I'm also a Be fan. I have FreeBSD installed and am playing around with GNOME 1.2 (after running with just Windowmaker on both it and the Linux partition it replaced, for reasons that are another story!). Despite the fact that there's some compelling reasons to stay in FreeBSD or Linux over BeOS--naming three of them off the top of my head: Acrobat 4.0, Netscape/Mozilla and Java--I spend most of my time in BeOS because I can do most of what I need with the tools I have there, and the UI is substantially more elegant and responsive. The responsiveness is something I don't think is going to be easy to match under the constraints of a desktop manager on top of a toolbox on top of X11.
Having said that, I think the work being done with GNOME is being misunderstood in (some of) the Linux community... and vastly underestimated in most of the BeOS community. At times we give diehard Amiga fans a run for their money when it comes to pound-for-pound smugness about the things our chosen platform gets right. At the very least, there are ideas in GNOME that aren't duplications of work on other platforms. And some of them are pretty intriguing. I think complaints about ugly minimalist icons or the obvious similarities between the Nautilus UI and other file managers is a case of missing the forest for the trees.
And, it's worth noting that two former Be programmers, including the programmer of the BeOS interface (the recently-opened Tracker/Deskbar), are now at Eazel.
No offense, but bullpucky. Even the most radical environmental groups I'm aware of (not just Greenpeace, but Earth First! and Sea Shepherd) have no stand on economics. They'll fight against what they see as misuse of the environment for economic reasons. I have yet to see an environmental group match your definition of "primitivist," and I can't think of a single group which has publicly advocated communism. (What you described as "socialism" matches communism; socialist countries do not have central control over all distribution of wealth, which would imply no sanctioned private employment, little to no personal property, and so on. That may describe Cuba, which is communist, but it doesn't at all describe France, which is socialist.)
I support the Nature Conservancy, too. But you don't have to be a communist to support the concept of national parks and wilderness refuges. Supporting things that benefit the country as a whole, even if you don't personally expect benefit from them, just strikes me as part of good citizenship.
The biggest challenge might be that distributors do know something about Linux: namely, that the most visible aspects of the community seem to be comprised of people who don't want to pay for closed-source software.
This is a potentially serious dilemma. There aren't any open source business models that allow for making money on software whose only value is the software itself--that is, you're not going to be selling subscriptions, service contracts, commercial OEM support, and the like.
Now, you might be saying "that's irrelevant--the games don't have to be open source." Well, theoretically, you're absolutely right. But are you going to devote significant resources to developing for a platform whose proponents are nearly always focused on free software? You may be more interested in the free speech part of it, but if your definition of "free speech" includes "you can't restrict my right to give the software you wrote away," the distinction is irrelevant to an accountant.
I'm sure people will think I'm being facetious or flippant, but I'm not. Right now, showing companies that you can make money doing Linux games means showing companies that Linux users are willing to pay for old-fashioned, closed source commercial software.
While I can't speak for ESR, in my experience a lot of libertarians don't take great pains to respect differences of opinion. Anyone who suggests that there are obvious benefits to some level of government regulation is derided as an economic neanderthal, usually with the dreaded dismissal, "Well, then, you're obviously a liberal."
It seems people on both the poles that RMS and ESR represent placidly ignore that America has done very, very well throughout the 20th century with a mixed economy, a market with imposed rules. It boils down to whether the model for "competition" you want the market to use is the competition of a game, or the competition of warfare. Personally, I'm more comfortable with the former than the latter.
Having picked my nit, I agree with the generalities of your post; it seems obvious to me that people should be compensated for their work if they so choose. If there is a way to do that within the definition of "Free Software," great. But RMS' underlying assertion is that using software I do not have the freedom to both copy and modify is an immoral restriction. A restriction, perhaps, but I have always had the freedom to use or not use software as I see fit, to learn enough to write my own applications if I don't like what's out there (for reasons practical or philosophical), or to throw away my computer and use a typewriter. If I were not free to try to sell my own products without being forced to subsidize competitors, this would seem a more serious restriction on my freedom.
As a follow-up to this observation, the reason Apple bought Next rather than buying Be was because of the enterprise capability--that was the market Gil "Human Prozac" Amelio wanted to try to capture. At the time a lot of people thought this was a stupid idea, and I'm still not convinced that Apple wouldn't have been better served by buying Be. (Of course, if they'd bought Be, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs. Whether that's good or bad depends on one's point of view.)
And what if one of the featured decides that the published version is too personal, and, despite of the alterations for privacy, all too personal and identifiable?
At risk of sounding harsh, then they shouldn't have posted them to start with.
Look, folks: how many people read Slashdot on a frequent basis? How many people see any given article or high-rated comment? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
How many people have seen a substantial part of the "Hellmouth" series? At least tens of thousands? Closer to hundreds of thousands?
More than you think than will see a book with a print run of, say, 25,000? I've worked in publishing. 25,000 would be an big run for a first printing of something that didn't have the name Danielle Steel or Stephen King on it.
Wake up, folks. These posts have already been published. There are some valid copyright concerns in theory, but I don't think this can be said to set a "once online, all rights are lost" precedent. (You can, of course, kiss first serial rights in all countries goodbye, but that's another story.)
The change in media is irrelevant--the question is only whether or not this falls under "fair use" provisions of copyright. If you're prepared to argue that it doesn't, you'd better be prepared to argue against
Copying someone else's.sig
Forwarding a joke, with or without attribution
Posting or forwarding most or all of a short news snippet
Clicking the "email this article to a friend" link anywhere
Printing out a web page with a recipe and letting someone else photocopy it
...you can see where I'm going with this. The media and the distribution of that media aren't relevant to copyright concerns; you don't get to say that those examples are okay but the Voices from the Hellmouth book isn't simply because there's a chance you'll be able to find it at Borders.
Be's position on BeOS on the G3/G4 has always been that the obstacles are political, not technical. They're not going to put resources into being on a platform whose owner doesn't want them there. Apple has made it clear that, despite the fact that they make most of their money from hardware, they see BeOS as competition. (For proof of this, look at the shareware BeOS program "Postmaster," whose future is in limbo now that its author works for Apple--they explicitly told him that they do not want him selling a product on a competing platform.) Could Be make BeOS work on the G3/G4s? Sure. Despite all the ire directed against them, it's important to remember that they've never claimed otherwise. They blame Apple for not supporting their efforts. Can you blame Apple, instead, then? Maybe; they're arguably being bastards on this point. Neither Steve Jobs nor Gassee are exactly known for their shy and retiring manners, though, and the fact is that BeOS wasn't ported to the Power Mac platform from the BeBox... it was ported to the Power Computing platform. Yes. Power Computing gave the support to Be initially, not Apple. The Amelio-era Apple just wasn't hostile to Be. Ultimately can you blame the conflicting egos of Gassee and Jobs? Probably. Life goes on. Personally, I'm kind of interested in LinuxPPC. I'm curious about getting MacOS X on my iBook, but I think there's more than a slight chance that OS X will prove to be a resource-sucking, underperforming swamp hog (albeit one with a lickable snout).
I think this attitude implicitly contains the assumption that all labels behave like Warner Brothers and Universal. Artists on labels like Rounder, Razor & Tie, HTD and countless other labels which rarely make it into chain music stores are often making a higher percentage of profits per album sold, but with a smaller up-front advance than they might get from a "big label" company.
Furthermore, let's look at the argument that the 7% they might make from the 15,000 copies of the CD that these "small label artists" sell is a small percentage of what they take in. That represents about $17,000 of income. Do you really think Dar Williams, Grey Eye Glances and other artists who perform in small clubs are making many times that through performances and merchandise?
While this is a cynical interpretation, it may be that the reason companies are releasing programs free for Linux while still selling the Windows/Mac counterparts has nothing to do with building market share at all--in Linux.
It suggests, perhaps, that they don't think there's any money to be made under Linux because people won't pay for products. Given a choice between a commercial product that does 95% of what one wants and an open source product that does 50% of it, many Linux users will go for the open source product. These companies are saying, in effect, "for all the talk about free speech, you guys really want free beer," and betting that if they release something that does 70% of what you want that's closed-source but "free for non-commercial use," you'll use that.
What's the advantage of that? Chiefly, word of mouth. It's a program you may get to be familiar with, even if you end up using the open source equivalent. If Linux takes off in the business market, perhaps that "free for noncommercial use" will get them money because you'll recommend the non-free version to your boss. And, of course, if Linux doesn't take off in the business market, no big deal. They weren't planning to give away the Windows NT version anyway, were they?
The interesting question is: are they right? As people have pointed out before, Linux may be the number two server platform behind NT, but some of the commercial OSes it leads in seats are still whomping it in profits. The reason behind this is at least guessable: people are installing Linux because it's cheap. They can buy one box and put it on a hundred machines. And despite all the companies that say they're going to make money selling service (Red Hat? Linuxcare?), Linux proponents often point to the great technical support you can get for free on the net.
In other words, many of Linux's best "selling points" for users may be big gaping pits of doom when it comes to making a profit, both for Linux OS vendors and for application vendors.
...if you read what Salon's saying, this is a book about the free software movement being written. It'll probably be drawing on what Leonard's already written, because that's what columnists generally do. Only one chapter is online so far, though, so it's rather disingenous of the Slashdottian editors to call it an archive--although it's probably misunderstanding borne of a too-quick look at the site.
The interesting thing is that it's being "made visible" throughout the writing process with the idea of being subject to peer review--not identical to free software, but in terms of book writing, perhaps analagous. This seems to me to be a fairly neat approach to a book on this subject, and one that future journalists quite likely won't take. (If Jon Katz was writing about the movement, would he invite the community to comment on drafts in progress, or would he be more interested in giving us 100% unadulterated Katz?)
The number of people who died under Stalin's rule has absolutely no relevance to public funding of universities. If you want to argue for the superiority of private funding, go ahead, but don't pull out this red herring of equating anything that could be described as "socialized" with Stalinist oligarchy. You may not like Canada's socialized medical insurance system (it is not "socialized medicine," as doctors are still more often than not in private practice), but it has demonstrably not led to widespread famine and forced labor camps. And, in practice, only the purest of libertarians complains about the government structures that help business in the United states, from sugar subsidies to below-market logging in national forests, from local "incentives" to companies and sports teams to the S&L bailout.
I know it's heretical to suggest in this day and age that public institutions, sometimes even in the form of (gasp) Big Government, can actually do some things better than companies can, but sometimes that's hard to dispute--you can go back to the railroads, and a little more recently to the analog phone system. These were public-private partnerships because there is little economic justification for companies to pursue plans that will not pay off for a decade (or more).
If innovation is effectively privatized, there wouldn't be things like the World Wide Web. And Monsanto was a much more chilling example to have picked than I suspect you intended. Perhaps the idea of companies patenting crops that indigenous farmers have been planting for thousands of years and then charging the farmers to keep planting those crops doesn't bother you. Maybe the idea of your own genes being patented by a company--giving them control over not only research but applications (like disease treatments) involving the genes they "own"--doesn't bother you, either. It bothers me, though. It bothers me a lot.
The Self page has moved to http://www.sun.com/research/self/index. html. (Actually, the entire 'SunLabs' tree has moved to http://www.sun.com/research, it appears.) The project is described as no longer being active, although the last release of Self, 4.1, was last month.
As someone pointed out (late enough that it'll probably get lost in the shuffle, as will this comment), this was an advisory (not even a proposed regulation) sent to a specific employer when they asked about their situation. Their situation was not telecommuting. It was handling of explosive material, specifically fireworks.
Now, maybe you think employers should be responsible for their employees' safety if they get their workers to assemble fireworks at home in their spare time, and maybe you don't. But the fact is that the haymakers here weren't "the administration," they were the administration's opponents, who want to take every opportunity possible to pump up the theory "Democrats = regulation, regulation = bad." The RNC went so far as to issue a press release that all but said Gore and Bradley were personally responsible for this stupid oppression of all home workers. Don't believe it--and don't buy into the "we're the anti-government party" rhetoric when either party spouts it. Not all regulations are bad, and conversely, bad regulation cuts across party lines handily (just like overspending and tax raises do).
And, don't paint OSHA as the bad guys. They're severely understaffed and can't enforce most of what they're charged with anyway--and if you look at most of what they do (instead of digging for spectacular stupids, which any set of regulations will have a few of), those regulations came about after accidents that they're trying to prevent. (The anti-regulation forces always somehow forget that the majority of regulation came about because of public outcry, not because bureaucrats wanted to make their own jobs more difficult.)
"Stinger" is a codename for a slimmed-down version of BeOS, basically, that uses a customized version of Opera for its UI. There's information about Stinger in other press releases on Be's web site, and it was introduced in prototype at Comdex running on National Semiconductor's WebPAD device.
Stinger (and the next major release of BeOS, as far as I know) will support RealAudio, RealVideo and Macromedia Flash for streaming media. It'll probably also support streaming MP3 and streaming QuickTime, but that's just hazarding a guess.
At the time of the Amiga's heyday, Microsoft wasn't really a juggernaut, and neither they nor the PC world in general took the Amiga seriously.
The company that did take them seriously was Apple.
The Amiga wasn't as friendly as the Macintosh--in terms of usability, Intuition never caught up to Finder--but in most other respects, it kicked the Macintosh's butt. Remember, this was 1985: Macs didn't even do color at that point, and there was nothing on the Apple drawing board that could come close to the Amiga's capabilities.
This is the real reason the Apple IIgs came into being--Apple needed something right then that could compete with the Amiga, and the in-development Macintosh II wasn't going to do it: its price was just far too prohibitive for home use.
Apple insiders said that while Apple dismissed Commodore in public, that wasn't the case inside--they were seen as the real threat. I still remember persistent rumors that Commodore's one "big money" TV campaign for the Amiga (high special-effects budget and the Pointer Sisters) failed to get much, if any, network time because Apple threatened to pull their advertising if Commodore was given time--although as far as I know those rumors have never been substantiated.
Restaurants in the World Showcase pavilions are generally branches of high-end restaurants from their "host" countries. The Italian restaurant is Alfredo's (of Fettucine Alfredo). The Mexican restaurant's other location is in Mexico City. The Japanese restaurants and store are run by a company that's been around in Japan since the mid-1600s. And so on. This doesn't mean the restaurants are automatically good, but Disney can't be accused of not making an effort to get the real thing.
Actually, Disney restaurants in general--particularly the ones outside the theme parks in the resorts--are well-respected. They may not make "10 Best in America" lists, but one or usually will make "100 Best in America" lists; the California Grill (in the Contemporary Resort) and Artist Point (in the Wilderness Lodge) are consistently among the top-rated in Florida.
As to Epcot's "authenticity" in general, I don't recall that word coming up in the brochures nearly as often as you seem to. The World Showcase pavilions are run as showcases for the tourism offices of their respective countries (Morocco even has a branch of their tourism office there). What do you expect? A "great slums of London" exhibit in the British pavilion? The museum in the China pavilion to be showing an exhibit titled '100 Years of Repressing Human Rights: A Retrospective?"
Permission to photograph your likeness and permission to reproduce the photograph are not identical.
The same is also true in art. If I write a story, and someone else does illustrations for it, I do not automatically "own" those illustrations: the artist does. We both have to grant permission for copying or publishing. (And, if the artist decides his painting is just "inspired" by my work, or even claims it's just coincidental, it'd be legally my responsibility to prove infringement, something that could be exceedingly difficult.)
In fact, when you buy a piece of art, you do not necessarily get the rights to make prints of that art: you may get them in a "package deal," but the rights can be reserved by the artist or sold separately.
Basically, it boils down to this: the ownership of the media (CD, photo paper, canvas), the ownership of the media's contents (software, audio recording, photograph, painting), and publication rights to those contents are all separate. "Owning" one does not automatically affect the states of the others, and any of them can be offered independently of one another.
The title of this comment may be a little facetious, but for the most part it's true. Most home office users don't buy support contracts, either. Not even all small offices do, unless it comes with the site license.
The entire "give the software away for free and charge for support" concept--it seems to me--came from people used to the traditional market for Unix software and applications: enterprise customers, research facilities and universities. In those markets, commercial software is supported constantly by the vendor. It's most of what you're paying for--you're more or less buying the support for $20,000 (or whatever) a year and that includes "free" updates to the systems you've purchased. In this environment, charging for support for open source software is pretty natural.
In home and SOHO environments, though, this model is unprecedented, in a canonical sense of the term. Some software comes with 90 days of free technical support, and some companies have a "knowledge base" of software. And that's it.
The question is: are people really crying out to change that? Don't give me a "yes" answer too fast. Even most newbie Linux users are net-savvy enough to find a newsgroup to ask for support on or to use Red Hat's free knowledge base, and anyone can manage to get to their local Borders and pick up "Linux for Dummies."
And this is just for the operating system, which is generally the most complex piece of a desktop OS. The chances are that most users aren't going to have any problems with a desktop app that require a support contract--they might have trouble with installation, but that's it. Nearly anything else they can ask a friend, find a web page, get a book, post a message on a news group, and so on.
At risk of sounding doom-and-gloom, this is a problem I see with the entire "give it away" philosophy. Flame if you will, but as has been observed before, all software has development costs associated with it; the free software world has had the fortune that most of those costs have effectively been eaten by universities and a select few companies.
When you try to make money by starting commercial projects as open source, though, they need to end up paying their way somehow. Red Hat and Linux distributors to date have essentially sold neither software nor support, they've sold convenience. Red Hat wants to move to a subscription-based model, it seems, and that's understandable--each "unofficial Red Hat" CD someone buys with no support is an indirect material harm to their business. (Again, that sounds harsh, but if you sell at a profit margin of 50% and 60% of your potential customers get your product without giving you money for it, you're losing money.)
But can that really work for a "desktop application"? I'm not sure that it can't... but I'm not convinced that it can, either.
While this will sound more cynical than it's really intended to, I think the "second wave" of Linux users--the hackers outside universities who had little or no Unix experience but were willing to learn--gravitated toward Linux because (a) it was free, (b) it was powerful (unlike Minix) and (c) it had a dynamic presence (unlike free BSD variants, which really didn't leave the university until after Linux had become visible).
I appreciate the value of open source software, both tools and OS, but I think that value to the majority of users is often overstated by proponents (particularly here on Slashdot, where overstatement is the natural order). For may users, just knowing the software is open source is a source of comfort; even so, in practice many of the "second wave" users (and I'd say a majority of the "third wave" that's been coming due to the buzz of the last 18 months or so) rely on the "core team" to make changes and updates to Linux's kernel and core utilities. I don't. I do kernel recompiles, but--like a lot of end users, I suspect--only when I need to reconfigure something in the OS that can only be set up by doing that. I generally only run production kernels.
Having watched both for a while now, I don't feel I'm going out on a limb by saying that Linux's development process isn't any faster than that of a "closed" OS like BeOS if you stick just to what the respective teams have released as production quality. The difference is that you can see into the development process with Linux, and potentially participate in it in a way that you couldn't with a closed OS.
The question is, though, how many people are coming to Linux because of that "transparency", and how many are coming because of the price? Slashdot's audience is likely skewed to the hacker side--and even so, it's worth noting that a common refrain here when Red Hat's "official distribution" is mentioned is "Why pay that when you can get it for $2 at Cheapbytes?"
Certainly, hacking on sound tools sounds a lot easier than creating a Maya clone.
Probably, yes.:-)
But, Carmack may be talking about things like SoundForge, CoolEdit, Logic, Aural Illusion, Nuendo and the like. These are not insignificant. I'm not sure there's even a good "SoundTracker" type program (creator, not player) for Linux.
Re:I have a big problem with that statement...
on
Gartner Slams Linux
·
· Score: 2
Okay, sure, Linux may not have MS Office, nor does it have Corel Office, but it does have Wordperfect and Star Office. Isn't this mainly what the typical business person needs?"
Depends on the typical business. I think a business that started on Linux from the ground up could do very well. The business that I'm working at now couldn't make such a switch, though: critical business applications are running on Access, and Excel spreadsheets that Star Office can't handle aren't uncommon.
(For those of you wondering what kind of spreadsheets Star Office can't handle: ones with embedded Visual Basic, for starters. For those of you wondering why we'd use Access for critical business applications: I didn't write it! Don't blame me! It's not my fault!...)
"The Salon article makes it out to sound as if Apple might somehow be hoping its choice of BSD would split the open source community."
The Salon article actually says:
"The circumstantial evidence available, however, suggests that Apple's embrace of BSD is part of a natural evolutionary process for Apple, and has little to do with a nefarious plot to undermine Linux."
Mmm... Apple's quality reputation during the "Performa era" was, IIRC, not very good. They were using cheap parts, throwing them together cheaply, and had an alarmingly high return rate. (This isn't just my perception--it was the perception of someone I know of who worked at Apple designing Performas!) And we won't even get into the flaming Powerbooks....
Granted, the Quadras never suffered from that reputation. But there's a reason every iMac went through a long burn-in process--as the "consumer Mac" it was going for the same space the Performa failed in, and it needed to have close to 100% reliability. And it has.
For what it's worth, the Macintosh IIsi systems we had when I worked at Kinko's were close to problem free, but so were the IBM PS/2s that arrived while I was working there (when I started Kinko's was a Mac-only chain). It comes down to build quality, and that's not an Apple exclusive.
The "AIM" group broke up last year. Apple has put themselves in the position of relying on Motorola, but the reverse isn't true; Motorola's original intent for AltiVec was embedded systems. From a business standpoint rather than a geek standpoint, Intel isn't competing against the PowerPC at all; chip customers are motherboard manufacturers, and the only way PPC and Pentium could be competing for the same space is to be compatible with one another. Motorola has no competition in their space, and Intel's competition is AMD. (Anyone who thinks the "Intel Inside" campaign was targeted against Apple, call me--I have a 64-bit TRS-80 to sell you. It'll be the next big thing.)
In anti-defense of Intel, our Anonymous friend is not exactly correct that the Pentium III is a tweaked Pentium II--it's even older than that. Both of them are using the P6 core from the Pentium Pro, which was the last major upgrade to the 8086 CPU family. Everything else has been either pushing the speed level or integrating separate units onto the CPU.
However, given that Intel hasn't released any specs for the P7 processor other than noting it's going to be using a.13-micron manufacturing process, it's premature to say that Intel won't be able to "compete performance-wise" with the G4 chip "for the next two years, at least." P7 is due in about a year (Q3 2000), and given AMD's Athlon processor, it's a good bet that Intel will be motivated to keep to that timetable. Let's wait for the P7 specs to be leaked before we slag it, hmm?
(To those not keeping score, by the way, the P7 is not Merced. The IA64 line is a separate dark horse from Intel, and I think Merced's successor, McKinley, is going to be one to watch.)
Not quite that simple
on
Be on the G4
·
· Score: 1
This is a common misunderstanding--because Apple has had "programming specs" for the G3 line up on their web site for a long time, people assume that that's what Be needs to port BeOS to Apple G3 machines. It's not. The freely-available documents detail the changes in the OS from the API side--essentially, the application-to-OS interface. Be needs the OS-to-hardware interface. This is the difference between a document telling programmers the API for new features in DirectX 10.3 to support the FooBarGL 2700's revolutionary features, and a document detailing how DirectX 10.3 talks to the FooBarGL 2700's hardware.
I don't remember the name, but there is a specific document that Apple produces for internal use for all of their machines which is essentially a hardware reference book, detailing the OS-to-hardware interface for the proprietary ASICs each new Macintosh model introduces. When Steve Jobs returned to the company, the release policy for these documents changed; they are now only releasable outside the company to MacOS licensees. You can't license MacOS unless you're making approved Macintosh-compatible hardware, which Be certainly isn't.
Be has said point blank--check the PowerPC FAQ on their site--that they could reverse engineer the specs for the G3. They're just not going to do it. Unless Apple explicitly gives them the hardware reference documents for their new Macintoshes, Be is not going to modify BeOS to run on them. End of story.
I know "Apple and Be are obstinate about one another" isn't nearly as sexy a rationale as a grand Intel conspiracy, but it's a lot more plausible. Intel has invested in not only Be, but Red Hat and VA Research; it is obvious that Intel has decided that it is in their interest to keep alternative operating systems alive on their CPUs. There is no rationale for believing that Intel would mandate ending of support for non-Intel chips from Be and not from Red Hat, and indeed, no rationale for Intel to do that at all: Intel is not interested in actions that make them look more like chip monopolists, and furthermore, from a business standpoint the PowerPC really isn't competing with them. (Think about who Intel's customers really are--hint: it's not consumers--and you'll see this.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also a Be fan. I have FreeBSD installed and am playing around with GNOME 1.2 (after running with just Windowmaker on both it and the Linux partition it replaced, for reasons that are another story!). Despite the fact that there's some compelling reasons to stay in FreeBSD or Linux over BeOS--naming three of them off the top of my head: Acrobat 4.0, Netscape/Mozilla and Java--I spend most of my time in BeOS because I can do most of what I need with the tools I have there, and the UI is substantially more elegant and responsive. The responsiveness is something I don't think is going to be easy to match under the constraints of a desktop manager on top of a toolbox on top of X11.
Having said that, I think the work being done with GNOME is being misunderstood in (some of) the Linux community... and vastly underestimated in most of the BeOS community. At times we give diehard Amiga fans a run for their money when it comes to pound-for-pound smugness about the things our chosen platform gets right. At the very least, there are ideas in GNOME that aren't duplications of work on other platforms. And some of them are pretty intriguing. I think complaints about ugly minimalist icons or the obvious similarities between the Nautilus UI and other file managers is a case of missing the forest for the trees.
And, it's worth noting that two former Be programmers, including the programmer of the BeOS interface (the recently-opened Tracker/Deskbar), are now at Eazel.
No offense, but bullpucky. Even the most radical environmental groups I'm aware of (not just Greenpeace, but Earth First! and Sea Shepherd) have no stand on economics. They'll fight against what they see as misuse of the environment for economic reasons. I have yet to see an environmental group match your definition of "primitivist," and I can't think of a single group which has publicly advocated communism. (What you described as "socialism" matches communism; socialist countries do not have central control over all distribution of wealth, which would imply no sanctioned private employment, little to no personal property, and so on. That may describe Cuba, which is communist, but it doesn't at all describe France, which is socialist.)
I support the Nature Conservancy, too. But you don't have to be a communist to support the concept of national parks and wilderness refuges. Supporting things that benefit the country as a whole, even if you don't personally expect benefit from them, just strikes me as part of good citizenship.
The biggest challenge might be that distributors do know something about Linux: namely, that the most visible aspects of the community seem to be comprised of people who don't want to pay for closed-source software.
This is a potentially serious dilemma. There aren't any open source business models that allow for making money on software whose only value is the software itself--that is, you're not going to be selling subscriptions, service contracts, commercial OEM support, and the like.
Now, you might be saying "that's irrelevant--the games don't have to be open source." Well, theoretically, you're absolutely right. But are you going to devote significant resources to developing for a platform whose proponents are nearly always focused on free software? You may be more interested in the free speech part of it, but if your definition of "free speech" includes "you can't restrict my right to give the software you wrote away," the distinction is irrelevant to an accountant.
I'm sure people will think I'm being facetious or flippant, but I'm not. Right now, showing companies that you can make money doing Linux games means showing companies that Linux users are willing to pay for old-fashioned, closed source commercial software.
While I can't speak for ESR, in my experience a lot of libertarians don't take great pains to respect differences of opinion. Anyone who suggests that there are obvious benefits to some level of government regulation is derided as an economic neanderthal, usually with the dreaded dismissal, "Well, then, you're obviously a liberal."
It seems people on both the poles that RMS and ESR represent placidly ignore that America has done very, very well throughout the 20th century with a mixed economy, a market with imposed rules. It boils down to whether the model for "competition" you want the market to use is the competition of a game, or the competition of warfare. Personally, I'm more comfortable with the former than the latter.
Having picked my nit, I agree with the generalities of your post; it seems obvious to me that people should be compensated for their work if they so choose. If there is a way to do that within the definition of "Free Software," great. But RMS' underlying assertion is that using software I do not have the freedom to both copy and modify is an immoral restriction. A restriction, perhaps, but I have always had the freedom to use or not use software as I see fit, to learn enough to write my own applications if I don't like what's out there (for reasons practical or philosophical), or to throw away my computer and use a typewriter. If I were not free to try to sell my own products without being forced to subsidize competitors, this would seem a more serious restriction on my freedom.
As a follow-up to this observation, the reason Apple bought Next rather than buying Be was because of the enterprise capability--that was the market Gil "Human Prozac" Amelio wanted to try to capture. At the time a lot of people thought this was a stupid idea, and I'm still not convinced that Apple wouldn't have been better served by buying Be. (Of course, if they'd bought Be, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs. Whether that's good or bad depends on one's point of view.)
At risk of sounding harsh, then they shouldn't have posted them to start with.
Look, folks: how many people read Slashdot on a frequent basis? How many people see any given article or high-rated comment? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
How many people have seen a substantial part of the "Hellmouth" series? At least tens of thousands? Closer to hundreds of thousands?
More than you think than will see a book with a print run of, say, 25,000? I've worked in publishing. 25,000 would be an big run for a first printing of something that didn't have the name Danielle Steel or Stephen King on it.
Wake up, folks. These posts have already been published. There are some valid copyright concerns in theory, but I don't think this can be said to set a "once online, all rights are lost" precedent. (You can, of course, kiss first serial rights in all countries goodbye, but that's another story.)
The change in media is irrelevant--the question is only whether or not this falls under "fair use" provisions of copyright. If you're prepared to argue that it doesn't, you'd better be prepared to argue against
...you can see where I'm going with this. The media and the distribution of that media aren't relevant to copyright concerns; you don't get to say that those examples are okay but the Voices from the Hellmouth book isn't simply because there's a chance you'll be able to find it at Borders.
Be's position on BeOS on the G3/G4 has always been that the obstacles are political, not technical. They're not going to put resources into being on a platform whose owner doesn't want them there. Apple has made it clear that, despite the fact that they make most of their money from hardware, they see BeOS as competition. (For proof of this, look at the shareware BeOS program "Postmaster," whose future is in limbo now that its author works for Apple--they explicitly told him that they do not want him selling a product on a competing platform.) Could Be make BeOS work on the G3/G4s? Sure. Despite all the ire directed against them, it's important to remember that they've never claimed otherwise. They blame Apple for not supporting their efforts. Can you blame Apple, instead, then? Maybe; they're arguably being bastards on this point. Neither Steve Jobs nor Gassee are exactly known for their shy and retiring manners, though, and the fact is that BeOS wasn't ported to the Power Mac platform from the BeBox... it was ported to the Power Computing platform. Yes. Power Computing gave the support to Be initially, not Apple. The Amelio-era Apple just wasn't hostile to Be. Ultimately can you blame the conflicting egos of Gassee and Jobs? Probably. Life goes on. Personally, I'm kind of interested in LinuxPPC. I'm curious about getting MacOS X on my iBook, but I think there's more than a slight chance that OS X will prove to be a resource-sucking, underperforming swamp hog (albeit one with a lickable snout).
I think this attitude implicitly contains the assumption that all labels behave like Warner Brothers and Universal. Artists on labels like Rounder, Razor & Tie, HTD and countless other labels which rarely make it into chain music stores are often making a higher percentage of profits per album sold, but with a smaller up-front advance than they might get from a "big label" company.
Furthermore, let's look at the argument that the 7% they might make from the 15,000 copies of the CD that these "small label artists" sell is a small percentage of what they take in. That represents about $17,000 of income. Do you really think Dar Williams, Grey Eye Glances and other artists who perform in small clubs are making many times that through performances and merchandise?
Really?
While this is a cynical interpretation, it may be that the reason companies are releasing programs free for Linux while still selling the Windows/Mac counterparts has nothing to do with building market share at all--in Linux.
It suggests, perhaps, that they don't think there's any money to be made under Linux because people won't pay for products. Given a choice between a commercial product that does 95% of what one wants and an open source product that does 50% of it, many Linux users will go for the open source product. These companies are saying, in effect, "for all the talk about free speech, you guys really want free beer," and betting that if they release something that does 70% of what you want that's closed-source but "free for non-commercial use," you'll use that.
What's the advantage of that? Chiefly, word of mouth. It's a program you may get to be familiar with, even if you end up using the open source equivalent. If Linux takes off in the business market, perhaps that "free for noncommercial use" will get them money because you'll recommend the non-free version to your boss. And, of course, if Linux doesn't take off in the business market, no big deal. They weren't planning to give away the Windows NT version anyway, were they?
The interesting question is: are they right? As people have pointed out before, Linux may be the number two server platform behind NT, but some of the commercial OSes it leads in seats are still whomping it in profits. The reason behind this is at least guessable: people are installing Linux because it's cheap. They can buy one box and put it on a hundred machines. And despite all the companies that say they're going to make money selling service (Red Hat? Linuxcare?), Linux proponents often point to the great technical support you can get for free on the net.
In other words, many of Linux's best "selling points" for users may be big gaping pits of doom when it comes to making a profit, both for Linux OS vendors and for application vendors.
...if you read what Salon's saying, this is a book about the free software movement being written. It'll probably be drawing on what Leonard's already written, because that's what columnists generally do. Only one chapter is online so far, though, so it's rather disingenous of the Slashdottian editors to call it an archive--although it's probably misunderstanding borne of a too-quick look at the site.
The interesting thing is that it's being "made visible" throughout the writing process with the idea of being subject to peer review--not identical to free software, but in terms of book writing, perhaps analagous. This seems to me to be a fairly neat approach to a book on this subject, and one that future journalists quite likely won't take. (If Jon Katz was writing about the movement, would he invite the community to comment on drafts in progress, or would he be more interested in giving us 100% unadulterated Katz?)
The number of people who died under Stalin's rule has absolutely no relevance to public funding of universities. If you want to argue for the superiority of private funding, go ahead, but don't pull out this red herring of equating anything that could be described as "socialized" with Stalinist oligarchy. You may not like Canada's socialized medical insurance system (it is not "socialized medicine," as doctors are still more often than not in private practice), but it has demonstrably not led to widespread famine and forced labor camps. And, in practice, only the purest of libertarians complains about the government structures that help business in the United states, from sugar subsidies to below-market logging in national forests, from local "incentives" to companies and sports teams to the S&L bailout.
I know it's heretical to suggest in this day and age that public institutions, sometimes even in the form of (gasp) Big Government, can actually do some things better than companies can, but sometimes that's hard to dispute--you can go back to the railroads, and a little more recently to the analog phone system. These were public-private partnerships because there is little economic justification for companies to pursue plans that will not pay off for a decade (or more).
If innovation is effectively privatized, there wouldn't be things like the World Wide Web. And Monsanto was a much more chilling example to have picked than I suspect you intended. Perhaps the idea of companies patenting crops that indigenous farmers have been planting for thousands of years and then charging the farmers to keep planting those crops doesn't bother you. Maybe the idea of your own genes being patented by a company--giving them control over not only research but applications (like disease treatments) involving the genes they "own"--doesn't bother you, either. It bothers me, though. It bothers me a lot.
The Self page has moved to http://www.sun.com/research/self/index. html. (Actually, the entire 'SunLabs' tree has moved to http://www.sun.com/research, it appears.) The project is described as no longer being active, although the last release of Self, 4.1, was last month.
As someone pointed out (late enough that it'll probably get lost in the shuffle, as will this comment), this was an advisory (not even a proposed regulation) sent to a specific employer when they asked about their situation. Their situation was not telecommuting. It was handling of explosive material, specifically fireworks.
Now, maybe you think employers should be responsible for their employees' safety if they get their workers to assemble fireworks at home in their spare time, and maybe you don't. But the fact is that the haymakers here weren't "the administration," they were the administration's opponents, who want to take every opportunity possible to pump up the theory "Democrats = regulation, regulation = bad." The RNC went so far as to issue a press release that all but said Gore and Bradley were personally responsible for this stupid oppression of all home workers. Don't believe it--and don't buy into the "we're the anti-government party" rhetoric when either party spouts it. Not all regulations are bad, and conversely, bad regulation cuts across party lines handily (just like overspending and tax raises do).
And, don't paint OSHA as the bad guys. They're severely understaffed and can't enforce most of what they're charged with anyway--and if you look at most of what they do (instead of digging for spectacular stupids, which any set of regulations will have a few of), those regulations came about after accidents that they're trying to prevent. (The anti-regulation forces always somehow forget that the majority of regulation came about because of public outcry, not because bureaucrats wanted to make their own jobs more difficult.)
"Stinger" is a codename for a slimmed-down version of BeOS, basically, that uses a customized version of Opera for its UI. There's information about Stinger in other press releases on Be's web site, and it was introduced in prototype at Comdex running on National Semiconductor's WebPAD device.
Stinger (and the next major release of BeOS, as far as I know) will support RealAudio, RealVideo and Macromedia Flash for streaming media. It'll probably also support streaming MP3 and streaming QuickTime, but that's just hazarding a guess.
At the time of the Amiga's heyday, Microsoft wasn't really a juggernaut, and neither they nor the PC world in general took the Amiga seriously.
The company that did take them seriously was Apple.
The Amiga wasn't as friendly as the Macintosh--in terms of usability, Intuition never caught up to Finder--but in most other respects, it kicked the Macintosh's butt. Remember, this was 1985: Macs didn't even do color at that point, and there was nothing on the Apple drawing board that could come close to the Amiga's capabilities.
This is the real reason the Apple IIgs came into being--Apple needed something right then that could compete with the Amiga, and the in-development Macintosh II wasn't going to do it: its price was just far too prohibitive for home use.
Apple insiders said that while Apple dismissed Commodore in public, that wasn't the case inside--they were seen as the real threat. I still remember persistent rumors that Commodore's one "big money" TV campaign for the Amiga (high special-effects budget and the Pointer Sisters) failed to get much, if any, network time because Apple threatened to pull their advertising if Commodore was given time--although as far as I know those rumors have never been substantiated.
Restaurants in the World Showcase pavilions are generally branches of high-end restaurants from their "host" countries. The Italian restaurant is Alfredo's (of Fettucine Alfredo). The Mexican restaurant's other location is in Mexico City. The Japanese restaurants and store are run by a company that's been around in Japan since the mid-1600s. And so on. This doesn't mean the restaurants are automatically good, but Disney can't be accused of not making an effort to get the real thing.
Actually, Disney restaurants in general--particularly the ones outside the theme parks in the resorts--are well-respected. They may not make "10 Best in America" lists, but one or usually will make "100 Best in America" lists; the California Grill (in the Contemporary Resort) and Artist Point (in the Wilderness Lodge) are consistently among the top-rated in Florida.
As to Epcot's "authenticity" in general, I don't recall that word coming up in the brochures nearly as often as you seem to. The World Showcase pavilions are run as showcases for the tourism offices of their respective countries (Morocco even has a branch of their tourism office there). What do you expect? A "great slums of London" exhibit in the British pavilion? The museum in the China pavilion to be showing an exhibit titled '100 Years of Repressing Human Rights: A Retrospective?"
Permission to photograph your likeness and permission to reproduce the photograph are not identical.
The same is also true in art. If I write a story, and someone else does illustrations for it, I do not automatically "own" those illustrations: the artist does. We both have to grant permission for copying or publishing. (And, if the artist decides his painting is just "inspired" by my work, or even claims it's just coincidental, it'd be legally my responsibility to prove infringement, something that could be exceedingly difficult.)
In fact, when you buy a piece of art, you do not necessarily get the rights to make prints of that art: you may get them in a "package deal," but the rights can be reserved by the artist or sold separately.
Basically, it boils down to this: the ownership of the media (CD, photo paper, canvas), the ownership of the media's contents (software, audio recording, photograph, painting), and publication rights to those contents are all separate. "Owning" one does not automatically affect the states of the others, and any of them can be offered independently of one another.
The title of this comment may be a little facetious, but for the most part it's true. Most home office users don't buy support contracts, either. Not even all small offices do, unless it comes with the site license.
The entire "give the software away for free and charge for support" concept--it seems to me--came from people used to the traditional market for Unix software and applications: enterprise customers, research facilities and universities. In those markets, commercial software is supported constantly by the vendor. It's most of what you're paying for--you're more or less buying the support for $20,000 (or whatever) a year and that includes "free" updates to the systems you've purchased. In this environment, charging for support for open source software is pretty natural.
In home and SOHO environments, though, this model is unprecedented, in a canonical sense of the term. Some software comes with 90 days of free technical support, and some companies have a "knowledge base" of software. And that's it.
The question is: are people really crying out to change that? Don't give me a "yes" answer too fast. Even most newbie Linux users are net-savvy enough to find a newsgroup to ask for support on or to use Red Hat's free knowledge base, and anyone can manage to get to their local Borders and pick up "Linux for Dummies."
And this is just for the operating system, which is generally the most complex piece of a desktop OS. The chances are that most users aren't going to have any problems with a desktop app that require a support contract--they might have trouble with installation, but that's it. Nearly anything else they can ask a friend, find a web page, get a book, post a message on a news group, and so on.
At risk of sounding doom-and-gloom, this is a problem I see with the entire "give it away" philosophy. Flame if you will, but as has been observed before, all software has development costs associated with it; the free software world has had the fortune that most of those costs have effectively been eaten by universities and a select few companies.
When you try to make money by starting commercial projects as open source, though, they need to end up paying their way somehow. Red Hat and Linux distributors to date have essentially sold neither software nor support, they've sold convenience. Red Hat wants to move to a subscription-based model, it seems, and that's understandable--each "unofficial Red Hat" CD someone buys with no support is an indirect material harm to their business. (Again, that sounds harsh, but if you sell at a profit margin of 50% and 60% of your potential customers get your product without giving you money for it, you're losing money.)
But can that really work for a "desktop application"? I'm not sure that it can't... but I'm not convinced that it can, either.
While this will sound more cynical than it's really intended to, I think the "second wave" of Linux users--the hackers outside universities who had little or no Unix experience but were willing to learn--gravitated toward Linux because (a) it was free, (b) it was powerful (unlike Minix) and (c) it had a dynamic presence (unlike free BSD variants, which really didn't leave the university until after Linux had become visible).
I appreciate the value of open source software, both tools and OS, but I think that value to the majority of users is often overstated by proponents (particularly here on Slashdot, where overstatement is the natural order). For may users, just knowing the software is open source is a source of comfort; even so, in practice many of the "second wave" users (and I'd say a majority of the "third wave" that's been coming due to the buzz of the last 18 months or so) rely on the "core team" to make changes and updates to Linux's kernel and core utilities. I don't. I do kernel recompiles, but--like a lot of end users, I suspect--only when I need to reconfigure something in the OS that can only be set up by doing that. I generally only run production kernels.
Having watched both for a while now, I don't feel I'm going out on a limb by saying that Linux's development process isn't any faster than that of a "closed" OS like BeOS if you stick just to what the respective teams have released as production quality. The difference is that you can see into the development process with Linux, and potentially participate in it in a way that you couldn't with a closed OS.
The question is, though, how many people are coming to Linux because of that "transparency", and how many are coming because of the price? Slashdot's audience is likely skewed to the hacker side--and even so, it's worth noting that a common refrain here when Red Hat's "official distribution" is mentioned is "Why pay that when you can get it for $2 at Cheapbytes?"
Certainly, hacking on sound tools sounds a lot easier than creating a Maya clone.
Probably, yes. :-)
But, Carmack may be talking about things like SoundForge, CoolEdit, Logic, Aural Illusion, Nuendo and the like. These are not insignificant. I'm not sure there's even a good "SoundTracker" type program (creator, not player) for Linux.
Depends on the typical business. I think a business that started on Linux from the ground up could do very well. The business that I'm working at now couldn't make such a switch, though: critical business applications are running on Access, and Excel spreadsheets that Star Office can't handle aren't uncommon.
(For those of you wondering what kind of spreadsheets Star Office can't handle: ones with embedded Visual Basic, for starters. For those of you wondering why we'd use Access for critical business applications: I didn't write it! Don't blame me! It's not my fault!...)
You write:
The Salon article actually says:
Reality check, please.
Mmm... Apple's quality reputation during the "Performa era" was, IIRC, not very good. They were using cheap parts, throwing them together cheaply, and had an alarmingly high return rate. (This isn't just my perception--it was the perception of someone I know of who worked at Apple designing Performas!) And we won't even get into the flaming Powerbooks....
Granted, the Quadras never suffered from that reputation. But there's a reason every iMac went through a long burn-in process--as the "consumer Mac" it was going for the same space the Performa failed in, and it needed to have close to 100% reliability. And it has.
For what it's worth, the Macintosh IIsi systems we had when I worked at Kinko's were close to problem free, but so were the IBM PS/2s that arrived while I was working there (when I started Kinko's was a Mac-only chain). It comes down to build quality, and that's not an Apple exclusive.
Hmm. IIsi and PS/2. I feel old now.
The "AIM" group broke up last year. Apple has put themselves in the position of relying on Motorola, but the reverse isn't true; Motorola's original intent for AltiVec was embedded systems. From a business standpoint rather than a geek standpoint, Intel isn't competing against the PowerPC at all; chip customers are motherboard manufacturers, and the only way PPC and Pentium could be competing for the same space is to be compatible with one another. Motorola has no competition in their space, and Intel's competition is AMD. (Anyone who thinks the "Intel Inside" campaign was targeted against Apple, call me--I have a 64-bit TRS-80 to sell you. It'll be the next big thing.)
In anti-defense of Intel, our Anonymous friend is not exactly correct that the Pentium III is a tweaked Pentium II--it's even older than that. Both of them are using the P6 core from the Pentium Pro, which was the last major upgrade to the 8086 CPU family. Everything else has been either pushing the speed level or integrating separate units onto the CPU.
However, given that Intel hasn't released any specs for the P7 processor other than noting it's going to be using a .13-micron manufacturing process, it's premature to say that Intel won't be able to "compete performance-wise" with the G4 chip "for the next two years, at least." P7 is due in about a year (Q3 2000), and given AMD's Athlon processor, it's a good bet that Intel will be motivated to keep to that timetable. Let's wait for the P7 specs to be leaked before we slag it, hmm?
(To those not keeping score, by the way, the P7 is not Merced. The IA64 line is a separate dark horse from Intel, and I think Merced's successor, McKinley, is going to be one to watch.)
This is a common misunderstanding--because Apple has had "programming specs" for the G3 line up on their web site for a long time, people assume that that's what Be needs to port BeOS to Apple G3 machines. It's not. The freely-available documents detail the changes in the OS from the API side--essentially, the application-to-OS interface. Be needs the OS-to-hardware interface. This is the difference between a document telling programmers the API for new features in DirectX 10.3 to support the FooBarGL 2700's revolutionary features, and a document detailing how DirectX 10.3 talks to the FooBarGL 2700's hardware.
I don't remember the name, but there is a specific document that Apple produces for internal use for all of their machines which is essentially a hardware reference book, detailing the OS-to-hardware interface for the proprietary ASICs each new Macintosh model introduces. When Steve Jobs returned to the company, the release policy for these documents changed; they are now only releasable outside the company to MacOS licensees. You can't license MacOS unless you're making approved Macintosh-compatible hardware, which Be certainly isn't.
Be has said point blank--check the PowerPC FAQ on their site--that they could reverse engineer the specs for the G3. They're just not going to do it. Unless Apple explicitly gives them the hardware reference documents for their new Macintoshes, Be is not going to modify BeOS to run on them. End of story.
I know "Apple and Be are obstinate about one another" isn't nearly as sexy a rationale as a grand Intel conspiracy, but it's a lot more plausible. Intel has invested in not only Be, but Red Hat and VA Research; it is obvious that Intel has decided that it is in their interest to keep alternative operating systems alive on their CPUs. There is no rationale for believing that Intel would mandate ending of support for non-Intel chips from Be and not from Red Hat, and indeed, no rationale for Intel to do that at all: Intel is not interested in actions that make them look more like chip monopolists, and furthermore, from a business standpoint the PowerPC really isn't competing with them. (Think about who Intel's customers really are--hint: it's not consumers--and you'll see this.)