscape as a last ditch effort because they couldn't compete in a real market.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, I for one like to eat and have a roof over my head!
You are certainly welcome to move to China or some other socialist country if you would rather have the government provide for you.
All you need to accomplish that is put a provision in your license that says "For non-commercial use only. If you want to include this in a commercial product contact me."
Us programers have been doing this for 20+ years. It's nothing new.
Brett is absolutely correct in his analysis of the GPL. I don't understand why some people continue to grasp for straws in support of Stallman.
If your motive is simply to create a experimental OS for use in University teaching environments, then embracing the GPL makes sense.
If your motive is to create an alternative OS to take on Microsoft, you can forget about it.
As Mr. Perens has so expertly shown, any company seriously trying to make money using Linux is likely to find themselves tasting something sour.
I'm a Microsoft stooge, and I thought your post was flamebait.
Wait a minute...
KVM's are reliable enough for servers, but VNC is?
Get real.
We use KVM's in our data center and they are very reliable. Compaq also makes a very nice TFT flat screen monitor that folds up and slides into the rack such that the whole solution takes up very little rack real estate.
IE4 was pretty good...
However IE5 is excellent. I have been using it since the beginning of the year and have yet to crash the browser.
With IE4 I was able to crash the browser by trying to scroll the window down while it was rendering certain webpages.
After using IE5 you will seriously question why anybody continues to use the buggy Netscape.
I don't want to say you are wrong because that is harsh. But I think you are seeing things from a different perspective.
First of all, in terms of OS/2 usage while there were very few individuals using it, unlike Linux... There were many companies using it, unlike Linux.
Many Fortune 500 companies were using OS/2 for their desktops and some of their servers(although Netware was far more popular). I worked at Lutheran Brotherhood for a time and we had OS/2 running on about 1,200 desktops in our company.
I had colleagues who worked for First Bank(now USBank) who had OS/2 running on many thousands of desktops(I'd guess somwhere around 10,000 or more). Other colleagues at American Express, etc were also using OS/2 in various parts of their companies.
OS/2 did have a huge groundswell of usage between about 1992 and 1996 in corporate America. A much larger groundswell of usage than Linux has ever enjoyed.
Microsoft pulled out of OS/2 back in the late 1980s, this was long before OS/2 truly became popular. That had very little to do with OS/2 decline, except that part of OS/2s features were Windows compatibility and it made it harder for IBM because MS was improving their own products at a very rapid pace and made it difficult to license the code to IBM.
But I think that was partly IBM's fault as well. They did not work to improve the UI to OS/2 and did not provide much to the development environment, so there was generally a lack of decent OS/2 software such that people relied on the Windows compatibility too much.
After the release of Windows 95 there was less motivation to use OS/2 by many people. Windows 95 was a better product than OS/2 from a user/support point of view. It was much easier to configure networking, supported a wider range of hardware and the users liked the UI better.
So in reality there had been a lot of OS/2 support up until 1996 or so. It was in 1996 that the tide turned after Microsoft released their product. But the media still spoke of OS/2 as being a serious competitor because the Team OS/2 zealots were out there making it look like there was a lot of support when there was not.
At infoworld anyway when the zealots were caught red handed stuffing the ballot boxes of the product awards, there seemed to be a huge backlash against further OS/2 coverage.
Yes, Linux has been built up from a grass roots effort, which is exactly similar to Team OS/2 not having commercial support. The resulting zealotry does not lend well because it creates an illusion of false support for a product.
Market share illusions are bad, companies prefer to deal with reality.
So now you are making excuses?
BTW, the topic of the discussion is a poll on CNN, not MSNBC. Your excuse about it being biased doesn't hold water.
This is how the OS/2 zealots screwed themselves. By spreading the word to go and pack the ballot boxes on polls.
Culminating in the Infoworld product of the year award for 1996 fiasco.
And guess what? After the media finally realized that there was no real interest in OS/2, it was mostly fake interest from zealots packing ballot boxes... They stopped reporting on OS/2.
Do yourself a favor, if you happen to come across a poll then vote. Otherwise don't go publicizing it with "Everybody go vote!"
Idiots...
This is one of the more irresponsible things I've seen on slashdot, not surprising it came from Roblimo either.
Why are you fighting a war? I just want software that doesn't suck, and so does your wife Trish. In your arrogance did you think that the competition would never improve? Did you think that computing technology would remain as it was 3 years ago?
Wait one bloody minute... You've got a e-commerce solution running over a serial cable against a Access database and you're wondering why it's unstable? It has nothing to do with Linux vs. NT it has everything to do with your application architects being idiots.
This was published on the back page of Infoworld this past week... CNN just repeated it.
Put up an article with a poll and link to it on slashdot and you can get you'll get skewed results...
The discussion appears to be more about algorithms rather than components.
The deal with a multi-person cooperative effort is that no one person holds the copyright any longer.
Linus essentially no longer holds the copyright to Linux fully because much of the work has been contributed by others.
In order to change the license, one would have to notify and obtain approval from all copyright holders, or remove their code from the project.
I think it's horribly unethical, because when I contribute code to a project it is done under the rules defined by the license the project exists in at the date of my submission.
I don't think the public money aspect is important.
The issue I have with an open source project suddenly changing licensing schemes, especially one which has been around for a long time is...
Did you bother to ask *EVERYBODY* who had contributed to the project since it started?
Let's say I have the open source project called 'widget', and it's released under an older typical open-source license which is BSD style with a clause for non-commercial use only.
Joe, and George, and Susie all contribute to the project at various points. Joe writes a major part of the project, and then gets a new job and disappears.
A few years later George suggests they change the license to GPL so that they can get slashdot.org to post articles about the widget project.
Can they do this? Without Joe's permission? I don't believe they can.
If you can do this, without getting the consent of every single developer who ever touched the code... Then I can also take the Linux kernel and rerelease it under a SCSL without getting anybody's permission.
I'm sorry, but having used GRASS and having spent 4 years working with Arc/Info.
No comparison... GRASS does not have a chance.
Yes, GRASS is fairly popular with the government and university segments because the licensing for Arc/Info is rather expensive. But Arc does so much more...
It's funny. This mediocre product mentions that it's now under the GPL and slashdot goes hyper for it.
you wrote:
"If Linux's success thus far is any indication, true open source will gradually win out over any closed source solutiuon in the corporate IT world as it has already for individual hackers."
I agree, but I don't think I agree for the same reason.
What Sun is offering is 'open source' software.
The GPL/Linux community does not agree because it is not given away for free. There in lies the important distinction.
Bill Joy makes a number of very valid arguments. Personally I agree with him and his motives.
As far as this claim that Sun is only doing this so they can get others to fix their bugs for them...
Who cares?
I as a consumer welcome this. If I find a bug in the widget module, and I have the source code... I can fix the bug!
I can then share my bugfix back with Sun who will incorporate it into the next release of the program. Then when we get the upgrade to the next release, not only do we get my bug fix, we get the bug fixes from thousands of other customers, along with new functionality from Sun's programmers.
That's a win-win situation for me. As a corporate IT shop, I don't want to have to maintain our core infrastructure software. It's hard enough for me to maintain my own custom business software.
That's why I am paying Sun for their software.
Ohwell. It seems the Linux community does a lot of foot stamping and screaming whenever someone suggests that their model doesn't suit business needs. So be it, but I think Sun has the right idea here.
This isn't true.
Internet bandwidth costs money. Distribution media costs money.
Perhaps you meant to say "low cost"?
As far as your other claims. I as an individual have certain skills and certain things which I enjoy doing.
Yes I can do tech-support for software, I've done it in the past. But you know what? I FUCKING HATE DOING IT!
I prefer to create, and that is a skill that I have and in our world if people find my skills worthwhile they will pay me money.
I don't think I need to get used to your new world order because I don't see any great inherent benefit from it. It doesn't benefit me, it doesn't benefit my company, it doesn't benefit mankind.
Sure it benefits you because you can get everything for free. But why should I be forced to give away my labor just because you are a cheapskate?
I think Bill Joy has the right idea here. If the APIs are open, and if the source code is open to review, everybody benefits.
You wrote:
-- The GPL explicitly permits you do do this, just so long as you don't restrict the purchaser's freedom. There's nothing in the GPL that is inherently "anti-sell". --
This is a conflicting statement. The GPL is "anti-sell" by relation to what you call not restricting the purchser's freedom.
If you GPL something, and then sell it to me. I am not allowed to redistribute it.
How do you make money if you sell one copy and everybody else gives it away?
Look at RedHat and Cheapbytes.com. And before you even say that RedHat is successful... Have they even made a profit yet?
The GPL works for you,that's fine. Perhaps you prefer being a waiter and programming in your spare time. But not everybody feels the same way, and I believe Sun's license is an attempt to meet the needs of their customers.
I've been looking at potentially buying a PDA myself. The main reason is to help organize my workload.
But the secondary reason is to have something to play with.
The Palm is cheap and it works.
The WinCE devices are more expensive, more powerful, and much cooler to play with.
Thus personally I think it would be cool to have a WinCE device. Somehow the appeal of being able to play Doom and MP3's on a PDA does something for me.
But in the real world, we go back to my initial desire to simply have something to keep track of my workload. And for that the Palm is simply much better suited. The display can be read outdoors, the applications are much simpler and easier to use.
And it costs about half what a CE device would run, along with being smaller.
And that is why the Palm computers sell, and the WinCE ones do not.
The PDA market is a fickle one. It's been around for over 10 years already, and the only successful entry in that time has been the Palm.
I just don't think having the source code to the OS is the issue. Sure then maybe WinCE might appeal to a small niche of developers. But the device still won't have the mass appeal that the Palm has.
Actually I'm curious why you would want to wait for Microsoft to bundle the hot fixes into a service pack when you could just go and download them.
That seems odd to me.
I'm not sure I agree that the current United States computer prosperity is entirely due to crackers.
Crackers are certainly very interesting as they come in many shapes and sizes, but do they provide any real value to the computer industry?
When was the last time you were up at 3am working on some interesting problem and said "Man, I could really use a cracker about now"?
Now I realize that Keebler's would very much like you to believe that they rule the world by holding the reigns on the saltine monopoly.
But come on... let's get real here.
The real powers are Hostess and Coca-Cola. As long as they have hold of the distribution of Twinkies and Coke, they control the main source of energy behind the entire Internet revolution.
And I notice that the DOJ is doing nothing about this!!!!
Slashdot ... News for Nerdy Microsoft haters.
Right from the article:...
"He should have told us," Simon Hakim, a Temple University economist, said when told yesterday of the financing. "I would not have participated if I had known. It's not right to use people as a vehicle for special interests."
Which indicates that the study was no way biased by Microsoft's funding of the published results.
I also agree with the last comment in the article about the DOJ trial being used by Netscape as a last ditch effort because they couldn't compete in a real market.