Are you suffering from a lack of google?;) GNU Scientific Library is GPL: http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ [gnu.org] The page also has a link to an RMS essay about how free software developers should prevent proprietary developers from using their software in order for the GPL software developers to get a collective advantage for themselves. (BTW, it sounds to me like RMS doesn't intend for proprietary developers to wrap the GSL in IPC.)
To wrap GPL code in its own process and use it via IPC is one of the most bizarre pro-GPL arguments I have ever heard. 'You are not being creative [subversive] enough!' What??? Why not simply license the code as LGPL in the first place and let the other developers avoid this arbitrary hassle that forces a most likely inelegant design? (Really. If you don't answer that question I can't take you seriously. As it is my faith in humanity went down a notch.) In addition, people may very rightly think it is circumvention of the GPL, including the authors of the GPL code and the end-users, breeding ill-will. Hypothetical GPL authors who promote IPC wrapping of their libraries seems obnoxious to me: you can use and redistribute my code in your proprietary app but only if you jump through hoops and waste your life to the benefit of nobody. Lose-lose.
(Of course, there could be a difference of perspective here: if you live in the world of the unix command line where so many things can be done with simple command line tools, and your role in life is shell script developer, doing simple command line things, then yeah the GPL is more a common part of life. If you are an application developer, using 10+ libraries, you do not want to have to create 10 auxiliary processes to run in the background and create 10 IPC server codebases. That is totally insane. And as an application developer, when I see someone license their middleware library as GPL (out of ignorance and not a cunning strategy for a future commercial dual license), I very quickly come to the conclusion that they are either ignorant newbies, or hippie idiots who don't understand how the world works and will end up with a userbase close to zero until someone slaps some sense into them. (And I have done that successfully.))
I have a open source project that I licensed as CC0 / public domain (it is small and obscure, otherwise I may have selected BSD/MIT), and in the same breath said I welcome contributions. I also am saying "We'll appreciate what you chose to contribute and... will respect your choice for the things you chose not to contribute," but without forcing them to jump through any hoops or threaten to sue them if they don't share their modifications (or fail to create an IPC wrapper around it...LOL) and decide not to jump through those hoops.
I find that contributing back to BSD licensed open source projects is often in the end-developer's best interest anyway, as it can mean they don't have to maintain a private fork, and their changes will be regression tested and supported by the official team. (I won't even get into the nightmare of GPL and LGPL linking requirements on mobile devices and app stores. And in case you haven't noticed, the world is going mobile.)
I have been a.NET developer for about 9 years, and I am a little dumbfounded by this article as I have integrated opensource whenever I could, whether from codeplex (or github) or codeproject. Of course, if you are developing an application, you are not going to incorporate one of the few libraries that suicidally licenses itself as GPL, forcing you to do the same with your entire application -- you are going to stick to LGPL and BSD type licenses. This is not.NET specific -- any real app developer doing commercial work is faced with this reality (unless they don't want to make money, or want to be exposed to lawsuits.) Another great option for library developers is a dual GPL/commercial license, to let users try a library and work with it internally before deciding to purchase.
Sure there has been a cultural shift that maybe was in more of a full swing from 2006-2010 that has seen open source as less suspicious and fringe and more useful, but my reaction is: 2009 called and they want their story back.
There is still a lot of irrational fear about.NET out there. I used to find it irritating but now I am amused by others' ignorance as.NET continues to do well and be an enjoyable evolving technology within the scopes of the markets carved out for it on the Windows desktop, Mono, and virtually every major gaming platform via Unity3D. (Unity3D itself is not open source but it was made possible by the open source projects Mono and MonoDevelop, and I was just looking at an opensource plugin for Unity3D today.)...And this while Oracle, which doesn't even seem to hide their evilness, seems to let Java rot with security vulnerabilities and slower inclusion of language features, as I uninstall it and don't miss it or see a competing alternative to Unity3D. And I develop for iOS, where Apple's tyranny makes Microsoft look pretty soft. (And LGPL isn't compatible with Apple's app store thanks to the relinking requirement.) (Note: I develop for both iOS and soon Android using.NET.) Aside from server-side things and perhaps Android, as far as I can tell.NET is being a better Java than Java at the things I pay attention to, and all the open source plays a huge part in that. (I do wish WPF/Silverlight was better and more prevalent, but perhaps I will be inspired to make an improved cross-platform version myself someday -- but many who like WPF have liked it a lot.)
I cut the haters some slack though, as I used to hate Microsoft in 2000, and it took me a few years of full time work with.NET to get over it and realize I could enjoy the technology today and probably years to come, rather than bracing for some unlikely patent-mageddon scenario where Microsoft lawyers slice off one of Microsoft's own legs and eat it for dinner. Even if that day comes, I am prepared to adapt to another technology feeling I come out ahead. I also stopped being a cheapskate and realized money (non-free software) makes cool things happen, and paying $1000 bucks for something is often better than working 200 hours to get something lesser that I don't have time to maintain or start an OSS community around. (And some stuff would be out of the question for me to create, like Xamarin or Unity3D.) Yes, companies like Microsoft have done and will continue to do some stupid things, but if you take corporate stupidity and greed into account and take the time to understand the realm of likely outcomes, you can save yourself from drinking the FUD kool aid and looking silly. But then again, if you are happy (and making a living) in whatever technological bubble you are secluding yourself in, power to ya. I for one am happy in the bubbles of my.NET worlds, surrounded with OSS (my projects usually end up with way too many cool OSS DLLs in them), and making my dreams come true with it.
No! People are upset about Facebook's privacy! And how they sell out as much as possible and have no qualms about ending privacy -- "privacy is dead" - didn't Zuck say that? Just recently they added wall postings, and people thought they were private messages. Even though this was a bogus problem, it gets people upset.
Also, ads.
Maybe if we all shared this with our non-techie friends it would help it gain traction.
Other plugs: 1) you can crosspost to facebook and twitter (and tumblr) 2) you can use hashtags. Score! People on FB get flamed for being idiots who don't know how to use twitter. This way they can win.
I've been using a VPS for $3/month from 123systems.net. I haven't done much with it yet, and I don't know how consistent it is, but so far I have no complaints. buyvm.net was another I was looking at that I believe has an even cheaper option ($15/yr!). Like someone else said, check out http://www.lowendbox.com/ to become informed about the options. Of course, you get only a pittance of ram/cpu for these bargain basement prices (and often limited availability -- buyvm sounds like a bit of a lottery), but it is still nice to have full control over a linux system that I can pack it up and deploy it to another linux server with more resources/consistency if/when I need to, while playing around with it for cheap now. It's also nice to have a far away offsite backup in case my city gets EMP'ed / destroyed by aliens / etc.
Also, like someone else mentioned, I have run ssh/www for about 15 years on my home ISP since whenever I got broadband with no complaints from my ISP.
I am pretty ticked off about it. My 7 year old 17" Dell laptop that still works (used for 5 years) but I no longer use daily has 1920x1200. For now when mobile I make do with 1366x768 with 7pt Verdana font and fullscreen mode and low expectations in Visual Studio and a nice and tiny 11" Macbook Air and 13" Acer.
My primary desktop is 2 1920x1200 monitors in portrait mode and I love being able to see a lot of code at once. The vertical (horizontal in portrait) viewing angle on Samsung 2443BW is atrocious but I get them just right and make do and they were dirt cheap at the time I bought them so I can't complain too much.
I'm hoping this iPad 3 thing and Apple's 27" monitor indulgences will spark a new resolution war. As in: a ~2000x1500 11" laptop please, and ~2400x1700 17-19" desktop monitors so I can put several of them together and take over the world.
I blame blu-ray and HD TVs for contributing to the marketing hype over 'short-screen' monitors.
Somehow I never knew that. A design infringement makes a lot more sense. (Unless of course, Samsung now has to release a triangular tablet with sharp corners.) I'm pulling for Samsung here.
In their greed for controlling of the entire PC ecosystem, Apple and MS will eventually end up pissing off most computer users... at least most power-users..
We need someone to sneak into Ballmer's room while he's sleeping and play a recording with subliminal message: "USERS USERS USERS. USERS USERS USERS! YES!"
(Or maybe some would argue he already got this message and that's why they're doing this. Maybe replace it that with power users, or else they may jump to Linux like the parent says. (Might Google take Android to the desktop and open it up for power users? Or are they too engrossed in the web to believe in the future of the desktop?))
As a reasonably happy (cross platform and OSS).NET developer for 7 years now (and Linux fanboy before that, so maybe that's saying something) it has been a relatively long time since Microsoft ticked me off. The walled garden thing is a big reason why I can't stand Apple, and it is invading the Windows desktop? I've got the heebie jeebies. But if Microsoft thinks they have a green thumb that will make a for a pretty little ecosystem like Apple (and hopefully not as annoying), I can see how they think it may help their image in software quality and ease of use and wish them the best in providing Apple with competition in the tablet and phone (and maybe eventually desktop app store) spaces, while hoping for a trivial way to break the walls of the walled garden for even the least of the power users.
The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
I think it might be nice for us Canadians since the levies are not too high, but still a horrible compromise. Conceding that everyone who buys MP3 player or blank media is a sort of criminal by putting a levy on the player is a horrible idea to me. It gives everyone in the country a license to be a legitimate pirate, because they're paying the penalty whether they like it or not. What kind of logic is "don't do this, it's bad, but even if you don't, we're taking your money anyway"? I've heard Indy producers get hurt by the blank media tax (not sure how much that is true). And where does the money go? In communistic fashion it gets redistributed in some horribly inefficient and inaccurate way to people who some government agency thinks deserves it, and it is a breakdown of the free market.
As for music (and movies), I think part of the answer is to make stores more convenient. The first music store I bought a lot from was allofmp3, but I don't think it was legit. It was awesome, had a very large library, letting me download previews and buy in any format I wanted. I wouldn't have minded paying more to a legit store. I currently subscribe to emusic and they give super short music samples, which is idiotic and I plan to unsubscribe when I finish getting what I want from there. (I can't speak for iPod/iTunes because I hate all the Apple DRM and proprietary lock-in.) A lot of people care about convenience more than freeness, and a lot of people also want to contribute back to the artists they love who they think does deserve something. Perhaps a radical idea is that it would be great to have more of a culture of honour and tipping. Magnatune.com lets the customer decide how much to tip, and most of their customers do, knowing 50% goes directly to artists. I also think Beatport.com has a great interface overall.
I think our government should take an anti-draconian stand in the world and against the US lobbies, and committing (in legislation) to never sell the souls of consumers to content companies. This legal and technical arms race in **AA is a cancer in the world and needs to be stopped. The forced obsolecence of the HD analog mentioned recently on/. makes me mad. Soon they will want to plug the analog hole by injecting devices into our eyeballs do degrade our viewing experience to standard def unless we pay extra money for the full experience, and throw everyone who takes the device out in jail.
As a Canadian, I would like to make it very, very clear that the rest of Canada, especially here in BC, have absolutely no patience, concern, or otherwise good will towards anyone who would consider them "Quebecois".
-The Canadians
Hey...! Speak for yourself. As an Albertan, I think Quebecois are important part of our country and that we all need to grow up and learn to get along, even if it means we westerners and other english canadians have to grow up first.
Sure the federal politics and apparent provincial idiocy regarding language protection have been very annoying for a very long time, but I believe in our nation of Canada, and I do not want to throw my fellow Canadians under the bus (even if some of them would throw me as an Albertan under the bus -- although it seems people from other eastern provinces do it too.)
Relations between french and english Canada seems to have always been difficult, but I don't think it is impossible. Hating each other and saying we wish Quebec would separate is not going to help. We don't need a big hole of alienated or separated people in the middle of our country.
We are supposed to take pride in our identity as one that celebrates diversity, contrasted to the melting pot to the south. For one, it is nice to have people from Quebec here who enjoy culture and life in a way that we who are more conservative Albertans can appreciate.
Maybe you are just trying to be funny, and let the world know that we non-Quebec canadians have quite a few differences with Quebec countrymen, but I have been concerned lately about the reckless hatred that seems to be growing among us.
We are supposed to have an identity as a peace-keeping nation. We have so much peace in Canada to be thankful for. Let's not throw that away.
Seems like overreacting to me too. The grandparent was pointing out the bizarre logic of how a francophone government trying to promote the french language in a francophone province (so as to not be overwhelmed by an english-dominated continent) had the reverse effect of forcing someone to learn english and to gain academic credentials in english.
I'm not usually one to say, "no big deal, this has been done before" but seriously... this time it really is no big deal, its been done before. Hell, lots of API's for this sort of stuff even already exist, some of them even come with OSes.
Can you name some examples?
(The rest is more my thoughts than a reply to anyone in particular...)
I have been experimenting how to do this in a generic way with db4o in C# (an object database for Java/.NET), and putting my own notification on top of the objects as well as the database events to enable (as an option) immediate persistance of object changes the way you mention you do with config files. I still had to do work to do this, though -- it's 2009, and this has probably been done in feeble and fantastic ways 100's or 1000's of times, if not more, and where is the reusable wisdom gained? I get upset with the naysayer crowds who want to stick with tried and true methods of doing everything manually over and over, just because they've gotten comfortable with it and don't want to learn or think about anything new.
People mention Squeak/scheme/smalltalk, and I have marveled at how cool it is and wished I could delve into it, but seriously, is it a practial platform ready for mainstream? Being a mainly.NET guy now (apologies to the Java/C++ world), I just googled a.NET bridge but it was talking ActiveX garbage which I don't want to touch, and then another bridge link that looked broken. (I just found Bigloo.net, which looks interesting, although experimental.) (And I don't have any ancient IBM machines from the 80s and their obscure OS, the names of which I have already forgotten, to do this either.)
I did set up and do a bit of coding for Zope (Plone) on Python, and loved some of the advantages of the object database system there (even though it was still hierarchical), for finer-grained objects where it would be annoying to create files everywhere.
Sure, big monolithic files have their place, like OpenOffice documents, but nobody's putting a gun to your head to tell you that you must chop that OOo doc up into 1000 tiny objects... that would be insanity, and to assume someone else is insane just shows close-mindedness and a lack of imagination. (Quote from the FAQ: "And objects can be huge. No limit.")
In general, I like to see common design patterns like this moved lower and pushed as a standard, either into the language or widely-used libraries. I'm glad C# made events and properties first class entities. I'm glad the SOA bandwagon camped around the observer pattern and basically built a sub-industry that pushed standard ways to do MOM and topic based routers with JMS AMQP etc. What do we have for objects that should be persisted? How are we going to make the semantic web with interesting bits of information if nobody bothers to notice that the barrier to entry to bridging semantic web to monolithic file structures is too high?
I think a good programming framework (probably cross-language... I know there are some ODBMSs out there like Objectivity that are more multiplatform than db4o's Java/.NET) would be great, and while I am not the type to venture out and create an entire OS around this concept, it will be interesting to see if someone can create a sound foundation with a suite of desktop-domain apps that establish that there are some useful low-level mechanisms that may be reasonable foundations for (a chunk of) general development. I think all this may have been tried before with WinFS, and quite a few interesting things came of that (hierarchical db structure, big files in the RDBMS, a generalized extensible sync framework). Hopefully this Russian guy knows what he's doing and will do something interesting with this, and maybe take a standardized workable environment further than MS did (or go more mainstream than Squeak / Zope, etc).
Anyway, while I may share some of the skepticism of the scoffers commenting about the near-term viability of
I should start by saying I've always been a MS skeptic technically and thought their business practices abhorrent.
But right about now, I am starting to wonder if the amoral forces of capitalism are leading us to the verge of good things for all platforms materializing, and a win-win for the consumer (and in this case, developers developers dev *ahem*.) Since the mid-90's, Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons and has put a lot of cool ideas into practice with.NET in a way that is simple and fun to use as a developer.
Sure, Microsoft is always trying to set itself up for greater success, but this doesn't always have to come at the expense of everyone else. (At least, I hope they are primarily greedy rather than predatorial...although that is still a rather dismal hope.) MS seems to have got enough ducks in a row to be moving ahead so quickly and strongly that no other dev platform developers can keep up, especially the open source community. It seems that.NET is gaining the momentum to be the multi-platform desktop client (and now maybe rich web) that we always hoped Java would be. Even if the open source world is a few years behind on things like WPF/WCF, it still seems like an asset to have the multi-language.NET environment and GTK# / Windows Forms across Win/Linux/OSX, as well as standardization in the language.
The only nasty thing I see MS doing is trying to extract $$ from the open-source world based on patents/IP on the cross-platform stuff. MS has been burned on patents themselves, and with the growing mainstream angst against patents, the optimist in me perhaps naively hopes that the recent FUD cross-licensing tactics is as far as they will go, or will be able to go.
That aside, MS can't make us do anything we don't want to do. If Silverlight 2.0 is full of Windows-only stuff, web developers don't have to adopt it (they would be idiots to, if it meant reaching significantly less users), and continue to use SL 1.0 with SL 1.0 toolset. Perhaps.NET and SL 1.0 will even be a source of inspiration to the open source community to innovate forks?
My point is that sure, MS will likely have the best tools, and will be doing as much fancy stuff to bolster Windows as they can, but once.NET gets replicated in the open source world, we hopefully get to keep it for good, and get rid of issues like vendor lock-in and obsolesence (VB6 comes to mind). (Just beware the trojan horse of MS patents! If we all adopt.NET and build a thriving open-source cross-platform community around it and then MS successfully claims patent rights, goodbye world of free open-source! (.NET based OSS anyway))
I used to be a Linux freak, and went without Windows for about 4 years, and still have linux on my primary desktop, but I don't really mind anymore having Windows around in order to use MS's slick IDE, and maybe some of their MS Expression tools. I think the cross-platform-ness of the clients is much more important. Honestly, my hope right now is that Silverlight becomes as commonly deployed as Flash as quickly as possible, because I hate the idea of learning Flash-only languages and libraries and rewriting data structures and things in multiple languages in different environments (I am not a web developer and have yet to get into Flash, but after doing.NET at work for a few years, SL is looking mighty attractive assuming the users get it installed.)
> Buying a used game for $20 is better than buying it new for $50 only to discover that it sucks.
On the other hand, you're probably paying $20 for a game someone else bought new and then decided it sucks.
If you want to buy stuff you like, I think that's what reviews and demos are for. Whether you pay $50 or $20 for stuff you like I think depends on whether you want to pay the premium for being an early adopter. Sometimes, the most exciting part of a game's lifecycle (for multiplayer community games) can be in the beta to 'just after release' time periods, as everyone is fresh and strategies and tactics and skills are just being formed and the gameplay is still taking form as the game's players and rules are still working themselves out. Personally, I think it is more fun to creatively discover new strats than to read them in the definitive manual, or have some cheap tactic used and abused against me countless times until I stoop to their level, and getting an early jump in the game is justification enough for me to spend more on a game I will like.
"Since I no longer burn songs to audio CDs, but rather put them on iPods, I (and everyone I know in that "second group") have once again started purchasing music CDs in stores."
Why? There are thousands of IT professionals and other people making weekly backups of their data in case their hard drives crash, and the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom (and who we the infinitely wise citizens elect) have figured out the grand central plan that somehow, CD-R revenues will balance out, and justify copying of music without restraint.
Whether you happen to use CD-R's or not is irrelevant: somebody does, and the government has it all worked out for us.
I have been in your "second group" who believes artists should get compensated. I buy my music from allofmp3.com, because I get to pick my encoding type and quality (ogg), they have a pretty big and easy to access collection (I don't like the ghettos of Kazaa) and the price is great...it could probably double to $0.04/MB without me flinching. If I want it, I buy it. And I tend to pay a lot more money this way than I used to when buying $20 CDs that I can't even preview from the mall.
For all I know, that money I send to the motherland is going to the Russian mafia or to support the Chechyn rebellion, but I know I personally am still supporting "the artists" because I buy CD-Rs to back up my important files every month. (And I have the utmost confidence that the Canadian government knows about all the artists I like, even though none of them are on the radio, and the last I heard, that's what they go by. So I guess my money goes to Britney and the Chechyns. Nice.)
Talking about this makes me mad and confused. Somebody, please get elected Prime Minister and fix this madness. I'd vote for you, but it doesn't matter because I don't live in Ontario.
Our massive socialized health system seems to be too expensive, but for the most part it seems like a good idea, while it has worked. This, on the other hand, is blatent central planning that's antithetical to a free market and doomed to make a mess of any healthy music industry. Unfortunately, I think that there are much bigger messes in our country besides health and this levy/copyright law that need to be cleaned up.
Keep the core of MythTV free, and have a deluxe edition for $30/year that provides bonuses like themes, the extra modules (weather, news, web, games), etc. $30/year would generate a lot of money for the Myth devs, and I'd certainly go for it, even if I didn't really need the deluxe edition. I wouldn't like to have $60/year sucked out of me for listings, but I would pay $2/month and $30/year for a spiffed up edition of Myth.
This way, Myth would have my goodwill, rather than being another business entity that tries to get away with leeching more than it's worth (RIAA and Microsoft come to mind). If enough people feel like I do, and won't put up with having $60/year sucked out of them for something basic, but would gladly pay $60 every 2 years (a fairly standard if not high price for a typical software package, IMO) for a top-of-the-line PVR suite, then they might make a lot more money and grow (rather than shrink) in popularity, by taking the general approach of my example suggestion.
I'm not throwing stones, just concerned about them getting a suboptimal price, for themselves and their customers. It seems like premium/charity pricing to me.
I think this world very much needs more successful open source companies and hope they find good ways to get money, so that they can 1) eat from their efforts, 2) make great open source software, instead of average hobby software, and 3) have muscle to lobby and litigate for sanity in things like software patents.
I can think of a couple that I was impressed by and I'm sure there are others: JBoss.org, Torus Knot Software (the Ogre3D dev's consulting company). Both of these offer free software, and offer consulting services. TV Listings seem to me to be close to a core functionality of the software, and think it would hurt the userbase to charge a lot for it, so I would hope they could find something more useful to sell as a premium/charity service, like a BitTorrent server network to exchange TV shows. I'm sure the TV distribution people would hate that, but it's an idea.
Instead of taking sides of holier-than-thou vs. cheapskates, let's be pragmatic. While it's noble and idealistic to give loads of cash to poor open source developers who have no lives because they're busy making awesome software for us, I don't think charity or charity pricing will work in the long run. TV Listings might be worth $2/month, so if they're going to charge, they should charge that, and not complain when a lot of people opt for listings that are free + filling out a survey every once in a while. That's capitalism. And to monoplize the service by hard-coding Myth, well that would be evil by my standards (I'm not sure the typical American business standards would agree. 'All's fair in love, war, and business.')
We've seen how much of a distorted reality the MPAA and RIAA live in when a disruptive technology disrupts their business model -- the last thing the open source world needs is its own reality-distortion people. The only strategy that works in the long run is to find a good, honest business model, period. Asking for donations or charging charity prices for tv listings can be a possible business option if there is enough goodwill, (and premium prices if there are enough rich geeks who spend time setting up Linux PVRs when they could buy a TiVo -- don't think there are many of these people).
I'm just saying whoever is running the business should know what they're doing (value pricing, charity pricing, premium pricing) and not cry when the public doesn't bite for something that doesn't provide the value they're looking for, or when open source developers don't rank as high on the public's charity priorities as they had hoped. (Example: in the time it took me to write this, about 30 people were infected with AIDS, and 18 died from it.)
$60/year sounds too high to me too, especially compared to Yahoo's music service. What do they need all that money for? Is it really worth just as much as what Yahoo offers?
Maybe I'm missing something and one can have a really exciting time reading more in depth or whatever TV listings, but the lowly Zap2It seems fine to me. Improving Zap2It's service might be worth something like $2/month, if desired, but I've never noticed any problems with it doing my Canadian listings.
OTOH, improving MythTV itself might be worth a lot more. It is important software and if all the money really went back into Myth development then I might go for it. Subscribing to software will take time for people to get used to, including me, but in some cases, it might be the only thing that really makes sense for continuously developed and used software. For this purpose, I think $30/year is more reasonable -- that's $60 over 2 years, as opposed to $120 for 2 years, or $180 for 3 years, which might be the rough average lifetime for a non-subscription piece of software. I wonder what the reaction of people would be if you couldn't use MythTV anymore (or it was crippled with no listings or whatever) because it all of a sudden cost $180, but you got free upgrades until version 2 came out (or version 1 as the case may be), which worked out to about 3 years? I think people wouldn't like it, yet this is what $5/month would amount to for long-term users.
Sure $5 isn't much, but when everyone starts asking for it every month, it adds up. As a linux punk who legally pays for almost nothing on my computer, I am maybe more conscious about the money I throw mindlessly at software -- $180/3years would be more than I pay for Microsoft OS's (and I've been fortunate to avoid having to upgrade to WinXP yet,) and to me, they seem to have too many billions of extra dollars. Supporting open source with cash is great, but there's no reason why some trust can't be earned first at a lower price point....just my thoughts.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suffering from a lack of google? ;) GNU Scientific Library is GPL: http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ [gnu.org]
The page also has a link to an RMS essay about how free software developers should prevent proprietary developers from using their software in order for the GPL software developers to get a collective advantage for themselves. (BTW, it sounds to me like RMS doesn't intend for proprietary developers to wrap the GSL in IPC.)
To wrap GPL code in its own process and use it via IPC is one of the most bizarre pro-GPL arguments I have ever heard. 'You are not being creative [subversive] enough!' What??? Why not simply license the code as LGPL in the first place and let the other developers avoid this arbitrary hassle that forces a most likely inelegant design? (Really. If you don't answer that question I can't take you seriously. As it is my faith in humanity went down a notch.) In addition, people may very rightly think it is circumvention of the GPL, including the authors of the GPL code and the end-users, breeding ill-will. Hypothetical GPL authors who promote IPC wrapping of their libraries seems obnoxious to me: you can use and redistribute my code in your proprietary app but only if you jump through hoops and waste your life to the benefit of nobody. Lose-lose.
(Of course, there could be a difference of perspective here: if you live in the world of the unix command line where so many things can be done with simple command line tools, and your role in life is shell script developer, doing simple command line things, then yeah the GPL is more a common part of life. If you are an application developer, using 10+ libraries, you do not want to have to create 10 auxiliary processes to run in the background and create 10 IPC server codebases. That is totally insane. And as an application developer, when I see someone license their middleware library as GPL (out of ignorance and not a cunning strategy for a future commercial dual license), I very quickly come to the conclusion that they are either ignorant newbies, or hippie idiots who don't understand how the world works and will end up with a userbase close to zero until someone slaps some sense into them. (And I have done that successfully.))
I have a open source project that I licensed as CC0 / public domain (it is small and obscure, otherwise I may have selected BSD/MIT), and in the same breath said I welcome contributions. I also am saying "We'll appreciate what you chose to contribute and ... will respect your choice for the things you chose not to contribute," but without forcing them to jump through any hoops or threaten to sue them if they don't share their modifications (or fail to create an IPC wrapper around it...LOL) and decide not to jump through those hoops.
I find that contributing back to BSD licensed open source projects is often in the end-developer's best interest anyway, as it can mean they don't have to maintain a private fork, and their changes will be regression tested and supported by the official team. (I won't even get into the nightmare of GPL and LGPL linking requirements on mobile devices and app stores. And in case you haven't noticed, the world is going mobile.)
There is sensationalistic journalism, and then there is blatantly misleading journalism. This is the latter.
Assuming /. wants to be taken seriously, someone's wrist should be slapped for this and/or the headline updated.
I have been a .NET developer for about 9 years, and I am a little dumbfounded by this article as I have integrated opensource whenever I could, whether from codeplex (or github) or codeproject. Of course, if you are developing an application, you are not going to incorporate one of the few libraries that suicidally licenses itself as GPL, forcing you to do the same with your entire application -- you are going to stick to LGPL and BSD type licenses. This is not .NET specific -- any real app developer doing commercial work is faced with this reality (unless they don't want to make money, or want to be exposed to lawsuits.) Another great option for library developers is a dual GPL/commercial license, to let users try a library and work with it internally before deciding to purchase.
Sure there has been a cultural shift that maybe was in more of a full swing from 2006-2010 that has seen open source as less suspicious and fringe and more useful, but my reaction is: 2009 called and they want their story back.
There is still a lot of irrational fear about .NET out there. I used to find it irritating but now I am amused by others' ignorance as .NET continues to do well and be an enjoyable evolving technology within the scopes of the markets carved out for it on the Windows desktop, Mono, and virtually every major gaming platform via Unity3D. (Unity3D itself is not open source but it was made possible by the open source projects Mono and MonoDevelop, and I was just looking at an opensource plugin for Unity3D today.) ...And this while Oracle, which doesn't even seem to hide their evilness, seems to let Java rot with security vulnerabilities and slower inclusion of language features, as I uninstall it and don't miss it or see a competing alternative to Unity3D. And I develop for iOS, where Apple's tyranny makes Microsoft look pretty soft. (And LGPL isn't compatible with Apple's app store thanks to the relinking requirement.) (Note: I develop for both iOS and soon Android using .NET.) Aside from server-side things and perhaps Android, as far as I can tell .NET is being a better Java than Java at the things I pay attention to, and all the open source plays a huge part in that. (I do wish WPF/Silverlight was better and more prevalent, but perhaps I will be inspired to make an improved cross-platform version myself someday -- but many who like WPF have liked it a lot.)
I cut the haters some slack though, as I used to hate Microsoft in 2000, and it took me a few years of full time work with .NET to get over it and realize I could enjoy the technology today and probably years to come, rather than bracing for some unlikely patent-mageddon scenario where Microsoft lawyers slice off one of Microsoft's own legs and eat it for dinner. Even if that day comes, I am prepared to adapt to another technology feeling I come out ahead. I also stopped being a cheapskate and realized money (non-free software) makes cool things happen, and paying $1000 bucks for something is often better than working 200 hours to get something lesser that I don't have time to maintain or start an OSS community around. (And some stuff would be out of the question for me to create, like Xamarin or Unity3D.) Yes, companies like Microsoft have done and will continue to do some stupid things, but if you take corporate stupidity and greed into account and take the time to understand the realm of likely outcomes, you can save yourself from drinking the FUD kool aid and looking silly. But then again, if you are happy (and making a living) in whatever technological bubble you are secluding yourself in, power to ya. I for one am happy in the bubbles of my .NET worlds, surrounded with OSS (my projects usually end up with way too many cool OSS DLLs in them), and making my dreams come true with it.
No! People are upset about Facebook's privacy! And how they sell out as much as possible and have no qualms about ending privacy -- "privacy is dead" - didn't Zuck say that? Just recently they added wall postings, and people thought they were private messages. Even though this was a bogus problem, it gets people upset.
Also, ads.
Maybe if we all shared this with our non-techie friends it would help it gain traction.
Other plugs:
1) you can crosspost to facebook and twitter (and tumblr)
2) you can use hashtags. Score! People on FB get flamed for being idiots who don't know how to use twitter. This way they can win.
I've been a user for about 14 minutes now.
The fishies will be swimming stupidly faster with more energy!
I've been using a VPS for $3/month from 123systems.net. I haven't done much with it yet, and I don't know how consistent it is, but so far I have no complaints. buyvm.net was another I was looking at that I believe has an even cheaper option ($15/yr!). Like someone else said, check out http://www.lowendbox.com/ to become informed about the options. Of course, you get only a pittance of ram/cpu for these bargain basement prices (and often limited availability -- buyvm sounds like a bit of a lottery), but it is still nice to have full control over a linux system that I can pack it up and deploy it to another linux server with more resources/consistency if/when I need to, while playing around with it for cheap now. It's also nice to have a far away offsite backup in case my city gets EMP'ed / destroyed by aliens / etc.
Also, like someone else mentioned, I have run ssh/www for about 15 years on my home ISP since whenever I got broadband with no complaints from my ISP.
I am pretty ticked off about it. My 7 year old 17" Dell laptop that still works (used for 5 years) but I no longer use daily has 1920x1200. For now when mobile I make do with 1366x768 with 7pt Verdana font and fullscreen mode and low expectations in Visual Studio and a nice and tiny 11" Macbook Air and 13" Acer.
My primary desktop is 2 1920x1200 monitors in portrait mode and I love being able to see a lot of code at once. The vertical (horizontal in portrait) viewing angle on Samsung 2443BW is atrocious but I get them just right and make do and they were dirt cheap at the time I bought them so I can't complain too much.
I'm hoping this iPad 3 thing and Apple's 27" monitor indulgences will spark a new resolution war. As in: a ~2000x1500 11" laptop please, and ~2400x1700 17-19" desktop monitors so I can put several of them together and take over the world.
I blame blu-ray and HD TVs for contributing to the marketing hype over 'short-screen' monitors.
Somehow I never knew that. A design infringement makes a lot more sense. (Unless of course, Samsung now has to release a triangular tablet with sharp corners.) I'm pulling for Samsung here.
In their greed for controlling of the entire PC ecosystem, Apple and MS will eventually end up pissing off most computer users... at least most power-users..
We need someone to sneak into Ballmer's room while he's sleeping and play a recording with subliminal message: "USERS USERS USERS. USERS USERS USERS! YES!"
(Or maybe some would argue he already got this message and that's why they're doing this. Maybe replace it that with power users, or else they may jump to Linux like the parent says. (Might Google take Android to the desktop and open it up for power users? Or are they too engrossed in the web to believe in the future of the desktop?))
As a reasonably happy (cross platform and OSS) .NET developer for 7 years now (and Linux fanboy before that, so maybe that's saying something) it has been a relatively long time since Microsoft ticked me off. The walled garden thing is a big reason why I can't stand Apple, and it is invading the Windows desktop? I've got the heebie jeebies. But if Microsoft thinks they have a green thumb that will make a for a pretty little ecosystem like Apple (and hopefully not as annoying), I can see how they think it may help their image in software quality and ease of use and wish them the best in providing Apple with competition in the tablet and phone (and maybe eventually desktop app store) spaces, while hoping for a trivial way to break the walls of the walled garden for even the least of the power users.
Or to sum up, Metro is "boxy but good"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ArDB7AJAI
Wait and see what Microsoft's lawyers do to you if you try to use it for commercial product development.
Do you know what you're talking about? A quick google makes it looks like their lawyers should be fine with it:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/Vsexpressinstall/thread/7390B2FE-54CA-4A5A-BE4F-EC044BE9545D
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/3030a179-f7be-4f40-84ff-debd6d290b2c
The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
I think it might be nice for us Canadians since the levies are not too high, but still a horrible compromise.
Conceding that everyone who buys MP3 player or blank media is a sort of criminal by putting a levy on the player is a horrible idea to me. It gives everyone in the country a license to be a legitimate pirate, because they're paying the penalty whether they like it or not. What kind of logic is "don't do this, it's bad, but even if you don't, we're taking your money anyway"? I've heard Indy producers get hurt by the blank media tax (not sure how much that is true). And where does the money go? In communistic fashion it gets redistributed in some horribly inefficient and inaccurate way to people who some government agency thinks deserves it, and it is a breakdown of the free market.
As for music (and movies), I think part of the answer is to make stores more convenient. The first music store I bought a lot from was allofmp3, but I don't think it was legit. It was awesome, had a very large library, letting me download previews and buy in any format I wanted. I wouldn't have minded paying more to a legit store. I currently subscribe to emusic and they give super short music samples, which is idiotic and I plan to unsubscribe when I finish getting what I want from there. (I can't speak for iPod/iTunes because I hate all the Apple DRM and proprietary lock-in.) A lot of people care about convenience more than freeness, and a lot of people also want to contribute back to the artists they love who they think does deserve something. Perhaps a radical idea is that it would be great to have more of a culture of honour and tipping. Magnatune.com lets the customer decide how much to tip, and most of their customers do, knowing 50% goes directly to artists. I also think Beatport.com has a great interface overall.
I think our government should take an anti-draconian stand in the world and against the US lobbies, and committing (in legislation) to never sell the souls of consumers to content companies. This legal and technical arms race in **AA is a cancer in the world and needs to be stopped. The forced obsolecence of the HD analog mentioned recently on /. makes me mad. Soon they will want to plug the analog hole by injecting devices into our eyeballs do degrade our viewing experience to standard def unless we pay extra money for the full experience, and throw everyone who takes the device out in jail.
As a Canadian, I would like to make it very, very clear that the rest of Canada, especially here in BC, have absolutely no patience, concern, or otherwise good will towards anyone who would consider them "Quebecois".
-The Canadians
Hey...! Speak for yourself. As an Albertan, I think Quebecois are important part of our country and that we all need to grow up and learn to get along, even if it means we westerners and other english canadians have to grow up first.
Sure the federal politics and apparent provincial idiocy regarding language protection have been very annoying for a very long time, but I believe in our nation of Canada, and I do not want to throw my fellow Canadians under the bus (even if some of them would throw me as an Albertan under the bus -- although it seems people from other eastern provinces do it too.)
Relations between french and english Canada seems to have always been difficult, but I don't think it is impossible. Hating each other and saying we wish Quebec would separate is not going to help. We don't need a big hole of alienated or separated people in the middle of our country.
We are supposed to take pride in our identity as one that celebrates diversity, contrasted to the melting pot to the south. For one, it is nice to have people from Quebec here who enjoy culture and life in a way that we who are more conservative Albertans can appreciate.
Maybe you are just trying to be funny, and let the world know that we non-Quebec canadians have quite a few differences with Quebec countrymen, but I have been concerned lately about the reckless hatred that seems to be growing among us.
We are supposed to have an identity as a peace-keeping nation. We have so much peace in Canada to be thankful for. Let's not throw that away.
Seems like overreacting to me too. The grandparent was pointing out the bizarre logic of how a francophone government trying to promote the french language in a francophone province (so as to not be overwhelmed by an english-dominated continent) had the reverse effect of forcing someone to learn english and to gain academic credentials in english.
I'm not usually one to say, "no big deal, this has been done before" but seriously... this time it really is no big deal, its been done before. Hell, lots of API's for this sort of stuff even already exist, some of them even come with OSes.
Can you name some examples?
(The rest is more my thoughts than a reply to anyone in particular...)
I have been experimenting how to do this in a generic way with db4o in C# (an object database for Java/.NET), and putting my own notification on top of the objects as well as the database events to enable (as an option) immediate persistance of object changes the way you mention you do with config files. I still had to do work to do this, though -- it's 2009, and this has probably been done in feeble and fantastic ways 100's or 1000's of times, if not more, and where is the reusable wisdom gained? I get upset with the naysayer crowds who want to stick with tried and true methods of doing everything manually over and over, just because they've gotten comfortable with it and don't want to learn or think about anything new.
People mention Squeak/scheme/smalltalk, and I have marveled at how cool it is and wished I could delve into it, but seriously, is it a practial platform ready for mainstream? Being a mainly .NET guy now (apologies to the Java/C++ world), I just googled a .NET bridge but it was talking ActiveX garbage which I don't want to touch, and then another bridge link that looked broken. (I just found Bigloo.net, which looks interesting, although experimental.) (And I don't have any ancient IBM machines from the 80s and their obscure OS, the names of which I have already forgotten, to do this either.)
I did set up and do a bit of coding for Zope (Plone) on Python, and loved some of the advantages of the object database system there (even though it was still hierarchical), for finer-grained objects where it would be annoying to create files everywhere.
Sure, big monolithic files have their place, like OpenOffice documents, but nobody's putting a gun to your head to tell you that you must chop that OOo doc up into 1000 tiny objects... that would be insanity, and to assume someone else is insane just shows close-mindedness and a lack of imagination. (Quote from the FAQ: "And objects can be huge. No limit.")
In general, I like to see common design patterns like this moved lower and pushed as a standard, either into the language or widely-used libraries. I'm glad C# made events and properties first class entities. I'm glad the SOA bandwagon camped around the observer pattern and basically built a sub-industry that pushed standard ways to do MOM and topic based routers with JMS AMQP etc. What do we have for objects that should be persisted? How are we going to make the semantic web with interesting bits of information if nobody bothers to notice that the barrier to entry to bridging semantic web to monolithic file structures is too high?
I think a good programming framework (probably cross-language... I know there are some ODBMSs out there like Objectivity that are more multiplatform than db4o's Java/.NET) would be great, and while I am not the type to venture out and create an entire OS around this concept, it will be interesting to see if someone can create a sound foundation with a suite of desktop-domain apps that establish that there are some useful low-level mechanisms that may be reasonable foundations for (a chunk of) general development. I think all this may have been tried before with WinFS, and quite a few interesting things came of that (hierarchical db structure, big files in the RDBMS, a generalized extensible sync framework). Hopefully this Russian guy knows what he's doing and will do something interesting with this, and maybe take a standardized workable environment further than MS did (or go more mainstream than Squeak / Zope, etc).
Anyway, while I may share some of the skepticism of the scoffers commenting about the near-term viability of
I should start by saying I've always been a MS skeptic technically and thought their business practices abhorrent.
.NET in a way that is simple and fun to use as a developer.
...although that is still a rather dismal hope.) MS seems to have got enough ducks in a row to be moving ahead so quickly and strongly that no other dev platform developers can keep up, especially the open source community. It seems that .NET is gaining the momentum to be the multi-platform desktop client (and now maybe rich web) that we always hoped Java would be. Even if the open source world is a few years behind on things like WPF/WCF, it still seems like an asset to have the multi-language .NET environment and GTK# / Windows Forms across Win/Linux/OSX, as well as standardization in the language.
.NET and SL 1.0 will even be a source of inspiration to the open source community to innovate forks?
.NET gets replicated in the open source world, we hopefully get to keep it for good, and get rid of issues like vendor lock-in and obsolesence (VB6 comes to mind). (Just beware the trojan horse of MS patents! If we all adopt .NET and build a thriving open-source cross-platform community around it and then MS successfully claims patent rights, goodbye world of free open-source! (.NET based OSS anyway))
.NET at work for a few years, SL is looking mighty attractive assuming the users get it installed.)
But right about now, I am starting to wonder if the amoral forces of capitalism are leading us to the verge of good things for all platforms materializing, and a win-win for the consumer (and in this case, developers developers dev *ahem*.) Since the mid-90's, Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons and has put a lot of cool ideas into practice with
Sure, Microsoft is always trying to set itself up for greater success, but this doesn't always have to come at the expense of everyone else. (At least, I hope they are primarily greedy rather than predatorial
The only nasty thing I see MS doing is trying to extract $$ from the open-source world based on patents/IP on the cross-platform stuff. MS has been burned on patents themselves, and with the growing mainstream angst against patents, the optimist in me perhaps naively hopes that the recent FUD cross-licensing tactics is as far as they will go, or will be able to go.
That aside, MS can't make us do anything we don't want to do. If Silverlight 2.0 is full of Windows-only stuff, web developers don't have to adopt it (they would be idiots to, if it meant reaching significantly less users), and continue to use SL 1.0 with SL 1.0 toolset. Perhaps
My point is that sure, MS will likely have the best tools, and will be doing as much fancy stuff to bolster Windows as they can, but once
I used to be a Linux freak, and went without Windows for about 4 years, and still have linux on my primary desktop, but I don't really mind anymore having Windows around in order to use MS's slick IDE, and maybe some of their MS Expression tools. I think the cross-platform-ness of the clients is much more important. Honestly, my hope right now is that Silverlight becomes as commonly deployed as Flash as quickly as possible, because I hate the idea of learning Flash-only languages and libraries and rewriting data structures and things in multiple languages in different environments (I am not a web developer and have yet to get into Flash, but after doing
Thoughts?
> Buying a used game for $20 is better than buying it new for $50 only to discover that it sucks.
On the other hand, you're probably paying $20 for a game someone else bought new and then decided it sucks.
If you want to buy stuff you like, I think that's what reviews and demos are for. Whether you pay $50 or $20 for stuff you like I think depends on whether you want to pay the premium for being an early adopter. Sometimes, the most exciting part of a game's lifecycle (for multiplayer community games) can be in the beta to 'just after release' time periods, as everyone is fresh and strategies and tactics and skills are just being formed and the gameplay is still taking form as the game's players and rules are still working themselves out. Personally, I think it is more fun to creatively discover new strats than to read them in the definitive manual, or have some cheap tactic used and abused against me countless times until I stoop to their level, and getting an early jump in the game is justification enough for me to spend more on a game I will like.
"Since I no longer burn songs to audio CDs, but rather put them on iPods, I (and everyone I know in that "second group") have once again started purchasing music CDs in stores."
...it could probably double to $0.04/MB without me flinching. If I want it, I buy it. And I tend to pay a lot more money this way than I used to when buying $20 CDs that I can't even preview from the mall.
Why? There are thousands of IT professionals and other people making weekly backups of their data in case their hard drives crash, and the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom (and who we the infinitely wise citizens elect) have figured out the grand central plan that somehow, CD-R revenues will balance out, and justify copying of music without restraint.
Whether you happen to use CD-R's or not is irrelevant: somebody does, and the government has it all worked out for us.
I have been in your "second group" who believes artists should get compensated. I buy my music from allofmp3.com, because I get to pick my encoding type and quality (ogg), they have a pretty big and easy to access collection (I don't like the ghettos of Kazaa) and the price is great
For all I know, that money I send to the motherland is going to the Russian mafia or to support the Chechyn rebellion, but I know I personally am still supporting "the artists" because I buy CD-Rs to back up my important files every month. (And I have the utmost confidence that the Canadian government knows about all the artists I like, even though none of them are on the radio, and the last I heard, that's what they go by. So I guess my money goes to Britney and the Chechyns. Nice.)
Talking about this makes me mad and confused. Somebody, please get elected Prime Minister and fix this madness. I'd vote for you, but it doesn't matter because I don't live in Ontario.
Our massive socialized health system seems to be too expensive, but for the most part it seems like a good idea, while it has worked. This, on the other hand, is blatent central planning that's antithetical to a free market and doomed to make a mess of any healthy music industry. Unfortunately, I think that there are much bigger messes in our country besides health and this levy/copyright law that need to be cleaned up.
Ok, good points.
Another idea...
Keep the core of MythTV free, and have a deluxe edition for $30/year that provides bonuses like themes, the extra modules (weather, news, web, games), etc. $30/year would generate a lot of money for the Myth devs, and I'd certainly go for it, even if I didn't really need the deluxe edition. I wouldn't like to have $60/year sucked out of me for listings, but I would pay $2/month and $30/year for a spiffed up edition of Myth.
This way, Myth would have my goodwill, rather than being another business entity that tries to get away with leeching more than it's worth (RIAA and Microsoft come to mind). If enough people feel like I do, and won't put up with having $60/year sucked out of them for something basic, but would gladly pay $60 every 2 years (a fairly standard if not high price for a typical software package, IMO) for a top-of-the-line PVR suite, then they might make a lot more money and grow (rather than shrink) in popularity, by taking the general approach of my example suggestion.
I'm not throwing stones, just concerned about them getting a suboptimal price, for themselves and their customers. It seems like premium/charity pricing to me.
I think this world very much needs more successful open source companies and hope they find good ways to get money, so that they can 1) eat from their efforts, 2) make great open source software, instead of average hobby software, and 3) have muscle to lobby and litigate for sanity in things like software patents.
I can think of a couple that I was impressed by and I'm sure there are others: JBoss.org, Torus Knot Software (the Ogre3D dev's consulting company). Both of these offer free software, and offer consulting services. TV Listings seem to me to be close to a core functionality of the software, and think it would hurt the userbase to charge a lot for it, so I would hope they could find something more useful to sell as a premium/charity service, like a BitTorrent server network to exchange TV shows. I'm sure the TV distribution people would hate that, but it's an idea.
Instead of taking sides of holier-than-thou vs. cheapskates, let's be pragmatic. While it's noble and idealistic to give loads of cash to poor open source developers who have no lives because they're busy making awesome software for us, I don't think charity or charity pricing will work in the long run. TV Listings might be worth $2/month, so if they're going to charge, they should charge that, and not complain when a lot of people opt for listings that are free + filling out a survey every once in a while. That's capitalism. And to monoplize the service by hard-coding Myth, well that would be evil by my standards (I'm not sure the typical American business standards would agree. 'All's fair in love, war, and business.')
We've seen how much of a distorted reality the MPAA and RIAA live in when a disruptive technology disrupts their business model -- the last thing the open source world needs is its own reality-distortion people. The only strategy that works in the long run is to find a good, honest business model, period. Asking for donations or charging charity prices for tv listings can be a possible business option if there is enough goodwill, (and premium prices if there are enough rich geeks who spend time setting up Linux PVRs when they could buy a TiVo -- don't think there are many of these people).
I'm just saying whoever is running the business should know what they're doing (value pricing, charity pricing, premium pricing) and not cry when the public doesn't bite for something that doesn't provide the value they're looking for, or when open source developers don't rank as high on the public's charity priorities as they had hoped. (Example: in the time it took me to write this, about 30 people were infected with AIDS, and 18 died from it.)
$60/year sounds too high to me too, especially compared to Yahoo's music service. What do they need all that money for? Is it really worth just as much as what Yahoo offers?
...just my thoughts.
Maybe I'm missing something and one can have a really exciting time reading more in depth or whatever TV listings, but the lowly Zap2It seems fine to me. Improving Zap2It's service might be worth something like $2/month, if desired, but I've never noticed any problems with it doing my Canadian listings.
OTOH, improving MythTV itself might be worth a lot more. It is important software and if all the money really went back into Myth development then I might go for it. Subscribing to software will take time for people to get used to, including me, but in some cases, it might be the only thing that really makes sense for continuously developed and used software. For this purpose, I think $30/year is more reasonable -- that's $60 over 2 years, as opposed to $120 for 2 years, or $180 for 3 years, which might be the rough average lifetime for a non-subscription piece of software. I wonder what the reaction of people would be if you couldn't use MythTV anymore (or it was crippled with no listings or whatever) because it all of a sudden cost $180, but you got free upgrades until version 2 came out (or version 1 as the case may be), which worked out to about 3 years? I think people wouldn't like it, yet this is what $5/month would amount to for long-term users.
Sure $5 isn't much, but when everyone starts asking for it every month, it adds up. As a linux punk who legally pays for almost nothing on my computer, I am maybe more conscious about the money I throw mindlessly at software -- $180/3years would be more than I pay for Microsoft OS's (and I've been fortunate to avoid having to upgrade to WinXP yet,) and to me, they seem to have too many billions of extra dollars. Supporting open source with cash is great, but there's no reason why some trust can't be earned first at a lower price point.
I reject U.S.'s rejection of Canada's Rejection of DMCA.
Thank you for explaining this. I had no idea why bloggers were fighting at all until I read your comment.
The journalism quality has gotten so bad on Slashdot that I have started to wonder if Slashdot editors have all become sadists.