I travel to the UK quite a bit on business. While there, I watch a number of U.S. shows, such as the Simpsons, Star Trek (Next Gen, Voyager, and Enterprise), Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, just to name the ones I can remember.
There are, of course, tons of English shows... news, stuff with Judy Dench, game shows, etc, but I have to wonder if Americans viewing commercials are not subsidizing the entertainment costs of England... If we weren't in a global economy, I wonder if the BBC would be making equivalent programming.
Believe me, England has their fair share of original crap programming too... It's not just the U.S.
I sppreciate the sentiment of the article, but many contributors to open source are hardly 'amateurs'. Plenty of OS contributors are paid for their work.
I'll take this mean 'amateurs' in the same way that the atheletes at the olympics are 'amateurs'. Amateurs, sure... but they are also at the top of their craft.
I have one of those green laser pointers from Slashdot... there is a water tower a little over a mile from my house, and I can hit that tower and see the dot with a pair of binoculars. It doesn't diverge THAT much...
Java is a turing complete language. It can be used to implement any other turing complete language.
Where do yu think C first came from? It did not burst forth, fully formed, from the loins of Kernigan and Ritche... it was originally written in some other language. As it became turing complete, it could be re-written in itself.
Why do copyrights need to be longer than 50 years? Not everything is Mickey Mouse... I mean, in 50 years, is Brittany Spears going to be relevant to anyone other than her grandkids?
Copyrights hinder things from becoming 'common' in our culture, and life becomes bland. Imagine if noone knew the words to 'happy birthday' or common Christmas carols...
On my project we do this with a globe (because we write international software), but the idea is the same...
Get a 'Team Ball', or some other token.
At your next big team meeting or get together, explain the 'new tradition', and hand it to someone, recognizing them for some job well done, or some other 'above and beyond' action.
That person then has the responsibility of deciding who should get the team ball next time it moves. It might move the next day, or it might not move for a month, but people who see something worthy of the team ball tell the person who has it about the action. That person then decides if it is worthy or not, and passes it on with some nice words. It doesn't move on any set schedule.
Why is this good? Recognition from your peers is nice. This ball isn't some 'management token', it is genuine recognition from your peers... it also feels good to pass it along. Eventually, someone will get it who 'hordes' it, but eventually it will move again as a result of peer pressure.
Ok, I'll bite... what's missing? I don't claim to know a lot about the libertarian party, I just know that as far as I have looked so far, it sounds good... I'm all for smaller government, less intrusion into personal matters, etc.
The little political quiz at This site ranks me as a Libertarian too. I have always thought of myself as conservative, although wihout any alliance to a particular party.
All the political discussion on slashdot recently, yet very little discussion about the libertarian party.
I am almost to the point where I could consider myself a libertarian... The party is basically fiscally conservative, socially liberal.
You can read more about the libertarian presidential candidate here:
http://www.badnarik.org/
Caution - some of the position papers make far too much sense. Granted, he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning in 2004, but I think he has a hell of a good chance of increasing awareness of the party and its platform.
China is too large a market to leave to 'alternative' operating systems.
1) Most other multi-national corporations need the emerging market of China in order to keep their growing revenue.
2) Microsoft needs the business of those multi-mational corporations in order to keep their marketshare and revenue.
3) Those multi-national corporations are opening offices and hiring employees in China.
If Microsoft doesn't have China as a market, then these new offices and new employees will be able to introduce 'alternative' operating systems within the corporate infrastructure.
This will probably be happening anyway - but Microsoft can't afford to let it happen without a fight. In fact, it is arguable that piracy in China is actually in Microsoft's best interest at this point.
Why would the disk space requirements be any different? An hour of video is an hour of video. In fact, since they wouldn't have to compress the stream in real time, they may be able to optimize it a little better than Tivo does in real-time.
I agree, the MPAA will probably freak, but how is this *really* any different then recording a movie off of HBO onto my Tivo? I could rip that if I really wanted to.
From my perspective, the only difference is the protocol used to get the video onto my Tivo... I mean, I can choose to spend 2 hours recording a movie off of HBO, or 2 hours downloading it from NerFlix. Either way, I watch it on the same TV with the same Tivo.
I am a consumer dammit! Not a criminal! I have money in my pocket! If you want it, sell me something I want!
What does it matter if it takes a couple of hours to download a movie that is a couple of hours long? If Tivo holds true to their current UI, you will be able to watch the movie before you have the whole thing doenloaded...
I mean, it currently takes me an hour to 'download' an hour long show on my Tivo via normal recording mechanisms.
People who love NetFlix don't seem to mind that they may have to wait DAYS to get the movies they asked for by mail... a few hours seems like an improvement to me.
Sign me up for this... now. I love my Tivo, and I am not currently a NetFlix subscriber... but anything that helps define that legal line of 'fair use' in my favor using technology that is already generally available sounds like a win to me. I will vote for them with my dollars.
You are ALMOST right... the GPL doesn't say ANYONE should be able to use, copy, and modify, it says that anyone that gets the binary code is entitled to the source code. Those people are free to use, copy, and modify the source, give to whomever, etc...
In practicality, it *almost* means the same thing, but there are situations where it might not.
I'm surprised there are already over 100 posts and noone has asked about the fedora version...
The article says "Fedora version 2.6.6". I take that means Fedora Core 2, with a 2.6.6 kernel, but it is rather imprecise... At that price, why not RHEL?
Wrong. Although she is dead now, Mrs Wakefield ran a restraunt and sold cookbooks under the name "Recipes from the Toll House". the publicity that she got from Nestle using the name of her restraunt brought her a lot of residual benefits.
She actually sold them the right to the recipe in exchange for a lifetime supply of free chocolate. No cash exchanged hands... but I bet she made some fabulous desserts at her restraunt with all of that cocolate!
I find it facinating that "Daddy's Roommate" is #2 on that list, while "Heather Has Two Mommies" is #11. Does this show that our culture is a little more accepting of a lesbian lifesytle?
Too bad that list isn't a click-through to Amazon to buy those books. I bet they could be raising a little bit of money from that website to combat censorship.
This is not different from the point I already made. You are paying for a service. It is worth it to you to pay for it than do it yourself. You can spend your time doing something other than learning to cook. It is convenient for you to buy the cookie.
I don't pay someone to clean my house, although a lot of people do pay for that kind of service. I have to pay for the windex, Mr. Clean, and paper towels myself. If I were to hire a main service, they would send me a bill based on time... it is not itemized saying, "4 paper towels - 13 cents each". In effect, the cleaning supplies appear 'free' to someone hiring the maid service.
Sometime in the 1940's Nestle approached Mrs. Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, and purchased her recipe. After purchasing it, they gave it away by printing it on every bag of chocolate chips.
Why would they do this? They PAID for that recipe! Why would they turn it around and GIVE it away?
Nestle was not in the business of selling cookbooks, and they were not a restraunt. They are (among other things) in the business of selling chocolate.
By giving away that recipe, they gave everyone a reason to buy chocolate chips. They couldn't patent the recipe (recipes aren't patentable), but they DID trademark the name "Nestle Tollhouse Cookies". Today, that is a brand that makes a considerable amount of money selling chocolate chips, selling prefab cookie dough, and selling cookies in shopping malls.
Why would someone pay a dollar for a cookie at a store in the mall whenthey could make that same cookie for 20 cents? Convenience.
So, people make money off of open source by providing the goods necessary to USE the open source, by providing services around the open source product, AND by turning it into a recognizable BRAND (ala Red Hat).
This is not a new business model - it is actually very old. People just think of it as new because of the huge impact it has had in recent history in a new market.
That headline blurb doesn't do this book justice. I was one of the first kids on my block with a copy of this book, and I highly recommend it.
This book is not about lava lamps (although it does talk about them). This book is about using automation to keep your software project on-track... never letting things get broken... using a computer in your office as a 'virtual employee', continually building and running unit tests and letting you know if someone breaks the build.
Yes, there is a reference about automatically turning on a red lava lamp if your unit tests fail... but far more important than that, the build on my project (which uses the ideas from this book) is never broken long enough for a lava lamp to heat up.
If you are interested in Agile process (especially the XP concept of 'continuous integration'), you need this book.
Sometime in the 1940's, Nestle Corp approach Mrs. Ruth Wakefield, and purchased her famous 'Toll House Cookie' recipe. They named it the 'Nestle TollHouse Cookie."
Even though they paid handsomly for the recipe, they started printing it on the bag of chocolate chips, and giving it away. Why would Nestle do this?
Nestle does not make money by selling cookies, and they do not make money selling cookbooks. they make money by (among other things) selling Chocolate Chips.
By giving away the recipe, people not had a reason to buy their chips. They made money, indirectly, by purchasing that recipe and giving it away.
In a very real sense, they 'open sourced' this recipe. Since recipes are not patentable, all they could do was 'trademark' the name 'TollHouse'. If you look at a bag of Hershey's chips, Ghiardelli chips, etc, they all have the same recipe, just named differently.
You can use this recipe with no obligation... you could break up your own favorite chocolate bar, and not have to buy any chips. You could leave the chips out entirely, and add M&Ms if you want. If you can make your own cookie for about 15 cents, why would you go to a store in a mall about pay a dollar for a cookie (US Currency)? You are paying for convenience, labor, expertise, etc.
This is how Open Source makes money.
Now, information is fundamentally different than tangible property. With tangible property, you don't have it once you give it to someone. Information is not like that. So how does this change the equation?
Lets say I'm building a house. I may have to pay for the bricks and mortar, but how much does that really cost compared to the price of the house? The material for an individual brick is cheap (but not free). BUT, it takes labor, time, and expetrise to move it to where it needs to be, and assemble many of them into a structure. THIS is the majority of the cost. If I were to own the brick factory AND be the bricklayer, it might be 'worth it' for me to give away the bricks in order to charge for my time.
Open Source philosophies are not new... they just seem to be thought of as new because of the impact they are having in a relatively new marketplace.
The major cost of 'bricks and mortar' are not the cost of the materials. There are costs associated with making them, transporting them, and finally, the skill associated with assembling them into something that doesn't look atrocious. These are the services you pay for. In an open source world, you would be paid for your services.
Slashdot Mirror
I travel to the UK quite a bit on business. While there, I watch a number of U.S. shows, such as the Simpsons, Star Trek (Next Gen, Voyager, and Enterprise), Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, just to name the ones I can remember.
There are, of course, tons of English shows... news, stuff with Judy Dench, game shows, etc, but I have to wonder if Americans viewing commercials are not subsidizing the entertainment costs of England... If we weren't in a global economy, I wonder if the BBC would be making equivalent programming.
Believe me, England has their fair share of original crap programming too... It's not just the U.S.
I sppreciate the sentiment of the article, but many contributors to open source are hardly 'amateurs'. Plenty of OS contributors are paid for their work.
I'll take this mean 'amateurs' in the same way that the atheletes at the olympics are 'amateurs'. Amateurs, sure... but they are also at the top of their craft.
I have one of those green laser pointers from Slashdot... there is a water tower a little over a mile from my house, and I can hit that tower and see the dot with a pair of binoculars. It doesn't diverge THAT much...
huh?
Java is a turing complete language. It can be used to implement any other turing complete language.
Where do yu think C first came from? It did not burst forth, fully formed, from the loins of Kernigan and Ritche... it was originally written in some other language. As it became turing complete, it could be re-written in itself.
-db
It gives my games that 'extra edge'.
Why do copyrights need to be longer than 50 years? Not everything is Mickey Mouse... I mean, in 50 years, is Brittany Spears going to be relevant to anyone other than her grandkids?
Copyrights hinder things from becoming 'common' in our culture, and life becomes bland. Imagine if noone knew the words to 'happy birthday' or common Christmas carols...
-db
Interesting that it mentions OpenOffice by name, but not StarOffice.
On my project we do this with a globe (because we write international software), but the idea is the same...
Get a 'Team Ball', or some other token.
At your next big team meeting or get together, explain the 'new tradition', and hand it to someone, recognizing them for some job well done, or some other 'above and beyond' action.
That person then has the responsibility of deciding who should get the team ball next time it moves. It might move the next day, or it might not move for a month, but people who see something worthy of the team ball tell the person who has it about the action. That person then decides if it is worthy or not, and passes it on with some nice words. It doesn't move on any set schedule.
Why is this good? Recognition from your peers is nice. This ball isn't some 'management token', it is genuine recognition from your peers... it also feels good to pass it along. Eventually, someone will get it who 'hordes' it, but eventually it will move again as a result of peer pressure.
Morale is free, but it is invaluable.
That's funny, because Grandma laughs at people who buy frozen pizza and pre-fab cookie dough who think they are 'cooking'.
Ok, I'll bite... what's missing? I don't claim to know a lot about the libertarian party, I just know that as far as I have looked so far, it sounds good... I'm all for smaller government, less intrusion into personal matters, etc.
The little political quiz at This site ranks me as a Libertarian too. I have always thought of myself as conservative, although wihout any alliance to a particular party.
All the political discussion on slashdot recently, yet very little discussion about the libertarian party.
I am almost to the point where I could consider myself a libertarian... The party is basically fiscally conservative, socially liberal.
You can read more about the libertarian presidential candidate here:
http://www.badnarik.org/
Caution - some of the position papers make far too much sense. Granted, he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning in 2004, but I think he has a hell of a good chance of increasing awareness of the party and its platform.
China is too large a market to leave to 'alternative' operating systems.
1) Most other multi-national corporations need the emerging market of China in order to keep their growing revenue.
2) Microsoft needs the business of those multi-mational corporations in order to keep their marketshare and revenue.
3) Those multi-national corporations are opening offices and hiring employees in China.
If Microsoft doesn't have China as a market, then these new offices and new employees will be able to introduce 'alternative' operating systems within the corporate infrastructure.
This will probably be happening anyway - but Microsoft can't afford to let it happen without a fight. In fact, it is arguable that piracy in China is actually in Microsoft's best interest at this point.
Why would the disk space requirements be any different? An hour of video is an hour of video. In fact, since they wouldn't have to compress the stream in real time, they may be able to optimize it a little better than Tivo does in real-time.
I agree, the MPAA will probably freak, but how is this *really* any different then recording a movie off of HBO onto my Tivo? I could rip that if I really wanted to.
From my perspective, the only difference is the protocol used to get the video onto my Tivo... I mean, I can choose to spend 2 hours recording a movie off of HBO, or 2 hours downloading it from NerFlix. Either way, I watch it on the same TV with the same Tivo.
I am a consumer dammit! Not a criminal! I have money in my pocket! If you want it, sell me something I want!
What does it matter if it takes a couple of hours to download a movie that is a couple of hours long? If Tivo holds true to their current UI, you will be able to watch the movie before you have the whole thing doenloaded...
I mean, it currently takes me an hour to 'download' an hour long show on my Tivo via normal recording mechanisms.
People who love NetFlix don't seem to mind that they may have to wait DAYS to get the movies they asked for by mail... a few hours seems like an improvement to me.
Sign me up for this... now. I love my Tivo, and I am not currently a NetFlix subscriber... but anything that helps define that legal line of 'fair use' in my favor using technology that is already generally available sounds like a win to me. I will vote for them with my dollars.
You are ALMOST right... the GPL doesn't say ANYONE should be able to use, copy, and modify, it says that anyone that gets the binary code is entitled to the source code. Those people are free to use, copy, and modify the source, give to whomever, etc...
In practicality, it *almost* means the same thing, but there are situations where it might not.
I'm surprised there are already over 100 posts and noone has asked about the fedora version...
The article says "Fedora version 2.6.6". I take that means Fedora Core 2, with a 2.6.6 kernel, but it is rather imprecise... At that price, why not RHEL?
I once made a necklace our of a dead mac mouse... just fed the end that normally attached to the computer back into the mouse case, and voila!
On a dare, I wore it out one night (while still in college). I took it off when a hot girl asked me why I was wearing a medic-alert necklace.
Wrong. Although she is dead now, Mrs Wakefield ran a restraunt and sold cookbooks under the name "Recipes from the Toll House". the publicity that she got from Nestle using the name of her restraunt brought her a lot of residual benefits.
She actually sold them the right to the recipe in exchange for a lifetime supply of free chocolate. No cash exchanged hands... but I bet she made some fabulous desserts at her restraunt with all of that cocolate!
I find it facinating that "Daddy's Roommate" is #2 on that list, while "Heather Has Two Mommies" is #11. Does this show that our culture is a little more accepting of a lesbian lifesytle?
Too bad that list isn't a click-through to Amazon to buy those books. I bet they could be raising a little bit of money from that website to combat censorship.
This is not different from the point I already made. You are paying for a service. It is worth it to you to pay for it than do it yourself. You can spend your time doing something other than learning to cook. It is convenient for you to buy the cookie.
I don't pay someone to clean my house, although a lot of people do pay for that kind of service. I have to pay for the windex, Mr. Clean, and paper towels myself. If I were to hire a main service, they would send me a bill based on time... it is not itemized saying, "4 paper towels - 13 cents each". In effect, the cleaning supplies appear 'free' to someone hiring the maid service.
I wrote something similar yesterday...
Sometime in the 1940's Nestle approached Mrs. Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, and purchased her recipe. After purchasing it, they gave it away by printing it on every bag of chocolate chips.
Why would they do this? They PAID for that recipe! Why would they turn it around and GIVE it away?
Nestle was not in the business of selling cookbooks, and they were not a restraunt. They are (among other things) in the business of selling chocolate.
By giving away that recipe, they gave everyone a reason to buy chocolate chips. They couldn't patent the recipe (recipes aren't patentable), but they DID trademark the name "Nestle Tollhouse Cookies". Today, that is a brand that makes a considerable amount of money selling chocolate chips, selling prefab cookie dough, and selling cookies in shopping malls.
Why would someone pay a dollar for a cookie at a store in the mall whenthey could make that same cookie for 20 cents? Convenience.
So, people make money off of open source by providing the goods necessary to USE the open source, by providing services around the open source product, AND by turning it into a recognizable BRAND (ala Red Hat).
This is not a new business model - it is actually very old. People just think of it as new because of the huge impact it has had in recent history in a new market.
That headline blurb doesn't do this book justice. I was one of the first kids on my block with a copy of this book, and I highly recommend it.
This book is not about lava lamps (although it does talk about them). This book is about using automation to keep your software project on-track... never letting things get broken... using a computer in your office as a 'virtual employee', continually building and running unit tests and letting you know if someone breaks the build.
Yes, there is a reference about automatically turning on a red lava lamp if your unit tests fail... but far more important than that, the build on my project (which uses the ideas from this book) is never broken long enough for a lava lamp to heat up.
If you are interested in Agile process (especially the XP concept of 'continuous integration'), you need this book.
Sometime in the 1940's, Nestle Corp approach Mrs. Ruth Wakefield, and purchased her famous 'Toll House Cookie' recipe. They named it the 'Nestle TollHouse Cookie."
Even though they paid handsomly for the recipe, they started printing it on the bag of chocolate chips, and giving it away. Why would Nestle do this?
Nestle does not make money by selling cookies, and they do not make money selling cookbooks. they make money by (among other things) selling Chocolate Chips.
By giving away the recipe, people not had a reason to buy their chips. They made money, indirectly, by purchasing that recipe and giving it away.
In a very real sense, they 'open sourced' this recipe. Since recipes are not patentable, all they could do was 'trademark' the name 'TollHouse'. If you look at a bag of Hershey's chips, Ghiardelli chips, etc, they all have the same recipe, just named differently.
You can use this recipe with no obligation... you could break up your own favorite chocolate bar, and not have to buy any chips. You could leave the chips out entirely, and add M&Ms if you want. If you can make your own cookie for about 15 cents, why would you go to a store in a mall about pay a dollar for a cookie (US Currency)? You are paying for convenience, labor, expertise, etc.
This is how Open Source makes money.
Now, information is fundamentally different than tangible property. With tangible property, you don't have it once you give it to someone. Information is not like that. So how does this change the equation?
Lets say I'm building a house. I may have to pay for the bricks and mortar, but how much does that really cost compared to the price of the house? The material for an individual brick is cheap (but not free). BUT, it takes labor, time, and expetrise to move it to where it needs to be, and assemble many of them into a structure. THIS is the majority of the cost. If I were to own the brick factory AND be the bricklayer, it might be 'worth it' for me to give away the bricks in order to charge for my time.
Open Source philosophies are not new... they just seem to be thought of as new because of the impact they are having in a relatively new marketplace.
-db
The major cost of 'bricks and mortar' are not the cost of the materials. There are costs associated with making them, transporting them, and finally, the skill associated with assembling them into something that doesn't look atrocious. These are the services you pay for. In an open source world, you would be paid for your services.
You mean Alton Brown LIED to me? What happened to "A pints a pound the world around"?