Well, obviously I don't want to be in the position of mediating for Debian any longer, because there is a conflict of interest. I told them that. I also told Corel months ago that I was working on a VC firm, but not about Progeny Linux because although I have been soliciting Ian to be in my company for a few weeks, that agreement only came a few days ago.
Understood. I think that Rob is having some problems resolving how to handle the S/N ratio without being in some way unfair or unethical by blocking people. You may have noticed I run my own weblog that is an alternative to Slashdot if you want less noise. People tell me that the two weblogs compliment each other because they fulfill different goals.
I had a great time speaking in Iceland and would love to go to Norway. If there's a conference there, tell me about the call for papers.
It's after Linux Capital Group goes public, but before any of its partner companies go public.
Essentially, when a partner company goes public it is treated as a spin-off, and the Linux Capital Group stockholders get shares of the new company. They still have their Linux Capital Group shares, too. And when the next partner goes public, they get its shares, too, ad infinitum. Linux Capital Group gets some cash from selling stock after each partner IPO, and uses that to refuel the process. So I can do exactly what you want with every partner company, including Progeny Linux, once Linux Capital Group goes public, but not before. Sorry.
I don't think I can get away with taking small investments before the Linux Capital Group IPO. I'm not happy about it, but I'm not sure we have a choice. Securities law makes running a public VC firm quite complicated, we have already expended some legal services looking into that, and plan to expend a lot more.
Given that Richard has dedicated his entire life to free software since 1984, I think that FSF and the rest of us got the benefit of the money.
The fact that he did arrange for the money to take care of his future because he knew that he'd be spending that future on political action for free software and not on having some sort of programmer job.
We're asking people to make free software, not starve.
Yes, there are already opportunists. There's one company that filed their S-1, which is a xerox of Red Hat's S-1, before they did any real work, and keeps coming out with mock-up products (they scratched the word Red Hat off the CD and wrote the name of their company in crayon).
The only thing we can do is put some quality people in quality companies. With my company, you know you're investing in a president who has been in Linux since 1994 and a CTO who has been in it since 1993, and they both have a solid grounding in free software, and some finance people who have really excellent qualifications. We have to promote that so that people will invest in us instead of the fly-by-nights.
Richard did get a McArthur foundation grant, which he did not donate to FSF. He invested it, and it is now enough so that he can live without having to have a job for the rest of his life even if FSF can't pay his salary.
I also suspect that Richard is a beneficiary of some of the directed-shares programs, but is simply being tastefully quiet about it.
But point taken. I also want to see Linus taken care of, but I'm sure he already is.
Debian is an excellent distribution. But go back and read the Wichert Akkerman interview a few days ago. He's the Debian project leader, and most of the questions that were directed to him were about problems in Debian that could be solved by a few salaried people working on the stuff that isn't getting done, or isn't getting done in time.
Note also that Corel is a Debian derivative and that SGI/VA/O'Reilly are also doing something with Debian, and also Kachinka, I think, so this is not exactly a new idea. But our plans aren't the same as theirs and there is room for lots of ingredients in this stone soup we're cooking.
What I was thinking of there was porting. What if Intuit approached me with a project to port Quicken and TurboTax to run natively on Linux? Should I turn them away, or take on the port and help spread Linux? Now, porting Quicken doesn't mean that nobody will use GNOMoney, and I've argued before that TurboTax is a special case and probably won't be handled in Open Source. So this is a serious question.
The problem is that the word communism has come to mean Soviet-style semi-totalitarian socialism. I'm not a political scholar, so if you want to call what the Soviets did something else that's fine.
What we are doing here is closer to what the Soviets themselves called Glasnost, isn't it?
The concept of a commons, and the concept of helping your neighbor, precede what we think of as communism by a few millenia. So, maybe we should call them something else.
I hope that people don't lose sight of why open source is successful, and how little it actually has to do with software development. It's about distributed collaboration, peer review, and the incredible accomplishments a group can make when they drop the barriers imposed on our daily lives.
I just had to smile while reading this. I mean, you know that you're talking with an ex Debian project leader and the person who proposed the Debian Free Software Guidelines to reinforce the exact principles you're talking about. So just how much do I have to change to forget about all of that?
But I accept your premise that actions speak louder than words. So, I request that you watch me. It'll take a while for you to get a read on my actions, but I think you'll like them.
I do work the press - it's an essential skill for business and the kind of advocacy I've been doing for years. But this page is going to end up being 99.6% your comments and 0.4% my posting, so I think the system tends to converge on some sort of objectivity.
If anyone wants to interview me and write an objective article, my email's up there in the header.
Will money change us? Sure thing. I think however that I've been changed already. I made enough money from Pixar to live the way I want. I've a loving wife, a baby on the way, a nice home in a great place to live, the freedom to do what I want, and no debt. This before I made a cent from free software and all of the directed-shares plans. And it doesn't seem to have hurt my participation in free software so far.
When I think of money, I think of making politicial change. You can get a hint of the changes I'm contemplating if you read my Upside interview. So, you might have a bunch of free-software philantrophists working for the ideals we share, with money to support that work. Can that be bad?
Sometime yesterday, I was thinking Would RMS have started the GNU project if he'd known it would come to this? I'll see him on Tuesday and discuss it. But I'm pretty sure he would have. RMS envisioned a world of free software. He never eschewed making a living from it, in fact he consulted for Intel, making money by writing free software (enhancements to GCC) long ago. Thus, I think things are going pretty much as RMS wanted them to go in the large, but not in the small. I'm sure he would have preferred that everyone use the GPL (I would too), but he's accepted that the Open Source Definition is a definition of Free Software.
I tried to get RMS on my board, but of course he doesn't want his name used for marketing. I still expect to be talking with him regularly about my company's operations, and I plan to help out FSF in whatever way possible, with money if I can, software and other services otherwise.
Ian is starting with scientific and technical users. I'm extremely interested in user-friendliness, and I'd like to work on that, when it's possible for Ian's company to do so. I'd like to work on a kind of user-friendliness that won't drive away the clueful users. Do you really have to treat the user like an idiot to make the system easy to use? I doubt that.
Open Source never meant taking a vow of poverty. Having people be able to support themselves while making free software is an opportunity we should take advantage of to the utmost, because that way we will have more free software.
The challenge is to embrace our success without losing the qualities that got us here. If I'm not meeting that challenge, I want to hear from you just how, with details, when that happens.
For an example of talk about the Artistic license, see my chapter of the O'Reilly Open Sources book. I do a short critique of the Artistic, BSD, GPL, etc.
The problem with the BSD and the Artistic for me is that I'm not interested in facilitating someone else's proprietary software without getting something back from them - I am only interested in sharing with people who give me the same rights that I give them. I can still make my own proprietary software with my own work, because I hold the copyright and can issue my work with any number of licenses. If I want to use someone else's work in proprietary software, I can buy a license from them, just as I can sell a license to other people who want to make proprietary use of my work. This is hardly anti-commercial. In fact, you could say that the GPL is neutral regarding proprietary work, because it allows you to buy and sell separate commercial licenses and do pretty much what you'd do with conventional software licensing if you wish.
There is an end to Linux. Some day, we'll be using something else. That something will most likely be Open Source, there's no going back on that one, and it will probably be compatible on some level with what we had before. But it will be a successor to Linux, not Linux. Will it be the Hurd? Maybe. But the point I want to make is that Linux is not forever.
There is a perfectly good reason why you should not be allowed to molest butterflies in Pacific Grove, California. Monarch butterflies congregate there as part of their breeding migration, hundreds of thousands on one tree. It's impressive to see - I've been there while it was happening. Someone molesting them with a bug sprayer could do serious damage to the species.
I just got a look at the source code. I think in a few years they might have a real translation database, but right now they only have a few hundred Spanish words and a few dozen German, French, and Portugese. It's a toy program. Not a bad place to start, but hardly worth the press release.
Forgive me if this sounds off-topic. It's nice to see another new problem set covered by Free Software. In thinking about what can't be covered by free software, the application I focus on is TurboTax. It's the laborious product of accountants and auditors building an expert system, not really the work of programmers. It needs to be accurate enough to persuade IRS not to audit in a tremendous number of situations. It can't ever be optimal, but it shouldn't be too much worse.
I don't think it's tenable under the Open Source paridigm. I'm sure there are other, similar examples. So, there's room for proprietary software, coexisting with free software and running on a free infrastructure. I'd just rather keep the proprietary stuff in the leaf nodes of the software "tree", where nothing else depends on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks
Bruce
Yes, that's the order in which I think of this stuff, too.
Bruce
I had a great time speaking in Iceland and would love to go to Norway. If there's a conference there, tell me about the call for papers.
Thanks
Bruce
Essentially, when a partner company goes public it is treated as a spin-off, and the Linux Capital Group stockholders get shares of the new company. They still have their Linux Capital Group shares, too. And when the next partner goes public, they get its shares, too, ad infinitum. Linux Capital Group gets some cash from selling stock after each partner IPO, and uses that to refuel the process. So I can do exactly what you want with every partner company, including Progeny Linux, once Linux Capital Group goes public, but not before. Sorry.
I don't think I can get away with taking small investments before the Linux Capital Group IPO. I'm not happy about it, but I'm not sure we have a choice. Securities law makes running a public VC firm quite complicated, we have already expended some legal services looking into that, and plan to expend a lot more.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
The fact that he did arrange for the money to take care of his future because he knew that he'd be spending that future on political action for free software and not on having some sort of programmer job.
We're asking people to make free software, not starve.
Bruce
Ian has been working on distributed filesystem stuff at U. Arizona for the past few years. I think he has something that might be better than Coda.
Thanks
Bruce
The only thing we can do is put some quality people in quality companies. With my company, you know you're investing in a president who has been in Linux since 1994 and a CTO who has been in it since 1993, and they both have a solid grounding in free software, and some finance people who have really excellent qualifications. We have to promote that so that people will invest in us instead of the fly-by-nights.
Thanks
Bruce
I also suspect that Richard is a beneficiary of some of the directed-shares programs, but is simply being tastefully quiet about it.
But point taken. I also want to see Linus taken care of, but I'm sure he already is.
Thanks
Bruce
Note also that Corel is a Debian derivative and that SGI/VA/O'Reilly are also doing something with Debian, and also Kachinka, I think, so this is not exactly a new idea. But our plans aren't the same as theirs and there is room for lots of ingredients in this stone soup we're cooking.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
What we are doing here is closer to what the Soviets themselves called Glasnost, isn't it?
The concept of a commons, and the concept of helping your neighbor, precede what we think of as communism by a few millenia. So, maybe we should call them something else.
Thanks
Bruce
I just had to smile while reading this. I mean, you know that you're talking with an ex Debian project leader and the person who proposed the Debian Free Software Guidelines to reinforce the exact principles you're talking about. So just how much do I have to change to forget about all of that?
But I accept your premise that actions speak louder than words. So, I request that you watch me. It'll take a while for you to get a read on my actions, but I think you'll like them.
Thanks
Bruce
If anyone wants to interview me and write an objective article, my email's up there in the header.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
When I think of money, I think of making politicial change. You can get a hint of the changes I'm contemplating if you read my Upside interview. So, you might have a bunch of free-software philantrophists working for the ideals we share, with money to support that work. Can that be bad?
Thanks
Bruce
I tried to get RMS on my board, but of course he doesn't want his name used for marketing. I still expect to be talking with him regularly about my company's operations, and I plan to help out FSF in whatever way possible, with money if I can, software and other services otherwise.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
The challenge is to embrace our success without losing the qualities that got us here. If I'm not meeting that challenge, I want to hear from you just how, with details, when that happens.
Thanks
Bruce
The problem with the BSD and the Artistic for me is that I'm not interested in facilitating someone else's proprietary software without getting something back from them - I am only interested in sharing with people who give me the same rights that I give them. I can still make my own proprietary software with my own work, because I hold the copyright and can issue my work with any number of licenses. If I want to use someone else's work in proprietary software, I can buy a license from them, just as I can sell a license to other people who want to make proprietary use of my work. This is hardly anti-commercial. In fact, you could say that the GPL is neutral regarding proprietary work, because it allows you to buy and sell separate commercial licenses and do pretty much what you'd do with conventional software licensing if you wish.
Thanks
Bruce
Corel is a Debian derivative. They entirely missed that fact.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
I don't think it's tenable under the Open Source paridigm. I'm sure there are other, similar examples. So, there's room for proprietary software, coexisting with free software and running on a free infrastructure. I'd just rather keep the proprietary stuff in the leaf nodes of the software "tree", where nothing else depends on it.
Bruce