I predicted this a while
ago when they were just talking about "dual boot".
OLPC can go two ways: one of the two is enough of a threat to book publishers
and Microsoft that there will be a lot of force waged against it. The other
way is just good for world freedom and doesn't have nearly as much power on its
side.
The purpose of OLPC is not to give third world kids a laptop. It's to
give them books. You see, those third world countries don't have an
annual budget of $100/student to buy kids textbooks. So, OLPC is an efficient
means to deliver e-texts to those kids.
The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC
framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or
low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions
of their textbooks available on OLPC. Thus, there will be less reason for the
development of fully free e-Texts under licensing that permits redistribution
and derivative works. This way, the
markets of those textbook publishers in more developed
countries won't be threatened by the presence of those free texts, and
Microsoft won't be threatened by a large force of youth trained on Linux.
The Open Source way is to direct the efforts of academic communities toward
the creation of fully free e-texts under licensing that permits redistribution
and derivative works. This is already well under way. OLPC would run Sugar
on top of Linux, and would not in general be a DRM platform. Open texts would
become a main stream in education, as would Open Source software. This is
obviously a threat to textbook publishers and Microsoft.
The good news is that OLPC is not the only possible platform, and we can keep
working on this without them. The bad news is that OLPC has the mind-share,
and that's going to be hard to fight, especially with Microsoft behind them.
Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument. They have made it
redundant as a standard and showed that people who lobby for its use
lose their jobs for their efforts. They did whatever was necesssary to win,
with much dirty fighting and no shame about it. The folks at
ISO and national organizations didn't show any shame about the perversion
of their process, either. Expect to see similar in this case.
Oops, it's not the cyber-mortuary, it's another product of eToys, also in a container. Coffin offices, sort of, but then freight containers aren't so small. That's reassuring. When I read the mortuary part, I wondered what sort of plans the organizers had for us:-)
Nobody said the judges were being up for 24 hours. In fact, I made sure they knew I wasn't volunteering for sleep deprivation. And I just found out about this strange cyber-morturary container they propose to hold the contest in. Now, we know these things don't always get delivered, but if it does, I want a picture!
Free Software was the first campaign to clearly associate rights with source code. Publicly distributed source code existed even before then, and sometimes had rights that complied with the OSD. The OSD was written to fit existing licenses, primarily BSD, GPL, and Artistic. Although Richard had published an article about the four freedoms in GNUs Bulletin number 4, he didn't maintain any publication about them after that, online or elsewhere, until after the OSD existed. The references to "open source" before 1998 don't clearly associate any rights with the fact that source code is distributed.
So, what I am claiming credit for is getting "Open Source" to be one thing that very many people ask for. It is essentially the same thing that Richard was (and is) promoting, but he was unable to reach the masses nearly as well, simply because of his emphasis that the audience must place its a priori appreciation of freedom above all else. I agee with Richard, but it wasn't the best way to convert the unconverted - at least those who didn't think very similarly to Richard.
The reference you refer to uses the words "open source" in a sense closer to the sense of "open source military intelligence", which was a well-known usage at that time and still continues to be used. It means something that has value but wasn't taken from a secret source. In early February 1998, the phrase gained a new usage which was promoted by the Open Source Initiative.
I will not, however, take any credit for the usage of "Open Source" in a series of articles by one "Violet Blue". This seems to be closer to the military sense "not a secret" than the sense I have promoted:-)
Actually, I was not at the meeting. Eric Raymond brought me the results of the meeting the next day. I proposed to change the Debian Free Software Guidelines to be the Open Source Definition at that time.
Interestingly enough, the Open Source Definition - and thus the "philosophy" of Open Source that the article discusses predates the founding of OSI by some 8 months, and thus the summit referred to in the article by 10 months. It was complete by the end of June, 1997, as part of Debian's promise to the community, and is still there today.
Before the Open Source Initiative was founded and the Open Source Definition was published, the term "open source" was commonly used to refer to a form of military intelligence, and that meaning still survives. There are a few references - not a ton - before that date to "open source code" to refer to published source code, but with no rights connected with it. The campaign started in February 1998 and "Open Source" gained a specific meaning at that time.
I understand your point. I just don't feel it's important, because until the start of the campaign the phrase was not particularly important. So, you can stop now. Also, please do me a favor and don't try to remind Richard Stallman that the two words "free software" were said in combination before his campaign, and meant something else. Of course they were. But you'd just be annoying him for no reason and he might not be as nice about it as me:-)
After the announcement, Netscape assembled a group experts to participate in a strategy session at which the term "open source" was first conceived. The participants also assembled a new philosophy that reconciled the ideological principles of software freedom with the pragmatism of commercial software development. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was then founded to supply and maintain an official definition for the open source philosophy.
No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.
And you think Intel is your savior? Inventor of HDCP? Inventor of CPUID?
No, I don't think Intel is my savior. However, there is one department in a corner of Intel that's doing good for us, and I don't want them to be a casualty to the usual corporate multiple-personality disorder. We had Mesa doing software GL for years with no good hardware, and these guys came through for us first. We can't really point to a company that makes full-custom VLSI and does everything the community would like, unfortunately.
I can't believe someone would really be out to defend intel's graphics technology, this is just a bit scary...
Sorry. Some of us had 3dFX cards with fully Open 3D a really long time ago, and we didn't like the way that 3dFX got murdered by nVidia, and we're worried about the same happening - through some back-room deal - to Intel's 3D division and ATI's efforts to go open.
Well, I probably am off-base this time. But if you see how well the Intel graphics chip family work these days with X (I have both a low-end and a high-end instance of that chip family), then it's easy to wonder "so what the heck is going on with Windows, and why".
Read this article. Microsoft wouldn't be doing bizarre stuff like that if they didn't think there was a war on.
It is faster with a smaller window. By full accelleration, I mean that the graphics hardware is still handling 3D. Some configurations of dual-screen monitor have to fall back on the software 3D. I hear Xinerama does that.
Animation done on 2-frames (15 frames per second for TV, 12 for film) was considered acceptable - for animation. I guess it still is. A lot of kid stuff was done on 4-frames. I don't do combat games.
How many games do you play on your intel 3d accelerator?
My 8-year-old son and I play Flightgear. We have two 1280x1024 monitors, both displaying different rectangles of the same graphics plane, and we sometimes pull the window wide so that it displays across both screens at around 2500x1000. The driver still delivers full accelleration when we do that. It gets about 14 frames per second in 2500x1000 mode. We have the CH yoke, pedals, and quadrant. We've played some of the other Open GL games that come with Debian.
Thanks. This makes more sense now. It is radically different from our experience on Linux, though.
I once came to the Intel X developers with a rather obtuse problem in the i965 driver that made it run at half-speed. It turned out to be related to the MTRR (memory type and range registers) and a BIOS bug. Believe it or not, the problem is activated by a BIOS FAN setting!
Now, on the mailing list for this driver, I immediately got access to the lead developers. OK, they knew I was Bruce, but it looked like they were treating all callers the same way. They connected me with Intel BIOS programmers, etc.
Now, imaging having this problem in the Windows world. You would be routed to a call-center employee in India who would go through a script with you.
I am using the same driver with i915 in an old Sony laptop and i965 in a new duo motherboard. Both seem to work fine. I don't know how much lower-level DirectX is than GL.
Your mistake is in thinking Bruce read the article, or cared. He saw "Microsoft" and hit reply.
I did read the part about Intel, and looked for why he thought Vista sucked. I am assuming that part of what he's complaining about could be Microsoft-implementation specific. Others have stepped up to explain the relationship between Direct X developers and MS better.
Microsoft dislikes Intel graphics because they're publicly documented for full 3D use by Linux and other Free Software. Intel has put a tremendous time into developing X for them, employing many of the key X developers. I use them on a laptop and desktop, and they work excellently. They are not yet as fast as some other graphics chips. But then again they are better than anything we had at Pixar when I was there:-) Time flies.
I see developers and vendors represented, but what about end-users?
I'll restate the first point in my campaign: Most Open Source developers are co-developing the software for their own use. They need the software for their own operations, and they are the users who are interested enough in the software to actually want to help.
Open Source doesn't really separate developers from users, anyone can develop. Not everybody knows how, but they can help the team in other ways - tech writing, for example.
So, I think what you are asking for is representation of casual users, those who run the software and haven't found the need to contribute. I think it's a good idea to listen to them about their experience with the software. But if they want a feature that isn't there, and they aren't willing to help (even by paying for that development), there's not much we can do for them.
I guess my concern is that to me it seems that you feel your definition is more entitled than mine, and I question on what authority that is so.
This is the essence of leadership. I stated clearly how I thought things should be, convinced others and rallied them to the cause of holding that line, and it's stood up pretty well for 10 years.
Would you be a proponent of the phrase, "OSI Certified," and discourage the use of the far more ambiguous, and non-trademarked term "open source"?
Sorry, no. And this is not because I disrespect anyone, it is because erosion of the term will not improve anything. Although "Open Source" is not federally registered, it is a trademark, and has the same status as "OSI Certified" because the attempt to register "OSI Certified" failed - I don't know why.
"Open Source" includes both source code and the set of rights defined by the Open Source Definition, which I created as the Debian Free Software Guidelines and which only later was taken up by OSI. "OSI Certified" means that OSI agrees that the license in question meets that definition.
I think the term you are looking for is "Disclosed Source Code". That means you can see the source code, but there are not necessarily any rights connected with that. There are many names that can be used for similar things: Shared Source: Microsoft's flavor, various different licenses with no rights in common. Some folks can see source code in some cases. Creative Commons: Usually used for non-software assets, the only common right between all of the licenses is that you can read or view them. And there are things called "crowdsource", "Public Source", and so on.
Is there something you'd like to confess now, Bruce?
Yes. I now realize that the title of this article is a double-entendre.:-)
And sure, I will be the april fool for doing this, because it's going to take my time, some of the interpersonal relationships aren't going to be fun, and nobody's paying. I must really care or something:-)
I did pass the complaint of another busybox developer on to SFLC after he came to me, and groused a bit to their lawyer at SFLC about the discourtesy of the whole thing while doing that. People would be happy, I think, to see SFLC compensated and those two guys paid for their time. And maybe that's all that happened.
Slashdot Mirror
OLPC can go two ways: one of the two is enough of a threat to book publishers and Microsoft that there will be a lot of force waged against it. The other way is just good for world freedom and doesn't have nearly as much power on its side.
The purpose of OLPC is not to give third world kids a laptop. It's to give them books. You see, those third world countries don't have an annual budget of $100/student to buy kids textbooks. So, OLPC is an efficient means to deliver e-texts to those kids.
The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions of their textbooks available on OLPC. Thus, there will be less reason for the development of fully free e-Texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This way, the markets of those textbook publishers in more developed countries won't be threatened by the presence of those free texts, and Microsoft won't be threatened by a large force of youth trained on Linux.
The Open Source way is to direct the efforts of academic communities toward the creation of fully free e-texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This is already well under way. OLPC would run Sugar on top of Linux, and would not in general be a DRM platform. Open texts would become a main stream in education, as would Open Source software. This is obviously a threat to textbook publishers and Microsoft.
The good news is that OLPC is not the only possible platform, and we can keep working on this without them. The bad news is that OLPC has the mind-share, and that's going to be hard to fight, especially with Microsoft behind them.
Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument. They have made it redundant as a standard and showed that people who lobby for its use lose their jobs for their efforts. They did whatever was necesssary to win, with much dirty fighting and no shame about it. The folks at ISO and national organizations didn't show any shame about the perversion of their process, either. Expect to see similar in this case.
Bruce
... they taste better when you eat them. :-)
It's a gun. Phaser, here we come.
Oops, it's not the cyber-mortuary, it's another product of eToys, also in a container. Coffin offices, sort of, but then freight containers aren't so small. That's reassuring. When I read the mortuary part, I wondered what sort of plans the organizers had for us :-)
Bruce
Free Software was the first campaign to clearly associate rights with source code. Publicly distributed source code existed even before then, and sometimes had rights that complied with the OSD. The OSD was written to fit existing licenses, primarily BSD, GPL, and Artistic. Although Richard had published an article about the four freedoms in GNUs Bulletin number 4, he didn't maintain any publication about them after that, online or elsewhere, until after the OSD existed. The references to "open source" before 1998 don't clearly associate any rights with the fact that source code is distributed.
So, what I am claiming credit for is getting "Open Source" to be one thing that very many people ask for. It is essentially the same thing that Richard was (and is) promoting, but he was unable to reach the masses nearly as well, simply because of his emphasis that the audience must place its a priori appreciation of freedom above all else. I agee with Richard, but it wasn't the best way to convert the unconverted - at least those who didn't think very similarly to Richard.
The reference you refer to uses the words "open source" in a sense closer to the sense of "open source military intelligence", which was a well-known usage at that time and still continues to be used. It means something that has value but wasn't taken from a secret source. In early February 1998, the phrase gained a new usage which was promoted by the Open Source Initiative.
I will not, however, take any credit for the usage of "Open Source" in a series of articles by one "Violet Blue". This seems to be closer to the military sense "not a secret" than the sense I have promoted :-)
Interestingly enough, the Open Source Definition - and thus the "philosophy" of Open Source that the article discusses predates the founding of OSI by some 8 months, and thus the summit referred to in the article by 10 months. It was complete by the end of June, 1997, as part of Debian's promise to the community, and is still there today.
Bruce
Before the Open Source Initiative was founded and the Open Source Definition was published, the term "open source" was commonly used to refer to a form of military intelligence, and that meaning still survives. There are a few references - not a ton - before that date to "open source code" to refer to published source code, but with no rights connected with it. The campaign started in February 1998 and "Open Source" gained a specific meaning at that time.
I understand your point. I just don't feel it's important, because until the start of the campaign the phrase was not particularly important. So, you can stop now. Also, please do me a favor and don't try to remind Richard Stallman that the two words "free software" were said in combination before his campaign, and meant something else. Of course they were. But you'd just be annoying him for no reason and he might not be as nice about it as me :-)
Thanks
Bruce
No part of this paragraph is true. The OSI had existed for two months when this summit convened. The term Open Source was concieved in a meeting at VA Linux Systems by Christine Petersen.
Bruce
No, I don't think Intel is my savior. However, there is one department in a corner of Intel that's doing good for us, and I don't want them to be a casualty to the usual corporate multiple-personality disorder. We had Mesa doing software GL for years with no good hardware, and these guys came through for us first. We can't really point to a company that makes full-custom VLSI and does everything the community would like, unfortunately.
Bruce
Sorry. Some of us had 3dFX cards with fully Open 3D a really long time ago, and we didn't like the way that 3dFX got murdered by nVidia, and we're worried about the same happening - through some back-room deal - to Intel's 3D division and ATI's efforts to go open.
Bruce
If I ever took myself that seriously, people would be calling me something starting with "The", but not ending with "Bruce". :-)
Well, I probably am off-base this time. But if you see how well the Intel graphics chip family work these days with X (I have both a low-end and a high-end instance of that chip family), then it's easy to wonder "so what the heck is going on with Windows, and why".
Read this article. Microsoft wouldn't be doing bizarre stuff like that if they didn't think there was a war on.
Bruce
Animation done on 2-frames (15 frames per second for TV, 12 for film) was considered acceptable - for animation. I guess it still is. A lot of kid stuff was done on 4-frames. I don't do combat games.
Thanks
Bruce
My 8-year-old son and I play Flightgear. We have two 1280x1024 monitors, both displaying different rectangles of the same graphics plane, and we sometimes pull the window wide so that it displays across both screens at around 2500x1000. The driver still delivers full accelleration when we do that. It gets about 14 frames per second in 2500x1000 mode. We have the CH yoke, pedals, and quadrant. We've played some of the other Open GL games that come with Debian.
Bruce
Now, on the mailing list for this driver, I immediately got access to the lead developers. OK, they knew I was Bruce, but it looked like they were treating all callers the same way. They connected me with Intel BIOS programmers, etc.
Now, imaging having this problem in the Windows world. You would be routed to a call-center employee in India who would go through a script with you.
I am using the same driver with i915 in an old Sony laptop and i965 in a new duo motherboard. Both seem to work fine. I don't know how much lower-level DirectX is than GL.
Bruce
Your mistake is in thinking Bruce read the article, or cared. He saw "Microsoft" and hit reply.
I did read the part about Intel, and looked for why he thought Vista sucked. I am assuming that part of what he's complaining about could be Microsoft-implementation specific. Others have stepped up to explain the relationship between Direct X developers and MS better.
Bruce
Bruce
I'll restate the first point in my campaign: Most Open Source developers are co-developing the software for their own use. They need the software for their own operations, and they are the users who are interested enough in the software to actually want to help.
Open Source doesn't really separate developers from users, anyone can develop. Not everybody knows how, but they can help the team in other ways - tech writing, for example.
So, I think what you are asking for is representation of casual users, those who run the software and haven't found the need to contribute. I think it's a good idea to listen to them about their experience with the software. But if they want a feature that isn't there, and they aren't willing to help (even by paying for that development), there's not much we can do for them.
Thanks
Bruce
This is the essence of leadership. I stated clearly how I thought things should be, convinced others and rallied them to the cause of holding that line, and it's stood up pretty well for 10 years.
Thanks
Bruce
Well, I can be a leader, or I can post judgements about the worth of the lives of other Open Source developers on Slashdot. :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Sorry, no. And this is not because I disrespect anyone, it is because erosion of the term will not improve anything. Although "Open Source" is not federally registered, it is a trademark, and has the same status as "OSI Certified" because the attempt to register "OSI Certified" failed - I don't know why.
"Open Source" includes both source code and the set of rights defined by the Open Source Definition, which I created as the Debian Free Software Guidelines and which only later was taken up by OSI. "OSI Certified" means that OSI agrees that the license in question meets that definition.
I think the term you are looking for is "Disclosed Source Code". That means you can see the source code, but there are not necessarily any rights connected with that. There are many names that can be used for similar things: Shared Source: Microsoft's flavor, various different licenses with no rights in common. Some folks can see source code in some cases. Creative Commons: Usually used for non-software assets, the only common right between all of the licenses is that you can read or view them. And there are things called "crowdsource", "Public Source", and so on.
Bruce
Yes. I now realize that the title of this article is a double-entendre. :-)
And sure, I will be the april fool for doing this, because it's going to take my time, some of the interpersonal relationships aren't going to be fun, and nobody's paying. I must really care or something :-)
Thanks
Bruce
I did pass the complaint of another busybox developer on to SFLC after he came to me, and groused a bit to their lawyer at SFLC about the discourtesy of the whole thing while doing that. People would be happy, I think, to see SFLC compensated and those two guys paid for their time. And maybe that's all that happened.