How can you except _any_ company under _any_ business model to compete with the Linus Torvalds of the world who give away their products and don't have to pay their "employees?"
Uhm, I don't. They can't compete. End of story:) The notion that software should be free because it costs next to nothing to distribute it is as plausible as the notion of paying on artist for the cost of his canvas and a can of point! Of course people should except to get paid for software they write. Not everyone is an artist capable of turning a bucket of paint and a blank canvas into a sight to behold!
I'm not saying you don't pay the artist. His work is worth more than just the cost of the canvas and paint. But how much should prints of that painting cost?
Programmers should still get paid the same salary for the act of programming, but the net worth of the software should not be how high it is currently.
Freeing the source code just takes out the middlemen (software vendors) of the industry. They are the only ones that need to fear free software. Companies will always need, and pay, developers.
Example: Netscape releases the source code for Navigator. Let's say you are a developer for Navigator. Suddenly you just lost your job because of this free software thing. It's ok though. There is a big ISP near by that uses netscape as it's default browser. Now that it has the source code for netscape, it hires you to hack on it and customize it for that ISP. So, you are still hacking on navigator like you were before it went free, still getting the same pay maybe even more, but instead of working at Netscape Inc. you are working for the ISP instead. You don't lose any jobs by going open, they just transfer from software vendors to companies that use the vendor's software.
The article states that Microsoft can't compete with linux in terms of price, but they believe that the ease in which you can port apps to these "thin servers" is what will give them an edge. I thought the main selling point of these servers is that they are thin and only serve one function. Why would you want to port an app to it?
It's always nice to see Microsoft making bad business decisions. We'll see a lot more of them as they try and combat Linux.
What can Microsoft do to stop the Free Software juggernaut? Their loss is inevitable; all they can do is slow it down. The economics of proprietary software are flawed. No other market sells a good that is as ridiculously over priced compared to it's creation costs as software. It's this flaw that made Gates the richest man in the history of the world, and it's the same flaw that will destroy almost all of proprietary software. If free software didn't come along to destroy the industry, piracy would have.
I think it's kind of funny watching the industry topple. It's not as apparent with Microsoft (because we don't have the end user apps to topple them yet), but just look at proprietary unix vendors. Most of them are dead and the rest will be shortly. The only ones that are really making money are the ones that run on the Big Iron that linux can't do, yet.
Anyway, to tie all this together and keep it on topic; The problem is how does Microsoft compete with Linux in the server market? The answer is that it doesn't. We know that, but they don't, or at least they are too arrogant to admit it. So instead they come up with a dumb answer to the "Competing with Linux" problem: "Thin" servers running WinCE. Fortunately this is flawed too. They propose a $1500-$2000 solution to a problem that Linux already solves for about $150 worth of hardware.
Posters with a history of posting good comments can still post bad comments, and vice-versa. The whole point of moderation is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which this won't do. There are just too many variables that go into what is a good comment and what isn't. What if a good comment poster posts an irrational comment because the subject matter was sensitive to him? If you are a user that sets his threshold really high so that you only see the good stuff, you are still going to get these guys with pretty good reputations but the occasional bad comment. The more users that/. gets, the more this score-history system will break down.
In the beginning, we had no moderation. Then we got moderation through scoring. Now we have moderation through scoring + past history. Next it will be moderation through scoring + past history + grammar. Then scoring + past history + grammar + buzzwords, etc.
Let the moderators decide, not past history. Moderators are the most effective noise filters. The logic a moderator goes through determining what is a good comment and what is not is a lot more involved than something you could code in Perl;).
When somebody asks me what I run on my system at home, I say Debian, not Linux, not GNU, and certainly not GNU/Linux. When they ask what Debian is, I say it's a unix-like operating system. If they ask "Is that linux?", I say "It uses the linux kernel."
Why can't we just say we run Debian, Redhat, S.u.s.e, Slackware, or whatever? My system has a lot more on it than just Linux and GNU. It would be inaccurate to call it anything else but Debian.
If you use any kind of hardware acceleration in your game, you're going to have a tough time rolling your own. It's easy to write a game in C/asm for straight VGA or a console system, but try it for SVGA games with 3d acceleration. I'm sorry to say it, but you need libraries to write state-of-the-art games on the PC. There's just no other way to support everybody's hardware setup.
Under that license, the code is yours, but they have the right to revoke the license that protects you, making the code theirs. That's the fundamental problem. They need to do that to protect themselves from patent laws, but how they word it is questionable. It's almost a mirror image of the problems with the IBM license.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you except _any_ company under _any_ business model to compete with the Linus Torvalds of the world who give away their products and don't have to pay their "employees?"
:)
Uhm, I don't. They can't compete. End of story
The notion that software should be free because it costs next to nothing to distribute it is as plausible as the notion of paying on artist for the cost of his canvas and a can of point! Of course people should except to get paid for software they write. Not everyone is an artist capable of turning a bucket of paint and a blank canvas into a sight to behold!
I'm not saying you don't pay the artist. His work is worth more than just the cost of the canvas and paint. But how much should prints of that painting cost?
Programmers should still get paid the same salary for the act of programming, but the net worth of the software should not be how high it is currently.
Freeing the source code just takes out the middlemen (software vendors) of the industry. They are the only ones that need to fear free software. Companies will always need, and pay, developers.
Example: Netscape releases the source code for Navigator. Let's say you are a developer for Navigator. Suddenly you just lost your job because of this free software thing. It's ok though. There is a big ISP near by that uses netscape as it's default browser. Now that it has the source code for netscape, it hires you to hack on it and customize it for that ISP. So, you are still hacking on navigator like you were before it went free, still getting the same pay maybe even more, but instead of working at Netscape Inc. you are working for the ISP instead. You don't lose any jobs by going open, they just transfer from software vendors to companies that use the vendor's software.
The article states that Microsoft can't compete with linux in terms of price, but they believe that the ease in which you can port apps to these "thin servers" is what will give them an edge. I thought the main selling point of these servers is that they are thin and only serve one function. Why would you want to port an app to it?
It's always nice to see Microsoft making bad business decisions. We'll see a lot more of them as they try and combat Linux.
What can Microsoft do to stop the Free Software juggernaut? Their loss is inevitable; all they can do is slow it down. The economics of proprietary software are flawed. No other market sells a good that is as ridiculously over priced compared to it's creation costs as software. It's this flaw that made Gates the richest man in the history of the world, and it's the same flaw that will destroy almost all of proprietary software. If free software didn't come along to destroy the industry, piracy would have.
I think it's kind of funny watching the industry topple. It's not as apparent with Microsoft (because we don't have the end user apps to topple them yet), but just look at proprietary unix vendors. Most of them are dead and the rest will be shortly. The only ones that are really making money are the ones that run on the Big Iron that linux can't do, yet.
Anyway, to tie all this together and keep it on topic; The problem is how does Microsoft compete with Linux in the server market? The answer is that it doesn't. We know that, but they don't, or at least they are too arrogant to admit it. So instead they come up with a dumb answer to the "Competing with Linux" problem: "Thin" servers running WinCE. Fortunately this is flawed too. They propose a $1500-$2000 solution to a problem that Linux already solves for about $150 worth of hardware.
Posters with a history of posting good comments can still post bad comments, and vice-versa. The whole point of moderation is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which this won't do. There are just too many variables that go into what is a good comment and what isn't. What if a good comment poster posts an irrational comment because the subject matter was sensitive to him? /. gets, the more this score-history system will break down.
;).
If you are a user that sets his threshold really high so that you only see the good stuff, you are still going to get these guys with pretty good reputations but the occasional bad comment. The more users that
In the beginning, we had no moderation. Then we got moderation through scoring. Now we have moderation through scoring + past history. Next it will be moderation through scoring + past history + grammar. Then scoring + past history + grammar + buzzwords, etc.
Let the moderators decide, not past history. Moderators are the most effective noise filters. The logic a moderator goes through determining what is a good comment and what is not is a lot more involved than something you could code in Perl
When somebody asks me what I run on my system at home, I say Debian, not Linux, not GNU, and certainly not GNU/Linux. When they ask what Debian is, I say it's a unix-like operating system. If they ask "Is that linux?", I say "It uses the linux kernel."
Why can't we just say we run Debian, Redhat, S.u.s.e, Slackware, or whatever? My system has a lot more on it than just Linux and GNU. It would be inaccurate to call it anything else but Debian.
Josh
If you use any kind of hardware acceleration in your game, you're going to have a tough time rolling your own. It's easy to write a game in C/asm for straight VGA or a console system, but try it for SVGA games with 3d acceleration. I'm sorry to say it, but you need libraries to write state-of-the-art games on the PC. There's just no other way to support everybody's hardware setup.
You can always set Z to zero and do 2D graphics.
What's wrong with GLUT (besides sound support)?
Under that license, the code is yours, but they have the right to revoke the license that protects you, making the code theirs. That's the fundamental problem. They need to do that to protect themselves from patent laws, but how they word it is questionable. It's almost a mirror image of the problems with the IBM license.