In a way, they're right; there are basicly 2 ways of looking at software. The first way is to consider software some kind of apparatus, the second way is to consider it a work of art. And us Open Source guys always use the latter as an argument in our battle against software patents. So from that I deduce that most of "us" consider the latter approach the right one. At least, I do.
And that's a bit of a problem; lawsuits like the one described in the story are considered pretty normal in the music industry; if OpenOffice and MSOffice both were songs, OpenOffice would probably have to pay some kind of fee to MSOffice for using their intellectual property and we'd all consider that normal...
Anyway... It'd be interesting to hear what other people think about this because to me it is a fundamental problem with how I view the whole copyright/patent/freespeech-discussion.
One solution would be to consider the sourcecode a work of art and the resulting binary an apparatus but that would be ridiculous since it would introduce a huge legal difference between scripts and binaries which would be great to feed a huge discussion but clearly is not a practical solution. So maybe the question we (or at least I) should ask ourselves first, is "What exactly are the differences between sourcecode and compiled sourcecode from a moral and IP point of view?"
Because the domain is owned by Google Inc, not by an English entity that could be held responsible. The same for the netblock. So it's effectively just an USAian site which happens to have a pointer to it that ends in co.uk.
You're right that code should not be compared to literature. It should be compared to recipes.
Really. They're exactly the same as a piece of software: a list of commands that explains how to get something done. It's just that nowadays we're used to recipes being interpreted by humans and software being interpreted by computers. So why's that? Simple. They don't speak the same language and cannot perform the same tasks. But that's just a matter of time.
So in effect computers are just slaves that perform tasks told to them in their own language. It's just that they cannot perform all tasks yet and don't understand your convenient natural language yet which causes most people not to understand this similarity and start treating things written in a certain language patentable because a computer happens to understand them. And that's completely utterly stupidly shortsightedly stupidly shortsighted.
On my clie NX70V the battery-life varies a lot on the applications used; the cam uses quite a lot, memorystick access as well. Wifi really drains it. So no matter how long they tell you the battery life is, it's utter bullshit anyway since it depends heavily on the application used. Taking pictures and immediately e-mailing them over wifi can drain the battery within half an hour while using it exclusively as an electronic agenda will get you somewhere around the mentioned 7 hours.
First of all, I've implemented quite a few enterprise-level applications. Mostly for the government and police in my country. All of them are based on Open Source and most of them where delivered including the source for exactly the reasons I gave in my previous comment.
All of your arguments have absolutely nothing to do with the software being Open Source or not:
Those products didn't just stop working. You were never forced to upgrade. If you want the new features of the new products, then you upgrade. I've seen plenty of WinNT 3.51 and MS-DOS solutions still chugging along just fine.
So? Support is not about new features or new products. It's about fixing problems. Fixing problems in these OS's after support was terminated is totally out of the question and therefore when you're trying to keep an enterprise level system running, you definately forced to upgrade. Had you used Open Source, you'd still have the option to try to find support elsewhere. I'm not saying you'll find it, but with a closed source product I can tell you for sure you won't find it.
Yes, "anyone with a brain," obviously they can understand several million lines of source code with a glance and be able to fix logical errors or hack on new features within minutes. Bzzt! Wrong! Can you get someone to hack at it? Sure. Is that qualified support that you can trust on? No, especially in the mind of a business.
Ok "anyone with a brain" may be a bit to easy but the fact remains that had you used Open Source you'd have the option of trying to find support elsewhere. The complexity of the software is totally unrelated to it being Open Source or not.
You might want to check out open source in the enterprise. Vendors providing Linux solutions also enforce support lifecycles. You won't find published material on any version of Redhat Linux prior to 7.1 on their website. Can you call and get support for prior versions? Sure, but it'll cost you, and if you want the new spiffies that they've brought out in newer versions be prepared to upgrade. Or you can pay that kid to Redhat's altered KDE 3.x onto the Linux kernel 1.0. But then you're right back to praying again, but this time who are you gonna call when it doesn't work?
Again, whether the source is open or closed doesn't have anything to do with when your support-contract is terminated. It has everything to do with your chances of finding support elsewhere when a migration to a newer product is not an option.
Enterprise systems are all about one thing: guaranteed reliability. IMHO reliability on the long term is best guaranteed by using Open Source; what good is an enterprise-ready system with a planned lifespan of 25 years with absolutely no guarantee that the platform it's based on will still be around in 10 years? MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and NT3.51 failed here; if your enterprise was depending on one of these, an upgrade was forced upon you and all you can do is pray your software works with the new version. This will always be the case with closed-source software.
With Open Source Software, this is not a problem at all; support can be done by anyone that has a brain to understand the source and you pretty much get the guarantee it'll work as long as you want.
Closed Source Software in the enterprise IMHO is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It's basicly based on trusting a few people and then feeling safe because it has cost you a lot of money. And paying others is a lot easier than using your brain.
Slightly offtopic but IMHO very important: the juridical department of the EU has approved a new proposal for allowing software patents in the EU just this week. If it's up to the person responsible for preparing the decision making - Arlene McCarthy from british labour - this will be decided on in the the europarliament on the 30th of june. Please sign this petition to help stop this nonsense. I unfortunately only have a dutch link to the story (here).
I don't think you have to expect much from the EU. Just this week the juridical department of the europarliament approved the new proposal for allowing software patents (and therefore . The woman responsible for preparing the final decision-making - a british labour member of the europarliament: Arlene McCarty somehow is in a lot of hurry to force this through by 30 june already. I think she has a hidden agenda.
Anyway - all pro-Open Source talk from the EU IMHO is just a lot of nice words and no action while at the same time they really don't understand what they're talking about and give more and more away to big multinationals...
Unfortunately I've only got a link about the news in dutch, but there's a petition to cut this crap over here. If you agree with what it states, please sign it.
When picking up a spoon, you can feel the object it's lying on. Try putting a pretty tall object on a flat surface and look at the top from the side on a distance with a stretched arm so you can just reach it. Now don't look at the flat surface but just at the top of the object (as if it was somewhere in the air without any point of reference to help you - like the robot). Try to fetch it. It's a lot harder now.
In the more advanced examples it did use stereoscopic vision. Look at the one where it repeatedly catches a ball. The same for the video where it catches a ball which falls vertically. Only in the tracking-examples it did use a single camera if I recall correctly.
I think the hand is just a bad example; nobody'd like to get a firm handshake from a robot... it's scary, you know. I think we'll never shake hands with robots - especially not when they look like robots and have metal hands.
When you look at the avoiding-video, it's very clear the behavior is preprogrammed; the hand moves when the object comes at clearly visible range from the hand. It has to be - you somehow have to tell a robot what is has to do and therefore it'll always look preprogrammed. But that doesn't really matter, I think. The whole thing doesn't really matter... it's just image recognition on a really fast cluster. What does matter is that it's possible now. What's also possible but not clearly demonstrated in this video, it identification of objects (in this video clearly a high contrast is necessary). Just add those two up, put it on Honda's dancing robot and you've got a robot that can play just about any sport:) Or catch criminals...
It does not. Open Source Software doesn't stand for choice. It stands for certain guarantees. In even forces those guarantees onto you. Guarantees like "you can be 100% sure about what this software does" and "you can be 100% sure in 100 years the data written by this software can still be read". So mandatory use of free software forces certain guarantees. IMHO those guarantees - especially in a government - are plain simply required. It's absolutely not acceptable to buy software that doesn't offer you those guarantees so closed source software just isn't an option.
...is a tool that guarantees you it can still be used in 20 years. Only Open Source Software can assure you that. The manufacturers of Closed Source Software will eventually stop support, go backrupt or be bought by a large company that just kills it. There is absolutely no excuse to use closed source software. And "It's easier to use on the short term" is NOT an excuse if you cannot be 100% certain that your data will still be readable in 10 years.
I don't think the question is stupid. I think it's more stupid to just say wireless infrastructure is stupid because of power-requirements. It's also stupid to drive a 1000kg car to transport a 75kg person. But we all do it. Because it's so convenient. What's also convenient are wireless networks. They may use a bit more power but I don't really care and I guess just about nobody cares. That's why everybody buys wireless networks. But guess what, they transmit to the block across the street as well. And that was practically impossible when we all used to use cables and only the really geeky ones dared to hang a coax-cable across the street:)
So now all that's missing is some nice software that let's you talk to all your neighboors. Bandwidth will grow steadily, storage and memory does as well. In 10 years we'll all have enough storage-space to mirror the entire Internet together with 50 neightboors or so, so content-distribution with local caching becomes really easy and all data can be had from maybe just a few hops away. I'm not saying that it's easy or that it'll happen soon - especially the lag will be a problem for communication - but everything can and will be solved by an abundance of bandwidth, CPU-speed, memory and hydrogen powercells (which can theoretically produce something like 100 times as much power as a normal battery).
I know nothing more of this than you do so I may be wrong but I think there probably was something in their employment contracts that would make this possible. It's pretty normal to have some sort of non-concurreny-clause (or what it's called in english) in a contract.
All Wifi stations are connected on a huge Mesh network
Everything is encrypted and signed
Bandwidth and memory are so abundant that keeping a list of all nodes and routes on this huge network becomes easy
Batteries get replaced by hydrogen power cells which promise a theoretical 100-fold improvement over batteries
Camera's get really small
retina-laser-projection HUD displays are default in glasses
You control what you do or who you communicate to by looking at your HUD (that's also possible already)
It's inevitable - probably during our lifetime we'll be wiressly connected just about everywhere while being able to talk to everybody for free and sending high resolution life-video from just about everywhere to just about everywhere. Control TV's, stereo's, lights and microwaves wirelessly with your eye-movements. Work on the beach lying in the sun on your back. But your head's in the office/school. Or in the cinema:) And ordering a drink is a matter of seconds.
But there's more:
Cam, HUD and videofilters will make the sun shine everywhere and you can be in any possible virtual room you want together with all your friends
Face-recognition will bring up names next to people while they automatically send you their business card, blink once to talk - even if the other person is pretty far away
Zooming is default on all glasses
IMHO all this is just a matter of time - all basic technologies exist and everything's getting faster, cheaper, smaller, wider...
Vodafone starts filtering SMS-spam as of sometime this month. Here's more information but it's in dutch... I'm not sure if it's happening in the Netherlands only btw.
settling a lawsuit is never in your best interest if you have done nothing wrong
So then why is about 90% (correct me if I'm wrong) of all lawsuits in the USA settled out of court without a trial? I'd say settling is the default in the USA?
...I don't live in the great "land of the free" where money has replaced justice, common sense and freedom in a few years without any major uproar. Try to imagine the image most foreign nerds have of the USA... all we see is frivolous lawsuits, the freedom of innocent people thrown away, utterly stupid laws like the DMCA and patent-nonsense like the GIF-story... it's a really sad image. And it doesn't even matter if this image represents the truth - it's the way the rest of the nerdy world sees the USA nowadays. So what is the vision of the US-nerds about all this? Is it really that bad? Why?
.. of some old cartoon in which space-pilots had suits that would instantly totally amputate body-parts that were hurt:P Afterwards they'd have to spend a few months in "regeneration" where some controlled cancers made the leg grow back:P... Anyway, I really wouldn't want an automatic tourniquet in my sleeve, thank you:)
I DO want 14.4mbit on my phone. It means that I can watch video, do real videophone, choose the music I want to listen to realtime (instead of having to decide at home when writing your memorystick or whatever). The problem is that operators are aiming at the low-bandwidth-market with those new technologies. Which is utterly stupid. As soon as operators start to understand we DO want such speeds as long as it's affordable, this will take of.
The new Clie's are exceptionally good at it as compared to older/other PalmOS devices. But they're still no way near as reliable as normal remote controls. And since we already had watches doing that over 10 years ago, I don't see what this is all about. What the review should have been about is the Sony Clie NX70V or N90 which have a digital video/still camera built in, wifi and bluetooth capability and just overall kick ass.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's a bit of a problem; lawsuits like the one described in the story are considered pretty normal in the music industry; if OpenOffice and MSOffice both were songs, OpenOffice would probably have to pay some kind of fee to MSOffice for using their intellectual property and we'd all consider that normal...
Anyway... It'd be interesting to hear what other people think about this because to me it is a fundamental problem with how I view the whole copyright/patent/freespeech-discussion.
One solution would be to consider the sourcecode a work of art and the resulting binary an apparatus but that would be ridiculous since it would introduce a huge legal difference between scripts and binaries which would be great to feed a huge discussion but clearly is not a practical solution. So maybe the question we (or at least I) should ask ourselves first, is "What exactly are the differences between sourcecode and compiled sourcecode from a moral and IP point of view?"
I believe that the license fee Sun paid was totally unrelated to the Linux-bullying and stems from even before SCO started the bullying.
Because the domain is owned by Google Inc, not by an English entity that could be held responsible. The same for the netblock. So it's effectively just an USAian site which happens to have a pointer to it that ends in co.uk.
Really. They're exactly the same as a piece of software: a list of commands that explains how to get something done. It's just that nowadays we're used to recipes being interpreted by humans and software being interpreted by computers. So why's that? Simple. They don't speak the same language and cannot perform the same tasks. But that's just a matter of time.
So in effect computers are just slaves that perform tasks told to them in their own language. It's just that they cannot perform all tasks yet and don't understand your convenient natural language yet which causes most people not to understand this similarity and start treating things written in a certain language patentable because a computer happens to understand them. And that's completely utterly stupidly shortsightedly stupidly shortsighted.
On my clie NX70V the battery-life varies a lot on the applications used; the cam uses quite a lot, memorystick access as well. Wifi really drains it. So no matter how long they tell you the battery life is, it's utter bullshit anyway since it depends heavily on the application used. Taking pictures and immediately e-mailing them over wifi can drain the battery within half an hour while using it exclusively as an electronic agenda will get you somewhere around the mentioned 7 hours.
My car still, by default, requires a check-up every now and then. That just screams stability.
If you don't like this - which you should:P, please sign this petition.
First of all, I've implemented quite a few enterprise-level applications. Mostly for the government and police in my country. All of them are based on Open Source and most of them where delivered including the source for exactly the reasons I gave in my previous comment.
All of your arguments have absolutely nothing to do with the software being Open Source or not:
Those products didn't just stop working. You were never forced to upgrade. If you want the new features of the new products, then you upgrade. I've seen plenty of WinNT 3.51 and MS-DOS solutions still chugging along just fine.
So? Support is not about new features or new products. It's about fixing problems. Fixing problems in these OS's after support was terminated is totally out of the question and therefore when you're trying to keep an enterprise level system running, you definately forced to upgrade. Had you used Open Source, you'd still have the option to try to find support elsewhere. I'm not saying you'll find it, but with a closed source product I can tell you for sure you won't find it.
Yes, "anyone with a brain," obviously they can understand several million lines of source code with a glance and be able to fix logical errors or hack on new features within minutes. Bzzt! Wrong! Can you get someone to hack at it? Sure. Is that qualified support that you can trust on? No, especially in the mind of a business.
Ok "anyone with a brain" may be a bit to easy but the fact remains that had you used Open Source you'd have the option of trying to find support elsewhere. The complexity of the software is totally unrelated to it being Open Source or not.
You might want to check out open source in the enterprise. Vendors providing Linux solutions also enforce support lifecycles. You won't find published material on any version of Redhat Linux prior to 7.1 on their website. Can you call and get support for prior versions? Sure, but it'll cost you, and if you want the new spiffies that they've brought out in newer versions be prepared to upgrade. Or you can pay that kid to Redhat's altered KDE 3.x onto the Linux kernel 1.0. But then you're right back to praying again, but this time who are you gonna call when it doesn't work?
Again, whether the source is open or closed doesn't have anything to do with when your support-contract is terminated. It has everything to do with your chances of finding support elsewhere when a migration to a newer product is not an option.
Enterprise systems are all about one thing: guaranteed reliability. IMHO reliability on the long term is best guaranteed by using Open Source; what good is an enterprise-ready system with a planned lifespan of 25 years with absolutely no guarantee that the platform it's based on will still be around in 10 years? MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and NT3.51 failed here; if your enterprise was depending on one of these, an upgrade was forced upon you and all you can do is pray your software works with the new version. This will always be the case with closed-source software.
With Open Source Software, this is not a problem at all; support can be done by anyone that has a brain to understand the source and you pretty much get the guarantee it'll work as long as you want.
Closed Source Software in the enterprise IMHO is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It's basicly based on trusting a few people and then feeling safe because it has cost you a lot of money. And paying others is a lot easier than using your brain.
Slightly offtopic but IMHO very important: the juridical department of the EU has approved a new proposal for allowing software patents in the EU just this week. If it's up to the person responsible for preparing the decision making - Arlene McCarthy from british labour - this will be decided on in the the europarliament on the 30th of june. Please sign this petition to help stop this nonsense. I unfortunately only have a dutch link to the story (here).
I don't think you have to expect much from the EU. Just this week the juridical department of the europarliament approved the new proposal for allowing software patents (and therefore . The woman responsible for preparing the final decision-making - a british labour member of the europarliament: Arlene McCarty somehow is in a lot of hurry to force this through by 30 june already. I think she has a hidden agenda.
Anyway - all pro-Open Source talk from the EU IMHO is just a lot of nice words and no action while at the same time they really don't understand what they're talking about and give more and more away to big multinationals...
Unfortunately I've only got a link about the news in dutch, but there's a petition to cut this crap over here. If you agree with what it states, please sign it.
When picking up a spoon, you can feel the object it's lying on. Try putting a pretty tall object on a flat surface and look at the top from the side on a distance with a stretched arm so you can just reach it. Now don't look at the flat surface but just at the top of the object (as if it was somewhere in the air without any point of reference to help you - like the robot). Try to fetch it. It's a lot harder now.
In the more advanced examples it did use stereoscopic vision. Look at the one where it repeatedly catches a ball. The same for the video where it catches a ball which falls vertically. Only in the tracking-examples it did use a single camera if I recall correctly.
I think the hand is just a bad example; nobody'd like to get a firm handshake from a robot... it's scary, you know. I think we'll never shake hands with robots - especially not when they look like robots and have metal hands.
When you look at the avoiding-video, it's very clear the behavior is preprogrammed; the hand moves when the object comes at clearly visible range from the hand. It has to be - you somehow have to tell a robot what is has to do and therefore it'll always look preprogrammed. But that doesn't really matter, I think. The whole thing doesn't really matter... it's just image recognition on a really fast cluster. What does matter is that it's possible now. What's also possible but not clearly demonstrated in this video, it identification of objects (in this video clearly a high contrast is necessary). Just add those two up, put it on Honda's dancing robot and you've got a robot that can play just about any sport:) Or catch criminals...
It does not. Open Source Software doesn't stand for choice. It stands for certain guarantees. In even forces those guarantees onto you. Guarantees like "you can be 100% sure about what this software does" and "you can be 100% sure in 100 years the data written by this software can still be read". So mandatory use of free software forces certain guarantees. IMHO those guarantees - especially in a government - are plain simply required. It's absolutely not acceptable to buy software that doesn't offer you those guarantees so closed source software just isn't an option.
...is a tool that guarantees you it can still be used in 20 years. Only Open Source Software can assure you that. The manufacturers of Closed Source Software will eventually stop support, go backrupt or be bought by a large company that just kills it. There is absolutely no excuse to use closed source software. And "It's easier to use on the short term" is NOT an excuse if you cannot be 100% certain that your data will still be readable in 10 years.
I don't think the question is stupid. I think it's more stupid to just say wireless infrastructure is stupid because of power-requirements. It's also stupid to drive a 1000kg car to transport a 75kg person. But we all do it. Because it's so convenient. What's also convenient are wireless networks. They may use a bit more power but I don't really care and I guess just about nobody cares. That's why everybody buys wireless networks. But guess what, they transmit to the block across the street as well. And that was practically impossible when we all used to use cables and only the really geeky ones dared to hang a coax-cable across the street:)
So now all that's missing is some nice software that let's you talk to all your neighboors. Bandwidth will grow steadily, storage and memory does as well. In 10 years we'll all have enough storage-space to mirror the entire Internet together with 50 neightboors or so, so content-distribution with local caching becomes really easy and all data can be had from maybe just a few hops away. I'm not saying that it's easy or that it'll happen soon - especially the lag will be a problem for communication - but everything can and will be solved by an abundance of bandwidth, CPU-speed, memory and hydrogen powercells (which can theoretically produce something like 100 times as much power as a normal battery).
I know nothing more of this than you do so I may be wrong but I think there probably was something in their employment contracts that would make this possible. It's pretty normal to have some sort of non-concurreny-clause (or what it's called in english) in a contract.
- Wifi becomes really really fast
- Long-range Wifi becomes really cheap
- All Wifi stations are connected on a huge Mesh network
- Everything is encrypted and signed
- Bandwidth and memory are so abundant that keeping a list of all nodes and routes on this huge network becomes easy
- Batteries get replaced by hydrogen power cells which promise a theoretical 100-fold improvement over batteries
- Camera's get really small
- retina-laser-projection HUD displays are default in glasses
- You control what you do or who you communicate to by looking at your HUD (that's also possible already)
It's inevitable - probably during our lifetime we'll be wiressly connected just about everywhere while being able to talk to everybody for free and sending high resolution life-video from just about everywhere to just about everywhere. Control TV's, stereo's, lights and microwaves wirelessly with your eye-movements. Work on the beach lying in the sun on your back. But your head's in the office/school. Or in the cinema:) And ordering a drink is a matter of seconds.But there's more:
- Cam, HUD and videofilters will make the sun shine everywhere and you can be in any possible virtual room you want together with all your friends
- Face-recognition will bring up names next to people while they automatically send you their business card, blink once to talk - even if the other person is pretty far away
- Zooming is default on all glasses
IMHO all this is just a matter of time - all basic technologies exist and everything's getting faster, cheaper, smaller, wider...Vodafone starts filtering SMS-spam as of sometime this month. Here's more information but it's in dutch... I'm not sure if it's happening in the Netherlands only btw.
So then why is about 90% (correct me if I'm wrong) of all lawsuits in the USA settled out of court without a trial? I'd say settling is the default in the USA?
So you're basicly saying justice has been replaced by money in the USA?
...I don't live in the great "land of the free" where money has replaced justice, common sense and freedom in a few years without any major uproar. Try to imagine the image most foreign nerds have of the USA... all we see is frivolous lawsuits, the freedom of innocent people thrown away, utterly stupid laws like the DMCA and patent-nonsense like the GIF-story... it's a really sad image. And it doesn't even matter if this image represents the truth - it's the way the rest of the nerdy world sees the USA nowadays. So what is the vision of the US-nerds about all this? Is it really that bad? Why?
.. of some old cartoon in which space-pilots had suits that would instantly totally amputate body-parts that were hurt:P Afterwards they'd have to spend a few months in "regeneration" where some controlled cancers made the leg grow back:P... Anyway, I really wouldn't want an automatic tourniquet in my sleeve, thank you:)
I DO want 14.4mbit on my phone. It means that I can watch video, do real videophone, choose the music I want to listen to realtime (instead of having to decide at home when writing your memorystick or whatever). The problem is that operators are aiming at the low-bandwidth-market with those new technologies. Which is utterly stupid. As soon as operators start to understand we DO want such speeds as long as it's affordable, this will take of.
The new Clie's are exceptionally good at it as compared to older/other PalmOS devices. But they're still no way near as reliable as normal remote controls. And since we already had watches doing that over 10 years ago, I don't see what this is all about. What the review should have been about is the Sony Clie NX70V or N90 which have a digital video/still camera built in, wifi and bluetooth capability and just overall kick ass.