This actually makes a little bit of sense. Training is not free. If their IT guys don't know anything about Macs, they're going to need some training to get up to speed. That could easily run into the $10,000+ range. Perhaps that still makes sense in total dollars, but finding the money for it could be difficult -- the $43,000 worth of computers doesn't add any money to their available budget.
Sounds like a pretty good fit for Dreamweaver. I think MX does JSP, and I'm sure that it does all the rest. It's got a pretty nice interface and is pretty easy to use. I'm not a big Windows user, but I like Dreamweaver a lot.
Doesn't even matter, really. You can sue someone because they caused you harm. You don't have to show that they broke some law to do it. Just show how much monetary harm they caused you.
But when recordable DVD drives are $100 next year, he'll be able to add that feature for $100. You'll have to get a whole new unit, spending probably $400 more.
Any extra goes into my "rain day fund" (aka "unexpected unemployment fund")
I call my rainy day fund my "expected unemployment fund". In this industry, I fully expect to have a month or 2 of down-time per year. I've been lucky the past 2 years, with full employment.
If I owned a Star Trek replicator and I bought a box of Hostess cupcakes, then replicated them and gave them away, I would have wronged Hostess.
You just made a huge leap in logic there. The reason we pay Hostess to make cupcakes is three-fold. First, we pay them for the physical goods that they are selling us. Second, we pay them for the time they spent making the product, because it saves us the time and effort of having to do so. Finally, we pay them for the idea of what they have created -- in this case, the recipe.
If we eliminate the first 2 reasons for payment, the question then becomes "what is the percentage of the price for each of the 3 components?". I'd argue that none of them are 0, but I'd suggest that the cost of the idea is very small. Mainly for the reason that the cost of creating the idea is amortized among a large number of items. (Compare the price of an original piece of art versus a lithograph to see this in practice today.)
You'll note that there is no money in Star Trek. Likely for the reason that if you can replicate anything, it's not necessary any more. Everyone can obtain what they need, and largely what they want. For a counter-point view, read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, where Intellectual Property is the only valuable commodity, and is well-protected. Unfortunately, we're already headed toward the (slightly) distopian society instead of the utopian society.
So once we get to a point where ideas are the only thing of value, I believe we have these 2 choices as a society: allow Intellectual Property to be freely shared, or strongly protect Intellectual Property. You'll note that the software industry is currently realizing this, and separating into the 2 groups: proprietary software and Free Software / Open Source. (Admittedly, it does take time to create software; this time is also amortized, but to a lesser extent for most software as compared to cupcakes.)
Now to address the original question: which is more ethical? Think about living in a society where everything you need is easily and freely obtainable for everyone, because raw materials and the ability to build things from them are overly abundant. Is it ethical to artificially limit who can get what they want? Consider that a large portion of the society may not be intelligent or creative enough to come up with new ideas, which are the only thing of value that can be traded. Is it ethical to keep those people from getting what they want?
This is actually a really though ethical dilemma. Giving everyone everything they want may not be the right choice. (Witness the child who is given everything he wants.) On the other hand, I don't think its ethical to artifically create "have" and "have-not" portions of society, when it would be easy not to.
Xtra is trying to protect themselves from (frivolous) lawsuits by customers who upload content to an Xtra owned webserver not understanding that said content has now been effectively "published" to the world.
I agree. The second version makes that clear, but the first version sounded like a complete land grab. But why don't they just say what they mean? Something to the effect:
Customer agrees that material placed on Xtra systems will be published in a manner consistent with Internet practices. This means that your material may be copied to other systems in the process of transferring the data to consumers of such published materials, and may be cached to improve performance.
Lawyers aren't supposed to make things more difficult to understand. They're supposed to protect people and companies.
God, it's great to see some intelligent thought here. These are exactly the criteria that need to be considered.
I especially think that point #7 is very important. It's clear to me that separating the GUI design from the code is the way to go. GUI design and programming are very different tasks -- sometimes people are godd at one and not the other. Plus, GUIs should be done in a different language than programming -- something descriptive, not procedural.
I've used GLADE (for GTK/GNOME) and it makes a nice clean separation. The main problem is that it's mostly tied to C and GTK. I'd love to see a GUI-agnostic, language-agnostic version of GLADE.
TV and radio. They didn't explicitly give you permission. Well OK, you could still watch/listen, since the proposed law says "with the intent to defraud or cause harm". But the stations could convincingly argue that skipping commercials is intentionally causing them harm.
How stupid are people? If you'd bothered to pay attention the past couple years, your firewall would already be blocking this. Your firewall should already be blocking port 135 -- and every other port that you don't explicitly need. Your outbound connections should be limited to basically HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, FTP, SSH, POP/IMAP, and perhaps a few others.
I find it disgusting that this poster got noticed and modded up. He's made serious accusations with nothing to back it up. I don't see anything on the site to back his accusations. The thought that Kim Jung Il would be selling peace pins to Americans is preposterous.
As far as using images of injured civilians to make their point -- that's the entire reason that they are against the war -- because it hurts innocent people. I don't find it odd that they would show the reason for their concern.
And God forbid that someone suggest that blowing the fuck out of each other isn't nice and won't make people like us.
Another (true) story talks of a CEO who walked into a room full of employees, and signed a major deal without reading it. When queried by one of his lawyers he replied 'I don't read contracts, that's what I pay you guys for.'
It seems he's more interested in protecting his image than the company.
It's at this point that you should consider going over his head. If you believe that you can save the company money, and management is standing in the way, you should point that out to higher management. That said, you'll probably be seen as not being a team player, since upper management has a better relationship with your management than with you.
He's expressed the opinion that since we've invested so much into this product already, he can't just back out now. You see, it would make it look like he made a bad decision.
I've made the argument that that's an excellent reason that management chooses proprietary software. They need someone to blame when things go wrong. Open Source software is generally better for the company. It's management's self-preservation that requires them to choose proprietary software, at the expense of the company.
That's absurd, and probably the weakest part of your argument. Nobody is forcing these developers to write code for free and give it away. (Or to work on existing GPLed software.) I think you're still missing my point about adding value versus zero-cost copying.
And who is likely to be the best consultant on a piece of software? The folks who helped write it!
As for people making money off of stuff they didn't create -- welcome to the real world!
So if someone can produce a web server for $0, what sense is there in paying $800,000 for one? This is capitalism in action. Sure you can be disappointed that software companies can't charge ridiculous amounts, but that doesn't change anything.
Folks really can make money off of Apache. Consultants who install it; and there are a few commercial versions that have some added features, mostly easier management. The things is, nobody can make obscene amounts of money on software anymore.
You never addressed my point about how software companies hoarding money is better for society and the economy than client companies saving nearly that same amount.
I think/hope that the future of Open Source is that companies will pay for changes to software, and existing software will be free. I think that's a fair compromise that can work if people realize the benefits. Remember, 90% of software developed is for use internally. If those folks can use existing software as a base, they save money.
Think of Open Source as analagous to Science. The government and a lot of companies and universities spend money for folks to work on Science. But the results of the scientific studies end up in the public domain. Often right away for publicly funded projects. For private companies, the Science often gets put into the public domain after a certain number of years through the patent system. And the patent system was *designed* to make this information public.
Anyway, the results of the scientific research can be used by anyone. Whether they are commercial profiteers, non-profit organizations, or hackers in their garage. It's called "standing on the shoulders of giants". Without this ability to use what others before have built, we'd never have gotten anywhere.
One of the best examples of this is NASA. It has developed a ton of new technologies. Many of them have been commercialized. This lead to a pretty large advance of American industry in the 1980s.
1. Your paper does nothing to explain why Shared Source would be any better.
2. Your paper doesn't cover using Open Source, only creating it. Since it already exists, I don't see any reason not to use it. In fact, most of the pro-Open-Source literature concentrates on why using it is beneficial. (And they tend to do a good job of explaining it -- customer control probably being number one.) And since Microsoft is trying to get people to use Shared Source (or proprietary) and stop using Open Source, I think usage is the real issue here.
3. You've missed a lot of things in your paper. For example, the Internet was built on Open Source. Ever heard of Sendmail? How about NCSA httpd (and Apache, its follow-on)? BIND? These were (and still are) core components of the Internet.
4. GCC is not the fastest compiler. But that is not its primary goal. It is however, the most portable. This was one of the primary goals, and it has been successful as the most widely available compiler. Still, on x86 systems, it is competitive with even Intel's own compiler. I also believe that it was the first compiler to be completely ISO C++ compliant.
5. How can something that can be copied for virtual nothing be scarce? Any scarcity you create is artifical. And competition tends to remove such artificial barriers.
6. By artificially increasing the value of software, you are increasing the costs to all consumers of software. Thus you reduce the amount of productivity savings to all those customers. It's not clear which is more beneficial to the econmony/society as a whole. But I expect that spreading the wealth around would be better.
7. If people want to give away their labor, who are you to complain about it? If someone offered to cut your grass for free, would you turn them down because it is depressing the economy? Maybe they want to have an excuse to be outside, or maybe they enjoy doing it, or maybe it makes them feel good to help others.
8. The issue of why people want to work on Open Source without monetary remuneration have been covered in several places. ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" probably being the best.) Such reasons include making a name for one's self, generosity, no value seen in the software beyond using it for one's own purposes, wanting others to work on the product, etc. Also, don't discount the fact that if someone creates some software and releases it, he tends to end up with a better version than what he released.
While your paper makes some good points (I moderated it "Interesting" in another thread) I don't think you've spent too much time doing your research. You provide reasons why people shouldn't work on Open Source, and yet they do. So you're busy explaining why this shouldn't happen, when you should be figuring out why it does.
At my brother's wedding, they gave out heart-shaped cookie cutters with a recipe attached. Something like "love cookies", probably some poem too. I still have the cookie cutter, and use it whenever I'm trying to woo a woman. Anyway, the recipe is cool, because geeks like to make things and experiment. And the cookie cutter is useful, keepable, and brings back memories when they use it.
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This actually makes a little bit of sense. Training is not free. If their IT guys don't know anything about Macs, they're going to need some training to get up to speed. That could easily run into the $10,000+ range. Perhaps that still makes sense in total dollars, but finding the money for it could be difficult -- the $43,000 worth of computers doesn't add any money to their available budget.
Why don't they accept the Macs and trade them (maybe with another district) for some PCs?
Sounds like a pretty good fit for Dreamweaver. I think MX does JSP, and I'm sure that it does all the rest. It's got a pretty nice interface and is pretty easy to use. I'm not a big Windows user, but I like Dreamweaver a lot.
That really sounds like a made-up name. And if it's in the Arctic Circle, shouldn't it be Longdaybyen?
There's no monetary harm in your example.
For another example, it isn't against the law to have an accident. But you still have to pay for the damages.
Doesn't even matter, really. You can sue someone because they caused you harm. You don't have to show that they broke some law to do it. Just show how much monetary harm they caused you.
Agreed. It sounds like he's figured out the solution to a problem that he doesn't have.
But when recordable DVD drives are $100 next year, he'll be able to add that feature for $100. You'll have to get a whole new unit, spending probably $400 more.
I call my rainy day fund my "expected unemployment fund". In this industry, I fully expect to have a month or 2 of down-time per year. I've been lucky the past 2 years, with full employment.
You just made a huge leap in logic there. The reason we pay Hostess to make cupcakes is three-fold. First, we pay them for the physical goods that they are selling us. Second, we pay them for the time they spent making the product, because it saves us the time and effort of having to do so. Finally, we pay them for the idea of what they have created -- in this case, the recipe.
If we eliminate the first 2 reasons for payment, the question then becomes "what is the percentage of the price for each of the 3 components?". I'd argue that none of them are 0, but I'd suggest that the cost of the idea is very small. Mainly for the reason that the cost of creating the idea is amortized among a large number of items. (Compare the price of an original piece of art versus a lithograph to see this in practice today.)
You'll note that there is no money in Star Trek. Likely for the reason that if you can replicate anything, it's not necessary any more. Everyone can obtain what they need, and largely what they want. For a counter-point view, read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, where Intellectual Property is the only valuable commodity, and is well-protected. Unfortunately, we're already headed toward the (slightly) distopian society instead of the utopian society.
So once we get to a point where ideas are the only thing of value, I believe we have these 2 choices as a society: allow Intellectual Property to be freely shared, or strongly protect Intellectual Property. You'll note that the software industry is currently realizing this, and separating into the 2 groups: proprietary software and Free Software / Open Source. (Admittedly, it does take time to create software; this time is also amortized, but to a lesser extent for most software as compared to cupcakes.)
Now to address the original question: which is more ethical? Think about living in a society where everything you need is easily and freely obtainable for everyone, because raw materials and the ability to build things from them are overly abundant. Is it ethical to artificially limit who can get what they want? Consider that a large portion of the society may not be intelligent or creative enough to come up with new ideas, which are the only thing of value that can be traded. Is it ethical to keep those people from getting what they want?
This is actually a really though ethical dilemma. Giving everyone everything they want may not be the right choice. (Witness the child who is given everything he wants.) On the other hand, I don't think its ethical to artifically create "have" and "have-not" portions of society, when it would be easy not to.
I agree. The second version makes that clear, but the first version sounded like a complete land grab. But why don't they just say what they mean? Something to the effect:
Lawyers aren't supposed to make things more difficult to understand. They're supposed to protect people and companies.God, it's great to see some intelligent thought here. These are exactly the criteria that need to be considered.
I especially think that point #7 is very important. It's clear to me that separating the GUI design from the code is the way to go. GUI design and programming are very different tasks -- sometimes people are godd at one and not the other. Plus, GUIs should be done in a different language than programming -- something descriptive, not procedural.
I've used GLADE (for GTK/GNOME) and it makes a nice clean separation. The main problem is that it's mostly tied to C and GTK. I'd love to see a GUI-agnostic, language-agnostic version of GLADE.
Hook your Zaurus up to your PC and use VNC to do anything that requires a lot of typing.
TV and radio. They didn't explicitly give you permission. Well OK, you could still watch/listen, since the proposed law says "with the intent to defraud or cause harm". But the stations could convincingly argue that skipping commercials is intentionally causing them harm.
How stupid are people? If you'd bothered to pay attention the past couple years, your firewall would already be blocking this. Your firewall should already be blocking port 135 -- and every other port that you don't explicitly need. Your outbound connections should be limited to basically HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, FTP, SSH, POP/IMAP, and perhaps a few others.
As far as using images of injured civilians to make their point -- that's the entire reason that they are against the war -- because it hurts innocent people. I don't find it odd that they would show the reason for their concern.
And God forbid that someone suggest that blowing the fuck out of each other isn't nice and won't make people like us.
And that man was ..... Ken Lay of Enron.
It's at this point that you should consider going over his head. If you believe that you can save the company money, and management is standing in the way, you should point that out to higher management. That said, you'll probably be seen as not being a team player, since upper management has a better relationship with your management than with you.
He's expressed the opinion that since we've invested so much into this product already, he can't just back out now. You see, it would make it look like he made a bad decision.
I've made the argument that that's an excellent reason that management chooses proprietary software. They need someone to blame when things go wrong. Open Source software is generally better for the company. It's management's self-preservation that requires them to choose proprietary software, at the expense of the company.
That's absurd, and probably the weakest part of your argument. Nobody is forcing these developers to write code for free and give it away. (Or to work on existing GPLed software.) I think you're still missing my point about adding value versus zero-cost copying.
And who is likely to be the best consultant on a piece of software? The folks who helped write it!
As for people making money off of stuff they didn't create -- welcome to the real world!
Folks really can make money off of Apache. Consultants who install it; and there are a few commercial versions that have some added features, mostly easier management. The things is, nobody can make obscene amounts of money on software anymore.
You never addressed my point about how software companies hoarding money is better for society and the economy than client companies saving nearly that same amount.
I think/hope that the future of Open Source is that companies will pay for changes to software, and existing software will be free. I think that's a fair compromise that can work if people realize the benefits. Remember, 90% of software developed is for use internally. If those folks can use existing software as a base, they save money.
Think of Open Source as analagous to Science. The government and a lot of companies and universities spend money for folks to work on Science. But the results of the scientific studies end up in the public domain. Often right away for publicly funded projects. For private companies, the Science often gets put into the public domain after a certain number of years through the patent system. And the patent system was *designed* to make this information public.
Anyway, the results of the scientific research can be used by anyone. Whether they are commercial profiteers, non-profit organizations, or hackers in their garage. It's called "standing on the shoulders of giants". Without this ability to use what others before have built, we'd never have gotten anywhere.
One of the best examples of this is NASA. It has developed a ton of new technologies. Many of them have been commercialized. This lead to a pretty large advance of American industry in the 1980s.
2. Your paper doesn't cover using Open Source, only creating it. Since it already exists, I don't see any reason not to use it. In fact, most of the pro-Open-Source literature concentrates on why using it is beneficial. (And they tend to do a good job of explaining it -- customer control probably being number one.) And since Microsoft is trying to get people to use Shared Source (or proprietary) and stop using Open Source, I think usage is the real issue here.
3. You've missed a lot of things in your paper. For example, the Internet was built on Open Source. Ever heard of Sendmail? How about NCSA httpd (and Apache, its follow-on)? BIND? These were (and still are) core components of the Internet.
4. GCC is not the fastest compiler. But that is not its primary goal. It is however, the most portable. This was one of the primary goals, and it has been successful as the most widely available compiler. Still, on x86 systems, it is competitive with even Intel's own compiler. I also believe that it was the first compiler to be completely ISO C++ compliant.
5. How can something that can be copied for virtual nothing be scarce? Any scarcity you create is artifical. And competition tends to remove such artificial barriers.
6. By artificially increasing the value of software, you are increasing the costs to all consumers of software. Thus you reduce the amount of productivity savings to all those customers. It's not clear which is more beneficial to the econmony/society as a whole. But I expect that spreading the wealth around would be better.
7. If people want to give away their labor, who are you to complain about it? If someone offered to cut your grass for free, would you turn them down because it is depressing the economy? Maybe they want to have an excuse to be outside, or maybe they enjoy doing it, or maybe it makes them feel good to help others.
8. The issue of why people want to work on Open Source without monetary remuneration have been covered in several places. ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" probably being the best.) Such reasons include making a name for one's self, generosity, no value seen in the software beyond using it for one's own purposes, wanting others to work on the product, etc. Also, don't discount the fact that if someone creates some software and releases it, he tends to end up with a better version than what he released.
While your paper makes some good points (I moderated it "Interesting" in another thread) I don't think you've spent too much time doing your research. You provide reasons why people shouldn't work on Open Source, and yet they do. So you're busy explaining why this shouldn't happen, when you should be figuring out why it does.
At my brother's wedding, they gave out heart-shaped cookie cutters with a recipe attached. Something like "love cookies", probably some poem too. I still have the cookie cutter, and use it whenever I'm trying to woo a woman. Anyway, the recipe is cool, because geeks like to make things and experiment. And the cookie cutter is useful, keepable, and brings back memories when they use it.
Or more commonly referred to as one iota of success.
-
http://www2.warehouse.com/product.asp?pf%5Fid=DEB
3 743&cat=pc
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http://www2.warehouse.com/product.asp?pf%5Fid=DEB
5 356&cat=pc
And they are in stock.