Ok, thanks for the explanation - it sheds light on the background of the decision.
But what I'm interested in is: is there a way for a young startup company to create and make money off a GPL-ed product? My views on this are pessimistic, as I can see following possible outcomes as most likely:
may one-man-band hackers will use it to gain profit, will not contribute to the software
a well-organized rival(s) will eventually emerge and suffocate the startup by making more money from the product than the original authors
product will be obscure enough that almost nobody will use it, then when the company closes the source, there will be difficulties as previous versions are free for the taking
As I see it, the only really good outcome is that a big (think: IBM-sized) company will eventually buy the company, possibly closing the source.
(note: all my discussion start from the point that a major purpose of creating the software is getting profit from it; I'm not discussing programming for fun or fame here:) )
Why isn't anybody looking at it from *their* perspective: A small, young-ish company tried to make a great product but failed to remain financially viable with the GPL license. Free-as-in-speech code is all well and great but at the end of the day, philosophy doesn't pay the bills.
Or is everyone scared that all the "You can't actually make money with GPL" rumours are true (especially for small start-ups)?;)
The entire parent post can be summarized as "Real Programmers Use Assembler".
I myself welcome each and every language feature that will make programming easier. It's true that not every language is optimal for every purpose but it's up to the programmer (or system designer) to choose which language to apply where.
(I'm one of the "SoC students") There are couple more problems:
- That's $4500 before taxes. Where I live at least jobs and services are usually negotiated with after-taxes sums, so I was disappointed that I had to give up 30% of the sum.
- I'm not the only one that hasn't received even the so-called "initial" payment ($500 - 30%) even after it's been more than a week since the project ended
- Not a single deadline Google set for themselves was honoured. Not for announcements, forms, nor payment.
Organization of the SoC project from the Google's side was just horrible - they obviously didn't know what they are getting into. Some students didn't know details about how and when they will be paid until the end. Students were left to deal with taxation issuses without help from Google (and have did extraordinarily well - on occasions even proving what little advice Google gave was wrong).
All this is inexcusable for such a large corporation, and one that actually has lots of experience with international issues. The have a lot to improve.
There's an important little fact hidden in all this - that the current average PC, with gigabyte+ memory, a significant percent of terabyte of storage space, 64 bit instructions, and clock speed of several gigahertz can natively execute a binary (compiled) program made in time when 16bit processors and dozens of kilobytes of memory running DOS 1.0 was hot new stuff.
It's either one of greatest accomplishments of engineering or a great folly - your pick:)
We are using internal combustion engines for the last 100 years for the same reasons the chariot was used for the 2000 years before that - because there's nothing better around.
It will probably take another 100 years before something as radical happens in transportation. (Remember, even in ancient time the technology level was raising exponentialy - it's just that there were fewer people on Earth.)
The high cost of life in western countries is just awful - it makes A LOT sense to move to a country where food, water and housing is cheap.
Even the "luxury" stuff electricity and Internet access is becoming cheap in new and developing countries, simply because they don't have all that old copper to dig out first.
Most people were bitten by it in the transition from Word 95 to Word 97. The new format (W97) was designed to be future-proof, and is used in all Word version since, but Word 95 (from Office 95... the one that introduced gradient fills in the title bar, IIRC?:) ) couldn't open it.
Then, there's another thing: newer versions of Word added stuff, or interpret the data slightly different, so sometimes you get wrong page borders or formatting when reading.DOCs created in different Word versions.
I believe this is the reason for the poor acting seen from some of the cast. It's like "You there! Go stand in front of that huge blue wall and act like you were fighting for your dear life for the past hour."
I don't know how do they expect actors to be convincing if all they've seen of their gorgeous/dangeours surroundings is a blue wall and camera men. Obviously, more experienced actors (especially if they have experience in theater) can cope better...
Make a HTML document, rename it to.doc - problem solved.
Recent Word versions don't really pay attention to the file extension, they guess the content by its signature.
A nice side to it is that if they STILL complain (maybe because of some automated scripts they're using), you can point to them "How can it not be a proper.DOC file if Word can open it?".
Except that Windows introduced substantially better functionality, user interface for example, and 32 bit support (in winNT or win95, depends on your standpoint:) ). What important news does Linux intrododuce?
I'm not trolling, because everything I've said is true - If you don't think so, quote parts of my post and respond, instead of calling names.
Have you ever noticed that the more software gets installed on Windows, the more likely it is to have trouble? There are a number of reasons for that, but the biggest is known colloquially as "DLL Hell"
The DLL hell on Windows is real, and true, there's no enforced version management like on free unixes (which in itself is really bad from architectural point of view - embedding version numbers in filenames - yuck! This is a separate file property and doesn't belong there! Much pain could be alleviated by using the version information constructively instead of just binding executables to libmygreat.so.1.2.3.4 - see what DragonFlyBSD is planning for instance.), but that doesn't even touch on my point - that you CAN'T (ever ever ever!) pick an application compiled for some early version of your Linux distribution (I won't even try to touch the problem of gazillion different distribution, for fear of being incinerated in flamefest by Linux apologists), and run it on your current latest-and-greatest desktop distribution without additional hussle (e.g. hunting down obsucre and obsolete compatibility libraries).
Your arguments mention Exchange and Information Store - these are server technologies and by definition require experts to handle them (if you can't install them - call an expert you paid for when you bought the applications). I'm also talking about the ability to go to google, or sourceforge, search for an application I need, and install it on my grannys 6 years old Win98 without much trouble.
The problem is simply that binary compatibility is hard.
Yes, that must be the reason MS Windows is (for most application) binary compatible FOR ONLY PAST TEN-TO-FIFTEEN YEARS!! while with a decent Linux distribution one can only hope to run it for a year mostly, maybe two if it's a server before it becomes so crufty and obsolete you have to install a new version. People out there are sill running WIn98, and I'm sure there are several WIn95 machines also - and they can run most recent applications on them without problems.
Hell, if you run WINE you can run Windows applications from about 10 years ago on your Linux system, while you can't even say that for native Linux applications, Wine included.
There's no point talking "Linux desktop" with this problem still around... it's simply more economical for people to buy Windows knowing they'll still be able to use it with all new applications 5 years from now.
who "innovated" DOS, gui computing, windowed applications, mouse based ui, menus, word processor, spreadsheets, email client, address book, database... you get the picture. Such willful ignorance of the facts is quite staggering and makes for good reading/flaming.
Microsoft didn't, but neither did the 'open-source community'. People paid to research and/or brainstorm did.
Now, point me to a paid open-source think-tank so I can enlist:)
Most of the posts seem to bash on the guy(s) for violating GPL and other licenses. That (violating GPL) is bad, against license, morals, etc. - no news here.
What I would really wish is for someone to explain how could they use the open-source code, produce something marketable and still profit from it? Or is it just the case of "if you don't want to release it as GPL, you don't belong here and don't ever ever ever use GPL tainted code for commercial stuff". If that's the case, several good products (theirs) wouldn't have been made.
As I understand it, they took the open-sourced code and actually added value (features) to it, and their customers are happy for it. They certainly invested time & resources in adding the features. In short, how to reconcile the wish for profit & GPL?
Don't forget that if you want to distribute it within your organisation, deploy it with your own non GPL application, or even require people to download it to use your non GPL application, you will need to get a commercial license!
... or get a real database such as PostgreSQL or Firebird that's also actually free. But then, you'll need to teach yourself out of writing braindamaged excuse for SQL the MySQL is encouraging...
Like, wow! Using a database that has foreign key and !sic! constrains you to actually write numbers to integer fields is sooooo hard to get used to... And that whole "ACID" thingy... spaced out, I tells ya.
OOo 1.1 was NOT a speed demon on any platform. Most people I know who tried to use it on slower platforms (1GHz or less) claim it's slower than MS Word from circa Office 2000. Also, its startup time is really bad on whatever platform.
I tried OOo 2.0 beta on Windows and was unpleasently surprised. There were *no significant changes* in its ugly-ish user interface (other than it finally supports XP skins and Impress has slide sorter as dockable thingy; actually the ONLY thing i liked in OOo2 is more options in PDF conversion - too bad SWF support is stalling) and it's very bloated. Since it requires Java, especially in the database component/client, it's practically unusable - it devours memory and CPU for event the simplest operations.
Now, this is very bad PR. Consider a company with somewhat older computers and OS+Office (e.g. Win98, Office 97 or 2000) wishing to switch to Linux - that scenario is getting less likely by the day (If said company, for whatever reason (faster? smaller?) chooses FreeBSD, it will have even more problems w/java):
User interfaces on newer Linux distributions are getting waaaay too memory-hungry (ref: a Slashdot article a while ago about bloat in Gnome)
OpenOffice.org is getting bloated even faster
Unfortunately, OOo is still the only Open-source product out there that can reasonably understand MS Office file formats.
>> Only when Donald Knuth takes over the Linux kernel...
...which is actually a pretty good idea. I'm sure he could do many improvements once he got his hands (and mind) on it. Plus, there would be at least one another supported platform - MIX:)
This is actually connected to the development model of FreeBSD. Since BIND is part of 'base', very special care is taken in the import and any changes to it once it's released will be extremely conservative. The version of BIND imported in 5.3 will remain the same (+bugfixes) for the whole duration of 5_STABLE, the same as BIND 8 was present almost unchanged for the entire age of RELENG_4. Also, gcc in RELENG_5 will always be 3.4, even when 4.0 is out.
If you're not happy with it, ports will contain latest and greatest versions.
Slashdot Mirror
But what I'm interested in is: is there a way for a young startup company to create and make money off a GPL-ed product? My views on this are pessimistic, as I can see following possible outcomes as most likely:
As I see it, the only really good outcome is that a big (think: IBM-sized) company will eventually buy the company, possibly closing the source.
(note: all my discussion start from the point that a major purpose of creating the software is getting profit from it; I'm not discussing programming for fun or fame here :) )
Or is everyone scared that all the "You can't actually make money with GPL" rumours are true (especially for small start-ups)? ;)
I myself welcome each and every language feature that will make programming easier. It's true that not every language is optimal for every purpose but it's up to the programmer (or system designer) to choose which language to apply where.
(And yes, I know assembler. So what?)
- Philosophy doesn't pay the bills
- In any serious business, continually neglecting deadlines is extremely bad.
- That's $4500 before taxes. Where I live at least jobs and services are usually negotiated with after-taxes sums, so I was disappointed that I had to give up 30% of the sum.
- I'm not the only one that hasn't received even the so-called "initial" payment ($500 - 30%) even after it's been more than a week since the project ended
- Not a single deadline Google set for themselves was honoured. Not for announcements, forms, nor payment.
Organization of the SoC project from the Google's side was just horrible - they obviously didn't know what they are getting into. Some students didn't know details about how and when they will be paid until the end. Students were left to deal with taxation issuses without help from Google (and have did extraordinarily well - on occasions even proving what little advice Google gave was wrong).
All this is inexcusable for such a large corporation, and one that actually has lots of experience with international issues. The have a lot to improve.
It's either one of greatest accomplishments of engineering or a great folly - your pick :)
Science is a process by which we replace a less accurate description of the world with a more accurate one.
It will probably take another 100 years before something as radical happens in transportation. (Remember, even in ancient time the technology level was raising exponentialy - it's just that there were fewer people on Earth.)
A century from now all profit will be gathered from suing one another about IP & copyright rights :)
I see that the glorious art of asking the google first is nearly abandoned.i n.html#Why_is_it_called_the_patch_pumpk.
Here's the first hit: http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/Porting/pumpk
Even the "luxury" stuff electricity and Internet access is becoming cheap in new and developing countries, simply because they don't have all that old copper to dig out first.
Why isn't the data encrypted with some sort of strong schema during the transit?
Most people were bitten by it in the transition from Word 95 to Word 97. The new format (W97) was designed to be future-proof, and is used in all Word version since, but Word 95 (from Office 95... the one that introduced gradient fills in the title bar, IIRC? :) ) couldn't open it.
Then, there's another thing: newer versions of Word added stuff, or interpret the data slightly different, so sometimes you get wrong page borders or formatting when reading .DOCs created in different Word versions.
I don't know how do they expect actors to be convincing if all they've seen of their gorgeous/dangeours surroundings is a blue wall and camera men. Obviously, more experienced actors (especially if they have experience in theater) can cope better...
Recent Word versions don't really pay attention to the file extension, they guess the content by its signature.
A nice side to it is that if they STILL complain (maybe because of some automated scripts they're using), you can point to them "How can it not be a proper .DOC file if Word can open it?".
No they should not. They are not real persons, and by definitions have no interests except profits.
Except that Windows introduced substantially better functionality, user interface for example, and 32 bit support (in winNT or win95, depends on your standpoint :) ). What important news does Linux intrododuce?
Have you ever noticed that the more software gets installed on Windows, the more likely it is to have trouble? There are a number of reasons for that, but the biggest is known colloquially as "DLL Hell"
The DLL hell on Windows is real, and true, there's no enforced version management like on free unixes (which in itself is really bad from architectural point of view - embedding version numbers in filenames - yuck! This is a separate file property and doesn't belong there! Much pain could be alleviated by using the version information constructively instead of just binding executables to libmygreat.so.1.2.3.4 - see what DragonFlyBSD is planning for instance.), but that doesn't even touch on my point - that you CAN'T (ever ever ever!) pick an application compiled for some early version of your Linux distribution (I won't even try to touch the problem of gazillion different distribution, for fear of being incinerated in flamefest by Linux apologists), and run it on your current latest-and-greatest desktop distribution without additional hussle (e.g. hunting down obsucre and obsolete compatibility libraries).
Your arguments mention Exchange and Information Store - these are server technologies and by definition require experts to handle them (if you can't install them - call an expert you paid for when you bought the applications). I'm also talking about the ability to go to google, or sourceforge, search for an application I need, and install it on my grannys 6 years old Win98 without much trouble.
Hell, if you run WINE you can run Windows applications from about 10 years ago on your Linux system, while you can't even say that for native Linux applications, Wine included.
There's no point talking "Linux desktop" with this problem still around... it's simply more economical for people to buy Windows knowing they'll still be able to use it with all new applications 5 years from now.
Now, point me to a paid open-source think-tank so I can enlist :)
What I would really wish is for someone to explain how could they use the open-source code, produce something marketable and still profit from it? Or is it just the case of "if you don't want to release it as GPL, you don't belong here and don't ever ever ever use GPL tainted code for commercial stuff". If that's the case, several good products (theirs) wouldn't have been made.
As I understand it, they took the open-sourced code and actually added value (features) to it, and their customers are happy for it. They certainly invested time & resources in adding the features. In short, how to reconcile the wish for profit & GPL?
Like, wow! Using a database that has foreign key and !sic! constrains you to actually write numbers to integer fields is sooooo hard to get used to... And that whole "ACID" thingy... spaced out, I tells ya.
I tried OOo 2.0 beta on Windows and was unpleasently surprised. There were *no significant changes* in its ugly-ish user interface (other than it finally supports XP skins and Impress has slide sorter as dockable thingy; actually the ONLY thing i liked in OOo2 is more options in PDF conversion - too bad SWF support is stalling) and it's very bloated. Since it requires Java, especially in the database component/client, it's practically unusable - it devours memory and CPU for event the simplest operations.
Now, this is very bad PR. Consider a company with somewhat older computers and OS+Office (e.g. Win98, Office 97 or 2000) wishing to switch to Linux - that scenario is getting less likely by the day (If said company, for whatever reason (faster? smaller?) chooses FreeBSD, it will have even more problems w/java):
- User interfaces on newer Linux distributions are getting waaaay too memory-hungry (ref: a Slashdot article a while ago about bloat in Gnome)
- OpenOffice.org is getting bloated even faster
Unfortunately, OOo is still the only Open-source product out there that can reasonably understand MS Office file formats.If you're not happy with it, ports will contain latest and greatest versions.