Why *should* they be sued? Where's the damage to Linux?
It looks to me like they were using the name Linux in part to take advantage of the current Linux hype. This in turn generates more favorable hype for Linux. Which is a good thing, right?
Now, if the product turns out to suck, and thus makes Linux look bad, *then* it would be appropriate to at least issue a cease-and-desist order and have them issue a press release explaining that they don't actually use Linux.
Dumb idea, but the inverse would be nice
on
The Factoid
·
· Score: 1
The problem with this is that they're drawing the wrong conclusions. Yes, people are buying things that let them record stuff. The point DEC is missing is that, currently, people only record THINGS *THEY* CONSIDER IMPORTANT. You don't find people walking around making digital voice memos of everything they see.
This Factoid thing has the premise that *everything* is important. If it's being broadcast by a Factoid, it must be important, therefore you must want it stored away at home, permanently.
And more importantly, what *you* think is important is irrelevant. You have a Factoid device, You Will Accept This Very Important Announcement Of A Drastic Price Reduction On Adult Diapers This Week Only At Walgreens.
(For example.)
What I would find more useful would be a factoid squelcher, which would remove useless factoids from my awareness. Cigarette billboards, GONE! TV show ads, GONE!
There's a company called PixelVision (www.pixelvision.com) which has a similar technology. Their version only requires one video card (a Matrox). The card's signal goes through a hub box which actually splits the signal and feeds it to multiple monitors, for a real video-wall approach. The nice thing about this is that you can run multiple panels off a single AGP card.
The Mass Engineered Design approach looks like it requires multiple cards.
If I find someone is traipsing through my servers without permission, how exactly am I going to determine whether they are there for criminal reasons, or if they are simply being 'mischevious'?
I can't. There's no way to tell the difference between someone benignly poking around, and someone looking around for things to steal, or weaknesses to exploit later.
Therefore, why should they be cut any slack? They have no *right* to trespass in my machines, just like they have no *right* to trespass in my home.
Or would you be okay with people breaking into your home just to have a 'mischevious' look around?
A disgruntled or exiting employee from HP grabs a copy of some source code that was *never* GPL'ed. It was always proprietary. (Or maybe it's an HP customer or developer which got the code through an NDA or similar deal.)
A month or two later, the code turns up in someone's GPL'ed project. Not necessarily a Merced port of Linux. Maybe it's some proprietary driver code for some HP hardware.
In a case like this, the code was GPL'ed by someone who had no right to do so.
What recourse does HP (or any such company) have?
As far as I can see, they have none. They might be able to sue the ex-employee, but their technology is released to the wild, without their permission, and they get screwed.
This, I think, is exactly the kind of situation for which the APSL termination clause is intended.
The appliance concept does make much more sense for business/home-office tasks.
These are single-purpose boxes, which make good appliances. General-purpose information appliances don't do very well. Eventually, they can't be general-purpose, because their hardware can't handle future general-purpose tasks very well.
We're starting to see business appliances which act as webservers, file servers, routers, gateways, etc. Single-purpose devices which can be hung off a network as needed. Sure, they're more expensive than using a multi-purpose Linux PC, but they're more convenient.
The whole HDTV thing is a joke. Especially considering the monster TV's they expect people to buy.
Riddle me this.
If I'm not mistaken, the SGI LCD monitor can support HDTV resolution.
Why don't they use *that* for HDTV TV's? Granted, it's a little small for typical living rooms, but it's big enough to watch TV or movies on if you move the couch up a bit. And you'll have to move the couch up to really see the difference in picture quality.
That LCD is cheaper than the HDTVs they're selling; it's not a gargantuan room-filling, back-breaking, spouse-upsetting monster; and it would easily used in a dual-purpose mode, switching between PC use and video use. It's hard to carry a 50" HDTV back to the den after you're done watching a flick.
Actually, I bet there's a market for HDTV-delivered financial market information. You could fit an enormous amount of data on there, clearly, in addition to video feeds from multiple cable news channels. Finance wizzes would probably buy such things. One for the bedroom, one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom...
With a more reasonable price and form factor, this could help popularize HDTV a lot more; it'd help lower the price of big high-res LCD's; and it'd hasten the demise of big-box TV's you could fit a VW in.
Over time, the LCD size would probably grow, so only the first generation would have the small ones.
Does the gray lady have an agenda here? I remember when Steve Jobs was starting up NeXT, and the WSJ bashed the endeavour really badly. It essentially shot down NeXT's enterprise market for a long, long time, until he dropped the hardware
Even better- on the opening day of a NeXTWorld EXPO (I think in 6/93) the Journal ran an article by G. Pascal Zachary. The writer said that it was doubtful NeXT could ever make any alliances with others in the industry, and thus would surely fail pronto.
That morning, at the keynote, Jobs announced they were working with DEC and HP, and some other things. It resulted in NeXTSTEP running on HP workstations, and NeXT's Distributed Objects software running on HP/UX and Digital's Unix. (The idea being that you could use DO to offload processing to huge big-iron compute/database servers. There was a demo Mandelbrot app which did this.)
In the case of the Linux article, I think they just relied too heavily on the one lame source, and didn't bother checking the facts in the report.
Overall, the Journal does fairly well, as long as you stay away from the loons and fascists on the OpEd pages.
Personally, I'm pissed that they're running ZiffDavis stories. I'm *paying* to read the Journal, not ZD. I can read their crap for free.
If you really value freedom, by the way, please realize that it is possibly, often luxurious to live (in California even) on less than $50K/yr. It's possible to live, but how much can you save? What if you want to do something else someday, something that has little or no earning potential?
This leads to the conclusion that if OSS can produce software for free(dollars, not time here)...
But time is exactly the problem.
We expect our freedom.
The freedom to work as an IT drone for your entire life? The freedom to keep your creative development work severely limited to nights and weekends (as long as other things don't interfere)?
The problem with the dentist vs. rock n roller comparison is that it leaves creativity out.
Some people are content to spend their careers fixing other people's problems. They don't really have big ideas, or dreams. They don't have an idea they want to work on full-time; they work on other people's ideas.
For other people, this is a stifling environment. It's the difference between a composer who writes symphonies, and a composer who writes commercial jingles.
The dentist role is not fulfilling for these people. The dentist wakes up one day, and realizes they've done little with their lives but filled cavities and collected a paycheck. That's not enough for some people.
The money is a bonus, but it's not the central issue and it's mistaken to focus on it. If you want to find programmers interested in money, look at consultants. They face little risk, they just bill their time. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, often put *everything* at risk. Savings, marriage, house, car - everything. By saying the 'rock star' is after a 'hit', you're ignoring the enormous risk involved.
For me, what's important is freedom. The ability to work on what *I* want to work on. The ability to work on a project, full-time (and more) and to have *something* significant when I'm done. To have created something new, of my own design.
The same impulse drives a lot of free software developers. They would generally prefer to work on their free software fulltime, and many are trying to figure out how to do this.
Entrepreneurs know one solution: You can get paid for working on your own projects if you charge for the results.
Also- For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
This is incorrect; I get the code whether or not I put any time into maintaining the code. I already have the code, so why should I put the time in maintaining it?
Likewise, While when you spend one hour's worth of salary on a closed source software tool, you get a few dollars worth of software and that's it.
What I get for the money is that, first, unlike free software, I get software I didn't have before. Second, I don't have to spend time to maintain it.
Time is more scarce than money. I can borrow money - I cannot borrow time.
Perhaps a key failing of free software theory is that it places a higher value on money than on time. It assumes that there is infinite time available to work on free software.
I see some confusion here---you appear to assume that open source software works via a "volunteering" process, and I'm not sure that's a useful model. It implies a single-direction transaction, rather than an exchange.
No it doesn't.
A volunteer benefits from their volunteering. First, they get the intangible feeling of having done a good thing. Second, they get the benefit of living in the society which they have helped improve.
If I volunteer to clean up litter on the street I live on, I benefit by living on a cleaner street.
If I volunteer to participate in a neighborhood crime watch, I benefit by living in a safer neighborhood.
At an indirect level, if I volunteer to teach computer-illiterate adults how to use a computer, then they can participate more fully in today's economy, possibly earning more money. This in turn may help them put their kids through college.
This boosts the local, regional, and national economies over several generations, which benefits me quite a bit. Somebody's got to buy those mutual funds.
Think about it this way, do the works of Shakespear gain their worth from their scarcity? Of course not! Their worth is determined by their quality. Their lack of scarity is a result of their quality, not other other way around.
Ah, but Shakespeare's quality is exactly what makes it scarce.
If everyone wrote like Shakespeare, would we value his works as highly? Probably not. Hell, there'd probably be a backlash against quality playwrights, in favor of crap like 'Cats'.
Non-programers could help by trying to offer constructive criticism and suggestions to free software projects.
I don't know if GUI Linux apps are like this, but a lot of NeXTSTEP applications included an easy way to mail feedback and suggestions to the author. You'd just click a menu, and the program would bring up Mail.app with a pre-addressed compose window.
That would probably help a great deal.
For free-software projects, the mail could be sent to a suggestions mailing list, instead of to a single author.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this "state of completion" you speak of?
It looks to me like they were using the name Linux in part to take advantage of the current Linux hype. This in turn generates more favorable hype for Linux. Which is a good thing, right?
Now, if the product turns out to suck, and thus makes Linux look bad, *then* it would be appropriate to at least issue a cease-and-desist order and have them issue a press release explaining that they don't actually use Linux.
The problem with this is that they're drawing the wrong conclusions. Yes, people are buying things that let them record stuff. The point DEC is missing is that, currently, people only record THINGS *THEY* CONSIDER IMPORTANT. You don't find people walking around making digital voice memos of everything they see.
This Factoid thing has the premise that *everything* is important. If it's being broadcast by a Factoid, it must be important, therefore you must want it stored away at home, permanently.
And more importantly, what *you* think is important is irrelevant. You have a Factoid device, You Will Accept This Very Important Announcement Of A Drastic Price Reduction On Adult Diapers This Week Only At Walgreens.
(For example.)
What I would find more useful would be a factoid squelcher, which would remove useless factoids from my awareness. Cigarette billboards, GONE! TV show ads, GONE!
There's a company called PixelVision (www.pixelvision.com) which has a similar technology. Their version only requires one video card (a Matrox). The card's signal goes through a hub box which actually splits the signal and feeds it to multiple monitors, for a real video-wall approach. The nice thing about this is that you can run multiple panels off a single AGP card.
The Mass Engineered Design approach looks like it requires multiple cards.
If I find someone is traipsing through my servers without permission, how exactly am I going to determine whether they are there for criminal reasons, or if they are simply being 'mischevious'?
I can't. There's no way to tell the difference between someone benignly poking around, and someone looking around for things to steal, or weaknesses to exploit later.
Therefore, why should they be cut any slack? They have no *right* to trespass in my machines, just like they have no *right* to trespass in my home.
Or would you be okay with people breaking into your home just to have a 'mischevious' look around?
It takes a long time to get a patent. If they filed in 1996, they may very well have received it this year.
There's lots of Intel-oriented code in there already. Drivers, booting code, etc.
I suppose getting it up on Intel will require booting on a PowerMac, then cross-compiling the source to produce Intel binaries.
Are they upgradeable? I doubt it.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to
sell a Firewire-based portable chassis, into which you could install disks of any capacity?
Sony's VAIO notebooks have Firewire ports built-in. (Or at least some do, including their smallest one.)
What's even weirder is that one of the killers was Jewish.
Perhaps. But at least there'd be a working driver to tide people over until someone gets a GPL'd implementation written.
Hm. I wonder if a UDI 'sniffer' would be possible.
A disgruntled or exiting employee from HP grabs a copy of some source code that was *never* GPL'ed. It was always proprietary. (Or maybe it's an HP customer or developer which got the code through an NDA or similar deal.)
A month or two later, the code turns up in someone's GPL'ed project. Not necessarily a Merced port of Linux. Maybe it's some proprietary driver code for some HP hardware.
In a case like this, the code was GPL'ed by someone who had no right to do so.
What recourse does HP (or any such company) have?
As far as I can see, they have none. They might be able to sue the ex-employee, but their technology is released to the wild, without their permission, and they get screwed.
This, I think, is exactly the kind of situation for which the APSL termination clause is intended.
The appliance concept does make much more sense for business/home-office tasks.
These are single-purpose boxes, which make good appliances. General-purpose information appliances don't do very well. Eventually, they can't be general-purpose, because their hardware can't handle future general-purpose tasks very well.
We're starting to see business appliances which act as webservers, file servers, routers, gateways, etc. Single-purpose devices which can be hung off a network as needed. Sure, they're more expensive than using a multi-purpose Linux PC, but they're more convenient.
The whole HDTV thing is a joke. Especially considering the monster TV's they expect people to buy.
Riddle me this.
If I'm not mistaken, the SGI LCD monitor can support HDTV resolution.
Why don't they use *that* for HDTV TV's? Granted, it's a little small for typical living rooms, but it's big enough to watch TV or movies on if you move the couch up a bit. And you'll have to move the couch up to really see the difference in picture quality.
That LCD is cheaper than the HDTVs they're selling; it's not a gargantuan room-filling, back-breaking, spouse-upsetting monster; and it would easily used in a dual-purpose mode, switching between PC use and video use. It's hard to carry a 50" HDTV back to the den after you're done watching a flick.
Actually, I bet there's a market for HDTV-delivered financial market information. You could fit an enormous amount of data on there, clearly, in addition to video feeds from multiple cable news channels. Finance wizzes would probably buy such things. One for the bedroom, one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom...
With a more reasonable price and form factor, this could help popularize HDTV a lot more; it'd help lower the price of big high-res LCD's; and it'd hasten the demise of big-box TV's you could fit a VW in.
Over time, the LCD size would probably grow, so only the first generation would have the small ones.
What does difficulty have to do with anything?
It's not *hard* to shake a baby until it's brain-damaged.
It's not *hard* to shoot a bunch of people.
It's not *hard* to cheat a bunch of old people out of their money through a telemarketing scam.
Does that make these things okay? Are you suggesting that criminal law should be based on the *level of difficulty* of a crime?
Get a grip.
Even better- on the opening day of a NeXTWorld EXPO (I think in 6/93) the Journal ran an article by G. Pascal Zachary. The writer said that it was doubtful NeXT could ever make any alliances with others in the industry, and thus would surely fail pronto.
That morning, at the keynote, Jobs announced they were working with DEC and HP, and some other things. It resulted in NeXTSTEP running on HP workstations, and NeXT's Distributed Objects software running on HP/UX and Digital's Unix. (The idea being that you could use DO to offload processing to huge big-iron compute/database servers. There was a demo Mandelbrot app which did this.)
In the case of the Linux article, I think they just relied too heavily on the one lame source, and didn't bother checking the facts in the report.
Overall, the Journal does fairly well, as long as you stay away from the loons and fascists on the OpEd pages.
Personally, I'm pissed that they're running ZiffDavis stories. I'm *paying* to read the Journal, not ZD. I can read their crap for free.
If you really value freedom, by the way, please realize that it is possibly, often luxurious to live (in California even) on less than $50K/yr. It's possible to live, but how much can you save? What if you want to do something else someday, something that has little or no earning potential?
But no freedom for programmers who wish to choose what they do to make a living.
But time is exactly the problem.
We expect our freedom.
The freedom to work as an IT drone for your entire life? The freedom to keep your creative development work severely limited to nights and weekends (as long as other things don't interfere)?
Some people are content to spend their careers fixing other people's problems. They don't really have big ideas, or dreams. They don't have an idea they want to work on full-time; they work on other people's ideas.
For other people, this is a stifling environment. It's the difference between a composer who writes symphonies, and a composer who writes commercial jingles.
The dentist role is not fulfilling for these people. The dentist wakes up one day, and realizes they've done little with their lives but filled cavities and collected a paycheck. That's not enough for some people.
The money is a bonus, but it's not the central issue and it's mistaken to focus on it. If you want to find programmers interested in money, look at consultants. They face little risk, they just bill their time. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, often put *everything* at risk. Savings, marriage, house, car - everything. By saying the 'rock star' is after a 'hit', you're ignoring the enormous risk involved.
For me, what's important is freedom. The ability to work on what *I* want to work on. The ability to work on a project, full-time (and more) and to have *something* significant when I'm done. To have created something new, of my own design.
The same impulse drives a lot of free software developers. They would generally prefer to work on their free software fulltime, and many are trying to figure out how to do this.
Entrepreneurs know one solution: You can get paid for working on your own projects if you charge for the results.
Also- For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
This is incorrect; I get the code whether or not I put any time into maintaining the code. I already have the code, so why should I put the time in maintaining it?
Likewise, While when you spend one hour's worth of salary on a closed source software tool, you get a few dollars worth of software and that's it.
What I get for the money is that, first, unlike free software, I get software I didn't have before. Second, I don't have to spend time to maintain it.
Time is more scarce than money. I can borrow money - I cannot borrow time.
Perhaps a key failing of free software theory is that it places a higher value on money than on time. It assumes that there is infinite time available to work on free software.
"My best", and the time required to give it, is also a scarce resource. Time is very, very scarce.
Unfortunately, this means in free software the exchange is a scarce resource (time) for infinite resources (respect and joy).
Er - as demand increases, then price should increase, not decrease.
Prices fall when supply is fixed and demand drops, or when competition increases the supply of similar goods.
No it doesn't.
A volunteer benefits from their volunteering. First, they get the intangible feeling of having done a good thing. Second, they get the benefit of living in the society which they have helped improve.
If I volunteer to clean up litter on the street I live on, I benefit by living on a cleaner street.
If I volunteer to participate in a neighborhood crime watch, I benefit by living in a safer neighborhood.
At an indirect level, if I volunteer to teach computer-illiterate adults how to use a computer, then they can participate more fully in today's economy, possibly earning more money. This in turn may help them put their kids through college.
This boosts the local, regional, and national economies over several generations, which benefits me quite a bit. Somebody's got to buy those mutual funds.
Ah, but Shakespeare's quality is exactly what makes it scarce.
If everyone wrote like Shakespeare, would we value his works as highly? Probably not. Hell, there'd probably be a backlash against quality playwrights, in favor of crap like 'Cats'.
Non-programers could help by trying to offer constructive criticism and suggestions to free software projects.
I don't know if GUI Linux apps are like this, but a lot of NeXTSTEP applications included an easy way to mail feedback and suggestions to the author. You'd just click a menu, and the program would bring up Mail.app with a pre-addressed compose window.
That would probably help a great deal.
For free-software projects, the mail could be sent to a suggestions mailing list, instead of to a single author.