Destroying one or more television sets will do liberty no good. It can merely decrease one or more people's access to information.
You increase someone's freedom when you give that person more options to choose from.
You can rank the intelligence of sentient beings by their ability to predict future events based on their grasp on past and present.
Pirating a TV show means nothing in itself.
But using the fact that this TV show was pirated at this point in time and the fact that some people in a traditionally closed circle want to disseminate medical information at this point in time to show a trend and alert other people to what MAY happen is doing something to increase liberty.
Because, when you make other people aware of what is going on BEFORE it is finished, you give them the option to choose to go with or against the flow.
Too bad those Apple people are a bunch of pricks and expect me to buy a Power Mac and an expensive operating system. Oh well.
I have both an old PPC 7100 on my desk and a brand new Pentium II MMX (which cost me 3000$CAN). And I find that Linux with KDE on this Pentium feels much slower than MacOS on my PPC 7100.
An iMac is MUCH faster and would have cost me less!
A few weeks ago, people were giving shit to some company that was charging $1.99 more than the next for shipping a CD-ROM.
And the same people are now saying the George Lucas should milk each and every nickel possible out of his product.
Lots of people here don't like spam in their mail boxes, but they encourage the film producers to shove all that publicity mercilessly down our throats.
Jon Katz is one of the few persons making Slashdot more than a bunch of clueless nerds and I hope he will continue to contribute his thoughts.
However, anytime you start talking about "redistribution of wealth," this starts sounding like someone making 35K a year jealous of those who make 250k.
Being jealous is one thing, saying that everyone who gets 250k a year get 7 times more work done every day than people who earn only 35k a year is something else.
I'm 47 years old now, and though I have tried very hard, I have yet to find the relationship between the revenue of a person and his or her contribution to society.
Some of the people who depend on welfare for their survival are more useful to society than a few of the millionaires who have never done anything useful in their whole life.
I've been saying about the same thing since I met with the computer world at the Berkeley Homebrew Computer Club in 1981.
But from my point of view, the last mile is not the main problem.
1. The data architecture for managing the whole thing is not quite there yet (some harmonization and normalization is still needed);
2. The software is not quite up to the task yet (the OpenSource believers who give their code for the benefit of mankind have yet to meet with the volunteers in the non-profit organizations who also give their time for the benefit of said mankind);
3. The political will is nowhere to be seen (I have not yet heard of one politician who has dared imagine that computers could be used to do more than simply balance debits and credits or accumulate data on individual citizens).
The fight around MP3 and the discussions about the fact that FREE software is more a question of freedom than price, are bringing us closer to home. But we still have a long way to go.
For many years, we have heard the slogan: "Power to the people".
Well, power is not given, it is taken.
So the next move for democracy is for the citizens to make.
Now that the open source programmers have created the basic tools to make the computers work, they have to turn their attention to what is needed to help local communities use the new information technologies to regain control of what is going on on their territories.
And they have to do it for a price that will make it affordable to even the small communities of developping countries.
Also, people have to realize that using proprietary or open source software, is as much a political as a technical decision.
What's important with the Internet is not what we can find there now, but what we will use it for from now on!
I think this whole discussion about OpenSource software, is not an end in itself, but the process by which some of the hackers will find a way for all hackers to keep on coding happily well into the next millenium.
At this point in time, the way to achieve that is far from obvious.
But I find that some of the most significant headway in the good direction is being made right here, right now.
Getting the job done and getting paid is a good enough reward. The question is how to achieve it. Here's a suggestion:
For the time being, let's divide programmers in two groups:
- The Rock&Roll stars - The dentists
The Rock&Roll stars want to create a hit and strike gold. If they don't make it, they stay unknown and poor. If they do, their wealth increases by orders of magnitude.
The dentists just do their job, day after day. However good a job they did for one customer, they still have to start from scratch in the next one's mouth. Of course, as they go along, they gather experience and may be able to process more clients in one day, but not by orders of magnitude.
I'd say the Rock&Roll star depends on the existence of closed software to work.
And the dentist could do very well in an open software paradigm.
It depends what is the profile of most programmers: a teenage wonder kid with no responsibilities or a skilled adult in a particular trade.
I have been creating open source software for customers for the last fifteen years and in all that time, not one of my customers ever tried to understand my source code, let alone try to learn how to code himself.
They pay me by the hour to be able to focus on their own job instead of trying to learn of to make the damn thing work.
So, on one side, you have end users and on the other, you have technicians.
One side pays the other to spend time solving problems. That's pretty much in line with the idea of capitalism. And it takes care of feeding the programmers.
Now forget the end user one moment and focus on the programmers.
To do their work, they need software tools. They have a choice between paying for a closed tool kit or an open one.
In my opinion, it is very easy to demonstrate that it makes much more economic sense for each individual programmer to share the tools than to sell it to each other.
For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
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.
So what I'm saying is that the economic model under which Open Source software makes economic sense is one where most programmers are not confined within the glass walls of an ivory tower, but are supported by a network of paying customers.
This may help bridge the gap between programmers who give away their work of love for the benefit of mankind and the volunters who also give away their time for the benefit of mankind in non-profit organisations (generally working in a Windows environment).
Slashdot Mirror
Destroying one or more television sets will do liberty no good. It can merely decrease one or more people's access to information.
You increase someone's freedom when you give that person more options to choose from.
You can rank the intelligence of sentient beings by their ability to predict future events based on their grasp on past and present.
Pirating a TV show means nothing in itself.
But using the fact that this TV show was pirated at this point in time and the fact that some people in a traditionally closed circle want to disseminate medical information at this point in time to show a trend and alert other people to what MAY happen is doing something to increase liberty.
Because, when you make other people aware of what is going on BEFORE it is finished, you give them the option to choose to go with or against the flow.
And this is what freedom is all about.
Too bad those Apple people are a bunch of pricks and expect me to buy a Power Mac and an expensive operating system. Oh well.
I have both an old PPC 7100 on my desk and a brand new Pentium II MMX (which cost me 3000$CAN). And I find that Linux with KDE on this Pentium feels much slower than MacOS on my PPC 7100.
An iMac is MUCH faster and would have cost me less!
A few weeks ago, people were giving shit to some company that was charging $1.99 more than the next for shipping a CD-ROM.
And the same people are now saying the George Lucas should milk each and every nickel possible out of his product.
Lots of people here don't like spam in their mail boxes, but they encourage the film producers to shove all that publicity mercilessly down our throats.
Jon Katz is one of the few persons making Slashdot more than a bunch of clueless nerds and I hope he will continue to contribute his thoughts.
Serge
However, anytime you start talking about "redistribution of wealth," this starts sounding like someone making 35K a year jealous of those who make 250k.
Being jealous is one thing, saying that everyone who gets 250k a year get 7 times more work done every day than people who earn only 35k a year is something else.
I'm 47 years old now, and though I have tried very hard, I have yet to find the relationship between the revenue of a person and his or her contribution to society.
Some of the people who depend on welfare for their survival are more useful to society than a few of the millionaires who have never done anything useful in their whole life.
I've been saying about the same thing
since I met with the computer world
at the Berkeley Homebrew Computer Club in 1981.
But from my point of view,
the last mile is not the main problem.
1. The data architecture for managing the whole thing is not quite there yet
(some harmonization and normalization is still needed);
2. The software is not quite up to the task yet
(the OpenSource believers who give their code
for the benefit of mankind have yet to meet with
the volunteers in the non-profit organizations
who also give their time for the benefit of said mankind);
3. The political will is nowhere to be seen
(I have not yet heard of one politician
who has dared imagine that computers could be used to do more than simply balance debits and credits or accumulate data on individual citizens).
The fight around MP3 and the discussions about the fact that FREE software is more a question of freedom than price, are bringing us closer to home. But we still have a long way to go.
For many years, we have heard the slogan: "Power to the people".
Well, power is not given, it is taken.
So the next move for democracy is for the citizens to make.
Now that the open source programmers have created the basic tools to make the computers work, they have to turn their attention to what is needed to help local communities use the new information technologies to regain control of what is going on on their territories.
And they have to do it for a price that will make it affordable to even the small communities of developping countries.
Also, people have to realize that using proprietary or open source software, is as much a political as a technical decision.
What's important with the Internet
is not what we can find there now,
but what we will use it for from now on!
Does this mean: "You are what you hack"?
I think this whole discussion about OpenSource software, is not an end in itself, but the process by which some of the hackers will find a way for all hackers to keep on coding happily well into the next millenium.
At this point in time, the way to achieve that is far from obvious.
But I find that some of the most significant headway in the good direction is being made right here, right now.
Getting the job done and getting paid is a good enough reward. The question is how to achieve it. Here's a suggestion:
For the time being, let's divide programmers in two groups:
- The Rock&Roll stars
- The dentists
The Rock&Roll stars want to create a hit and strike gold. If they don't make it, they stay unknown and poor. If they do, their wealth increases by orders of magnitude.
The dentists just do their job, day after day. However good a job they did for one customer, they still have to start from scratch in the next one's mouth. Of course, as they go along, they gather experience and may be able to process more clients in one day, but not by orders of magnitude.
I'd say the Rock&Roll star depends on the existence of closed software to work.
And the dentist could do very well in an open software paradigm.
It depends what is the profile of most programmers: a teenage wonder kid with no responsibilities or a skilled adult in a particular trade.
I have been creating open source software for customers for the last fifteen years and in all that time, not one of my customers ever tried to understand my source code, let alone try to learn how to code himself.
They pay me by the hour to be able to focus on their own job instead of trying to learn of to make the damn thing work.
So, on one side, you have end users and on the other, you have technicians.
One side pays the other to spend time solving problems. That's pretty much in line with the idea of capitalism. And it takes care of feeding the programmers.
Now forget the end user one moment and focus on the programmers.
To do their work, they need software tools. They have a choice between paying for a closed tool kit or an open one.
In my opinion, it is very easy to demonstrate that it makes much more economic sense for each individual programmer to share the tools than to sell it to each other.
For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
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.
So what I'm saying is that the economic model under which Open Source software makes economic sense is one where most programmers are not confined within the glass walls of an ivory tower, but are supported by a network of paying customers.
This may help bridge the gap between programmers who give away their work of love for the benefit of mankind and the volunters who also give away their time for the benefit of mankind in non-profit organisations (generally working in a Windows environment).