Hey - good idea! We could start a big rumour about Earth's impending doom, then make sure all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and marketing consultants are on the first ship...no wait, I'm sure this has been tried before...
Not to denigrate your otherwise excellent points but I'm tired of seeing the "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" phrase. Linux is free: free as in Free Software, free as in speech - you have the freedom to use, copy, modify and distribute it as long as you adhere to the terms of the GPL. "Linux is free" is itself a statement that needs to be qualified anyway - since the "free" really means Free Software.
The problem is most people say "Linux is free" and take it to mean that it's free as in zero price.
Real Life Space Invaders was the funniest thing that happened to me in the army. The bombardier (artillery equivalent of a corporal) had us on parade and decided we should all play a game of Space Invaders.
He was the player and we were the invaders. We had to take small steps sideways saying "dun dun dun dun" and moving our arms correctly for effect while he shuffled sideways and threw stones at us. I distinctly remember being the last invader "killed" - of course by that time I was crabbing quite quickly and going "dununununununnunun":)
He's saying that the copyright crackdown on Napster stifled a lot of creativity in the dot com boom. And it wasn't just the Napster crackdown, it was DeCSS, Felten, etc. He says the general tightening of the RIAA/MPAA noose may have scared a lot of dotcommers and vulture capitalists, and stifled creativity.
Dead right. Hilary Rosen made this sparkling clear once when she was asked at a news briefing why Napster was being sued. She said: "we are sending a message to those venture capitalists who are thinking of investing in peer-to-peer technology."
In other words, forget about any kind of innovation in content distribution - we are the ones who will allow what does and doesn't happen. Lessig has explained in some detail what happens when existing infrastructure owners stifle new innovation in his excellent speech "Architecting Innovation" which he gave last year.
Actually it's gltron that kicks ass - because it compiles and runs out of the box. I tried Armagetron and eventually got it to compile after telling the configure script that GLU was in/usr/X11R6/lib. Unfortunately it bombs telling me that there's no available video device. There's also no standard install procedure - 'make bindist' creates a whole copy of the exe and data files and sticks them in an arb directory which it's then up to you to copy somewhere.
Don't get me wrong - I'll be submitting patches to the author as soon as I find out what's wrong, and I'd love to see it working - but first impressions count when you're compiling from source. Configure scripts that a) work and b) use the available facilities properly and in a standard way are a really important feature of writing a decent game. It's not hard to learn them either - there's even a free online book on the subject.
The physical link may once have been DARPA but not anymore. Now all it takes is access to a phone line from anywhere in the world which has one. Besides he's not talking about governments building infrastructure but goverments trying to impose their laws, culture and way of doing things on cyberspace itself. Barlow's most vitriolic piece in this regard was his outburst against the CDA which boils down to: "I had lunch with a couple of senators who used several choice phrases that they would nevertheless like to see banned from the Net." Check the context here. This was written in 1996 - before corporations woke up and started going after the logical and content layers of the Net with their lawyers.
Has this guy ever *read* Slashdot?:)
Barlow has fought for the upholding of fundamental rights in the digital world long before Slashdot even existed. He writes but he also acts - minor stuff like fighting Operation Sundevil and founding the EFF spring to mind...
And guess what? He's right. Ethics and enlightened self-interest have contributed more to the Internet and it's culture than any external law. Rough consensus and running code keeps it working for a start.
Yup, I can certainly manufacture and repair my own Pentium4, graphics card, telephone, generate my own electricity, connect cities thousands of miles apart with fibre-optic cable...
Context problems again. Barlow doesn't mean the physical factories that produce PCs, telephones, network connections and power - he means the myriad laws, stupid regulations, censorship of communications and taxes that governments use to prevent citizens from getting on with their lives.
Let's go back to 1996: the Net has been getting an increasing amount of press. It's anarchistic (which means without leaders NOT without order) and not controlled by any government. A bunch of people have realised that they have tremendous freedoms to speak, publish and act in cyberspace which would otherwise be curtailed by nation states in meat space (a Barlow term). So nation states act. In the US it kicks off with the CDA, but more follow. This declaration perfectly crystallized the difference between the establishment and the Net.
If OOP seems like overkill for small and specific engineering problems but you're facing the problem of maintaining and enhancing a large procedural code base, then there's a nice solution.
One of the most efficient ways of tackling this kind of problem is to keep your existing investment in procedural code but wrap it using a scripting language - preferably something like Python. Python has enough classical OO built in to keep your front end clean and maintainable but interfaces easily to programs written in C or C++. There are also tools to do this wrapping automatically for you. Your engineering data and equations will just look like normal Python objects but of course run at the same speed - minus a small amount of call overhead.
Example: after experimenting with Ken Perlin's source code for the 1, 2 and 3d noise which now bears his name, I found that the code was becoming hard to maintain and enhance without changing bits all over the place. Messy. Rewriting it all in Python or C++ would have been a pain because it was optimised C with lots of inline Asm. The solution was to keep the existing code base doing what it did best - calculating perlin noise functions at full speed - and just create a Python wrapper for the interface functions. In the end I got the best of both worlds - Python kept the frontend testbed clean and easy to maintain, the back-end code was unchanged. Time taken to convert the lib - a couple of hours reading the Extending and Embedding part of the Python manual.
Try it - you might like it. I don't know if Python talks to Fortran though.
The second wave will be a full blown cost analysis comparison case study between Linux and Windows in a variety of usage scenarios (web, file and print, etc.) done independently by the analysts for us. (Emphasis added)
If it's a hoax, then the pranksters know this is just how Microsoft think - lets pay someone to do an "independent" job - and are doing a great chain-pulling job. If it's real - and I personally think it is - then, er, it's funny for the same reason. Millions will be given to the analysts to produce what Microsoft wants. A good 70% of the result will be refuted within days of publication. The 30% that makes good points will just focus the priorities of the developers concerned.
I've just upgraded to Linux From Scratch 3.1 (which I can highly recommend by the way) and I was not looking forward to compiling and installing all of Gnome and/or KDE from scratch. I even got halfway through compiling Gnome 1.4 before I tripped over the fact that a key system library needs the new Gtk+ which doesn't want to run with many other Gtk+ apps I have. Anyway, out of curiosity I grabbed WindowMaker because it was a) small and b) needed very few dependencies - the basic image libraries I think was all and since I had those I needed nothing more.
I'm not going elsewhere anytime soon. WM is fast, easily configurable and almost as pretty as E without chewing half the CPU. And to echo the sentiments of Bronster, it doesn't get in your way.
Don't ever use a Kevin Warwick story as a link unless it's this one showing how he's a complete fraud or maybe this one for a look into his thinking, or you could even use this one.
On second thoughts, just go to The Reg and search for Captain Cyborg.
Isn't there sometimes a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up?
This happy medium is described well by Bruce Eckel in Thinking in C++. He says in the chapter on design (paraphrased): "don't worry that getting some aspects of a design wrong will mean you have to rewrite everything. You won't - properly-written classes shield you from your mistakes." This is from the section that talks about the problems that occur early on in implementation, but applies equally to rewrites.
For example, maybe you can identify certain modules that can be isolated and rewritten, then tested rigorously against the old code to make sure they're functionally identical.
This is called refactoring and is now a widely-accepted industry standard practice for improving a codebase without rewriting it from scratch. The official web site is here.
Patents on hardware of all concievable kinds are used as weapons in the real world all the time. That is nothing new. That still does not mean that we should abandon Patents and let anachy reign.
On the contrary, that is the exact reason why the patent system should be seriously overhauled. Not abolished - I didn't say that anywhere - but at least given a big shakeup. The original intent of the patent system was to promote the common good . Part of this means providing a limited time protection to the inventor after which the invention may be freely used by anyone. I don't see any common good in the current patent situation.
Nobody died and made software god. Big evil companies have been using Patents as Weapons for over a hundred years. Sam Colt got a patent for his revolver and used it to kill his competitors for years until the patent expired.
Hello? Anyone at home? Software is not the same as hardware It is stupid to apply the same rules to it as to a manufacturing-based process which churns out physical objects.
will happen because there is a good reason for them and the Software patenting system will eventually stabilize and if it does not there are the courts.
You're slightly misinformed. The US Government asked the software industry about twenty years ago whether software patents were a good idea. For a number of very good reasons they said no, they weren't. 17 years is a ridiculous period of time in software land, software value depends on availability - not scarcity (unlike physical inventions) and a patent system would impose costs on development - like any regulation does. The Feds didn't listen and software became patentable shortly after that.
What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
Because they got to the patent office before you did.
Um, that's not a reason. Luckily I live in a different country with its own - rather robust - Constitution which ensures that the profits of a company in another country do not infringe my rights to write software in any way.
It sucks ass but that is the way the world works, people play hardball, and the real world just arrived in Software-land.
/s/Real World/American View of The Real World/g
Plenty of countries think that America's patent system is the thing that sucks ass and thus ignore it. Ironically, the US itself had this attitude when it was once a young nation - foreign patents and copyrights were ignored - because the common good of the nation was at stake. Nothing like telling a large foreign power where to shove it when you're just starting out. Oh, wait...
There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware.
There's a huge difference between software innovation and hardware innovation. Software innovation is sequential and complementary. Software development is not a zero sum game. Developers have always used the work of others to build, improve and enhance functionality. In the open source and Free Software worlds, this works through availability of source and the distribution licenses. In the commercial worlds, it works through user groups, conferences and special interest Web sites (like this one) where people can share ideas and code.
If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off???
Be my guest. Discover a new algorithm without any access to the work of others (I'd be impressed with that straight away) and then patent it. Oops. Is it too expensive? Darn. It seems only the big companies can afford to patent XORing a bitmap with the background to achieve transparency, something I thought up independently when I was 12. And are they protecting themselves from others ripping off this "innovation". Nope - they use patents for attack, not defence. So smaller developers can't write software even when protected by the patent system.
If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor.
This is a great idea - in theory. The problem is that there are no "clever ways of coding something" which don't boil down to techniques which have been used for years: linked lists, hash tables, look up tables, mathematical operations, bitwise operations and basic algorithms used on basic data structures. It's easy to check this too - pick any software patent held by say IBM, get it translated into English or pseudocode and it will be a trivial operation. Guaranteed.
Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission.
Do you mean technology or software specifically? If software, then commercial organisations should not be using free or open source software at all. Come to think of it, they shouldn't be using the Internet either.
Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves.
Software innovation doesn't happen when development is hampered by a mass of patents. In the non-software worlds, the inventor needs to recoup his costs and thus I can see the need for a limited time of protection. But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't. And very few true innovations happen in large patent-holding companies. It's the garage operations, the one or two guys in their back rooms who come up with new stuff all the time.
And why should non-US programmers pay license fees to someone like IBM in the US? What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
In the quotes, he keeps referring to Microsoft as "it".
Nothing wrong with that. "It" is singular, the legal entity Microsoft Corp. is singular - and not a collective noun either. Using "they" or "them" can be a problem since now you're not really talking about the single company, but rather "all the people who work there."
For example:
"Microsoft is poised to launch Empty Box 1.0. It hopes there will be enough customers to provide a platform for future upgrades."
"Microsoft is poised to launch Empty Box 1.0. They hope there will be enough customers to provide a platform for future upgrades."
Who is "they"? The company? No - it's one company. The people who work there? Then it needs to say so.
Yeah yeah - I had this beaten into me on a newspaper with a rather original fining system. Companies are singular.
Welcome bakunin the Invoker - More -
Be careful! New Moon tonight!
. You see here a large webserver - More -
The server appears to be running normally.
You hear some noises in the distance.
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits! - More -
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits! - More -
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits!
X What do you want to transcribe? f You read the spellbook of Instant Hardware Upgrade. The spellbook crumbles into dust!
#pray A Large voice booms: "You have angered me mortal! " - More -
"I demand a sacrifice!"
Q Do you want your possessions identified? [y/n]?
n Goodbye bakunin.
You were BSD-aligned.
You were chaotic.
You were ambitious.
You did not survive the Slashdot effect.
Microsoft's business right now is selling millions of CDs with the same code on it to as many customers as they can. There are multi-billion dollar niceties like marketing and getting existing customers to buy newer versions of the code but ultimately Microsoft's core business is to get as many of those discs out the door and installed onto customers' hardware - by whatever channel they can.
.NET and its components represent a shift away from this. A huge shift. Instead of selling code, the company wants to sell services. And when you sell services, a lot of things change about your business model which can be very painful while you're trying to make the move.
Services are different from boxed product. Well doh. But more than one IT company has been bitten by that in the past. Charging for a service means customers generally demand that service from you. If they don't get it, they go elsewhere. And on the Web, there are plenty of places to go - most of them for free.
Offering services means your infrastructure has to change - radically. Instead of a finely tuned assembly line turning out the latest products, a services-based business must offer the best infrastructure in the game to customers. Don't believe me? Then check out the unique selling points of any systems integrator you can think of. Our Global Network Brings Economies of Scale! We Will Manage Your Infrastructure! Does Microsoft have the reputation for security and reliability that goes with running an infrastructure? Not at the moment. Not even nearly.
There are limits to the economies of scale in a services business that aren't there in a software business. As one of the linked articles says, Microsoft has many millions of Windows users out there, but hardly any monthly billing relationships with any of them. It has to find some way of getting to that ideal, but it will find that selling millions of CDs is a very different proposition to selling millions of relationships - because that's what it is. Sure you can wrap it all up in words like Convenience and Access Anytime Anywhere but a service contract is a relationship. It takes post-sale time and effort - something which Microsoft will have to learn because the company doesn't know a hell of a lot about it now.
Services represent a trust relationship - packaged software often represents a grudge relationship The lock-in of Windows can be very easily side-stepped in a services model. Don't like the service? Don't sign up for it. Don't like the levels of service you got last month? Don't pay for them. Or go somewhere else.
Make no mistake - moving from a boxed product model to a services-based model is hard, whether you are a small dealer or Microsoft Corp. And often the two have clashing priorities. At the moment Microsoft spends hundreds of millions making sure its channel works hard at getting product out to the end user. If they ultimately want to move to services-based revenue and electronic upgrades, the channel could well find itself out in the cold eventually.
Re:Small Unix utilities written in assembly
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
LinuxAssembly - go here - also has an almost complete set of replacements for common GNU and bash utilities. There's some nice bonuses as well - the world's smallest Web server and some tiny graphics apps for the framebuffer.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey - good idea! We could start a big rumour about Earth's impending doom, then make sure all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and marketing consultants are on the first ship...no wait, I'm sure this has been tried before...
Not to denigrate your otherwise excellent points but I'm tired of seeing the "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" phrase. Linux is free: free as in Free Software, free as in speech - you have the freedom to use, copy, modify and distribute it as long as you adhere to the terms of the GPL. "Linux is free" is itself a statement that needs to be qualified anyway - since the "free" really means Free Software.
The problem is most people say "Linux is free" and take it to mean that it's free as in zero price.
5) 1st person Space Invaders
:)
Real Life Space Invaders was the funniest thing that happened to me in the army. The bombardier (artillery equivalent of a corporal) had us on parade and decided we should all play a game of Space Invaders.
He was the player and we were the invaders. We had to take small steps sideways saying "dun dun dun dun" and moving our arms correctly for effect while he shuffled sideways and threw stones at us. I distinctly remember being the last invader "killed" - of course by that time I was crabbing quite quickly and going "dununununununnunun"
...on this one. Perhaps there's a reason for her smile of anticipation?
This page shows what could happen if Jar Jar is seduced by the Dark Side...
He's saying that the copyright crackdown on Napster stifled a lot of creativity in the dot com boom. And it wasn't just the Napster crackdown, it was DeCSS, Felten, etc. He says the general tightening of the RIAA/MPAA noose may have scared a lot of dotcommers and vulture capitalists, and stifled creativity.
Dead right. Hilary Rosen made this sparkling clear once when she was asked at a news briefing why Napster was being sued. She said: "we are sending a message to those venture capitalists who are thinking of investing in peer-to-peer technology."
In other words, forget about any kind of innovation in content distribution - we are the ones who will allow what does and doesn't happen. Lessig has explained in some detail what happens when existing infrastructure owners stifle new innovation in his excellent speech "Architecting Innovation" which he gave last year.
Actually it's gltron that kicks ass - because it compiles and runs out of the box. I tried Armagetron and eventually got it to compile after telling the configure script that GLU was in /usr/X11R6/lib. Unfortunately it bombs telling me that there's no available video device. There's also no standard install procedure - 'make bindist' creates a whole copy of the exe and data files and sticks them in an arb directory which it's then up to you to copy somewhere.
Don't get me wrong - I'll be submitting patches to the author as soon as I find out what's wrong, and I'd love to see it working - but first impressions count when you're compiling from source. Configure scripts that a) work and b) use the available facilities properly and in a standard way are a really important feature of writing a decent game. It's not hard to learn them either - there's even a free online book on the subject.
One word - DARPA.
:)
The physical link may once have been DARPA but not anymore. Now all it takes is access to a phone line from anywhere in the world which has one. Besides he's not talking about governments building infrastructure but goverments trying to impose their laws, culture and way of doing things on cyberspace itself. Barlow's most vitriolic piece in this regard was his outburst against the CDA which boils down to: "I had lunch with a couple of senators who used several choice phrases that they would nevertheless like to see banned from the Net." Check the context here. This was written in 1996 - before corporations woke up and started going after the logical and content layers of the Net with their lawyers.
Has this guy ever *read* Slashdot?
Barlow has fought for the upholding of fundamental rights in the digital world long before Slashdot even existed. He writes but he also acts - minor stuff like fighting Operation Sundevil and founding the EFF spring to mind...
And guess what? He's right. Ethics and enlightened self-interest have contributed more to the Internet and it's culture than any external law. Rough consensus and running code keeps it working for a start.
Yup, I can certainly manufacture and repair my own Pentium4, graphics card, telephone, generate my own electricity, connect cities thousands of miles apart with fibre-optic cable...
Context problems again. Barlow doesn't mean the physical factories that produce PCs, telephones, network connections and power - he means the myriad laws, stupid regulations, censorship of communications and taxes that governments use to prevent citizens from getting on with their lives.
Let's go back to 1996: the Net has been getting an increasing amount of press. It's anarchistic (which means without leaders NOT without order) and not controlled by any government. A bunch of people have realised that they have tremendous freedoms to speak, publish and act in cyberspace which would otherwise be curtailed by nation states in meat space (a Barlow term). So nation states act. In the US it kicks off with the CDA, but more follow. This declaration perfectly crystallized the difference between the establishment and the Net.
If OOP seems like overkill for small and specific engineering problems but you're facing the problem of maintaining and enhancing a large procedural code base, then there's a nice solution.
One of the most efficient ways of tackling this kind of problem is to keep your existing investment in procedural code but wrap it using a scripting language - preferably something like Python. Python has enough classical OO built in to keep your front end clean and maintainable but interfaces easily to programs written in C or C++. There are also tools to do this wrapping automatically for you. Your engineering data and equations will just look like normal Python objects but of course run at the same speed - minus a small amount of call overhead.
Example: after experimenting with Ken Perlin's source code for the 1, 2 and 3d noise which now bears his name, I found that the code was becoming hard to maintain and enhance without changing bits all over the place. Messy. Rewriting it all in Python or C++ would have been a pain because it was optimised C with lots of inline Asm. The solution was to keep the existing code base doing what it did best - calculating perlin noise functions at full speed - and just create a Python wrapper for the interface functions. In the end I got the best of both worlds - Python kept the frontend testbed clean and easy to maintain, the back-end code was unchanged. Time taken to convert the lib - a couple of hours reading the Extending and Embedding part of the Python manual.
Try it - you might like it. I don't know if Python talks to Fortran though.
Eeek - you're absolutely right.
Aha! I was wondering what this comment from the article meant:
... only 2.5 women at any given moment; it was good to have them around.
There were
The second wave will be a full blown cost analysis comparison case study between Linux and Windows in a variety of usage scenarios (web, file and print, etc.) done independently by the analysts for us. (Emphasis added)
If it's a hoax, then the pranksters know this is just how Microsoft think - lets pay someone to do an "independent" job - and are doing a great chain-pulling job. If it's real - and I personally think it is - then, er, it's funny for the same reason. Millions will be given to the analysts to produce what Microsoft wants. A good 70% of the result will be refuted within days of publication. The 30% that makes good points will just focus the priorities of the developers concerned.
I've just upgraded to Linux From Scratch 3.1 (which I can highly recommend by the way) and I was not looking forward to compiling and installing all of Gnome and/or KDE from scratch. I even got halfway through compiling Gnome 1.4 before I tripped over the fact that a key system library needs the new Gtk+ which doesn't want to run with many other Gtk+ apps I have. Anyway, out of curiosity I grabbed WindowMaker because it was a) small and b) needed very few dependencies - the basic image libraries I think was all and since I had those I needed nothing more.
I'm not going elsewhere anytime soon. WM is fast, easily configurable and almost as pretty as E without chewing half the CPU. And to echo the sentiments of Bronster, it doesn't get in your way.
Makes you feel all sort of insignificant, doesn't it?
Yeah.
SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE PAUSE
Can we have your liver then?
Don't ever use a Kevin Warwick story as a link unless it's this one showing how he's a complete fraud or maybe this one for a look into his thinking, or you could even use this one.
On second thoughts, just go to The Reg and search for Captain Cyborg.
Isn't there sometimes a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up?
This happy medium is described well by Bruce Eckel in Thinking in C++. He says in the chapter on design (paraphrased): "don't worry that getting some aspects of a design wrong will mean you have to rewrite everything. You won't - properly-written classes shield you from your mistakes." This is from the section that talks about the problems that occur early on in implementation, but applies equally to rewrites.
For example, maybe you can identify certain modules that can be isolated and rewritten, then tested rigorously against the old code to make sure they're functionally identical.
This is called refactoring and is now a widely-accepted industry standard practice for improving a codebase without rewriting it from scratch. The official web site is here.
...is when the team announce the latest Unstable release, Windows users will feel right at home :)
Argh - I moderated this as funny and it somehow selected Underrated. Sorry :)
Patents on hardware of all concievable kinds are used as weapons in the real world all the time. That is nothing new. That still does not mean that we should abandon Patents and let anachy reign.
On the contrary, that is the exact reason why the patent system should be seriously overhauled. Not abolished - I didn't say that anywhere - but at least given a big shakeup. The original intent of the patent system was to promote the common good . Part of this means providing a limited time protection to the inventor after which the invention may be freely used by anyone. I don't see any common good in the current patent situation.
Nobody died and made software god. Big evil companies have been using Patents as Weapons for over a hundred years. Sam Colt got a patent for his revolver and used it to kill his competitors for years until the patent expired.
Hello? Anyone at home? Software is not the same as hardware It is stupid to apply the same rules to it as to a manufacturing-based process which churns out physical objects.
will happen because there is a good reason for them and the Software patenting system will eventually stabilize and if it does not there are the courts.
You're slightly misinformed. The US Government asked the software industry about twenty years ago whether software patents were a good idea. For a number of very good reasons they said no, they weren't. 17 years is a ridiculous period of time in software land, software value depends on availability - not scarcity (unlike physical inventions) and a patent system would impose costs on development - like any regulation does. The Feds didn't listen and software became patentable shortly after that.
What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
Because they got to the patent office before you did.
Um, that's not a reason. Luckily I live in a different country with its own - rather robust - Constitution which ensures that the profits of a company in another country do not infringe my rights to write software in any way.
It sucks ass but that is the way the world works, people play hardball, and the real world just arrived in Software-land.
/s/Real World/American View of The Real World/g
Plenty of countries think that America's patent system is the thing that sucks ass and thus ignore it. Ironically, the US itself had this attitude when it was once a young nation - foreign patents and copyrights were ignored - because the common good of the nation was at stake. Nothing like telling a large foreign power where to shove it when you're just starting out. Oh, wait...
There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware.
There's a huge difference between software innovation and hardware innovation. Software innovation is sequential and complementary. Software development is not a zero sum game. Developers have always used the work of others to build, improve and enhance functionality. In the open source and Free Software worlds, this works through availability of source and the distribution licenses. In the commercial worlds, it works through user groups, conferences and special interest Web sites (like this one) where people can share ideas and code.
If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off???
Be my guest. Discover a new algorithm without any access to the work of others (I'd be impressed with that straight away) and then patent it. Oops. Is it too expensive? Darn. It seems only the big companies can afford to patent XORing a bitmap with the background to achieve transparency, something I thought up independently when I was 12. And are they protecting themselves from others ripping off this "innovation". Nope - they use patents for attack, not defence. So smaller developers can't write software even when protected by the patent system.
If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor.
This is a great idea - in theory. The problem is that there are no "clever ways of coding something" which don't boil down to techniques which have been used for years: linked lists, hash tables, look up tables, mathematical operations, bitwise operations and basic algorithms used on basic data structures. It's easy to check this too - pick any software patent held by say IBM, get it translated into English or pseudocode and it will be a trivial operation. Guaranteed.
Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission.
Do you mean technology or software specifically? If software, then commercial organisations should not be using free or open source software at all. Come to think of it, they shouldn't be using the Internet either.
Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves.
Software innovation doesn't happen when development is hampered by a mass of patents. In the non-software worlds, the inventor needs to recoup his costs and thus I can see the need for a limited time of protection. But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't. And very few true innovations happen in large patent-holding companies. It's the garage operations, the one or two guys in their back rooms who come up with new stuff all the time.
And why should non-US programmers pay license fees to someone like IBM in the US? What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
In the quotes, he keeps referring to Microsoft as "it".
Nothing wrong with that. "It" is singular, the legal entity Microsoft Corp. is singular - and not a collective noun either. Using "they" or "them" can be a problem since now you're not really talking about the single company, but rather "all the people who work there."
For example:
"Microsoft is poised to launch Empty Box 1.0. It hopes there will be enough customers to provide a platform for future upgrades."
"Microsoft is poised to launch Empty Box 1.0. They hope there will be enough customers to provide a platform for future upgrades."
Who is "they"? The company? No - it's one company. The people who work there? Then it needs to say so.
Yeah yeah - I had this beaten into me on a newspaper with a rather original fining system. Companies are singular.
"When you going public?"
I don't know when, but you know we'll have good time then, yeah
You know we'll have a good time then.
My boss arrived just the other day,
Came to work in the usual way...
Welcome bakunin the Invoker - More -
.
Be careful! New Moon tonight!
You see here a large webserver - More -
The server appears to be running normally.
You hear some noises in the distance.
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits! - More -
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits! - More -
Slashdot hits! Slashdot hits!
X
What do you want to transcribe? f
You read the spellbook of Instant Hardware Upgrade. The spellbook crumbles into dust!
#pray
A Large voice booms: "You have angered me mortal! " - More -
"I demand a sacrifice!"
Q
Do you want your possessions identified? [y/n]?
n
Goodbye bakunin.
You were BSD-aligned.
You were chaotic.
You were ambitious.
You did not survive the Slashdot effect.
.NET and its components represent a shift away from this. A huge shift. Instead of selling code, the company wants to sell services. And when you sell services, a lot of things change about your business model which can be very painful while you're trying to make the move.
Make no mistake - moving from a boxed product model to a services-based model is hard, whether you are a small dealer or Microsoft Corp. And often the two have clashing priorities. At the moment Microsoft spends hundreds of millions making sure its channel works hard at getting product out to the end user. If they ultimately want to move to services-based revenue and electronic upgrades, the channel could well find itself out in the cold eventually.
LinuxAssembly - go here - also has an almost complete set of replacements for common GNU and bash utilities. There's some nice bonuses as well - the world's smallest Web server and some tiny graphics apps for the framebuffer.