You dont upgrade when theres a 10% or 50% speed increase unless you love wasting money on nothing. You upgrade when you cant stand your old machine anymore and the new one you buy will be at least 4 times faster. Seems to be around a 3 year cycle.
My 300MHz pII is still working fine, but its slowly reaching the point where a new one would be useful. But it's not like I care if the new one would be 4.1 or 4.2 times faster.
Then again, I work with bleeding edge million dollar crap machines every day and Im not very easily impressed by gee-whiz-gotta-have-that hardware anymore.
But of course, what really drives the speed market is the unbelievable crap that the a lot of so-called 'programmers' in the commercial software buisness of today deliver.
The first company has the copyright to their software. If the second company does not accept and conform to the terms in the GPL license they are engaging in copyright violations for profit. That in itself is a federal crime and the first company can just hand it over to the police and prosecutors and watch their competitors getting nice little cells and cute little fines. Then, when they're not going anywhere they can hand over the civil lawsuit for damages, of course.
Bad for what buisness? Maybe Mundie doesnt realize it, but the other 2.5 billion people working on this planet arent working in the software buisness. And in the IT industry, even there I'd guess maybe about 5 percent are working in companies whose buisness the GPL would be bad for.
And for all those people GPL software is a good thing, because it makes their software cheaper and more reliable.
So maybe Mundie should try explaining exactly why the other 6 billion people somehow affected by software should care about his desires to control any and all of their software and make them pay through the nose at every turn.
Free software is about and for USERS of software. The important thing isnt wether Microsoft can survive or not (because who cares if they whine all the way to irrelevancy), it's wether the freedom and value provided by free software can make it a Good Buisness Choice for everyone else.
And those who compromise and tread on dubious ground have been faced, time after time after time after time, with all their work having the rug pulled out from under them. It's not about dogma, it is about experience with the reality of the buisness world. Functionality is important, but you have to be able to trust that the functionality will remain there in a decade or a century, otherwise the appearance of functionality is just a tempting mirage.
Because C++ is an unstandardized language that gives you no end of portability problems, including, but not limited to, code only compilable on a certain compiler, version of compiler or platform. Virtually every language can do calls to C, and language bindings to C libs are common, while C++ toolkits like Qt have very few bindings.
C++ in general causes far more problems than it solves, and with the way things are going I suspect it wont get worked out for the next decade.
No, it wouldnt really be _worth_ a patent because you've obviously already thought about the idea.
The fact that you dont have the faintest clue how to go about it, or that any way you might think up would require the processing power of the entire world doesnt really prevent you from patenting the idea of 'algorithmically analyzing waveforms to determine greatest match with currently available recordings' tho. Because the USPTO would probably grant it anyway and then you can just lean back and sue when someone else does the actual work.
Well, IANAL either, and 3 minutes isnt enough to figure out a license really, but from a quick reading it seems you're right.
Looks pretty much like GPL, but with less work done on specifying problematic technical software issues like linking, and with more work gone into the disclaiming and patent parts. If you read it more carefully, you cannot change the license on binaries. You can issue a disjointed license on binaries but then it has to conform to both, and there is nothing preventing that on GPL software either (Ie, you can say "I will provide warranty for this software in the form distributed by me" in your extra license and that would be ok for both GPL and this IBM license).
Of course, the GPL deals with these issues too. So, yet another license that isnt saying anything original but which is very likely incompatible with the GPL (the license revocation clause was the first thing I thought of).
Im afraid you're in the wrong market then. Proprietary consumer productivity software is dead as a market. There you're stuck between Microsoft on one side that will implement your programs if they're useful and bundle them with windows, opensource on another side who will implement it if anyone cares about the software and will give it away for free, the problem that this type of software becomes pretty much 'finished' on the third side, and consumer reluctance to pay for each and every little component in a system.
Id advise you go into consulting, some vertical market, entertainment markets or some market that doesnt have the same dead end mechanics built into that market.
Of course, Caldera releasing their own software under a BSD license rather than the GPL license makes even less buisness sense since their competitors can then take the code, improve it and then not give Caldera the improvements back.
The only way the BSD license makes more sense than GPL for buisness reasons is if you're in the position of being the taking part, not the giving part.
I do expect Caldera to release yet another slew of licenses that arent compatible with any current ones, and making codesharing between stuff under those licenses impossible with everything else.
Please. Do. Not. Do. That.
BSD/X11, LGPL and GPL cover all the possible permutations of terms that are interesting. I have yet to see any license that diverges from the basic idea in them except in obnoxiously incompatible ways.
Well, due to the lag before the UltraSPARC III, there hasnt been any real reason for anything but real hobbyist work on Sun machines. The single or dual cpu workstation are too expensive price/performance wise to merit serious porting work for clusters, and for the highend, the scalability of Linux compared to Solaris make it worth little to make a port. Not to mention the dearth of idle 8+ cpu Suns of any current generation.
Of course, if file formats werent arbitrarily changed all the time, supporting those older formats wouldnt _be_ a problem (or, heck, use PostScript. That worked in 89, and Im sure it works now). And if those helpdesk people werent forced to learn a new Office suite every year they woulnt have a problem with supporting the older versions.
A company that decides it wants off the upgrade treadmill can cut costs and be more competetive. There has been no significant increased value for most companies in upgrading something like Office for the last 5 years, and without any increased value there is no solid buisness reason for upgrading.
Well, actually he is restoring the cars to their rightful owners, which might make it a bit better (remember, if those people default on their loans, _you_ will get the pleasure of paying for it one way or the other).
And the systems built by a lot of the bombed dot.commers were neither beautiful nor sophisticated, nor used by very many people apparently. Paid for by money conned out of the inexperienced and gullible in a lot of cases too.
So the choice isnt exactly as clear cut as you might think.
Actually, you have to willfully infringe for _profit_ to get into really really bad trouble.
That, I think, is the main reason the we dont see more GPL infringements from large corporations. They know that most GPL authors lack the resources to bring a civil suit, but in the case of a willful infringement for profit you up the stakes so you get to go up against a federal prosecutor and face possible prison time instead.
You are right that the restriction of freedoms can be for the promotion of security, but there is often a component of promoting freedom too. For example, restricting the right to enslave someone is definitely promoting freedom for a larger part of the population.
The difficulty occurs when you watch the entire system as a whole. For the individual wanting to exercise his freedom you can say he is less free when there are restrictions on what he can do. But when what he wants to do is to remove other peoples freedoms in some way, the system as a whole will be more free when he is denied that right.
In my example where I couldnt fix code, the problem is that I dont get the source. In the most annoying current case, its the HP-UX 11 X server, which leaks memory like a sieve. In other cases there have been small BSD based utilities ported to other operating system with small but annoying bugs that sometimes render them unusable for what I need to do with them.
This I find very annoying because there is basically nothing new there. There is nothing to protect but the porting, and there is no logical reason to close the source. Yet some people seem to take the path of making it proprietary, no matter what.
Of course there is a logical flaw in this argument. The flaw being that without the ability to close the software then maybe it wouldnt have been ported at all. Maybe. But in the cases that have no logical reason for not releasing the source I think the value of having the software available and not having to do more than the porting work and releasing the source, it would get ported either way.
In any case, I think there are good reasons for the BSD license in some cases (mainly in vertical fields), altho I think that in many cases more people would be served better by moving algorithms and interesting pieces of code into libs and LGPL'ing them, in the cases where allowing proprietary use is desired, giving us the best of both worlds.
Considering that willful copyright infringement for profit is a federal crime, your friendly neighbourhood US Attorney could assist you. They are rumored to have some funds at their disposal.
Im sure he would just loooove a tape recording saying 'go ahead, sue us, see if we care', and make them care all the way to the cell.
You mean apart from the rather severe fines plus jailtime a violator would get for copyright violation for profit, which is what not complying with the GPL amounts to? That is, after all, a federal crime, not merely a civil case.
Easy. Because I run across more originally BSD/X11/etc licensed code that I cannot read/fix than GPL code that I cannot read/fix. That means my freedom is more limited than it would have been, had the code been GPL from the start.
It all depends on your point of view. If you want to exploit free software and make it proprietary you have more freedoms with the BSD license.
But if you arent in the buisness of exploiting free software, you _will_ get less freedom as the end result from code originally licensed with BSD or similar license.
Of course, in the example you gave, the law RESTRICTS the Evil (tm) Mr Gandhi Twins freedoms you know. He isnt allowed to threaten Mr Bloggs with a lead pipe. In that case, the end result of the restriction of one freedom (you cant threaten people with lead pipes) is greater freedom for all (because Mr Bloggs doesnt have to be constantly scared of getting a lead pipe bent over his head).
Eh... as opposed to if I include gobs of the Windows 2000 code into a product and sell it? Im sure that would go down real fine. So, its ok for them to disallow me to use their code in any product, free or otherwise, but not ok for me to disallow them to use my code for proprietary products?
The BSD license is concerned with the freedom of proprietary software vendors, but the GPL is concerned with the freedom of every consumer of software.
The reality is that very few of those who use BSD licensed code contribute significant portions back. Further, the ultimate consumers of the proprietary offspring of BSD or other similarly licensed software get the hard end of the deal.
The X11 license is the reason I cannot fix the huge memory leaks in my HP-UX X server, but instead Im forced to restart it every two weeks (and no patch in sight) Oh, and all those proprietary X extensions really brought X forward as a standard, didnt they. The end result was a lot of programmers saying, well, nice idea but we cant USE it because we have to support 3 other platforms that dont HAVE your proprietary extension.
The BSD license is the reason I couldnt fix the 10 minute timeout in a proprietary rsh derivate (oh, and tech support said it was supposed to work that way and they aint gonna fix it no sirree).
The BSD license can be argued to be more altruistic until everyone arguing that goes blue in the face, but the result for the end user is more fragmentation, more broken proprietary software they cannot fix and more incompatiblities due to 'strategic proprietary diffrentiation'.
"Open Source isnt a good thing in general if you want to make a profit from selling proprietary consumer productivity software."
However, Open Source is a great thing if you want to make a higher profit in any other buisness segment. And considering that the Microsoft is one of very very few companies making money in from that segment, that would mean that for 99.5% of worldwide industry, ranging from car manufacturers to corner grocers, Open Source (including Free, GPL software) is a very good proposition.
Of course they will revise it again. Hey, even the lawyers who come up with such genious moves as forging evidence in court and just happen to write agreements where you sign over all your intellectual property to them will eventually, after many iterations, come up with something that might allow people to buy the software.
Was the requirement for a lawyer position at Microsoft that you'd pass a MCSE?
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You dont upgrade when theres a 10% or 50% speed increase unless you love wasting money on nothing. You upgrade when you cant stand your old machine anymore and the new one you buy will be at least 4 times faster. Seems to be around a 3 year cycle.
My 300MHz pII is still working fine, but its slowly reaching the point where a new one would be useful. But it's not like I care if the new one would be 4.1 or 4.2 times faster.
Then again, I work with bleeding edge million dollar crap machines every day and Im not very easily impressed by gee-whiz-gotta-have-that hardware anymore.
But of course, what really drives the speed market is the unbelievable crap that the a lot of so-called 'programmers' in the commercial software buisness of today deliver.
The first company has the copyright to their software. If the second company does not accept and conform to the terms in the GPL license they are engaging in copyright violations for profit. That in itself is a federal crime and the first company can just hand it over to the police and prosecutors and watch their competitors getting nice little cells and cute little fines. Then, when they're not going anywhere they can hand over the civil lawsuit for damages, of course.
Bad for what buisness? Maybe Mundie doesnt realize it, but the other 2.5 billion people working on this planet arent working in the software buisness. And in the IT industry, even there I'd guess maybe about 5 percent are working in companies whose buisness the GPL would be bad for.
And for all those people GPL software is a good thing, because it makes their software cheaper and more reliable.
So maybe Mundie should try explaining exactly why the other 6 billion people somehow affected by software should care about his desires to control any and all of their software and make them pay through the nose at every turn.
Free software is about and for USERS of software. The important thing isnt wether Microsoft can survive or not (because who cares if they whine all the way to irrelevancy), it's wether the freedom and value provided by free software can make it a Good Buisness Choice for everyone else.
IIRC, that happens mostly when the page has some fault like a failure to terminate a table. 6.0 does render pages in that case anyway.
There is a 6.01 beta available for HP-UX, but it still crashes fairly often.
Search the KDE mailing list archives, you will likely find several of the old debates.
And those who compromise and tread on dubious ground have been faced, time after time after time after time, with all their work having the rug pulled out from under them. It's not about dogma, it is about experience with the reality of the buisness world. Functionality is important, but you have to be able to trust that the functionality will remain there in a decade or a century, otherwise the appearance of functionality is just a tempting mirage.
Because C++ is an unstandardized language that gives you no end of portability problems, including, but not limited to, code only compilable on a certain compiler, version of compiler or platform. Virtually every language can do calls to C, and language bindings to C libs are common, while C++ toolkits like Qt have very few bindings.
C++ in general causes far more problems than it solves, and with the way things are going I suspect it wont get worked out for the next decade.
No, it wouldnt really be _worth_ a patent because you've obviously already thought about the idea.
The fact that you dont have the faintest clue how to go about it, or that any way you might think up would require the processing power of the entire world doesnt really prevent you from patenting the idea of 'algorithmically analyzing waveforms to determine greatest match with currently available recordings' tho. Because the USPTO would probably grant it anyway and then you can just lean back and sue when someone else does the actual work.
Well, IANAL either, and 3 minutes isnt enough to figure out a license really, but from a quick reading it seems you're right.
Looks pretty much like GPL, but with less work done on specifying problematic technical software issues like linking, and with more work gone into the disclaiming and patent parts. If you read it more carefully, you cannot change the license on binaries. You can issue a disjointed license on binaries but then it has to conform to both, and there is nothing preventing that on GPL software either (Ie, you can say "I will provide warranty for this software in the form distributed by me" in your extra license and that would be ok for both GPL and this IBM license).
Of course, the GPL deals with these issues too. So, yet another license that isnt saying anything original but which is very likely incompatible with the GPL (the license revocation clause was the first thing I thought of).
Im afraid you're in the wrong market then. Proprietary consumer productivity software is dead as a market. There you're stuck between Microsoft on one side that will implement your programs if they're useful and bundle them with windows, opensource on another side who will implement it if anyone cares about the software and will give it away for free, the problem that this type of software becomes pretty much 'finished' on the third side, and consumer reluctance to pay for each and every little component in a system.
Id advise you go into consulting, some vertical market, entertainment markets or some market that doesnt have the same dead end mechanics built into that market.
Of course, Caldera releasing their own software under a BSD license rather than the GPL license makes even less buisness sense since their competitors can then take the code, improve it and then not give Caldera the improvements back.
The only way the BSD license makes more sense than GPL for buisness reasons is if you're in the position of being the taking part, not the giving part.
I do expect Caldera to release yet another slew of licenses that arent compatible with any current ones, and making codesharing between stuff under those licenses impossible with everything else.
Please. Do. Not. Do. That.
BSD/X11, LGPL and GPL cover all the possible permutations of terms that are interesting. I have yet to see any license that diverges from the basic idea in them except in obnoxiously incompatible ways.
Well, due to the lag before the UltraSPARC III, there hasnt been any real reason for anything but real hobbyist work on Sun machines. The single or dual cpu workstation are too expensive price/performance wise to merit serious porting work for clusters, and for the highend, the scalability of Linux compared to Solaris make it worth little to make a port. Not to mention the dearth of idle 8+ cpu Suns of any current generation.
Maybe the UIII can make it interesting again.
Of course, if file formats werent arbitrarily changed all the time, supporting those older formats wouldnt _be_ a problem (or, heck, use PostScript. That worked in 89, and Im sure it works now). And if those helpdesk people werent forced to learn a new Office suite every year they woulnt have a problem with supporting the older versions.
A company that decides it wants off the upgrade treadmill can cut costs and be more competetive. There has been no significant increased value for most companies in upgrading something like Office for the last 5 years, and without any increased value there is no solid buisness reason for upgrading.
Well, actually he is restoring the cars to their rightful owners, which might make it a bit better (remember, if those people default on their loans, _you_ will get the pleasure of paying for it one way or the other).
And the systems built by a lot of the bombed dot.commers were neither beautiful nor sophisticated, nor used by very many people apparently. Paid for by money conned out of the inexperienced and gullible in a lot of cases too.
So the choice isnt exactly as clear cut as you might think.
Actually, you have to willfully infringe for _profit_ to get into really really bad trouble.
That, I think, is the main reason the we dont see more GPL infringements from large corporations. They know that most GPL authors lack the resources to bring a civil suit, but in the case of a willful infringement for profit you up the stakes so you get to go up against a federal prosecutor and face possible prison time instead.
You are right that the restriction of freedoms can be for the promotion of security, but there is often a component of promoting freedom too. For example, restricting the right to enslave someone is definitely promoting freedom for a larger part of the population.
The difficulty occurs when you watch the entire system as a whole. For the individual wanting to exercise his freedom you can say he is less free when there are restrictions on what he can do. But when what he wants to do is to remove other peoples freedoms in some way, the system as a whole will be more free when he is denied that right.
In my example where I couldnt fix code, the problem is that I dont get the source. In the most annoying current case, its the HP-UX 11 X server, which leaks memory like a sieve. In other cases there have been small BSD based utilities ported to other operating system with small but annoying bugs that sometimes render them unusable for what I need to do with them.
This I find very annoying because there is basically nothing new there. There is nothing to protect but the porting, and there is no logical reason to close the source. Yet some people seem to take the path of making it proprietary, no matter what.
Of course there is a logical flaw in this argument. The flaw being that without the ability to close the software then maybe it wouldnt have been ported at all. Maybe. But in the cases that have no logical reason for not releasing the source I think the value of having the software available and not having to do more than the porting work and releasing the source, it would get ported either way.
In any case, I think there are good reasons for the BSD license in some cases (mainly in vertical fields), altho I think that in many cases more people would be served better by moving algorithms and interesting pieces of code into libs and LGPL'ing them, in the cases where allowing proprietary use is desired, giving us the best of both worlds.
Considering that willful copyright infringement for profit is a federal crime, your friendly neighbourhood US Attorney could assist you. They are rumored to have some funds at their disposal.
Im sure he would just loooove a tape recording saying 'go ahead, sue us, see if we care', and make them care all the way to the cell.
You mean apart from the rather severe fines plus jailtime a violator would get for copyright violation for profit, which is what not complying with the GPL amounts to? That is, after all, a federal crime, not merely a civil case.
Easy. Because I run across more originally BSD/X11/etc licensed code that I cannot read/fix than GPL code that I cannot read/fix. That means my freedom is more limited than it would have been, had the code been GPL from the start.
It all depends on your point of view. If you want to exploit free software and make it proprietary you have more freedoms with the BSD license.
But if you arent in the buisness of exploiting free software, you _will_ get less freedom as the end result from code originally licensed with BSD or similar license.
Of course, in the example you gave, the law RESTRICTS the Evil (tm) Mr Gandhi Twins freedoms you know. He isnt allowed to threaten Mr Bloggs with a lead pipe. In that case, the end result of the restriction of one freedom (you cant threaten people with lead pipes) is greater freedom for all (because Mr Bloggs doesnt have to be constantly scared of getting a lead pipe bent over his head).
They should really know better too, since Mr Powell has repeatedly proved himself in need of more medication. This isnt exactly his first article.
Eh... as opposed to if I include gobs of the Windows 2000 code into a product and sell it? Im sure that would go down real fine. So, its ok for them to disallow me to use their code in any product, free or otherwise, but not ok for me to disallow them to use my code for proprietary products?
The BSD license is concerned with the freedom of proprietary software vendors, but the GPL is concerned with the freedom of every consumer of software.
The reality is that very few of those who use BSD licensed code contribute significant portions back. Further, the ultimate consumers of the proprietary offspring of BSD or other similarly licensed software get the hard end of the deal.
The X11 license is the reason I cannot fix the huge memory leaks in my HP-UX X server, but instead Im forced to restart it every two weeks (and no patch in sight) Oh, and all those proprietary X extensions really brought X forward as a standard, didnt they. The end result was a lot of programmers saying, well, nice idea but we cant USE it because we have to support 3 other platforms that dont HAVE your proprietary extension.
The BSD license is the reason I couldnt fix the 10 minute timeout in a proprietary rsh derivate (oh, and tech support said it was supposed to work that way and they aint gonna fix it no sirree).
The BSD license can be argued to be more altruistic until everyone arguing that goes blue in the face, but the result for the end user is more fragmentation, more broken proprietary software they cannot fix and more incompatiblities due to 'strategic proprietary diffrentiation'.
Ah, you should qualify that even further really.
"Open Source isnt a good thing in general if you want to make a profit from selling proprietary consumer productivity software."
However, Open Source is a great thing if you want to make a higher profit in any other buisness segment. And considering that the Microsoft is one of very very few companies making money in from that segment, that would mean that for 99.5% of worldwide industry, ranging from car manufacturers to corner grocers, Open Source (including Free, GPL software) is a very good proposition.
Oooh. Great idea. But with the experience Ive had with IBM support, I suspect it would go something like:
... ... etc.
Server detects hardware fault.
Server promptly shuts down the WORKING component and lets the faulty one chug along.
Server automatically requests hardware replacement.
Hardware replacement request is rejected until operator can type in serial code of hardware unit.
Server requests hardware replacement again.
Hardware replacement request is rejected until the automatic software update agent can send current patch info and install all the newest patches.
System is shut down for patching.
System fails to boot, getting stuck in obscure boot menu. Software recovery agent requests info about how to get out of this menu.
Request denied until system serial number can be entered.
System requires manual removal of battery backup to recover out of unknown obscure boot menu.
IBM technician removing battery blows up fiber channel card.
System boots but without mass storage online.
...
By now, system admin has gone utterly insane watching a simple broken disk take the system offline for a week.
Of course they will revise it again. Hey, even the lawyers who come up with such genious moves as forging evidence in court and just happen to write agreements where you sign over all your intellectual property to them will eventually, after many iterations, come up with something that might allow people to buy the software.
Was the requirement for a lawyer position at Microsoft that you'd pass a MCSE?
Crossfire (crossfire.real-time.com) had a networked chat interface with a 3d isometric view since um... 92 or 93 something.