It has nothing to do with "monopoly profits". Redhat is growing, but if they were closed source/proprietary, they would probably making 10X as much (which would mean more jobs as well).
That money would be away from the users of the software. Do you think that it's good for handful of software-companies to make massive profits, while all the other companies pay through their nose for software, as opposed of having handful of software-companies making decent profits, while all the other companies pay reasonable amounts of money for software? In short: there are relatively few companies in the world (Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, IBM etc.) making money from creating and selling software and related services. There are maybe thousand times more companies who'se business is not related to selling software, yet they are USERS of software (ExxonMobil, WalMart, Volkswagen, that Mom & Pop bookstore down the street).
You then drag the argument that more profits == more jobs. Well, it might mean more jobs for the software-companies, but it might mean less jobs for the companies who use software, since their money gets transferred to the software-companies, leaving less money to hire new employees.
I also find it kind of funny that so many open source supporters name redhat as an example company when they basically built their business on the backs of hard-working open source programmers.
So what? There's nothing preventing anyone from selling GPL'ed software, nor is there anything to prevent someone from selling support to GPL'ed software. And it does not matter who originally wrote the software. If Red Hat can make profit from their GPL-related business, great! More power to them! I see NO problem with Red Hat making money from software originally written by someone else. None whats-o-ever.
I am saying you can't make that much money with GNU software.
Oh, so now you say that you CAN make money from the software, just not "as much"? Well, competition has the tendency to drive down prices. Is this news to you? Who benefits from those lower prices? The customers and users.
no. Microsoft makes most of their money with software, so they are a software company.
They make their money from licenses, they are a licensing-company. Why is it that when Microsoft sells software-licenses and support, they are "software-company", but when Red Hat sells software-licenses and support, they are NOT "software-company"? Considering that Microsoft has lots of businesses not related to software as such (MSN, Xbox, Zune), I would say that they are less of a software-company than Red Hat is.
Redhat isn't making that much in terms of a company
They have growing and profitable business, what more do you want? Microsoft-esque monopoly-profits? Sorry, not gonna happen.
they also realized it's difficult to sell something for free and are selling certifications/books/support contracts
So you are agreeing with me that you can make money from GPL'ed software, but it just doesn't have to involve selling license to that software?
I would imagine they get a very small percentage of people that acutally purchase a copy (1% or less than the # of people using redhat..which is very bad for the survivability of a company.
I have seen some numbers a while ago (sorry, don't have any links), and the percentage is way above 1%. If people don't want the support-contract, why run Red Hat at all, since they could use CentOS instead?
Also, there are other means of making money, but then you aren't really considered a software company anymore and shouldn't even be considered in the "making money with gnu" argument.
Red Hat's product is an OS, and the related software-stack. They have zillion people whose sole task is to improve that software. So yes, they are a software-company. Or are you saying that if they are not selling you bunch of bits as such, then they are not a software-company? You are artificially limiting the definition of a "software company" so it fits your argument. Hell, Microsoft isn't selling me bits either, they are just selling licenses. They are not a software-company, they are a licensing-company.
Well, Red Hat seems to be doing quite OK, even though all their software is GPL'ed, and there are even 1:1 clones of their OS out there (CentOS among others). There are other means of making money besides "selling software".
Few days ago I saw a piece of news in futuretech.blinkenlights.nl which showed loads of Tezros, Fuels, Octanes and other system on their way to be recycled. Brand-new gear, still in their boxes on their way to be destroyed. Maybe they are not competetive anymore in the price-performance arena, but they are still very very cool machines. Was their destruction really the best option here?
When I read this piece of news, I was immediately reminded of the purchase of Empeg my SONICblue. Empeg was a kick-ass piece of equipment, and SONICblue promptly ran it to the ground. I have a bad feeling that same thing will happen here. The world is full of cases where a big company buys a smaller company with great product, only to kill the product. Besides Empeg, Sun and Cobalt comes to my mind.
I have actually mailed him (Alex Stubb in my case) before, and I have had lenghty discussions with. There actually are MEP's out there that actually do listen to their voters
I mailed Viviane Reding, the comissioner in charge, while I was at it:
Hello Mrs. Reding
I just read a newspaper-article on Times Online, which said that the EU-comission is creating a new directive ("Television without frontiers") which would mandate that anyone publishing video-material on a website would need a broadcasting-license. As a citizen of the EU, I must inform you of my strong opposition to this directive.
If this directive is passed, it would mean that I would have to get a license from the government if I wanted to publish video-clips made by me, on my own website. I consider such licenses to be a gross breach of my rights to free speech! I should not be required to obtain a "license" from the government in order to show other people videos created by me. I do believe that broadcast-licenses were originally set up to prevent frequency-interference. Such interference does not occur in the Internet. If I publish a video on my own website, it does not interfere other online-services.
According to the article, one of the goals of the new directive is to "protect the children". I feel that the comission does not need to trample on the Citizens rights to free speech in order to protect the children. If the goal is to protect the children, where does this end? Will we need a "license" in the future to post text on the web? Or pictures? Or send email? After all, someone could harm a child by sending him or her offensive email. Should we start handing out email-licenses as well? Maybe we should start handing out speech-licenses as well, since someone could say something rude to a child in a supermarket or something? We already have legislation in place which protects the children. Government-mandated "licenses" are not needed to protect children.
Let me re-emphazise: I'm totally and completely against this directive. I find any attempts to limit my rights to free speech to be gross injustice by the EU-comission. We do not need to limit free speech in order to "protect the children".
The complaining makes the prospect of releasing a Linux driver undesirable for a lot of companies.
If they do not know that people want it, why would they release it? Do you think that they are thinking along the lines of "Damn, there are lots of people telling us that we should open our drivers, and they are complaining as well! If only they stopped complaining so we could release the drivers as open source....".
It really starts harming me when the developers in charge of the driver interface in the kernel deliberately make it difficult for non-GPL drivers to work
It might harm you in the short-term, but it benefits you in the long-term. If they made it easy for binary-drivers to work, then companies would have NO reason to rlease open GPL'ed drivers. You would then have to rely on multitude of closed, binary-only drivers. And that is a recipe for disaster.
I understand the idealism of discouraging binary blob drivers, but *nix users are not in a position to dictate software policies to hardware manufacturers.
They are not dictating anything. They are asking and complaining. And companies are free to disregard their wishes, like NVIDIA does. If we really were in the position to "dictate policies", then those companies would have no option but to release open drivers. But since they DO release closed drivers, then we are not obviously dictating anything.
"I'm not complaining about NVidia.... I'm complaining about OSS zealots"
Um, you know, that was kinda my point. Why are you complaining? People have valid reasons to complain about NVIDIA. While those reasons might not be important to you, they are important to others. Don't like the complaining? well, ignore it then. But no, you are not doing that. Instead, you are wasting your time by whining "you should not be complaining!". Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Just because you don't care about the license of the drivers does not mean that others should not care about it either.
In short: we have people complaining about an issue that they see as a problem. And then we have you complaining about other people complaining. instead of doing that, why not do something productive instead (complaining about other people complaining is NOT productive)? like mowing my lawn or something.
Of course NVIDIA has the every right to license their drivers however they please. It's their driver and their product after all. That said, we also have the right to complain about their choice of licenses, and we have the right to buy something else. So why are you (and others like you) complaining? How does it harm you if some people complain about NVIDIA's drivers? It doesn't. People have the right to complain, and the reason they are complaining about is a valid one, even though it might not matter to you. But it does matter to other people.
No-one here is under the illusion that NVIDIA will open their drivers because someone on/. said so. But does that mean that we shouldn't voice our displeasure about the situation in places like/.? No it does not. Don't like seeing people complain about NVIDIA? Tough.
It should take the snails about 2000 years to reach Tokyo. Unless they hitch a ride on a plane or something ("Snakes on a plane 2: Snails on a plane". You heard it here first!). So there's no rush. Yet. Assuming that the radioactivity didn't mutate them so that they can reach slithering-speeds of up to 200mph
But as my quote showed, an open _firmware_ is being developed for the chip. So there will be open drivers AND open firmware. Again: Am I missing something here?
Getting off-topic, but.... WW2 started going downhill for the Germans when they lost at Stalingrad. Battle of Stalingrad ended in early 1943, long before the Second Front. In summer -44 (during D-day), Germans were already being annihilated in the east. D-Day (and to lesser extent, Italy) did hasten the end, but Germany's fate was sealed long before D-day or Italy.
"A GPL Linux device driver for the Marvell wireless chip, the Libertas driver, still under development but also fully functional can be found in our GIT tree.
We are having open firmware for the Marvell wireless chip developed by Meraki. I don't know yet what license that code will be released under, though would expect it would likely be one or more of the MIT, LGPL or GPL licenses; but we'll have to think through the usage cases and needs of the communities involved before we can make that choice."
So yes, open and free drivers and firmwares are being developed as we speak. So is this an issue not about what OLPC will use in the future, but about what they are temporarily using at this very moment?
"I've been following global warming for a long time now doing a lot research on the side for the last couple of years."
As much as those scientist who claim that Earth is getting warmer due to Co2-emissions? Yeah, I didn't think so either. And besides: what makes your amateur-research (or are you a meteorologist or something similar?) better than their professional research? Or is this a case of "I Googled for it, therefore I'm an expert on this field!"?
"However, we, in the US, have this little thing called the first amendment. The right to free speech. What Spamhaus (or rather, the email server admin) does is interfere with end users ability to receive free speech."
Instead of wasting time discussing this moronic comment, why not just flag his post as "retarded" and be done with it? Oh, it's already -1, Flamebait? Nevermind then.
"ability to receive free speech"... Now THAT made my day!
"A flavor called "Warty Warthog" is just plain bad marketing. Of course the most popular Jelly-Belly jelly bean flavor is "Vomit"."
Um, that's a codename, not the name of the product itself. It's similar to what Microsoft had with Vista/Longhorn. Do we have people saying stuff like "The OS is called "Longhorn"? That's retarded!"? No we do not.
"If they paid decent wages and gave decent working conditions, then why on earth would anyone spend any time complaining about them?"
Because the salaries would still be considerably less what we are being paid. We will always have "holier than thou" folks in the west, who will make it their life's mission to complain about "injustices of the world". Fact remains that thanks to those factories, poverty has been going down. In south Asia poverty-rate has gone from 50+% to 30+% in 20 years. East Asia went from 60% to about 15%! And both of those areas are places where western companies have been investing heavily.
I don't care much for Nike, and you can't use them alone as proof that things are bad. Look at the overall situation.
Slashdot Mirror
That money would be away from the users of the software. Do you think that it's good for handful of software-companies to make massive profits, while all the other companies pay through their nose for software, as opposed of having handful of software-companies making decent profits, while all the other companies pay reasonable amounts of money for software? In short: there are relatively few companies in the world (Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, IBM etc.) making money from creating and selling software and related services. There are maybe thousand times more companies who'se business is not related to selling software, yet they are USERS of software (ExxonMobil, WalMart, Volkswagen, that Mom & Pop bookstore down the street).
You then drag the argument that more profits == more jobs. Well, it might mean more jobs for the software-companies, but it might mean less jobs for the companies who use software, since their money gets transferred to the software-companies, leaving less money to hire new employees.
So what? There's nothing preventing anyone from selling GPL'ed software, nor is there anything to prevent someone from selling support to GPL'ed software. And it does not matter who originally wrote the software. If Red Hat can make profit from their GPL-related business, great! More power to them! I see NO problem with Red Hat making money from software originally written by someone else. None whats-o-ever.
Oh, so now you say that you CAN make money from the software, just not "as much"? Well, competition has the tendency to drive down prices. Is this news to you? Who benefits from those lower prices? The customers and users.
They make their money from licenses, they are a licensing-company. Why is it that when Microsoft sells software-licenses and support, they are "software-company", but when Red Hat sells software-licenses and support, they are NOT "software-company"? Considering that Microsoft has lots of businesses not related to software as such (MSN, Xbox, Zune), I would say that they are less of a software-company than Red Hat is.
They have growing and profitable business, what more do you want? Microsoft-esque monopoly-profits? Sorry, not gonna happen.
So you are agreeing with me that you can make money from GPL'ed software, but it just doesn't have to involve selling license to that software?
I have seen some numbers a while ago (sorry, don't have any links), and the percentage is way above 1%. If people don't want the support-contract, why run Red Hat at all, since they could use CentOS instead?
Red Hat's product is an OS, and the related software-stack. They have zillion people whose sole task is to improve that software. So yes, they are a software-company. Or are you saying that if they are not selling you bunch of bits as such, then they are not a software-company? You are artificially limiting the definition of a "software company" so it fits your argument. Hell, Microsoft isn't selling me bits either, they are just selling licenses. They are not a software-company, they are a licensing-company.
Well, Red Hat seems to be doing quite OK, even though all their software is GPL'ed, and there are even 1:1 clones of their OS out there (CentOS among others). There are other means of making money besides "selling software".
Few days ago I saw a piece of news in futuretech.blinkenlights.nl which showed loads of Tezros, Fuels, Octanes and other system on their way to be recycled. Brand-new gear, still in their boxes on their way to be destroyed. Maybe they are not competetive anymore in the price-performance arena, but they are still very very cool machines. Was their destruction really the best option here?
When I read this piece of news, I was immediately reminded of the purchase of Empeg my SONICblue. Empeg was a kick-ass piece of equipment, and SONICblue promptly ran it to the ground. I have a bad feeling that same thing will happen here. The world is full of cases where a big company buys a smaller company with great product, only to kill the product. Besides Empeg, Sun and Cobalt comes to my mind.
I have actually mailed him (Alex Stubb in my case) before, and I have had lenghty discussions with. There actually are MEP's out there that actually do listen to their voters
I mailed Viviane Reding, the comissioner in charge, while I was at it:
Hello Mrs. Reding
I just read a newspaper-article on Times Online, which said that the EU-comission is creating a new directive ("Television without frontiers") which would mandate that anyone publishing video-material on a website would need a broadcasting-license. As a citizen of the EU, I must inform you of my strong opposition to this directive.
If this directive is passed, it would mean that I would have to get a license from the government if I wanted to publish video-clips made by me, on my own website. I consider such licenses to be a gross breach of my rights to free speech! I should not be required to obtain a "license" from the government in order to show other people videos created by me. I do believe that broadcast-licenses were originally set up to prevent frequency-interference. Such interference does not occur in the Internet. If I publish a video on my own website, it does not interfere other online-services.
According to the article, one of the goals of the new directive is to "protect the children". I feel that the comission does not need to trample on the Citizens rights to free speech in order to protect the children. If the goal is to protect the children, where does this end? Will we need a "license" in the future to post text on the web? Or pictures? Or send email? After all, someone could harm a child by sending him or her offensive email. Should we start handing out email-licenses as well? Maybe we should start handing out speech-licenses as well, since someone could say something rude to a child in a supermarket or something? We already have legislation in place which protects the children. Government-mandated "licenses" are not needed to protect children.
Let me re-emphazise: I'm totally and completely against this directive. I find any attempts to limit my rights to free speech to be gross injustice by the EU-comission. We do not need to limit free speech in order to "protect the children".
Your respectfully
XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
I'm typing an email to my MEP as we speak.
If they do not know that people want it, why would they release it? Do you think that they are thinking along the lines of "Damn, there are lots of people telling us that we should open our drivers, and they are complaining as well! If only they stopped complaining so we could release the drivers as open source....".
It might harm you in the short-term, but it benefits you in the long-term. If they made it easy for binary-drivers to work, then companies would have NO reason to rlease open GPL'ed drivers. You would then have to rely on multitude of closed, binary-only drivers. And that is a recipe for disaster.
They are not dictating anything. They are asking and complaining. And companies are free to disregard their wishes, like NVIDIA does. If we really were in the position to "dictate policies", then those companies would have no option but to release open drivers. But since they DO release closed drivers, then we are not obviously dictating anything.
"I'm not complaining about NVidia.... I'm complaining about OSS zealots"
Um, you know, that was kinda my point. Why are you complaining? People have valid reasons to complain about NVIDIA. While those reasons might not be important to you, they are important to others. Don't like the complaining? well, ignore it then. But no, you are not doing that. Instead, you are wasting your time by whining "you should not be complaining!". Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Just because you don't care about the license of the drivers does not mean that others should not care about it either.
In short: we have people complaining about an issue that they see as a problem. And then we have you complaining about other people complaining. instead of doing that, why not do something productive instead (complaining about other people complaining is NOT productive)? like mowing my lawn or something.
Of course NVIDIA has the every right to license their drivers however they please. It's their driver and their product after all. That said, we also have the right to complain about their choice of licenses, and we have the right to buy something else. So why are you (and others like you) complaining? How does it harm you if some people complain about NVIDIA's drivers? It doesn't. People have the right to complain, and the reason they are complaining about is a valid one, even though it might not matter to you. But it does matter to other people.
/. said so. But does that mean that we shouldn't voice our displeasure about the situation in places like /.? No it does not. Don't like seeing people complain about NVIDIA? Tough.
No-one here is under the illusion that NVIDIA will open their drivers because someone on
None of this would have happened if devs had just included Reiser4 in to the kernel....
It should take the snails about 2000 years to reach Tokyo. Unless they hitch a ride on a plane or something ("Snakes on a plane 2: Snails on a plane". You heard it here first!). So there's no rush. Yet. Assuming that the radioactivity didn't mutate them so that they can reach slithering-speeds of up to 200mph
Who cares if it has zillion cores and threads, if it still sucks?
But as my quote showed, an open _firmware_ is being developed for the chip. So there will be open drivers AND open firmware. Again: Am I missing something here?
Getting off-topic, but.... WW2 started going downhill for the Germans when they lost at Stalingrad. Battle of Stalingrad ended in early 1943, long before the Second Front. In summer -44 (during D-day), Germans were already being annihilated in the east. D-Day (and to lesser extent, Italy) did hasten the end, but Germany's fate was sealed long before D-day or Italy.
Gettys says quite clearly that:
"A GPL Linux device driver for the Marvell wireless chip, the Libertas driver, still under development but also fully functional can be found in our GIT tree.
We are having open firmware for the Marvell wireless chip developed by Meraki. I don't know yet what license that code will be released under, though would expect it would likely be one or more of the MIT, LGPL or GPL licenses; but we'll have to think through the usage cases and needs of the communities involved before we can make that choice."
So yes, open and free drivers and firmwares are being developed as we speak. So is this an issue not about what OLPC will use in the future, but about what they are temporarily using at this very moment?
"I've been following global warming for a long time now doing a lot research on the side for the last couple of years."
As much as those scientist who claim that Earth is getting warmer due to Co2-emissions? Yeah, I didn't think so either. And besides: what makes your amateur-research (or are you a meteorologist or something similar?) better than their professional research? Or is this a case of "I Googled for it, therefore I'm an expert on this field!"?
"However, we, in the US, have this little thing called the first amendment. The right to free speech. What Spamhaus (or rather, the email server admin) does is interfere with end users ability to receive free speech."
Instead of wasting time discussing this moronic comment, why not just flag his post as "retarded" and be done with it? Oh, it's already -1, Flamebait? Nevermind then.
"ability to receive free speech"... Now THAT made my day!
"A flavor called "Warty Warthog" is just plain bad marketing. Of course the most popular Jelly-Belly jelly bean flavor is "Vomit"."
Um, that's a codename, not the name of the product itself. It's similar to what Microsoft had with Vista/Longhorn. Do we have people saying stuff like "The OS is called "Longhorn"? That's retarded!"? No we do not.
" tiny wireless chip capable of storing and transmitting data." ... it transmits that data to a bunch of private investigators by default.
...only one of THEM survived. D'oH!
"# Picard never visits planets that look suspiciously like a Californian desert, except for that time he met Kirk."
# When Picard met Kirk, only one of the survived.
Um, those countries were already part of Europe. This might come as a shock to you, but there is Europe outside EU as well.
"If they paid decent wages and gave decent working conditions, then why on earth would anyone spend any time complaining about them?"
Because the salaries would still be considerably less what we are being paid. We will always have "holier than thou" folks in the west, who will make it their life's mission to complain about "injustices of the world". Fact remains that thanks to those factories, poverty has been going down. In south Asia poverty-rate has gone from 50+% to 30+% in 20 years. East Asia went from 60% to about 15%! And both of those areas are places where western companies have been investing heavily.
I don't care much for Nike, and you can't use them alone as proof that things are bad. Look at the overall situation.