And as far as the political aspects, to most companies GPL == toxic, and they don't care about the details.
Exactly. The executives will see big companies being sued over using GPL software. You think they are going to take the word of some low level coder that this isn't a legal risk? No way.
They are going to ask their legal staff, who's going to say it take X tens of thousands of $$$ (or more) in equivalent billable hours to evaluate all these lawsuits and all the potential risks, and then Y hundreds of thousands of $$$ to put in place procedures and review systems to prevent these potential lawsuits while still maximizing competitive IP value in ways that the even higher paid patent attorneys require. Management will look at these legal and procedural costs, ignore the lowly coder who hosts his own GPL source code on his free blog as knowing nothing about real business risk management.
I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back.
Nonsense. In fact, potentially completely the opposite. Someone who profits from distributing unmodified copies of your code doesn't have to give you anything back. But someone who tries to combine your code with code which they have previously written, and give away the combined result for free (or maybe even at a loss including their server hosting fees), is still required to send you a whole bunch of code unrelated to your work.
A commercial distribution license based on a percentage of sales would be more in line with your stated purpose. Or maybe a commercial license with a 100% discount for people who send you rights to use a number of lines of their own code equal to yours.
I don't see why anyone would not want to use the GPL if they want their software to be free and open. Why create something, give it out for free, and then allow businesses to take your work, profit from it, and give nothing back?
Why require something back only from those who improve your software with bug fixes and additions, and not from all other users and distributors? Sounds more like an unfair disincentive for creating better software to me.
The VLC developer made the claim because Apple's TOS is incompatible with the GPL. Apple is 100% to blame for that incompatibility.
Actually, the authors of GPLv3 were perfectly aware of the concept of a tivo-ized app store when they designed the license. So those GPL authors are 100% to blame for the incompatibility. Not Apple.
BTW, there is no absolute App store restriction on the distribution of open source apps. Any user who purchases the standard iOS developers tools (comes with the $99/annum iOS Developer enrollment) is free to (re)build an App store app from source and install it on their iOS devices without going near the App store.
...This prompted the Dad speech: "when I was your age, we had C-64's. They plugged into the TV and you could write your OWN games".
Her eyes lit up. "I want to do that" she said.... she had a couple of amusing ideas for angry birds knock offs. Of course, starting from 0 might take a while to get there.
It started me thinking. The C-64 could suck you into programming real easy. Because with a few one liners you could change the screen color, make some noises, etc etc. It peeled back the curtain a little, and let you see how the thing you just bought worked, and how you could make it do neat things, and it didn't take a lot of effort to get there.
How in the hell could I even start my daughter down this path today?
There's a C64 emulator app available for the iPad in the iOS App store. Also about a half dozen BASIC interpreters.
One can also learn some Javascript just using the iPad browser, or with some apps that make it slightly easier to type in Javascript and run it.
One problem with shareholder democracy is that if a shareholder doesn't like the management of the company it is far easier for them to sell the stock and forget about it then to work to elect better management.
A lot of people have been selling their HP stock recently.
If enough shareholders sell in disgust, that will eventually depress the stock price until some take-over artist can do a leveraged buy-out and fire the existing board and the management. It's usually in the interest of management not to let that happen.
The customers for iPad don't know about or care about tablets (even if some vendors are deluded into thinking they are the same thing because the specs are comparable).
Sure, Android's shipment percentages and activation rates look good. But the elephants in the basement are the return rates, relative to Apple's, and eventually Microsoft's.
I wouldn't call failing to distribute the source a "tiny mistake".
If your server goes down or gets unplugged or rebooted for any reason, you are temporarily failing to distribute source. How long before that's not "tiny"?
That's exactly as it should be, as the vast majority of "music" sales aren't due to anything about the "artist's" unique talent, but due to the fact that consumers mostly buy whatever packaged and promoted sound/image the producers feed them. So the producers rake in the profits for their ideas. And the A-list wannabee musicians pay for their PR, rather than vice versa.
There's lots of good new music, just as good as the stuff that the *IAA promotes, hidden on indy sites, but almost nobody buys it. So there's really no money to be made in good music these days, only in good promotion/advertising using some "musicians" fronting as scripted personalities, video actors, and dancers.
Sounds like the new term for "Racial Profiling"...
So what's wrong with racial profiling if it accurately (e.g. passes statistical tests) for predicting crime rates in certain areas?
If a bunch of white males in suits drive into a neighborhood where that racial profile is uncommon, and the mortgage fraud rate goes up by a statistically significant amount, shouldn't that type of profiled activity cause increased fraud investigation in that area?
Software people sometimes forget physical limitations. Web apps require more CPU cycles for the same work (even if just to run a JIT compiler), more CPU cycles will consume more of the user's battery life, and battery energy density isn't getting that much better over time.
If there is enough "supply" this sounds interesting.
Except in extreme bubbles, "supply" can usually be adjusted by money. The value of not having an employee who can't code dragging down the entire team (or the cost of getting rid of such) may well be worth a good portion of a team's budget.
I know a company that hires promising candidates without sufficient relavent experience, but only as interns and consultants, for 1 to 3 months. They either produce relavent experience (and other contributions to the company) of sufficient quality after their 1 to 3 months, and get a job offers, or get replaced with new interns and consultants. Rinse and repeat. The advantages of building a team with at least some proven experience might be worth the cost of continuous interviewing and project churning (projects chosen to have not too much business risk).
On another note, they would need to get some deal with apple to let them side load the playbook though since I'd imagine not many teams would want to submit their playbook for approval to the app store.
All the data doesn't need to be submitted with even an App store iPad app (other than test data for review). Apple has a WWDC 2010 video on this concept, data driven app design.
A team could put a playbook app in the App store (with, say, historical plays for gamers to use for their fantasy team), but only upload the real playbook content (as long as it's not executable code and not interpreted code other than Javascript) in some password protected manner, and store it in a database for offline use.
No special deal with Apple required.
They could also use Enterprise app distribution from their own private app store to player/employee's iPads.
The obscurity of the syntax just builds an extra barrier that's really unnecessary in this day and age
Objective C's form of punctuation abuse isn't any higher a barrier than C++'s forms of punctuation abuse. In fact, it has less total weird syntax. Reports are that Objective C stops looking obscure to most programmers after about 2 weeks of use, even if they were previously biased towards C++ or Java like syntax.
Half the fun of explaining the Cray 1 during museum tours was comparing its cycle time to the time it took light from the nearby ceiling spotlight to hit the Cray. At 33 MHz that would require a really tall room.
The problem with using embedded microcontrollers for this tutorial purpose is that they are usually incomplete slave devices, and thus the experience is incomplete and misleading. Rarely did people ever do or teach development completely on those embedded machines themselves (including compiling compilers, the OS itself, etc. on that microcomputer itself), as people did with old tube mainframes, IBM 360s, PDP-11s, and the like. In addition, some of the newer 8-bit microcontrollers are actually a lot faster than these vintage machines.
If you don't hire that second team and have them compete internally, your competition might just hire those other programmers, compete with your company, and potentially take all your business away. There will be competition, whether from within or without. You choose.
The iTunes store has been featuring more and more VNC and RDP apps lately, probably pointing in the direction of how they'd like this particular type of user experience implemented.
As screwed up as organized labor has been in the US, this is what happens when you don't have it at all.
Organized labor did try running China a few years back. It was called the Cultural Revolution. Millions died. A lot more than the current suicide rate.
Slashdot Mirror
And as far as the political aspects, to most companies GPL == toxic, and they don't care about the details.
Exactly. The executives will see big companies being sued over using GPL software. You think they are going to take the word of some low level coder that this isn't a legal risk? No way.
They are going to ask their legal staff, who's going to say it take X tens of thousands of $$$ (or more) in equivalent billable hours to evaluate all these lawsuits and all the potential risks, and then Y hundreds of thousands of $$$ to put in place procedures and review systems to prevent these potential lawsuits while still maximizing competitive IP value in ways that the even higher paid patent attorneys require. Management will look at these legal and procedural costs, ignore the lowly coder who hosts his own GPL source code on his free blog as knowing nothing about real business risk management.
I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back.
Nonsense. In fact, potentially completely the opposite. Someone who profits from distributing unmodified copies of your code doesn't have to give you anything back. But someone who tries to combine your code with code which they have previously written, and give away the combined result for free (or maybe even at a loss including their server hosting fees), is still required to send you a whole bunch of code unrelated to your work.
A commercial distribution license based on a percentage of sales would be more in line with your stated purpose. Or maybe a commercial license with a 100% discount for people who send you rights to use a number of lines of their own code equal to yours.
I don't see why anyone would not want to use the GPL if they want their software to be free and open. Why create something, give it out for free, and then allow businesses to take your work, profit from it, and give nothing back?
Why require something back only from those who improve your software with bug fixes and additions, and not from all other users and distributors? Sounds more like an unfair disincentive for creating better software to me.
The VLC developer made the claim because Apple's TOS is incompatible with the GPL. Apple is 100% to blame for that incompatibility.
Actually, the authors of GPLv3 were perfectly aware of the concept of a tivo-ized app store when they designed the license. So those GPL authors are 100% to blame for the incompatibility. Not Apple.
BTW, there is no absolute App store restriction on the distribution of open source apps. Any user who purchases the standard iOS developers tools (comes with the $99/annum iOS Developer enrollment) is free to (re)build an App store app from source and install it on their iOS devices without going near the App store.
...This prompted the Dad speech: "when I was your age, we had C-64's. They plugged into the TV and you could write your OWN games".
Her eyes lit up. "I want to do that" she said. ... she had a couple of amusing ideas for angry birds knock offs.
Of course, starting from 0 might take a while to get there.
It started me thinking. The C-64 could suck you into programming real easy. Because with a few one liners you could change the screen color, make some noises, etc etc. It peeled back the curtain a little, and let you see how the thing you just bought worked, and how you could make it do neat things, and it didn't take a lot of effort to get there.
How in the hell could I even start my daughter down this path today?
There's a C64 emulator app available for the iPad in the iOS App store. Also about a half dozen BASIC interpreters.
One can also learn some Javascript just using the iPad browser, or with some apps that make it slightly easier to type in Javascript and run it.
One problem with shareholder democracy is that if a shareholder doesn't like the management of the company it is far easier for them to sell the stock and forget about it then to work to elect better management.
A lot of people have been selling their HP stock recently.
If enough shareholders sell in disgust, that will eventually depress the stock price until some take-over artist can do a leveraged buy-out and fire the existing board and the management. It's usually in the interest of management not to let that happen.
Fixed that for you.
The customers for iPad don't know about or care about tablets (even if some vendors are deluded into thinking they are the same thing because the specs are comparable).
Sure, Android's shipment percentages and activation rates look good. But the elephants in the basement are the return rates, relative to Apple's, and eventually Microsoft's.
I wouldn't call failing to distribute the source a "tiny mistake".
If your server goes down or gets unplugged or rebooted for any reason, you are temporarily failing to distribute source. How long before that's not "tiny"?
That's exactly as it should be, as the vast majority of "music" sales aren't due to anything about the "artist's" unique talent, but due to the fact that consumers mostly buy whatever packaged and promoted sound/image the producers feed them. So the producers rake in the profits for their ideas. And the A-list wannabee musicians pay for their PR, rather than vice versa.
There's lots of good new music, just as good as the stuff that the *IAA promotes, hidden on indy sites, but almost nobody buys it. So there's really no money to be made in good music these days, only in good promotion/advertising using some "musicians" fronting as scripted personalities, video actors, and dancers.
Sounds like the new term for "Racial Profiling"...
So what's wrong with racial profiling if it accurately (e.g. passes statistical tests) for predicting crime rates in certain areas?
If a bunch of white males in suits drive into a neighborhood where that racial profile is uncommon, and the mortgage fraud rate goes up by a statistically significant amount, shouldn't that type of profiled activity cause increased fraud investigation in that area?
Software people sometimes forget physical limitations. Web apps require more CPU cycles for the same work (even if just to run a JIT compiler), more CPU cycles will consume more of the user's battery life, and battery energy density isn't getting that much better over time.
If there is enough "supply" this sounds interesting.
Except in extreme bubbles, "supply" can usually be adjusted by money. The value of not having an employee who can't code dragging down the entire team (or the cost of getting rid of such) may well be worth a good portion of a team's budget.
I know a company that hires promising candidates without sufficient relavent experience, but only as interns and consultants, for 1 to 3 months. They either produce relavent experience (and other contributions to the company) of sufficient quality after their 1 to 3 months, and get a job offers, or get replaced with new interns and consultants. Rinse and repeat. The advantages of building a team with at least some proven experience might be worth the cost of continuous interviewing and project churning (projects chosen to have not too much business risk).
Reports from web analytics are that iPad usage in just one year has already passed 20 years of linux on the desktop installed base.
It that trend continues, then linux on tablets, not desktops, might be the path forward.
I'd be very concerned if I was a frequent flier.
Because of the additional high altitude radiation that all airline passengers and crew expose themselves to?
On another note, they would need to get some deal with apple to let them side load the playbook though since I'd imagine not many teams would want to submit their playbook for approval to the app store.
All the data doesn't need to be submitted with even an App store iPad app (other than test data for review). Apple has a WWDC 2010 video on this concept, data driven app design.
A team could put a playbook app in the App store (with, say, historical plays for gamers to use for their fantasy team), but only upload the real playbook content (as long as it's not executable code and not interpreted code other than Javascript) in some password protected manner, and store it in a database for offline use.
No special deal with Apple required.
They could also use Enterprise app distribution from their own private app store to player/employee's iPads.
The obscurity of the syntax just builds an extra barrier that's really unnecessary in this day and age
Objective C's form of punctuation abuse isn't any higher a barrier than C++'s forms of punctuation abuse. In fact, it has less total weird syntax. Reports are that Objective C stops looking obscure to most programmers after about 2 weeks of use, even if they were previously biased towards C++ or Java like syntax.
Half the fun of explaining the Cray 1 during museum tours was comparing its cycle time to the time it took light from the nearby ceiling spotlight to hit the Cray. At 33 MHz that would require a really tall room.
The problem with using embedded microcontrollers for this tutorial purpose is that they are usually incomplete slave devices, and thus the experience is incomplete and misleading. Rarely did people ever do or teach development completely on those embedded machines themselves (including compiling compilers, the OS itself, etc. on that microcomputer itself), as people did with old tube mainframes, IBM 360s, PDP-11s, and the like. In addition, some of the newer 8-bit microcontrollers are actually a lot faster than these vintage machines.
The ARM core is so widely licensed that it would be hard to find a modern handheld device that does NOT contain one.
Not only handhelds. There's a good chance your Wintel laptop or desktop PC might have one hidden in its disk controller or wifi chipset as well.
If you don't hire that second team and have them compete internally, your competition might just hire those other programmers, compete with your company, and potentially take all your business away. There will be competition, whether from within or without. You choose.
The iTunes store has been featuring more and more VNC and RDP apps lately, probably pointing in the direction of how they'd like this particular type of user experience implemented.
As screwed up as organized labor has been in the US, this is what happens when you don't have it at all.
Organized labor did try running China a few years back. It was called the Cultural Revolution. Millions died. A lot more than the current suicide rate.
Nonsense. How can you compare workers with the general population?
Because that's what they would still be part of if they weren't working.