It's totally okay to want money from me when they create something that solves a problem of mine, it is not okay to ask for money just to figure out how the thing works. They want the people who've never used it before to pay, not the people who are actually solving problems with it.
I can understand this, and it basically comes down to a transaction problem; you don't want to pay any money until you know you'll get value for it, and the authors won't want to do a lot of work until they know they'll get some recompense for their work. Chicken and egg, all over again.:)
I'm definitely not convinced that open source is a viable business model, or that closing the documentation is the right thing to do -- however, it is the author's choice to make that mistake, if it is one.
I'm glad you brought that up because you touch on a really interesting point: You see, that $50 doesn't guarantee me Gimp will do the job. If Gimp w/documentation doesn't do the job, then I'm out that $50.
The $600 (or whatever) that you pay for Photoshop provides no guarantees either, and it's a lot easier to evaluate something that's freely available on many more platforms. You're the one who has the problem that requires the manual, anyway -- many others seem to do fine without it, and some of those people have even put together free manuals (not of as high quality as a paid work, I imagine, and not entirely germane to the original topic of discussion, which is free software & paid docs). Anyway, it's your shortfall, you should be paying to overcome it instead of expecting authors of something you've paid nothing for to do even more work for free. Again, TANSTAAFL. Where's the benefit to them for doing something for nothing? Free software and documentation isn't magically produced out of thin air -- people work hard to create it.
Want to do it the right way? Make the software free + documentation (like anybody with an ounce of common sense would do), then sell me a commercial license for it if I use it in production.
Sure, you can choose to favour companies that do that as a consumer -- but the author of any work gets to choose the terms under which they release it. If you don't like it, whining about it isn't going to change anything.
Racial stereotypes are something that I don't like to see, because people have tended to use them to denigrate and hurt others, over something that is a not a matter of choice (e.g. you don't choose to be white, black, Jewish or Uzbeki). I don't like it any better when absorbed by the communities themselves (e.g. films by Greek comedians like 'Wog Boy' here in Australia, or 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' in the US, to pick one particular often-stereotyped culture), as it just reinforces the idea that it's OK to stereotype people based on their race.
Just a personal preference, I know many others don't agree with me. But seeing the victimisation of Westerners in Asia, and Indonesians, Afghanis and Iraqis here in Oz, just makes me hope that the day comes quickly where people won't assume that, just because their 'targets' are from a certain background, it's acceptable to attack those individual people as if they have all the terrible attributes that that they think the entire group possesses. Judge people by their own actions, not those of their ethnic grouping.
If I use Gimp for free but the lack of documentation prevents me from doing my job, then I didn't get that software for free, it cost me $5,000.
You can't blame that on anyone but yourself -- definitely not on the authors of the Gimp. You should have ponied up $50 for a decent book on the program, and you'd be up by $4950.
Every software program you use is going to have some cost to you involved, whether it be money, time to learn it, or something else. TANSTAAFL.
Seeing as how you're forced to use Gimp because you can't afford Photoshop
Noone's forcing anyone to do anything here.
At least with the Photoshop route, you have that guaranteed to you.
And you've paid for the documentation in that case -- why wouldn't you expect to pay for it otherwise?
If you're not going to be the best at what you do, then what's the point?
Who are you to complain? If you want a say, either pitch in some money or help in some other way. Or do you expect life to hand you everything on a plate?
Just as a piece of trivia, people used to say "You jewed me down on that one." No, really.
Besides, Gypsies really aren't a 'race' per se. It's a way of life.
Gypsy also Gipsy Pronunciation Key (jps) n. pl. Gypsies
1. A member of a people that arrived in Europe in migrations from northern India around the 14th century, now also living in North America and Australia. Many Gypsy groups have preserved elements of their traditional culture, including an itinerant existence and the Romany language.
2. See Romany.
3. gypsy One inclined to a nomadic, unconventional way of life.
4. A person who moves from place to place as required for employment, especially:
1. A part-time or temporary member of a college faculty.
2. A member of the chorus line in a theater production.
The difference there is probably that Apple has a license for its decoder from the relevant industry body (is that the DVDCCA?), and paid a fair whack of change for the privilege.
As an Australian myself, I just thought I'd check using IMDB... I think it's interesting that from Mel, Guy, Russell and Hugh, only Hugh Jackman was actually born in Australia, with all of the others moving here as children. Does this say something about the alienating experience that moving to Australia must be?
You can't blame someone's actions on their race -- it's not as if being violent is intrinsically Vietnamese, and to act as if it is is a massive insult to the large majority of law-abiding Australian citizens and residents of Vietnamese descent.
I'd never vote for pauline hanson
Oh, that's right, I forgot. You wouldn't need to vote for Hanson because Howard's in power, and he's implementing all of her race-based policies for her.
Right, look at Canada and Australia. We're still bastard colonies of Great Britain, aren't we ? Not everybody has to go through a bloody battle to become independent.
Um... isn't the Queen still the head of state in Canada and Australia? Unfortunately, a referendum to change this here in Australia failed a few years ago.
How about that DMCA case with the Russian guy. He broke a US law while in his home country and got in the shit over it. So US jurisdication covers the entire world and everyone elses' jurisdication only covers their own lands' and then only when it doesn't contradict US law?
Realistically, they should only have taken the company to court, and only for selling the software within the US, thus breaking US law. (I'm not sure whether vendor and customer need both be inside US borders, or only the customer, but at least one would have been required for the US legal system to have jurisdiction.)
Arresting Sklyarov (sp?) was a grab for the headlines, and if not illegal at the very least unethical.
A company's only duty is to its shareholders. (as people seem to keep parroting on/.).
Just someone who has been working on the field for couple years....
Sure, you're working for one of the good companies...:)
I'm not saying that they all do it, but there are definitely people out there who would do things like this, especially as they have developed the knowledge of the exploitable points of OSes and apps. Look at the number of people within the games industry who are involved in the 'pirate' scene -- OK, the numbers used to be larger when the scene was more amateur (games written by 5-10 people), but it's still a moderately large number even now.
What about viruses that change the structure of the files they infect? Especially ones that haven't been spotted by the anti-virus firms yet (rare, I know, because they probably develop and release most of them).
Also, can't people still use disassemblers to 'crack' files, and maybe add backdoors at the same time?
Both of these activities would be reflected by checksum changes.
People who hold the opinion that that which is popular cannot also be good are wrong as often as they're right.
I think it's just an overreaction to the assumption, carefully fostered by marketers, that if something is extremely popular it must be good. Equally fallacious, of course.
NS's work has more interesting language, but often a bit too much. IMO, NS is in bad need of an editor. A good 20-25% of "Cryptonomicon" could've been cut without any harm to the plots or the technology HOWTO asides.
I enjoy his writing at length; not every word needs to be used to advance the plot, I think it works well to flesh some things out in great detail.
It'd also do NS some good to work on better endings.
Definitely.:)
Diamond Age was particularly disappointing in that respect -- felt like he had a page limit to fit into and he'd just realised he was about to run up against it. Unforgivable, since other parts of the book dragged a bit.
It would require quite a feat of temporal manipulation
While I have no knowledge regarding the original assertion, it wouldn't have been difficult for either project to borrow code from the other at some point after they had both started. Open source, after all...
Slashdot Mirror
It's totally okay to want money from me when they create something that solves a problem of mine, it is not okay to ask for money just to figure out how the thing works. They want the people who've never used it before to pay, not the people who are actually solving problems with it.
:)
I can understand this, and it basically comes down to a transaction problem; you don't want to pay any money until you know you'll get value for it, and the authors won't want to do a lot of work until they know they'll get some recompense for their work. Chicken and egg, all over again.
I'm definitely not convinced that open source is a viable business model, or that closing the documentation is the right thing to do -- however, it is the author's choice to make that mistake, if it is one.
I'm glad you brought that up because you touch on a really interesting point: You see, that $50 doesn't guarantee me Gimp will do the job. If Gimp w/documentation doesn't do the job, then I'm out that $50.
The $600 (or whatever) that you pay for Photoshop provides no guarantees either, and it's a lot easier to evaluate something that's freely available on many more platforms. You're the one who has the problem that requires the manual, anyway -- many others seem to do fine without it, and some of those people have even put together free manuals (not of as high quality as a paid work, I imagine, and not entirely germane to the original topic of discussion, which is free software & paid docs). Anyway, it's your shortfall, you should be paying to overcome it instead of expecting authors of something you've paid nothing for to do even more work for free. Again, TANSTAAFL. Where's the benefit to them for doing something for nothing? Free software and documentation isn't magically produced out of thin air -- people work hard to create it.
Want to do it the right way? Make the software free + documentation (like anybody with an ounce of common sense would do), then sell me a commercial license for it if I use it in production.
Sure, you can choose to favour companies that do that as a consumer -- but the author of any work gets to choose the terms under which they release it. If you don't like it, whining about it isn't going to change anything.
Racial stereotypes are something that I don't like to see, because people have tended to use them to denigrate and hurt others, over something that is a not a matter of choice (e.g. you don't choose to be white, black, Jewish or Uzbeki). I don't like it any better when absorbed by the communities themselves (e.g. films by Greek comedians like 'Wog Boy' here in Australia, or 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' in the US, to pick one particular often-stereotyped culture), as it just reinforces the idea that it's OK to stereotype people based on their race.
Just a personal preference, I know many others don't agree with me. But seeing the victimisation of Westerners in Asia, and Indonesians, Afghanis and Iraqis here in Oz, just makes me hope that the day comes quickly where people won't assume that, just because their 'targets' are from a certain background, it's acceptable to attack those individual people as if they have all the terrible attributes that that they think the entire group possesses. Judge people by their own actions, not those of their ethnic grouping.
If I use Gimp for free but the lack of documentation prevents me from doing my job, then I didn't get that software for free, it cost me $5,000.
You can't blame that on anyone but yourself -- definitely not on the authors of the Gimp. You should have ponied up $50 for a decent book on the program, and you'd be up by $4950.
Every software program you use is going to have some cost to you involved, whether it be money, time to learn it, or something else. TANSTAAFL.
Seeing as how you're forced to use Gimp because you can't afford Photoshop
Noone's forcing anyone to do anything here.
At least with the Photoshop route, you have that guaranteed to you.
And you've paid for the documentation in that case -- why wouldn't you expect to pay for it otherwise?
If you're not going to be the best at what you do, then what's the point?
Who are you to complain? If you want a say, either pitch in some money or help in some other way. Or do you expect life to hand you everything on a plate?
Just as a piece of trivia, people used to say "You jewed me down on that one." No, really.
Besides, Gypsies really aren't a 'race' per se. It's a way of life.
Gypsy also Gipsy Pronunciation Key (jps)
n. pl. Gypsies
1. A member of a people that arrived in Europe in migrations from northern India around the 14th century, now also living in North America and Australia. Many Gypsy groups have preserved elements of their traditional culture, including an itinerant existence and the Romany language.
2. See Romany.
3. gypsy One inclined to a nomadic, unconventional way of life.
4. A person who moves from place to place as required for employment, especially:
1. A part-time or temporary member of a college faculty.
2. A member of the chorus line in a theater production.
So, how is buying material from the MPAA/RIAA like eating babies? Seriously?
Some of the other posts suggest that the culprit is Oracle... so that could take a while :/
employment as an agreement among equals
:)
Thanks, that gave me my best laugh for months.
The difference there is probably that Apple has a license for its decoder from the relevant industry body (is that the DVDCCA?), and paid a fair whack of change for the privilege.
As an Australian myself, I just thought I'd check using IMDB... I think it's interesting that from Mel, Guy, Russell and Hugh, only Hugh Jackman was actually born in Australia, with all of the others moving here as children. Does this say something about the alienating experience that moving to Australia must be?
because vietnamese often form gangs?
You can't blame someone's actions on their race -- it's not as if being violent is intrinsically Vietnamese, and to act as if it is is a massive insult to the large majority of law-abiding Australian citizens and residents of Vietnamese descent.
I'd never vote for pauline hanson
Oh, that's right, I forgot. You wouldn't need to vote for Hanson because Howard's in power, and he's implementing all of her race-based policies for her.
Let me guess... you probably voted for One Nation as well? Firebombed a few Chinese restaurants?
Right, look at Canada and Australia. We're still bastard colonies of Great Britain, aren't we ? Not everybody has to go through a bloody battle to become independent.
Um... isn't the Queen still the head of state in Canada and Australia? Unfortunately, a referendum to change this here in Australia failed a few years ago.
My opinion of the "Guns Kill People" theory. I have guns. I haven't killed anyone.
Guns don't kill people. Bullets do.
They have a moral obligation to release their code under the BSD license . . . What a bunch of anti-innovation socialists.
Nice troll. They wrote the code, they can do what they want with it.
How about that DMCA case with the Russian guy. He broke a US law while in his home country and got in the shit over it. So US jurisdication covers the entire world and everyone elses' jurisdication only covers their own lands' and then only when it doesn't contradict US law?
Realistically, they should only have taken the company to court, and only for selling the software within the US, thus breaking US law. (I'm not sure whether vendor and customer need both be inside US borders, or only the customer, but at least one would have been required for the US legal system to have jurisdiction.)
Arresting Sklyarov (sp?) was a grab for the headlines, and if not illegal at the very least unethical.
All it takes is a single line in the HTML document:
Or you send it out in the HTTP headers, of course.
(and theres the morals and ethics or course :)
/.).
:)
A company's only duty is to its shareholders. (as people seem to keep parroting on
Just someone who has been working on the field for couple years....
Sure, you're working for one of the good companies...
I'm not saying that they all do it, but there are definitely people out there who would do things like this, especially as they have developed the knowledge of the exploitable points of OSes and apps. Look at the number of people within the games industry who are involved in the 'pirate' scene -- OK, the numbers used to be larger when the scene was more amateur (games written by 5-10 people), but it's still a moderately large number even now.
What about viruses that change the structure of the files they infect? Especially ones that haven't been spotted by the anti-virus firms yet (rare, I know, because they probably develop and release most of them).
Also, can't people still use disassemblers to 'crack' files, and maybe add backdoors at the same time?
Both of these activities would be reflected by checksum changes.
Cripes, I though /. would be the last place to be overriden by pathetic, thoughtless, bigoted, stereotyped opinions.
You must have missed the Jon Katz articles.
So, what you're really saying is that Farscape is like Babylon 5 with farting muppets, then?
People who hold the opinion that that which is popular cannot also be good are wrong as often as they're right.
I think it's just an overreaction to the assumption, carefully fostered by marketers, that if something is extremely popular it must be good. Equally fallacious, of course.
NS's work has more interesting language, but often a bit too much. IMO, NS is in bad need of an editor. A good 20-25% of "Cryptonomicon" could've been cut without any harm to the plots or the technology HOWTO asides.
:)
I enjoy his writing at length; not every word needs to be used to advance the plot, I think it works well to flesh some things out in great detail.
It'd also do NS some good to work on better endings.
Definitely.
Diamond Age was particularly disappointing in that respect -- felt like he had a page limit to fit into and he'd just realised he was about to run up against it. Unforgivable, since other parts of the book dragged a bit.
It would require quite a feat of temporal manipulation
While I have no knowledge regarding the original assertion, it wouldn't have been difficult for either project to borrow code from the other at some point after they had both started. Open source, after all...