Artists could make up for it by painting cathedral ceilings or doing portraits of rich Italian bankers. Musicians can make their money by selling t-shirts and doing concerts.
You are at this point telling people how they will earn money under your system. That is antithetical to the entire concept of freedom.
Re:O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
on
Freedom or Power Redux
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Let the people decide which license should govern them.
Okay, I'll ask. Does anyone know of a NON-GPL license that does as described in the article: "you are free to do anything with this code except take it out of its free state." Because I like the GPL concept, but I'm getting pretty freaked out and turned off by the people behind the GPL. I'm looking for the safe & sane alternative.
First off, let me say that of all the responses, you need to be listening to corky's response the most. Having worked on some huge sites myself, I can confirm that he appears to actually speak from experience. As for my experience, I've worked at 4 companies since I got into the Web in 1994. Here's the breakdown:
At Borland in 95-98, the Web stuff was part of "Electronic Marketing" which was an offshoot of the Marketing group. IT ran the Unix servers, but I and 2 others built most of the apps as part of the Marketing team. IT eventually tried to deploy StoryServer for content management, but it was terribly inflexible at the time. Since I had been building highly creative, DHTML games and presentations to hype product launches, I couldn't resign myself to a future of paint-by-numbers page building. I bailed.
At Actuate in 98-00, I was the sole Web person for most of the time. I was in Marketing. It was flat-out miserable trying to convince the VP we should be using Oracle instead of Access or MS SQL Server. I was forced to use technology based upon who we partnered with rather than upon what was superior. When I left, the CEO offered to move my "team" into its own department, reporting directly to him. I should have listened to him. He was right.
Arzoo was a Web company, so I was part of the design team. There was no IT or Marketing, not in any substantial sense. There were a few product marketing people, and they mostly used my team to create content.
At SST, I am currently part of the IT department, and I run a small team called "Web Technology". This seems to be the best balance for me now. I have a lot of Marketing under my belt, so being in IT has allowed me to build a technically competent team but I focus them on the company's image, helping Sales, and so on.
In my experience, the best solution is autonomy. Being in Marketing, you are going to butt up against people who are driving technology decisions but have no clue what they're talking about. Marketing people should not be managing developers. In IT, the Web will either be too rigidly controlled, or will be a hodge-podge of all the various new technologies the geeks wanted to play with.
At SST, the saving grace has been the content management system, which we've built entirely ourselves. It's simply a few Web forms that dump data into a database. And then other Web pages use that data for display. But what is sooooo important is that each form has an owner, and that person is responsible for filling it out when needed. Each time we deploy a form, we free IT from the manual labor of building and rebuilding pages upon request. We are also able to tie in automated signoffs -- some content goes to a manager for approval, some content is published immediately. Whatever the case, you need a content management system. A small, nimble one.
At least at this point, there is no list of what's new on their Web site. If you download the file, you can check out the changelog. Here are some changes for 1.0 and previous release (which is where most of the interesting stuff happened):
disable gfs for 1.0
toggle the history dock on history menu activation. bug #65151.
support for spinners in ~/.galeon/spinners
additional check for NULL returned from gconf on/apps/galeon/gconf_test to __TIME__ comparison.
Added pt.
remove the fixed width of the persistent data manager dialog. bug #64413.
use a build identifier = __TIME__ in/apps/galeon/gconf_test to test if we are not running a new build/version. If so set the mozilla prefs explicitly.
Including "xpinstall.enabled" = FALSE and "network.http.accept-encoding" = "gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9"
do not load mozilla prefs explicitly. Mozilla does it. This was causing the autoproxy bug
Fixed bug where window positions were not being saved correctly in sessions.
Also, they added a few new themes (Azundris & Glass66 & Glass75) and some new spinners (I believe Netscape used to call these "throbbers").
As for expecting poor, starving civilians to change the policies of armed governments or pseudo-militia that is as ridiculous as Bin Laden thinking that terrorist attacks against the US would turn the American populace against the US government
If true, that only lends weight to the "imperialist" policy of going in and killing off the bad guys ourselves. But I think your comment only applies to Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance did overthrow the government, just this week. There is always an opposition group that can overthrow the government. But in Iraq that group is weak, small, and unsupported. In Afghanistan, that group is weak, but large, and supported. The problem is not with the concept of insurrection, only that it must be applied to the right situations at the right time.
We can't stop terrorists directly with threats or direct actions, but if the threat of suffering and death makes the people around them take action and prevent their actions, then so be it.
All this does is make more people mad enough at America that they are willing to die for revenge.
No, it also stops bad people. The poster you responded too is certainly spouting off at the mouth a bit too much, and you were correct to rebuff him or her. But to oversimplify a war like this isn't going to make your case. Actions such as these may galvanize some to resist. But as we've seen with the fall of the Taliban, even their own citizens are celebrating the downfall. People have to take action to stop evil people. Sometimes non-evil people get hurt. But there is a greater good, and a 90% solution is better than the hand-wringing you suggest.
"Why do they hate us?" Because we're a bunch of self-righteous bastards who think we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world.
Well that's one opinion. I would rewrite it just a tad: "Why do they hate so many countries?" Because they're a bunch of envious, disempowered people who cannot do whatever they want to the rest of the world.
part of the reason I hate Microsoft...
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2
...is because they force my hand too much, too often. I feel disempowered when I use MS products. I never thought I'd say this, but the GPL is starting to feel that way too. But I like the concept of the license itself -- that if someone takes my code, I can require them to publish their changes. I just don't like these people foisting the GPL on "code owners" (yes, I believe in ownership). I don't mean this as a troll, but as a real question in light of the circumstances: are there licenses similar to the GPL that are not in any way associated with these people?
Open source is great, but it only works for projects interesting enough to generate "many eyes" rather than someone's personal hobby code.
Building on another post I made last week, I would rewrite your sentence as follows: "Open source is great, but it only works for projects interesting enough to generate interested contributors rather than someone's personal hobby code." Getting interested contributors doesn't require many eyes looking at the project, although it helps. It only really requires "luring" or "wooing" a couple like-minded people. Unfortunately, people tend to consolidate efforts and work on projects with the most critical mass. So a lone geek reinventing the wheel shouldn't be surprised to find that others want to put their efforts to the wheel that's already turning.
Not in my experience. Perhaps your generalization holds up for others, though. But for me, the only way to keep my projects going is to walk away from them immediately. I am not a big developer. But for example, I wrote a few Applescripts for Outlook Express on the Macintosh. Including a well-loved script that restored password-protection to the app. I always released this code into the wild with text that stated the code was not only free, but that it had scratched my itch and others were invited to take over. All my Applescripts & Perl programs have since been completely taken over by others.
Perhaps in order to have a successful passing-of-the-baton, you need to disclaim ownership and encourage others to do as they wish. I see this as a flaw of mrgrumpy's approach to passing on his Java game, World. He wants to be the "grandfather" figure giving guidance and vision. He wants it to be GPL'd or similar. He wants to be sure the project won't gather dust. He needs too many assurances, and developers have a fear of commitment. When I use/patch code, I play with it out of curiosity and interest. So by encouraging freedom -- even freedom to fork code into new directions that I never intended -- my code always finds a new home or two.
This is merely little more than anecdotal evidence. Prove some real facts.
I think his methods, while not scientific, were a bit better than anecdotal evidence. He introduced an element, removed it, re-introduced it, and re-removed it. But if you need corroboration, as another parent, I will concur with his conclusion. My daughter watches a cartoon with someone hitting someone else, and she attempts to hit someone as well. She sees a movie with some Karate in it, and she attempts some Karate herself. It's such an obvious (and immediate, and easy to reproduce) cause-and-effect situation, that we no longer allow our kids to watch even "family" TV stations without some limitations.
People mirror their environment. It's called the "theory of social proof". It used to be called the Werther's effect. Go learn about it sometime.
Many of the "big names" who would have been listed as leaders a couple of years ago are no longer very active in actual free software development, and there isn't much in the way of new blood.
Can anyone take this guy's side for a minute? Play devil's advocate, and tell me what basis there is for his comment? Apart from Jamie & Mozilla, I haven't seen a lot of high-profile dropouts. ESR and tons -- tons -- of other leaders/developers appear to be moving forward en masse and full steam ahead. There's Miguel, Alan & the new 2.4 maintainer (remember when the only kernel guy was Linus? Nowadays it seems like Linus could be hit by a train and Linux would survive.), Bruce (at HP now, right?), even Rob, etc.
OSS advocates routinely bring up points about how millions of eyes look for bugs
I don't think I've seen the number "millions" bantered about much. There is a line in Cathedral & Bazaar, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." But to me that doesn't imply insane masses of developers swarming over code like flies on ripe meat. Instead, from what I can tell, it implies interest. And not even interest in "all" code -- C&B's entire point is that you have to do things to be a successful open source project, and only those successful ones get the benefits.
And that they have the gall to think they can make seat of the pants fixes without a clear picture of the overall architecture.
Sometimes you can. Don't forget that lots of sourceforge projects are under 5000 lines of code -- you don't need much grasp of architecture to delve into something that small. Hell, I just made two code contributions to the faqts.com Web site, and I hadn't even seen the code. I just knew that if it was PHP, my code snippets could be dropped into the files where needed, so I wrote them up and emailed them in. So you may be right about your main point -- there really aren't crazy-big masses of developers eagerly waiting to work for everyone else. But there is a more subtle point that still holds true -- there are power-users and uber-geeks who gravitate toward projects of interest, and an Open Source project can capitalize on those people in some interesting new ways.
The 402 status code is for "payment required" pages. It can send HTML back to the browser, just as a 404 code can. What does this mean? This means that, if browsers bothered to implement this, your site could return a "402, payment required" message, along with whatever "incentive" HTML you wanted. Perhaps the first 3 paragraphs of your article. The beauty of this scheme is:
you can give people a preview of the content
you don't transmit the actual content until authorized, so users can't suck it out of a browser cache or something
you would have to take some action at the browser level to make the 402 go away, so 100 popups wouldn't auto-charge you 100 pennies
you can custom-build 402s just as you can custom-build 404s, so you could allow search engines full access for indexing
you could return payment costs with the 402 headers, so you could charge more or less than a penny
you could authorize payments to cover the entire site for the entire day or more or less
I think this is a viable option that just hasn't been put to use yet -- the 402 code is still listed as "not yet implemented" by browsers. Perhaps those browser vendors should start thinking about it.
I don't claim to be very accurate in my roundup of distros
Your round-up is much less accurate than the one this slashdot story is about, that's for certain. Others have already corrected your comments about Red Hat. I'll correct some of the other comments.
SUSE - big in europe, getting in US too lately. At least as user-friendly as RH. Don't know much more about it. I think it uses RPM, like redhat.
While SuSE does come with RPM (and apt-get for that matter), it uses its own YAST tool as the default package manager.
Mandrake - used to be based entirely on RH with a few minor tweaks but then branched into a separate distro. At least as user-friendly as RH, uses the same RPM system, a bit less buggy?
Mandrake is typically noted as being more user-friendly than Red Hat -- their installer can auto-configure some quite obscure stuff, and more buggy (already covered in other threads, but recent problems included the fonts, TuxRacer crashing under KDE, lockups of the drakconf if you couldn't do passive FTP, and so on).
What's the situation with Linux Standards Base? Is any of the distros 100% compatible?
Well, I won't guarantee 100% compatibility, but I will say that after installing the new SuSE 7.3, I noticed the filesystem had been revamped. There were some readme files in places where I was looking for things, so I read through them, and each said the same thing: "these files are now found in/etc/foo (or wherever), for LSB compatibility."
The outside of the SuSE box also says "LSB compatibility" but I don't know if that's 100%. In any case, at least one distro is trying.
Re:alas, not 0.9.5
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 [mozilla.org] and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code.
Hmmm. You're working on this, and you noted a speed hit. And I want something from you that might address that speed hit. Perhaps we can help each other. Here is my suggestion: steal an idea from the Web TV guys. They had link support back in 1996 or 1997 -- what they did was look for any link tag with a "next" value for the relationship attribute, and then they pre-fetched that page during idle cycles. So the end-user visits a page, reads through it, clicks the next link, and it appears instantaneously. Damn that was a cool feature. I'd love to see it in Mozilla, and it would definitely cause a perceptual increase in speed.
He did no such thing -- his example of how he got what he wanted mentioned Linux only as a peripheral fact. His point was that whatever OS you use, you can sometimes get what you want if you agree to absolve IT of maintenance responsibility.
Get a grip on reality, you dunce.
How the hell did you manage a +1 bonus with all the trolling you do?
Re:Which releases are production stable?
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 2
The fast releases don't inspire confidence.
Linus used to release new kernels daily. In fact, it was part of the foundation for The Cathedral And The Bazaar. It's a feature, not a bug. 8^)
The protests for Dmitry seemed to work a little. They got some reporters to report it. Is there anything similar in the works for this? Does anyone know of a Web site that I can view about organizing some people in a planned march?
Second, get some damn probes into Europa already!!!
You are aware that NASA is working on a Europa Orbiter at the moment?
Does this "Orbiter" do more than orbit? Because when I said I would send probes "into" Europa, I meant it: send landers, crawl the surface, heat the ice, melt down into the plates, swim into the slush or water underneath, really look for life, send home photos of the environment, etc.
To answer the question in the story, if I were taking over, I would do two things. First, get a moon station, as many others have suggested. Second, get some damn probes into Europa already!!! For those unaware, Europa and even Callisto supposedly have oceans underneath their frozen crusts. Life can exist there, and life that is more than just bacteria. I want to see it before I die. You can get info about the moons if you're interested.
Slashdot Mirror
You are at this point telling people how they will earn money under your system. That is antithetical to the entire concept of freedom.
Okay, I'll ask. Does anyone know of a NON-GPL license that does as described in the article: "you are free to do anything with this code except take it out of its free state." Because I like the GPL concept, but I'm getting pretty freaked out and turned off by the people behind the GPL. I'm looking for the safe & sane alternative.
First off, let me say that of all the responses, you need to be listening to corky's response the most. Having worked on some huge sites myself, I can confirm that he appears to actually speak from experience. As for my experience, I've worked at 4 companies since I got into the Web in 1994. Here's the breakdown:
In my experience, the best solution is autonomy. Being in Marketing, you are going to butt up against people who are driving technology decisions but have no clue what they're talking about. Marketing people should not be managing developers. In IT, the Web will either be too rigidly controlled, or will be a hodge-podge of all the various new technologies the geeks wanted to play with.
At SST, the saving grace has been the content management system, which we've built entirely ourselves. It's simply a few Web forms that dump data into a database. And then other Web pages use that data for display. But what is sooooo important is that each form has an owner, and that person is responsible for filling it out when needed. Each time we deploy a form, we free IT from the manual labor of building and rebuilding pages upon request. We are also able to tie in automated signoffs -- some content goes to a manager for approval, some content is published immediately. Whatever the case, you need a content management system. A small, nimble one.
At least at this point, there is no list of what's new on their Web site. If you download the file, you can check out the changelog. Here are some changes for 1.0 and previous release (which is where most of the interesting stuff happened):
Also, they added a few new themes (Azundris & Glass66 & Glass75) and some new spinners (I believe Netscape used to call these "throbbers").
Wow. Really. What with all the troop movements and bombing, it appears to be a fairly real war to me.
If true, that only lends weight to the "imperialist" policy of going in and killing off the bad guys ourselves. But I think your comment only applies to Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance did overthrow the government, just this week. There is always an opposition group that can overthrow the government. But in Iraq that group is weak, small, and unsupported. In Afghanistan, that group is weak, but large, and supported. The problem is not with the concept of insurrection, only that it must be applied to the right situations at the right time.
No, it also stops bad people. The poster you responded too is certainly spouting off at the mouth a bit too much, and you were correct to rebuff him or her. But to oversimplify a war like this isn't going to make your case. Actions such as these may galvanize some to resist. But as we've seen with the fall of the Taliban, even their own citizens are celebrating the downfall. People have to take action to stop evil people. Sometimes non-evil people get hurt. But there is a greater good, and a 90% solution is better than the hand-wringing you suggest.
Well that's one opinion. I would rewrite it just a tad: "Why do they hate so many countries?" Because they're a bunch of envious, disempowered people who cannot do whatever they want to the rest of the world.
...is because they force my hand too much, too often. I feel disempowered when I use MS products. I never thought I'd say this, but the GPL is starting to feel that way too. But I like the concept of the license itself -- that if someone takes my code, I can require them to publish their changes. I just don't like these people foisting the GPL on "code owners" (yes, I believe in ownership). I don't mean this as a troll, but as a real question in light of the circumstances: are there licenses similar to the GPL that are not in any way associated with these people?
Building on another post I made last week, I would rewrite your sentence as follows: "Open source is great, but it only works for projects interesting enough to generate interested contributors rather than someone's personal hobby code." Getting interested contributors doesn't require many eyes looking at the project, although it helps. It only really requires "luring" or "wooing" a couple like-minded people. Unfortunately, people tend to consolidate efforts and work on projects with the most critical mass. So a lone geek reinventing the wheel shouldn't be surprised to find that others want to put their efforts to the wheel that's already turning.
Not in my experience. Perhaps your generalization holds up for others, though. But for me, the only way to keep my projects going is to walk away from them immediately. I am not a big developer. But for example, I wrote a few Applescripts for Outlook Express on the Macintosh. Including a well-loved script that restored password-protection to the app. I always released this code into the wild with text that stated the code was not only free, but that it had scratched my itch and others were invited to take over. All my Applescripts & Perl programs have since been completely taken over by others.
Perhaps in order to have a successful passing-of-the-baton, you need to disclaim ownership and encourage others to do as they wish. I see this as a flaw of mrgrumpy's approach to passing on his Java game, World. He wants to be the "grandfather" figure giving guidance and vision. He wants it to be GPL'd or similar. He wants to be sure the project won't gather dust. He needs too many assurances, and developers have a fear of commitment. When I use/patch code, I play with it out of curiosity and interest. So by encouraging freedom -- even freedom to fork code into new directions that I never intended -- my code always finds a new home or two.
Most of the 14 year-olds I know have jobs flipping burgers. This might not be the ideal way to gauge maturity.
I think his methods, while not scientific, were a bit better than anecdotal evidence. He introduced an element, removed it, re-introduced it, and re-removed it. But if you need corroboration, as another parent, I will concur with his conclusion. My daughter watches a cartoon with someone hitting someone else, and she attempts to hit someone as well. She sees a movie with some Karate in it, and she attempts some Karate herself. It's such an obvious (and immediate, and easy to reproduce) cause-and-effect situation, that we no longer allow our kids to watch even "family" TV stations without some limitations.
People mirror their environment. It's called the "theory of social proof". It used to be called the Werther's effect. Go learn about it sometime.
From the article:
Can anyone take this guy's side for a minute? Play devil's advocate, and tell me what basis there is for his comment? Apart from Jamie & Mozilla, I haven't seen a lot of high-profile dropouts. ESR and tons -- tons -- of other leaders/developers appear to be moving forward en masse and full steam ahead. There's Miguel, Alan & the new 2.4 maintainer (remember when the only kernel guy was Linus? Nowadays it seems like Linus could be hit by a train and Linux would survive.), Bruce (at HP now, right?), even Rob, etc.
I don't think I've seen the number "millions" bantered about much. There is a line in Cathedral & Bazaar, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." But to me that doesn't imply insane masses of developers swarming over code like flies on ripe meat. Instead, from what I can tell, it implies interest. And not even interest in "all" code -- C&B's entire point is that you have to do things to be a successful open source project, and only those successful ones get the benefits.
Sometimes you can. Don't forget that lots of sourceforge projects are under 5000 lines of code -- you don't need much grasp of architecture to delve into something that small. Hell, I just made two code contributions to the faqts.com Web site, and I hadn't even seen the code. I just knew that if it was PHP, my code snippets could be dropped into the files where needed, so I wrote them up and emailed them in. So you may be right about your main point -- there really aren't crazy-big masses of developers eagerly waiting to work for everyone else. But there is a more subtle point that still holds true -- there are power-users and uber-geeks who gravitate toward projects of interest, and an Open Source project can capitalize on those people in some interesting new ways.
The 402 status code is for "payment required" pages. It can send HTML back to the browser, just as a 404 code can. What does this mean? This means that, if browsers bothered to implement this, your site could return a "402, payment required" message, along with whatever "incentive" HTML you wanted. Perhaps the first 3 paragraphs of your article. The beauty of this scheme is:
I think this is a viable option that just hasn't been put to use yet -- the 402 code is still listed as "not yet implemented" by browsers. Perhaps those browser vendors should start thinking about it.
Your round-up is much less accurate than the one this slashdot story is about, that's for certain. Others have already corrected your comments about Red Hat. I'll correct some of the other comments.
While SuSE does come with RPM (and apt-get for that matter), it uses its own YAST tool as the default package manager.
Mandrake is typically noted as being more user-friendly than Red Hat -- their installer can auto-configure some quite obscure stuff, and more buggy (already covered in other threads, but recent problems included the fonts, TuxRacer crashing under KDE, lockups of the drakconf if you couldn't do passive FTP, and so on).
Well, I won't guarantee 100% compatibility, but I will say that after installing the new SuSE 7.3, I noticed the filesystem had been revamped. There were some readme files in places where I was looking for things, so I read through them, and each said the same thing: "these files are now found in /etc/foo (or wherever), for LSB compatibility."
The outside of the SuSE box also says "LSB compatibility" but I don't know if that's 100%. In any case, at least one distro is trying.
Hmmm. You're working on this, and you noted a speed hit. And I want something from you that might address that speed hit. Perhaps we can help each other. Here is my suggestion: steal an idea from the Web TV guys. They had link support back in 1996 or 1997 -- what they did was look for any link tag with a "next" value for the relationship attribute, and then they pre-fetched that page during idle cycles. So the end-user visits a page, reads through it, clicks the next link, and it appears instantaneously. Damn that was a cool feature. I'd love to see it in Mozilla, and it would definitely cause a perceptual increase in speed.
He did no such thing -- his example of how he got what he wanted mentioned Linux only as a peripheral fact. His point was that whatever OS you use, you can sometimes get what you want if you agree to absolve IT of maintenance responsibility.
How the hell did you manage a +1 bonus with all the trolling you do?
Linus used to release new kernels daily. In fact, it was part of the foundation for The Cathedral And The Bazaar. It's a feature, not a bug. 8^)
Shouldn't that be Cue::Video?
The protests for Dmitry seemed to work a little. They got some reporters to report it. Is there anything similar in the works for this? Does anyone know of a Web site that I can view about organizing some people in a planned march?
Does this "Orbiter" do more than orbit? Because when I said I would send probes "into" Europa, I meant it: send landers, crawl the surface, heat the ice, melt down into the plates, swim into the slush or water underneath, really look for life, send home photos of the environment, etc.
To answer the question in the story, if I were taking over, I would do two things. First, get a moon station, as many others have suggested. Second, get some damn probes into Europa already!!! For those unaware, Europa and even Callisto supposedly have oceans underneath their frozen crusts. Life can exist there, and life that is more than just bacteria. I want to see it before I die. You can get info about the moons if you're interested.