The difference between an open-source management model and a traditional management model is that the management in this case comes from the most expert software developers in the group. Raymond, being the primary force behind Fetchmail, and Torvalds, being the primary force behind the Linux kernel, are not traditional management types at all because they get their hands dirty, and they have technical expertise.
I don't want to insult anyone, but generally, people who have Computer Science/Management based degrees DO NOT know as much as people with Computer Science/Engineering degrees. They are taught to manage based on traditional techniques of business management, techniques which generally detract from the overall usefulness and efficiency of a project. They obtain a small amount of technical knowledge, enough to become merely adequate at their field, enough that they are not ignorant of the goals and ideas of a product (not entirely ignorant, anyway), yet they would be completely confused if actually asked to develop a worthwhile piece of the puzzle.
The open source projects mentioned in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, i believe, are similar to traditional projects in that they require orginization and central administration to become useful, but they differ in that people who don't understand the development process are not welcome to participate.
I'll just leave you with this: in our society, actual work is done by a large amount of people; products are produced by a large amount of people, etc. Yet the small few at the top who do not actually produce any products; who do not know how or want to actually work for a living; who attempt to administrate despite their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually produced; those people retain the largest cut of the money and hand out the rest to everyone else who did something. Is there something wrong with this societal model??
But if they don't know your name, then how are they going to bust you? Track your IP address to your computer, and then prove you were the one sitting at it when the account was set up? Oh, well maybe that's exactly what they could do. Never mind. (now deleting 5 false hotmail accounts:)
, because they made a statement which sounds apppealing to a large amount of people, and then asked them if they agree with it. Most people probably do not have such strong beliefs about it one way or the other, but they only have the options:
A: I agree with the statement
B: I disagree with the statement
These surveys, with only two very limited choices, do not give a valid readout of what people actually think about the situation. If they sort of agree with it, but not exactly, they'll just pick choice A, because they don't entirely DIS-agree with it.
Actually, he was talking about Amazon attempting to copyright ideas that software is based on (one-click shopping); ideas that are fundamentally obvious, widely used, and belong, essentially, to no one, and everyone at the same time.
Stop posting just to hear yourself talk.
It's not any harder to program for Linux. In fact, due to a greater number of freeware shared libraries, it might be easier depending on what you're doing.
My experiences with programming games under Linux has gone quite well. It is true that full screen graphics don't seem to move as fast under X11 as they do under Win9x, but the actual coding is very intuitive (using GGI to target X and SVGAlib).
Programming for Macs is also easier than programming for Windows. Have you tried all of them? Macintosh has hands down the best programming interface for graphics. Windows can not match its ease of use (unless you program in Visual Basic... i guess...)
I was just wondering if you had ever actually written any code or whether you were just speculating...
I think that people found the concepts presented in the article interesting, and they probably found that the pictures were humorous as well.
As for the snide comment about businesses obviously being competitive... "Competitive" business tactics would involve attempting to manufacture a better product to replace another company's product, such as if I were able to make a better word processing package than Microsoft Word. "Competitive" would not imply, on the other hand, that I should try to bring down a rival through propaganda, libel, rifling through their dumpsters, etc. What a waste of time and resources (which could have been devoted to "competition".
Thanks for the help. I guess I probably should have RPM for binary package installation. I really don't like RPM all that much, though. *.tgz is really only good for source distributions, anyway. (unless you want to bang your head on your keyboard after trying to uninstall all day...) Thanks.
With how often the MPAA espouses brilliant statements about how easy it is to find pirated movies on the internet, I found the following section of their legal brief particularly funny:
Defendants introduced no evidence to quantify the number of web sites on which the DeCSS software program is available. Although they elicited some testimony that typing the character string "DeCSS" into a search engine retrieves "a few hundred hits" (Tr. 1099:23-1100:2 (Appel)), that speculation proved to be highly misleading. As was made clear by defendants' expert, Dr. Appel -- who has specialized knowledge in browser technologies -- search engine results, by their nature, are grossly overbroad, since they do not distinguish between the appearance of articles about DeCSS or about this case, or the use of DeCSS as an acronym, on the one hand, and the appearance of the actual DeCSS software program on the other hand. (Tr. 1111:3-1112:19 (Appel)). Indeed, the only evidence of the number of sites on which DeCSS appears was elicited by plaintiffs' cross-examination of Dr. Appel, who estimated that only 20% to 30% of the 100 to 200 sites he reviewed from his own, independent search on the Internet actually made the DeCSS program available for download. Id. See also Tr. 127:15-128:6, 137:16-138:25 (Shamos, describing search that revealed "a huge number of pages that made reference to the string DeCSS," but that he only saw "a handful . . . between five and ten" which contained the source code and one with the object code). Dr. Appel explained that this results from the fact that any Internet search for "DeCSS": (1) would not provide information about the number of sites that actually have DeCSS source or object code; (2) would report sites that "just mention" DeCSS, but neither have the program nor link to the program on another site; (3) would commonly report multiple entries for different pages of the same site; and (4) would be driven by the appearance of the character string -- "DeCSS" -- that was typed in, rather than report the actual number of sites that are posting or linking to DeCSS in one form or another. (Tr. 1111:3-1114:12 (Appel)).
Are they claiming that they base their piracy statistics on actually downloading every pirated movie on the 'net??
The problem is not singular to Gnutella. Deceptive advertising is prevalent in nearly every forum for communication or sharing of any kind available. I certainly never encouraged anyone to download pirated content, and though this is most of what comprises the content of Gnutella, I could just as easily be searching for something legitimate.
Or i could be using altavista.com and have a bunch of non-existent *.cx sites point me to clickheretofind.com, no matter what I search for. (Yes, this actually happened last year).
The problem lies in the deceptive motives of people who come up with these types of programs. If whatever service they sell is not interesting enough to attract customers based on its own merits, they attempt instead to trick customers into reading about their service, with the hopes that a few of these accidental readers will be interested in what they have to offer. Trying to stick an ad in front of someone is fine with me; it's been done for a long time, but trying to disguise your ad as something entirely different? I think we have to draw a line between advertising and fraud at some point...
I disagree that the only factor in whether an operating system is provably stable is how many bugtraq reports are done on it. But I do believe from experience that UNIX-based operating systems have more security flaws than Windows NT.
But let's take a look at the bigger picture: he never ACTUALLY mentions stability. He is basing his entire opinion of an OS off of network security. He also never mentions the obviously greater functionality of UNIX over NT, I guess that doesn't matter either. He also never mentions the much larger choice of networking software on UNIX platforms (which may be a significant part of the reason why there are more security vulnerabilities in UNIX).
He also never mentions the fact that most network vulnerabilities on UNIX can be worked around by smart system administrators, while most NT problems must be fixed *eventually* by Microsoft.
You don't give a flying fuck? Well, some of us are programmers and think that creating a virtual machine in software is an interesting subject in and of itself. Whether it has yet produced a useful product in this case is another subject entirely. I would be immensely proud of such an achievement if it were mine... The concept of programming is so much more interesting in an open source environment because you can watch things develop, rather than just using the end product, which often times finally appears years later. I want to see where this goes from here!
If the "artists" were any good at all, they would make their living off of playing their music live rather than by selling studio-produced, watered down crap and then sitting back and raking in the dough.
If you want to listen to some real music, go to some bars and listen to some local musicians, you know, the people who still play music because they have creative instinct and talent?!
Or turn on Austin City Limits some time and see how good you really think Metallica is after watching some real guitarists play. And if you just have to have some bigger names, try Junior Brown or the Old 97's. You'll never listen to another shitty pop crap album again...
After Sony's continual failures in court over Playstation emulators, it should come as no shock I suppose that the judge is ruling this way. The future of reverse engineering is looking pretty damn good for once right now. Unless UCITA comes to your state that is...
Katz mentioned that there are moral and ethical considerations, which I happen to agree with, but I am confused as to whether he thinks this type of study should be done at all. I mean, are we supposed to halt science because it may possibly lead to negative consequences, or are you just advocating a more slow, careful approach to genetic study?? Sorry to say this, but that really just seemed like one huge rant about genetics that really didn't say very much.
You probably should read the post again. It was not posted by Jon Katz, and I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate you dragging his name through the mud without anything at all to support your claims...
There is an extremely positive aspect to King's bypassing his publisher to distribute his work, and a great point to be made here: publishers and other "middle men" don't actually accomplish anything outside of distribution. Think about it: marketing for a book or album or whatnot is unnecessary, since anything worthy of review gets reviews in national publications. While it is true that several of these publications only review what the record/publishing companies tell them to, many other publications review things because the writers themselves thought that it was good. What do these corporations do besides marketing and distribution? They have money. That's it. They will not make your art better. They will not make society better. Think about it: corporate management makes more money than the people who actually produce art, and their benefit to society is not immediately evident, while the artist's benefit is obvious: they provide you with entertainment. What King is doing is eliminating a useless function from the process of his creation. He does not need them, so he gets rid of them. This is how it should be.
A lot of really great things have been said about DeCSS here in response to the trial, and I am pleased to see so many people concerned about the outcome and its implications for freedom of information. But there's a lot more going on than this, and a victory in this trial will only be a temporary setback for huge corporate industry at best. The problem is that the DeCSS trial is only one facet of a much larger problem involving massive conglomeration of wealth and resources in the hands of a few greedy corporations, and as long as the majority of thinking people in this country remain apathetic, those corporations will keep coming back to these same points over and over until one day it's decided in their favor. Legal precedent is meaningless if our legislators continually decide to vote in favor of corporation-bootlicking bills like the DMCA. In World War II Germany, perfectly good, nice people did anything they were instructed to do by their government, whether that was to display a picture of Hitler in their house or to turn in their less patriotic neighboors for execution. These are the current faces of America. They are decent people, but they are unwilling to attempt to resist the domination of a greater power. Thus, if we are unable to change the tide of apathy in the US, you can win all the DeCSS trials you want and you'll still be buried under a pile of corporate shit someday soon.
Let me just ask you this: if you wrote a book, and it took you years to write it, and you were very proud of that book, and it even got on the national bestseller list, and then someone else two weeks later wrote the EXACT same book, with a few words changed, would you be pissed? This is basically what has happened with the eOne. I've seen the pictures; everyone knows it's purposefully an iMac rip-off. That's the whole point. eMachines went with a sure-fire design, one that's already been market tested. Whether you like it or not, the iMac was the top selling computer last year. I think Apple is perfectly within their rights on this one. Those unoriginal corporate nobodies at eMachines are going to get what's coming to them.
Personally, i wouldn't mind being the center of attention everywhere i went and getting free food to boot. But then again, i'm not a penguin... last time i checked, anyway...
There seem to be an awful lot of us suggesting that we should support the law because it's so bad that it will make free software look angelic in comparison. While i appreciate the irony of the software industry crippling itself with a self-serving uniform law, i think that the impact of this law will have severe effects on users of open source software as well. Where do you guys work? I would guess that most if not all of the companies that we work for depend on some sort of proprietary software package. Commercial software is everywhere; and even the Linux community is for the most part hoping that more companies will take notice of us and port some of their commercial software to our OS. Believe me, the consequences to all of us will be markedly visible if this legislation passes. I don't know about the rest of you, but i don't want to see this much power in the hands of the commercial software developers, even if it does make us look better in comparison. I really think that everyone should be very scared that such a law is not simply laughed into nonexistence. We need to oppose UCITA, or suffer possibly unforseen consequences.
Did you guys check out all the links from that article? There were some interesting comments from Gates and another article explaining why Linux sucks (different than the one on Slashdot's headlines page) I wish i could e-mail those guys and tell them that i'm using the X11 version of Netscape right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between an open-source management model and a traditional management model is that the management in this case comes from the most expert software developers in the group. Raymond, being the primary force behind Fetchmail, and Torvalds, being the primary force behind the Linux kernel, are not traditional management types at all because they get their hands dirty, and they have technical expertise.
I don't want to insult anyone, but generally, people who have Computer Science/Management based degrees DO NOT know as much as people with Computer Science/Engineering degrees. They are taught to manage based on traditional techniques of business management, techniques which generally detract from the overall usefulness and efficiency of a project. They obtain a small amount of technical knowledge, enough to become merely adequate at their field, enough that they are not ignorant of the goals and ideas of a product (not entirely ignorant, anyway), yet they would be completely confused if actually asked to develop a worthwhile piece of the puzzle.
The open source projects mentioned in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, i believe, are similar to traditional projects in that they require orginization and central administration to become useful, but they differ in that people who don't understand the development process are not welcome to participate.
I'll just leave you with this: in our society, actual work is done by a large amount of people; products are produced by a large amount of people, etc. Yet the small few at the top who do not actually produce any products; who do not know how or want to actually work for a living; who attempt to administrate despite their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually produced; those people retain the largest cut of the money and hand out the rest to everyone else who did something. Is there something wrong with this societal model??
But if they don't know your name, then how are they going to bust you? Track your IP address to your computer, and then prove you were the one sitting at it when the account was set up? Oh, well maybe that's exactly what they could do. Never mind. (now deleting 5 false hotmail accounts :)
, because they made a statement which sounds apppealing to a large amount of people, and then asked them if they agree with it. Most people probably do not have such strong beliefs about it one way or the other, but they only have the options:
A: I agree with the statement
B: I disagree with the statement
These surveys, with only two very limited choices, do not give a valid readout of what people actually think about the situation. If they sort of agree with it, but not exactly, they'll just pick choice A, because they don't entirely DIS-agree with it.
Actually, he was talking about Amazon attempting to copyright ideas that software is based on (one-click shopping); ideas that are fundamentally obvious, widely used, and belong, essentially, to no one, and everyone at the same time. Stop posting just to hear yourself talk.
It's not any harder to program for Linux. In fact, due to a greater number of freeware shared libraries, it might be easier depending on what you're doing.
My experiences with programming games under Linux has gone quite well. It is true that full screen graphics don't seem to move as fast under X11 as they do under Win9x, but the actual coding is very intuitive (using GGI to target X and SVGAlib).
Programming for Macs is also easier than programming for Windows. Have you tried all of them? Macintosh has hands down the best programming interface for graphics. Windows can not match its ease of use (unless you program in Visual Basic... i guess...)
I was just wondering if you had ever actually written any code or whether you were just speculating...
There's a large difference between distributing information because you have ideals and profiting from the use of other people's work.
What if the author wanted to sell his own thesis? Now he can't do that!!!
I think that people found the concepts presented in the article interesting, and they probably found that the pictures were humorous as well.
As for the snide comment about businesses obviously being competitive... "Competitive" business tactics would involve attempting to manufacture a better product to replace another company's product, such as if I were able to make a better word processing package than Microsoft Word. "Competitive" would not imply, on the other hand, that I should try to bring down a rival through propaganda, libel, rifling through their dumpsters, etc. What a waste of time and resources (which could have been devoted to "competition".
Thanks for the help. I guess I probably should have RPM for binary package installation. I really don't like RPM all that much, though. *.tgz is really only good for source distributions, anyway. (unless you want to bang your head on your keyboard after trying to uninstall all day...) Thanks.
RPM only? Just like my damn Voodoo drivers! I have to use rpm2tgz, and then I end up with 500 files scattered across my filesystem!!! I love it!!!
With how often the MPAA espouses brilliant statements about how easy it is to find pirated movies on the internet, I found the following section of their legal brief particularly funny:
Defendants introduced no evidence to quantify the number of web sites on which the DeCSS software program is available. Although they elicited some testimony that typing the character string "DeCSS" into a search engine retrieves "a few hundred hits" (Tr. 1099:23-1100:2 (Appel)), that speculation proved to be highly misleading. As was made clear by defendants' expert, Dr. Appel -- who has specialized knowledge in browser technologies -- search engine results, by their nature, are grossly overbroad, since they do not distinguish between the appearance of articles about DeCSS or about this case, or the use of DeCSS as an acronym, on the one hand, and the appearance of the actual DeCSS software program on the other hand. (Tr. 1111:3-1112:19 (Appel)). Indeed, the only evidence of the number of sites on which DeCSS appears was elicited by plaintiffs' cross-examination of Dr. Appel, who estimated that only 20% to 30% of the 100 to 200 sites he reviewed from his own, independent search on the Internet actually made the DeCSS program available for download. Id. See also Tr. 127:15-128:6, 137:16-138:25 (Shamos, describing search that revealed "a huge number of pages that made reference to the string DeCSS," but that he only saw "a handful . . . between five and ten" which contained the source code and one with the object code). Dr. Appel explained that this results from the fact that any Internet search for "DeCSS": (1) would not provide information about the number of sites that actually have DeCSS source or object code; (2) would report sites that "just mention" DeCSS, but neither have the program nor link to the program on another site; (3) would commonly report multiple entries for different pages of the same site; and (4) would be driven by the appearance of the character string -- "DeCSS" -- that was typed in, rather than report the actual number of sites that are posting or linking to DeCSS in one form or another. (Tr. 1111:3-1114:12 (Appel)).
Are they claiming that they base their piracy statistics on actually downloading every pirated movie on the 'net??
The problem is not singular to Gnutella. Deceptive advertising is prevalent in nearly every forum for communication or sharing of any kind available. I certainly never encouraged anyone to download pirated content, and though this is most of what comprises the content of Gnutella, I could just as easily be searching for something legitimate.
Or i could be using altavista.com and have a bunch of non-existent *.cx sites point me to clickheretofind.com, no matter what I search for. (Yes, this actually happened last year).
The problem lies in the deceptive motives of people who come up with these types of programs. If whatever service they sell is not interesting enough to attract customers based on its own merits, they attempt instead to trick customers into reading about their service, with the hopes that a few of these accidental readers will be interested in what they have to offer. Trying to stick an ad in front of someone is fine with me; it's been done for a long time, but trying to disguise your ad as something entirely different? I think we have to draw a line between advertising and fraud at some point...
I disagree that the only factor in whether an operating system is provably stable is how many bugtraq reports are done on it. But I do believe from experience that UNIX-based operating systems have more security flaws than Windows NT.
But let's take a look at the bigger picture: he never ACTUALLY mentions stability. He is basing his entire opinion of an OS off of network security. He also never mentions the obviously greater functionality of UNIX over NT, I guess that doesn't matter either. He also never mentions the much larger choice of networking software on UNIX platforms (which may be a significant part of the reason why there are more security vulnerabilities in UNIX).
He also never mentions the fact that most network vulnerabilities on UNIX can be worked around by smart system administrators, while most NT problems must be fixed *eventually* by Microsoft.
You don't give a flying fuck? Well, some of us are programmers and think that creating a virtual machine in software is an interesting subject in and of itself. Whether it has yet produced a useful product in this case is another subject entirely. I would be immensely proud of such an achievement if it were mine... The concept of programming is so much more interesting in an open source environment because you can watch things develop, rather than just using the end product, which often times finally appears years later. I want to see where this goes from here!
If the "artists" were any good at all, they would make their living off of playing their music live rather than by selling studio-produced, watered down crap and then sitting back and raking in the dough.
If you want to listen to some real music, go to some bars and listen to some local musicians, you know, the people who still play music because they have creative instinct and talent?!
Or turn on Austin City Limits some time and see how good you really think Metallica is after watching some real guitarists play. And if you just have to have some bigger names, try Junior Brown or the Old 97's. You'll never listen to another shitty pop crap album again...
After Sony's continual failures in court over Playstation emulators, it should come as no shock I suppose that the judge is ruling this way. The future of reverse engineering is looking pretty damn good for once right now. Unless UCITA comes to your state that is...
http://www.ucita.org
The concept of open-source fits well with the green party's ideals, but the concept of making money does not seem to fit in anywhere.
http://www.gp.org/platform_index.htm
So, they might be a little too anti-corporate for some of the more wealthy around here.
Katz mentioned that there are moral and ethical considerations, which I happen to agree with, but I am confused as to whether he thinks this type of study should be done at all. I mean, are we supposed to halt science because it may possibly lead to negative consequences, or are you just advocating a more slow, careful approach to genetic study?? Sorry to say this, but that really just seemed like one huge rant about genetics that really didn't say very much.
You probably should read the post again. It was not posted by Jon Katz, and I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate you dragging his name through the mud without anything at all to support your claims...
There is an extremely positive aspect to King's bypassing his publisher to distribute his work, and a great point to be made here: publishers and other "middle men" don't actually accomplish anything outside of distribution. Think about it: marketing for a book or album or whatnot is unnecessary, since anything worthy of review gets reviews in national publications. While it is true that several of these publications only review what the record/publishing companies tell them to, many other publications review things because the writers themselves thought that it was good. What do these corporations do besides marketing and distribution? They have money. That's it. They will not make your art better. They will not make society better. Think about it: corporate management makes more money than the people who actually produce art, and their benefit to society is not immediately evident, while the artist's benefit is obvious: they provide you with entertainment. What King is doing is eliminating a useless function from the process of his creation. He does not need them, so he gets rid of them. This is how it should be.
A lot of really great things have been said about DeCSS here in response to the trial, and I am pleased to see so many people concerned about the outcome and its implications for freedom of information. But there's a lot more going on than this, and a victory in this trial will only be a temporary setback for huge corporate industry at best. The problem is that the DeCSS trial is only one facet of a much larger problem involving massive conglomeration of wealth and resources in the hands of a few greedy corporations, and as long as the majority of thinking people in this country remain apathetic, those corporations will keep coming back to these same points over and over until one day it's decided in their favor. Legal precedent is meaningless if our legislators continually decide to vote in favor of corporation-bootlicking bills like the DMCA. In World War II Germany, perfectly good, nice people did anything they were instructed to do by their government, whether that was to display a picture of Hitler in their house or to turn in their less patriotic neighboors for execution. These are the current faces of America. They are decent people, but they are unwilling to attempt to resist the domination of a greater power. Thus, if we are unable to change the tide of apathy in the US, you can win all the DeCSS trials you want and you'll still be buried under a pile of corporate shit someday soon.
Let me just ask you this: if you wrote a book, and it took you years to write it, and you were very proud of that book, and it even got on the national bestseller list, and then someone else two weeks later wrote the EXACT same book, with a few words changed, would you be pissed? This is basically what has happened with the eOne. I've seen the pictures; everyone knows it's purposefully an iMac rip-off. That's the whole point. eMachines went with a sure-fire design, one that's already been market tested. Whether you like it or not, the iMac was the top selling computer last year. I think Apple is perfectly within their rights on this one. Those unoriginal corporate nobodies at eMachines are going to get what's coming to them.
Personally, i wouldn't mind being the center of attention everywhere i went and getting free food to boot. But then again, i'm not a penguin... last time i checked, anyway...
There seem to be an awful lot of us suggesting that we should support the law because it's so bad that it will make free software look angelic in comparison. While i appreciate the irony of the software industry crippling itself with a self-serving uniform law, i think that the impact of this law will have severe effects on users of open source software as well. Where do you guys work? I would guess that most if not all of the companies that we work for depend on some sort of proprietary software package. Commercial software is everywhere; and even the Linux community is for the most part hoping that more companies will take notice of us and port some of their commercial software to our OS. Believe me, the consequences to all of us will be markedly visible if this legislation passes. I don't know about the rest of you, but i don't want to see this much power in the hands of the commercial software developers, even if it does make us look better in comparison. I really think that everyone should be very scared that such a law is not simply laughed into nonexistence. We need to oppose UCITA, or suffer possibly unforseen consequences.
Did you guys check out all the links from that article? There were some interesting comments from Gates and another article explaining why Linux sucks (different than the one on Slashdot's headlines page) I wish i could e-mail those guys and tell them that i'm using the X11 version of Netscape right now.