I have a recipe for ravioli passed down to me through the generations from my nonna (grandmother in Italian), and yet mine suck ass and hers I would kill for.
In an industry driven by innovation, many companies feel they loose competitive advantage by opening their source... if everybody has access to their ideas, then why buy their product over another?
This argument doesn't hold much water with me.
I have access to all of Stephen King's ideas, since he publishes them in an easy-to-read and often easy-to-carry format, and yet when it comes to book writing he has a considerable advantage over me.
I've already seen The Two Towers as part of a special screening for Electronic Arts employees. I submitted the following review to/., but it was rejected:
Already???? Well, no offence to Tim, but it's got some way to go before it's SourceForge scale;)
While I realise this was meant to be homour, by way of info gforge.org is not going to be the next SF... gforge.org has 1 project, and that is GForge itself.
Before it got/.-ed, Tim had posted something to the effect that "Ripped out lots of hacks and ugly code, as GForge doesn't need to scale to 500,000 users".
GForge is meant more for people to use internally and has some very cool (planned) features that I'm looking forward to (and looking forward to helping out with, if I can), such as:
Jabber support
"Detachable" client (take your bugs with you on your Palm Pilot)
Gantt charts for the Task tracker
... bunch of other stuff I can't remember and which I could look up, were it not for the/.-ing
In one dramatic moment in a relatively anticlimactic afternoon of testimony, Frewing forced Sklyarov to acknowledge that he didn't consider the legality of his program.
"Isn't it true that when you wrote this software you didn't care whether it violated laws in the U.S.?" Frewing asked.
"That's true," Sklyarov said.
And why the fuck should he care? A Russian programmer working in Russia shouldn't have to consult the law books of every nation on Earth to see if his work may or may not violate some law somewhere. If we all had to do that, nobody would ever get anything done, and pretty much anything would be illegal in some country or other.
arguing that proprietary products are not inherently less secure.
Now, that isn't a direct quote from report itself, but rather a paraphrase from the reporter, but still...
"Not inherently less secure" is a strange way of advocating your position. Double-negatives like this usually betray a defensive mind set. Why didn't they have the conviction to say "we're *more* secure"?
If somebody lifts the look and functionality of some closed-source app, and you suspect infringement, how do you prove it?
Have the source out there would actually make things easier, not harder. As a TA I had tools to check for "copy and replace variable names", all nicely automated and such.
In your book example, the proof is actually kind of easy... give a judge a copy of one book and a copy of the other, and point out all the similarities, demonstrating how to transform one work into the other with the appropriate substitutions. Simple.
You constantly need new
library versions or new kernel versions.
Uhm... you do? I've been running the same kernel for over 270 days (or so says uptime). I only upgrade libs or kernels or whatever when there is some compelling reason to do so.
Perhaps you meant to say "to stay on the cutting edge, you need to constantly update", to which I say, "no shit".
The code would be way to complex for 99.9% of all users to understand.
This is where something like Consumer Reports comes in. 99.9% of all people don't understand the intricacies of car designs and dynamics, so we defer to experts such as those Consumer Reports hires.
And so it could be in the software world. Sure, 99.9% don't understand the code, but there's an opportunity for you to start up "Software Reports" in the same vein as Consumer Reports to translate and inform.
You don't support code, you support the binary you shipped.
Competitors may take advantage of reading the source
Only in the same way that Tom Clancey's competitors can take advantage of reading his books. The code is still under the full protection of copyright law, and since competitors would be required to disclose source as well, violations would easily be detected. Just like in the world of books.
It's "my money" that went into developing the source and "I" want to reap the benefits of "my" work
This proposal doesn't change that one bit.
Bug handling would be a nightmare
Er, wot?
I'm not sure why all source has to be open source.
That's not what this author is proposing. He is proposing the source be available for inspection, just like bridge blueprints are available for inspection, but they still can't be copied, because they are still copyrighted.
To quote the original article:
Note that I am not advocating open source licensing for commercial software. This is an important point.
Behold, the fool saith, `Put not all thine eggs in the one basket'--which is but a manner of saying, `Scatter your money and your attention'; but the wise man saith, `Put all your eggs in the one basket and--
watch that basket!'
There's been a sig going around, something to the effect of solving the world's energy problems if we could just harness the rotational energy coming from Orwell's grave.
I think we can add the Founding Fathers to that as well.
Another important factor, especially in preparing kids for university studies in computer science, is that the source code is available. You can read it, look at it, poke it, prod it, learn from it.
Imagine an English composition class that forbade you from reading other authors' works. This is the sort of vacuum that most early learners in programming are growing up in, and it shows in the quality of many university comp. sci students (speaking as a former TA).
In my mind, this should be the overriding argument in favour of using open source in the classroom.
I worked in Windows and NT for many years, and then MSR for a couple after that.
MSR provides nothing to the Windows internals. What a ridiculous statement.
One example is the Bayesian network troubleshooter developed by this group at MSR. (Note the typo at the top of the page... guess they don't have Bayesian grammar checkers yet)
Slashdot Mirror
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Conducted a /. interview?
Just a wild guess.
And you honestly have never heard of companies like say, oh, RedHat, selling GPLed licensed software?
All I can say is "Wow". And read this:
Selling Free Software.
Better?
I have access to all of Stephen King's ideas, since he publishes them in an easy-to-read and often easy-to-carry format, and yet when it comes to book writing he has a considerable advantage over me.
michael fail English? That's unpossible!
Two words: Fucking awesome.
Before it got /.-ed, Tim had posted something to the effect that "Ripped out lots of hacks and ugly code, as GForge doesn't need to scale to 500,000 users".
GForge is meant more for people to use internally and has some very cool (planned) features that I'm looking forward to (and looking forward to helping out with, if I can), such as:
See here
At any rate, it is a very rhetorically weak statement.
(Maybe that's the better way?)
"Not inherently less secure" is a strange way of advocating your position. Double-negatives like this usually betray a defensive mind set. Why didn't they have the conviction to say "we're *more* secure"?
If somebody lifts the look and functionality of some closed-source app, and you suspect infringement, how do you prove it?
Have the source out there would actually make things easier, not harder. As a TA I had tools to check for "copy and replace variable names", all nicely automated and such.
In your book example, the proof is actually kind of easy... give a judge a copy of one book and a copy of the other, and point out all the similarities, demonstrating how to transform one work into the other with the appropriate substitutions. Simple.
Perhaps you meant to say "to stay on the cutting edge, you need to constantly update", to which I say, "no shit".
And so it could be in the software world. Sure, 99.9% don't understand the code, but there's an opportunity for you to start up "Software Reports" in the same vein as Consumer Reports to translate and inform.
In short, RTFA.
I think we can add the Founding Fathers to that as well.
Imagine an English composition class that forbade you from reading other authors' works. This is the sort of vacuum that most early learners in programming are growing up in, and it shows in the quality of many university comp. sci students (speaking as a former TA).
In my mind, this should be the overriding argument in favour of using open source in the classroom.
What do you think of this widely reported quote:
Patrick Stewart, on whether Professor X from X-Men could kick Capt. Picard's ass.They also have developed a Bayesian junk mail filter that ships with MSN8 (see research.microsoft.com link).
So... I find your claim somewhat suspicious.