So which do you prefer? Unix Man Pages that contain all there is to know about a certain app in a not quite end user refined form or Windows Assistants ("Did you plug in the Cable?" - "Yes" - "Then I can't help you - call your vendor") and cryptic error codes?
I prefer MSDN. Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use and the amount of readable samples, explanations etc. of key APIs.
You can argeu (in fact you DO argue) that this amounts to the same thing but it doesn't. It probably DOES amount to saying that it is usually possible to OBTAIN Free software for gratis (as in beer), but that does not mean that no-one will buy it from you. If that were the case, how would Red Hat, Mandrake, the Free and Open BSD projects,... and all the other commercial Free software companies make a living?
I don't recall the authors of most GPL'd software working for Red Hat, Mandrake, FreeBSD, whatever... So they're certainly not getting paid. And we're talking about the authors here, not parasitical "support" companies.
Not to mention that a lot of the companies mentioned actually make their money by taking the base OS and adding their own proprietary software to it. Earlier versions of RedHat (IIRC) had their own proprietary accelerated X11 server. Until recently, Suse's YAST was proprietary to them (and may still be so - it certainly was in Suse 8.1).
Now, no-one's going to get as rich as Bill Gates with that sort of business model, but that i (I believe) partly because the Gates model - ignoring all the well-known questionable MS business practices for the moment - is fundamentally extorting money from the marketplace that it has no right to
So selling proprietary software is equivalent to "extorting money from the marketplace" to you?
Whilst it is true that I would not be able make living from free software if no-one had written & released it:) surely that's a circular argument? If the authors did not want others using their work they would have released it under a different license.
You, however, are advocating that it is unethical and wrong to release proprietary software. Therefore my statement holds - because you're seeking a world where the authors of the real core of the work are giving a free-ride to people like you, who sell support or customize their hard work.
And I guarantee you that customizing or supporting something is MUCH less difficult than creating it in the first place.
Perhaps you should do some research. The info is out there on the web. Look at the grants and awards he's been given - he has millions of dollars.
but he certainly doesn't have tenure
If you reread my post you'll see that I said that he had tenure.
he *resigned* from MIT to work found the FSF/GNU. And what about Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, Monty Widenius, Miguel de Icaza - of course for all these famous names I can think of there are tens of thousands if not more 'ordinary joes'.
None of those are claiming that everyone should give away their work for free, or that everyone should release their work under the GPL.
I also think you'll find that "tens of thousands if not more" is an overexaggeration.
You are correct, but that doesn't affect my falsification of your statement that talented people don't work for free.
Sure it does. You just gave two false examples, which don't prove me wrong. Not to mention that you're giving a tiny number of invalid specific examples in support of a general-case argument - which is known as "Hasty Generalization" if you're looking at the list of logical fallacies.
However (a) no-one is suggesting that software authors shouldn't get paid - how do you think the tens or hundreds of thousands of free software projects are supported?
Yes, you are. You're suggesting that programmers develop software which they are able to sell *once*. This means that to recoup the development costs, they must sell their software at a grossly inflated rate - which the market will not bear. Ergo, you're saying that software authors shouldn't be paid.
Secondly, only a tiny minority of programmers work on shrink-wrap proprietary software and make a living at it. Apart from developers at the large well-known commercial companies - a few thousands or tens of thousands at most - the vast majority of programmers work in-house or as consultants where the possible Free-ness of their products would either make no difference to their income, or would actually increase it.
Hmmm... really? Are you absolutely sure about that? Bear in mind that contractors are not the same as consultants, no matter how you might try to spin it.
And it might make no difference to the programmers, but it certainly would to their employers.
I personally think it's wrong because (in a very small way) writing / supporting etc non-Free software reduces the amount of freedom in the world. Freedom is good, lack of freedom is bad.. quod est demonstradum;)
You appear to be confusing freedom with "things being the way you want them to be".
Proprietary software does NOT reduce the amount of freedom in the world. I see no such thing as "the freedom to copy and modify software someone else wrote" recognized as a human right by any world government.
Sorry, but you're going to have to come up with better reasoning as to why you think this reduces your freedoms. Unless you're going to apply the same logic to murder being illegal - is that "reducing your freedom" and as such is wrong too?
"TeX might be great for putting together high precision layout documents. It's really lousy compared to Word for writing quick business proposals. Does that make Word lousy? Answer: no, of course it doesn't."
LaTeX macros exist for a reason.;-)
A very painful task turned into a moderately painful one is still a painful task, no matter how you paint it.
You are talking pretty much entirely about boxed software. That is a very small part of the software industry, and it always has been. Most of the software written today isn't being sold at Best Buy, etc., it is via contracts with businesses that need some kind of new application. Copies don't even really factor into that - the company is paying the programmer(s) for the program being created, period.
In other words, "I'm all right, Jack". Because it doesn't affect you, it's good for everyone, right?
Software creation isn't really a manufacturing industry (where the ability to copy something for 'free' could be devastating), it is a service industry. There will always be a need for new software.
Only because you want it to work that way. Me, I've been in the boxed software part of the industry since I got into it with my home computer back in the early 90s. You might enjoy working on small line-of-business applications for small companies - I don't.
But hey, when all the fun stuff is given away for free, they'll be after the stuff that isn't fun - don't you worry.
Huh? You don't remotely understand what you are talking about. You understand Stallman means "free as in freedom", right? Please, find us some evidence of him suggesting that selling software is remotely wrong in any way!
OK, if you want to be picky, he doesn't want anyone to sell more than a SINGLE copy of any piece of software.
Happier now?
If you want to be really picky, he wants to obliterate copyright protection on software, which is certainly against the sale of software.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Let's hear from Richard himself.
"Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction."
Destructive Restriction, of course, meaning the author enforcing the author's copyright.
In an ideal world (which does not exist), people would pay for the software they use regardless of copyright. The simple fact of the matter - as can be discovered by looking at the warez available on any torrent site, or on Kazaa or the original Napster - is that we do not live in an ideal world.
If people can copy something without consequence, they will do so without paying the author for their work. This was proven in the time of the Gutenberg printing press (and it's that era that the word piracy comes from), and it is proven again and again today every time someone installs a cracked copy of a game - or an operating system - on their computer.
In other words, if you follow RMS's prescription, then that's great. You'll end up with no commercial software industry any more, because there will be no cash flow powering its engines.
So yes, he is entirely against selling software. He may claim that he's not, however the structure of the GPL license, and his definition of freedom shows that this is nothing but a tautology. He's lying through his teeth, and the GPL has been designed with one single purpose in mind - the destruction of the commercial software industry.
Basically he's still pissed that all his friends left the MIT AI lab and got high paying jobs while he was left to stew in Academia because (1) he found paid work distasteful, and (2) he has the social skills of a sack of hammers.
You're mixing up shine with quality. MS Office has a lot of shine...
Yet if I want to produce professional looking text [such as manuals] I still use LaTeX. Why is that?
Certainly MS Office is easier [even for me] than LaTeX [not that TeX is super hard]. Certainly MS Office has more flash, cross-referencing help and even an assistant!
The reason is TeX does it's job and it does it well.
You put a different bias on your definition of "quality".
Your tradeoff appears to be "does exactly what I want it to do, no matter how much work I have to put into it to do it".
My definition of high quality is "does the most common tasks really well, and has at least some way of doing less common tasks. Has a polished experience which means I can use the application without having problems due to a badly implemented interface".
TeX might be great for putting together high precision layout documents. It's really lousy compared to Word for writing quick business proposals. Does that make Word lousy? Answer: no, of course it doesn't.
Don't make the logical mistake of confusing "doesn't work the way I want it to" with "is of poor quality". Otherwise, I could turn the argument on its head and claim that Linux is really awful quality because it does nearly nothing the way I want it to.
Hmmmm, OK here's the first difference between us then. Firstly, I think you're labouring under the classic misapprehension that when I say 'Free software' I mean "free as in beer" not "free as in speech". There are plenty of ways to get paid for writing Free (speech) software; I have myself been paid to do so, and am now paid to work with Free software (administration, security consultancy to be specific.) I'm certainly *NOT* advocating that no-one should, or should be able to, charge money for their software. Or indeed for anyone else's software... I have actually (and entirely legally) charged money for Fre software written by others, and of course hundreds of Linux distributions run businesses doing so.
If you say Free as in Free Software Foundation, then you mean Free as in Beer, as well as Free as in Speech.
Licenses which are FSF compatible require that others can take your work - without compensating you - and sell it.
In other words, you have ONE opportunity to sell your work, in a market where prices have been set based on a goods-sold-in-high-volume system. After you sell it once, anyone can also sell it, at no cost to them. Thus, you have no chance to redeem your cost.
There is only one way to make money with OSS - and that is custom work for specific business cases - ie. consultancy work.
I find it interesting that you make a lot of money as a parasite on the backs of the people doing the REAL work - writing the kernel, writing the compilers etc - and that you advocate this as a GOOD THING.
Talented people don't do things for free. > (a) That's patently untrue - RMS himself is the first of a very very very long list of people jsut in the area of Free software, and who paid (for example) Lord Byron to write poetry?
RMS is a multimillionaire. Before that he had tenure. He is a special case.
As for Lord Byron, the first word in his name should give you a clue - "Lord". He was rich. He had land, title, and wealth. He didn't need to be paid to write poetry.
What my question was getting at, was, -- I assume most other people feel the same way, so they (you) must therefore NOT think that eg working for Microsoft is the Wrong Thing To Do. I just wonder how that works... that's all.
Well, it comes down to this:
You have yet to prove to me that working on proprietary software is a bad thing. So it works because... there's no reason from my perspective to think that it's bad.
I work, I expect payment for that work. Other people expect payment for their work - whether it's garbage hauling or writing news articles - so why shouldn't I get paid for mine just because I'm writing something that you think should be free?
Well they're more interested in re-inventing the wheel instead of embracing OSS. I can see them hiding from GPL but MIT/APL/BSD/LGPL licenses are certainly easier to approach.
So instead of embracing and extending existing code they decide to write their own crap. Instead of open standards it's closed stuff, etc, etc, etc...
Not always... after all, their first TCPIP stack was BSD based. Their newer ones aren't, but then they're also designed for higher performance.
Quality software and profits aren't mutually exclusive either. Case in point - Microsoft software is usually of much higher quality than other software in the same price bracket. The only exception to this so far has been *some* OSS software - and certainly not all of it.
Richard Stallman asserts that closed, proprietary - non-Free - software is an ethical wrong. That is to say, it reduces the amount of freedom in the world. By developing, supporting, selling, evangelising - etc, etc - proprietary, non-Free software, one actively HURTS one's fellow humans. I mean this in the RMS sense - I'm not talking about Windows being less secure or less stable than GNU/Linux, but being less free.
How do Microsoft (et al) developers, who are obviously intelligent, hard-working and - at the technical level, at least - well-intentioned people, reconcile this with their consciences? Do they...
Simple:
Richard Stallman is wrong. There is nothing ethically wrong with selling software - it is no more unethical than selling groceries.
His way of doing things is a wonderful and delightful utopian ideal. Unfortunately, the rest of us live in the real world, where humans evolved from mammals, not angels. As such, the utopian ideal is something that will never work within human society.
If you're looking for nobility, go volunteer at a homeless shelter, or an Emergency Room at a hospital. Don't look for it within the free software movement, because (1) the FSF movement is NOT altruistic - the BSD guys, however, are, and (2) the world is much bigger than the confines of your computer screen.
That's what a billion users spending $50+ billion a year on Microsoft software get for their money. They could have hired tens of thousands of programmers just to do line-by-line code audits without making a dent in their budget.
That's the 7 developers managing the project. Not a list of all the developers who were working on it period.
Read the article instead of looking at the pretty pictures.
Apple had to port an operating system that was half in ROM, had no hooks at all for preemptive multitasking or protected memory, had no kernel, and had function calls that included, among other things, traps where you copied your function callback code into a data array and passed the data array to the library. Oh, and did I mention that the OS being ported itself was half-written in PowerPC code and half in 68040 code? Let's just leave it at: Apple had a much, much much harder job than Microsoft did.
Given that statement, I take it you've not run any Windows 3.1 apps on a DEC Alpha system running Windows NT then.
That was my point. Show me a story about how MSFT plans to fix their blatantly wrong development strategy. That would be worthy of a news headline. Some lame "interview" with the people responsible for a fairly unsuccessful SP2 isn't that interesting.
Which part of their development strategy do you think is wrong? Just curious.
That isn't a Windows Media Player replacement. But nice try. It also doesn't play more formats than Windows - in fact last time I checked nearly all of its codec DLLs were plagiarised from Windows, illegally.
Go back and re-read US DOJ vs Microsoft: MSIE killed Netscape not by being a better browser, but by being bundled with every copy of MS-Windows. A lot of MS apologists would really like to edit or forget that piece of history.
Also in US DOJ vs Microsoft is the claim by Real Networks that Microsoft prevented their G5 Beta from working on Windows.
Funny... because it was proved during the trial that it was a bug in Real's implementation of their installer.
Yet Real's claim still stood in the final documents.
So forgive me if I don't hold much stock by the US DOJ vs. Microsoft findings of facts - particularly as the judge was shown to be biased.
Why is it that nobody ever thinks it is possible to have a biased, negative opinion of something for a reason? Why is it that people assume that the bias came first, and apparently from nowhere?
Because people who are obviously biased tend to have a warped picture of the thing they're biased against. As such, they do not look at facts objectively. At all.
This just makes MS play on equal ground with Real and Apple. Now computer sellers get to pick which one, and there may even be a push for OPEN FORMATS, that everyone can read and write so that all of the players will work together.
Computer sellers already do get to pick which ones they bundle. This is why I have to uninstall RealPlayer and MusicMatch Jukebox from nearly every machine I've ever bought. (Mainly because I'm unwilling to run their system destabilizing, privacy invading spyware crap).
Surely just about every OEM would still choose to include WMP in their software installation anyway. Microsoft would stay on the right side of the law and with the right pricing, they would gather additional revenues from WMP. But why does Microsoft act like that would be their ruin? What have they got to lose?
Testing costs at least double - because now you have to test configurations both with and without Windows Media Player.
Not to mention increased tech support costs, because some people won't have it, an app will expect it, and things will break.
Also, typically the rulings are very vague, and could be interpreted to mean "you must remove the entire multimedia subsystem from Windows" instead of just "You must remove the tiny shell app that wraps the windows media subsystem from Windows".
"So manually editing a makefile because you're a masochist makes you a better programmer?"
My software builds out of the box without configuration on *ANY* GCC equipped platform [64/32 bit, big/little endian, etc, etc, etc]. I'd say spending the little extra time to write sane makefiles and learning how to actually use the tools is a good idea.
Congrats, but I don't target multiple platforms. Sorry. So that's a supposed advantage for you, but not for me.
Also it's about being clever.
For instance, there are 172 object files in my current project. I don't add them to my makefile manually. I wrote a 6 line script and a 10 line perl program that not only finds all the objects for the build, it also line wraps it at 80 chars for me automatically.
Which is great, I'm sure, until you screw up your link order because your automatic tool screws up. Or you end up linking in debug files.
Besides, why are you using a tool to do this? I thought your point was that Real programmers edit those make files by hand. Why are you using such an obvious crutch?
Of course that's because I'm smarter than you.
Doubtful. You're certainly more arrogant though.
IDEs and RAD are good for proof of concept and/or short-term inhouse tools. They're totally not a requirement for anything else though. I'm sure you CAN write good software with MSVC studio. You CAN also write good software with bash, perl, make, gcc and gedit.
There is no need to "cave in" to their tools just because you're too lazy to learn how development tools work.
Too lazy to learn how development tools work?
I know how they work, thanksmuch. Editing a makefile does NOT give you any greater insight into the compiler or the linker, the libraries you use or the language you program in. All it tells you is how make files are written.
You appear to be under the highly misguided impression that anyone who uses an IDE is a VB jockey who doesn't know what they're doing and drags and drops controls onto forms all day.
You're wrong. And if you weren't such a jackass, you might find that you get a factor of 10 or more productivity gain by using the right tool for the right job.
Slashdot Mirror
So which do you prefer? Unix Man Pages that contain all there is to know about a certain app in a not quite end user refined form or Windows Assistants ("Did you plug in the Cable?" - "Yes" - "Then I can't help you - call your vendor") and cryptic error codes?
I prefer MSDN. Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use and the amount of readable samples, explanations etc. of key APIs.
And no, the System V paper manuals don't count.
You can argeu (in fact you DO argue) that this amounts to the same thing but it doesn't. It probably DOES amount to saying that it is usually possible to OBTAIN Free software for gratis (as in beer), but that does not mean that no-one will buy it from you. If that were the case, how would Red Hat, Mandrake, the Free and Open BSD projects,... and all the other commercial Free software companies make a living?
:) surely that's a circular argument? If the authors did not want others using their work they would have released it under a different license.
I don't recall the authors of most GPL'd software working for Red Hat, Mandrake, FreeBSD, whatever... So they're certainly not getting paid. And we're talking about the authors here, not parasitical "support" companies.
Not to mention that a lot of the companies mentioned actually make their money by taking the base OS and adding their own proprietary software to it. Earlier versions of RedHat (IIRC) had their own proprietary accelerated X11 server. Until recently, Suse's YAST was proprietary to them (and may still be so - it certainly was in Suse 8.1).
Now, no-one's going to get as rich as Bill Gates with that sort of business model, but that i (I believe) partly because the Gates model - ignoring all the well-known questionable MS business practices for the moment - is fundamentally extorting money from the marketplace that it has no right to
So selling proprietary software is equivalent to "extorting money from the marketplace" to you?
Whilst it is true that I would not be able make living from free software if no-one had written & released it
You, however, are advocating that it is unethical and wrong to release proprietary software. Therefore my statement holds - because you're seeking a world where the authors of the real core of the work are giving a free-ride to people like you, who sell support or customize their hard work.
And I guarantee you that customizing or supporting something is MUCH less difficult than creating it in the first place.
Painful is subjective.
And "Bloaty, slow, bugridden 32-bit OS" isn't?
Running a bloaty, slow, bugridden 32-bit OS on my 64-bit AMD64 is painful to me...
By the way, are you describing Linux there? Because apart from the "32-bit" part, it certainly sounds like it.
I have no knowledge of RMS' financial status
Perhaps you should do some research. The info is out there on the web. Look at the grants and awards he's been given - he has millions of dollars.
but he certainly doesn't have tenure
If you reread my post you'll see that I said that he had tenure.
he *resigned* from MIT to work found the FSF/GNU. And what about Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, Monty Widenius, Miguel de Icaza - of course for all these famous names I can think of there are tens of thousands if not more 'ordinary joes'.
None of those are claiming that everyone should give away their work for free, or that everyone should release their work under the GPL.
I also think you'll find that "tens of thousands if not more" is an overexaggeration.
You are correct, but that doesn't affect my falsification of your statement that talented people don't work for free.
Sure it does. You just gave two false examples, which don't prove me wrong. Not to mention that you're giving a tiny number of invalid specific examples in support of a general-case argument - which is known as "Hasty Generalization" if you're looking at the list of logical fallacies.
However (a) no-one is suggesting that software authors shouldn't get paid - how do you think the tens or hundreds of thousands of free software projects are supported?
Yes, you are. You're suggesting that programmers develop software which they are able to sell *once*. This means that to recoup the development costs, they must sell their software at a grossly inflated rate - which the market will not bear. Ergo, you're saying that software authors shouldn't be paid.
Secondly, only a tiny minority of programmers work on shrink-wrap proprietary software and make a living at it. Apart from developers at the large well-known commercial companies - a few thousands or tens of thousands at most - the vast majority of programmers work in-house or as consultants where the possible Free-ness of their products would either make no difference to their income, or would actually increase it.
Hmmm... really? Are you absolutely sure about that? Bear in mind that contractors are not the same as consultants, no matter how you might try to spin it.
And it might make no difference to the programmers, but it certainly would to their employers.
I personally think it's wrong because (in a very small way) writing / supporting etc non-Free software reduces the amount of freedom in the world. Freedom is good, lack of freedom is bad.. quod est demonstradum ;)
You appear to be confusing freedom with "things being the way you want them to be".
Proprietary software does NOT reduce the amount of freedom in the world. I see no such thing as "the freedom to copy and modify software someone else wrote" recognized as a human right by any world government.
Sorry, but you're going to have to come up with better reasoning as to why you think this reduces your freedoms. Unless you're going to apply the same logic to murder being illegal - is that "reducing your freedom" and as such is wrong too?
"TeX might be great for putting together high precision layout documents. It's really lousy compared to Word for writing quick business proposals. Does that make Word lousy? Answer: no, of course it doesn't."
;-)
LaTeX macros exist for a reason.
A very painful task turned into a moderately painful one is still a painful task, no matter how you paint it.
You are talking pretty much entirely about boxed software. That is a very small part of the software industry, and it always has been. Most of the software written today isn't being sold at Best Buy, etc., it is via contracts with businesses that need some kind of new application. Copies don't even really factor into that - the company is paying the programmer(s) for the program being created, period.
In other words, "I'm all right, Jack". Because it doesn't affect you, it's good for everyone, right?
Software creation isn't really a manufacturing industry (where the ability to copy something for 'free' could be devastating), it is a service industry. There will always be a need for new software.
Only because you want it to work that way. Me, I've been in the boxed software part of the industry since I got into it with my home computer back in the early 90s. You might enjoy working on small line-of-business applications for small companies - I don't.
But hey, when all the fun stuff is given away for free, they'll be after the stuff that isn't fun - don't you worry.
Huh? You don't remotely understand what you are talking about. You understand Stallman means "free as in freedom", right? Please, find us some evidence of him suggesting that selling software is remotely wrong in any way!
OK, if you want to be picky, he doesn't want anyone to sell more than a SINGLE copy of any piece of software.
Happier now?
If you want to be really picky, he wants to obliterate copyright protection on software, which is certainly against the sale of software.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Let's hear from Richard himself.
"Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction."
Destructive Restriction, of course, meaning the author enforcing the author's copyright.
In an ideal world (which does not exist), people would pay for the software they use regardless of copyright. The simple fact of the matter - as can be discovered by looking at the warez available on any torrent site, or on Kazaa or the original Napster - is that we do not live in an ideal world.
If people can copy something without consequence, they will do so without paying the author for their work. This was proven in the time of the Gutenberg printing press (and it's that era that the word piracy comes from), and it is proven again and again today every time someone installs a cracked copy of a game - or an operating system - on their computer.
In other words, if you follow RMS's prescription, then that's great. You'll end up with no commercial software industry any more, because there will be no cash flow powering its engines.
So yes, he is entirely against selling software. He may claim that he's not, however the structure of the GPL license, and his definition of freedom shows that this is nothing but a tautology. He's lying through his teeth, and the GPL has been designed with one single purpose in mind - the destruction of the commercial software industry.
Basically he's still pissed that all his friends left the MIT AI lab and got high paying jobs while he was left to stew in Academia because (1) he found paid work distasteful, and (2) he has the social skills of a sack of hammers.
You're mixing up shine with quality. MS Office has a lot of shine...
Yet if I want to produce professional looking text [such as manuals] I still use LaTeX. Why is that?
Certainly MS Office is easier [even for me] than LaTeX [not that TeX is super hard]. Certainly MS Office has more flash, cross-referencing help and even an assistant!
The reason is TeX does it's job and it does it well.
You put a different bias on your definition of "quality".
Your tradeoff appears to be "does exactly what I want it to do, no matter how much work I have to put into it to do it".
My definition of high quality is "does the most common tasks really well, and has at least some way of doing less common tasks. Has a polished experience which means I can use the application without having problems due to a badly implemented interface".
TeX might be great for putting together high precision layout documents. It's really lousy compared to Word for writing quick business proposals. Does that make Word lousy? Answer: no, of course it doesn't.
Don't make the logical mistake of confusing "doesn't work the way I want it to" with "is of poor quality". Otherwise, I could turn the argument on its head and claim that Linux is really awful quality because it does nearly nothing the way I want it to.
Hmmmm, OK here's the first difference between us then. Firstly, I think you're labouring under the classic misapprehension that when I say 'Free software' I mean "free as in beer" not "free as in speech". There are plenty of ways to get paid for writing Free (speech) software; I have myself been paid to do so, and am now paid to work with Free software (administration, security consultancy to be specific.) I'm certainly *NOT* advocating that no-one should, or should be able to, charge money for their software. Or indeed for anyone else's software... I have actually (and entirely legally) charged money for Fre software written by others, and of course hundreds of Linux distributions run businesses doing so.
If you say Free as in Free Software Foundation, then you mean Free as in Beer, as well as Free as in Speech.
Licenses which are FSF compatible require that others can take your work - without compensating you - and sell it.
In other words, you have ONE opportunity to sell your work, in a market where prices have been set based on a goods-sold-in-high-volume system. After you sell it once, anyone can also sell it, at no cost to them. Thus, you have no chance to redeem your cost.
There is only one way to make money with OSS - and that is custom work for specific business cases - ie. consultancy work.
I find it interesting that you make a lot of money as a parasite on the backs of the people doing the REAL work - writing the kernel, writing the compilers etc - and that you advocate this as a GOOD THING.
Talented people don't do things for free.
>
(a) That's patently untrue - RMS himself is the first of a very very very long list of people jsut in the area of Free software, and who paid (for example) Lord Byron to write poetry?
RMS is a multimillionaire. Before that he had tenure. He is a special case.
As for Lord Byron, the first word in his name should give you a clue - "Lord". He was rich. He had land, title, and wealth. He didn't need to be paid to write poetry.
What my question was getting at, was, -- I assume most other people feel the same way, so they (you) must therefore NOT think that eg working for Microsoft is the Wrong Thing To Do. I just wonder how that works... that's all.
Well, it comes down to this:
You have yet to prove to me that working on proprietary software is a bad thing. So it works because... there's no reason from my perspective to think that it's bad.
I work, I expect payment for that work. Other people expect payment for their work - whether it's garbage hauling or writing news articles - so why shouldn't I get paid for mine just because I'm writing something that you think should be free?
Well they're more interested in re-inventing the wheel instead of embracing OSS. I can see them hiding from GPL but MIT/APL/BSD/LGPL licenses are certainly easier to approach.
So instead of embracing and extending existing code they decide to write their own crap. Instead of open standards it's closed stuff, etc, etc, etc...
Not always... after all, their first TCPIP stack was BSD based. Their newer ones aren't, but then they're also designed for higher performance.
Quality software and profits aren't mutually exclusive either. Case in point - Microsoft software is usually of much higher quality than other software in the same price bracket. The only exception to this so far has been *some* OSS software - and certainly not all of it.
Richard Stallman asserts that closed, proprietary - non-Free - software is an ethical wrong. That is to say, it reduces the amount of freedom in the world. By developing, supporting, selling, evangelising - etc, etc - proprietary, non-Free software, one actively HURTS one's fellow humans. I mean this in the RMS sense - I'm not talking about Windows being less secure or less stable than GNU/Linux, but being less free.
How do Microsoft (et al) developers, who are obviously intelligent, hard-working and - at the technical level, at least - well-intentioned people, reconcile this with their consciences? Do they...
Simple:
Richard Stallman is wrong. There is nothing ethically wrong with selling software - it is no more unethical than selling groceries.
His way of doing things is a wonderful and delightful utopian ideal. Unfortunately, the rest of us live in the real world, where humans evolved from mammals, not angels. As such, the utopian ideal is something that will never work within human society.
If you're looking for nobility, go volunteer at a homeless shelter, or an Emergency Room at a hospital. Don't look for it within the free software movement, because (1) the FSF movement is NOT altruistic - the BSD guys, however, are, and (2) the world is much bigger than the confines of your computer screen.
Get a sense of perspective.
That's what a billion users spending $50+ billion a year on Microsoft software get for their money. They could have hired tens of thousands of programmers just to do line-by-line code audits without making a dent in their budget.
That's the 7 developers managing the project. Not a list of all the developers who were working on it period.
Read the article instead of looking at the pretty pictures.
Apple had to port an operating system that was half in ROM, had no hooks at all for preemptive multitasking or protected memory, had no kernel, and had function calls that included, among other things, traps where you copied your function callback code into a data array and passed the data array to the library. Oh, and did I mention that the OS being ported itself was half-written in PowerPC code and half in 68040 code?
Let's just leave it at: Apple had a much, much much harder job than Microsoft did.
Given that statement, I take it you've not run any Windows 3.1 apps on a DEC Alpha system running Windows NT then.
That was my point. Show me a story about how MSFT plans to fix their blatantly wrong development strategy. That would be worthy of a news headline. Some lame "interview" with the people responsible for a fairly unsuccessful SP2 isn't that interesting.
Which part of their development strategy do you think is wrong? Just curious.
does XP SP2 have some kind of buffer overflow protection besides NX?
Yes. The reason SP2 is so huge is because the entire OS was recompiled with their stack canary protection from Visual C++.NET
mplayer on Mac OS X.
That isn't a Windows Media Player replacement. But nice try. It also doesn't play more formats than Windows - in fact last time I checked nearly all of its codec DLLs were plagiarised from Windows, illegally.
Go back and re-read US DOJ vs Microsoft: MSIE killed Netscape not by being a better browser, but by being bundled with every copy of MS-Windows. A lot of MS apologists would really like to edit or forget that piece of history.
Also in US DOJ vs Microsoft is the claim by Real Networks that Microsoft prevented their G5 Beta from working on Windows.
Funny... because it was proved during the trial that it was a bug in Real's implementation of their installer.
Yet Real's claim still stood in the final documents.
So forgive me if I don't hold much stock by the US DOJ vs. Microsoft findings of facts - particularly as the judge was shown to be biased.
Why is it that nobody ever thinks it is possible to have a biased, negative opinion of something for a reason? Why is it that people assume that the bias came first, and apparently from nowhere?
Because people who are obviously biased tend to have a warped picture of the thing they're biased against. As such, they do not look at facts objectively. At all.
Better players exist today. They have more features, more codecs to choose from, run faster, etc.
Name one.
If it's saddled with spyware, or you have to pay for it, you lose.
This just makes MS play on equal ground with Real and Apple. Now computer sellers get to pick which one, and there may even be a push for OPEN FORMATS, that everyone can read and write so that all of the players will work together.
Computer sellers already do get to pick which ones they bundle. This is why I have to uninstall RealPlayer and MusicMatch Jukebox from nearly every machine I've ever bought. (Mainly because I'm unwilling to run their system destabilizing, privacy invading spyware crap).
Surely just about every OEM would still choose to include WMP in their software installation anyway. Microsoft would stay on the right side of the law and with the right pricing, they would gather additional revenues from WMP. But why does Microsoft act like that would be their ruin? What have they got to lose?
Testing costs at least double - because now you have to test configurations both with and without Windows Media Player.
Not to mention increased tech support costs, because some people won't have it, an app will expect it, and things will break.
Also, typically the rulings are very vague, and could be interpreted to mean "you must remove the entire multimedia subsystem from Windows" instead of just "You must remove the tiny shell app that wraps the windows media subsystem from Windows".
"So manually editing a makefile because you're a masochist makes you a better programmer?"
My software builds out of the box without configuration on *ANY* GCC equipped platform [64/32 bit, big/little endian, etc, etc, etc]. I'd say spending the little extra time to write sane makefiles and learning how to actually use the tools is a good idea.
Congrats, but I don't target multiple platforms. Sorry. So that's a supposed advantage for you, but not for me.
Also it's about being clever.
For instance, there are 172 object files in my current project. I don't add them to my makefile manually. I wrote a 6 line script and a 10 line perl program that not only finds all the objects for the build, it also line wraps it at 80 chars for me automatically.
Which is great, I'm sure, until you screw up your link order because your automatic tool screws up. Or you end up linking in debug files.
Besides, why are you using a tool to do this? I thought your point was that Real programmers edit those make files by hand. Why are you using such an obvious crutch?
Of course that's because I'm smarter than you.
Doubtful. You're certainly more arrogant though.
IDEs and RAD are good for proof of concept and/or short-term inhouse tools. They're totally not a requirement for anything else though. I'm sure you CAN write good software with MSVC studio. You CAN also write good software with bash, perl, make, gcc and gedit.
There is no need to "cave in" to their tools just because you're too lazy to learn how development tools work.
Too lazy to learn how development tools work?
I know how they work, thanksmuch. Editing a makefile does NOT give you any greater insight into the compiler or the linker, the libraries you use or the language you program in. All it tells you is how make files are written.
You appear to be under the highly misguided impression that anyone who uses an IDE is a VB jockey who doesn't know what they're doing and drags and drops controls onto forms all day.
You're wrong. And if you weren't such a jackass, you might find that you get a factor of 10 or more productivity gain by using the right tool for the right job.