Makes me wonder what the value of their assets are, and if one shouldn't evaluate the donated time as if it were a revenue stream (even though it isn't really liquid, it replaces what a commercial company would have to direct a portion of their revenue stream towards paying for). Their debt/equity ratio is probably zero:-) It is, at the very least, an incredible organizational experiment.
I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal. Or run mostly stable, and just upgrade select items to testing, and other select items to unstable. Hell, if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, CVS and compile and help with testing. I couldn't imagine anyone running debian stable unless it was critical to be *rock-solid* stable. Which means heavy load servers, in my mind.
I moved from Mandrake to Debian because I like estoeric math software. I ran into trouble with Mandrake where I could get some stuff from Mandrake's unstable, but I couldn't satisfy all the dependencies. What is the point of having an RPM if it can't be installed? Debian allowed me to install a ton of stuff with apt-get that I was having to download tarballs to try install. I admit I *love* debian:-)
I wonder if there is a "time value of money" equation for the rate of evolution of technology. You have to innovate at least as fast as the "market rate" in order to stay current. If you could burn through a lot of cash (and still remain somewhat konstant (there are communication costs as the number of people in a project increases) in terms of value recieved) you would jump a generation or two ahead of the competition. Might this not be worth considering? What good would be getting DOS really really right, if it came in 2038? The perfect Win3.1 replacement in 2076?
I'm not saying it is needed, now. Just you prompted the thought, and I've never seen "time value of tech dev acceleration" equations...
Qrix, IANAL, but I think you could legally sell any regions DVDs in any other region, but you'd have trouble continuing to sell them after word got around that they wouldn't play in the DVD player the customer bought at Walmart. I seem to remember there was some sort of legal action to prevent the importation of another regions DVD players into Australia. Or perhaps it was a mod chip? Does region encoding imply DMCA?
It wouldn't be a problem if arbitrage worked in this case. The fact is that region encoding was established as an anti-arbitrage, and hence anti-market force. While disrupting market forces can lead to greater profit, I suggest that demand would be much higher at the lower cost point. The only way more product would be sold at the anti-market (inflated) price would be in the case of inelastic demand (say, insulin), which DVDs most certainly are *not*. When you consider the incredible cheap marginal cost of pressing just one more DVD, I doubt supply would have any trouble keeping up with the increased demand. I have trouble believing it is for any purpose other than maximizing profit.
All that said, I do admit it was in a Marketing class and not an Econ or Finace class.:-)
I don't see how the Free/Open "duality" can be disputed in terms of existing as seperate categories. Open came later, and is a superset of Free. All Free Software is Open, but not all Open Software is Free. This is obvious from both the definitions, as well as from the compatible software lists both organizations make public.
Gotta call bullshit: "to show hostile attitude that led to that event". Didn't happen that way that I read about.
"told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired" but it wasn't done on company time, or servers.
"he encouraged creation of Gnome because KDE was somehow not free enough for him." It wasn't free, and now it is. Thanks to RMS and Gnome.
"Now there is a massive duplication of effort when everyone could be working on making one thing better." Which is a *good* thing, not a bad thing. The diversity of an ecosphere leads to robustness, and parallel exploration of many paths. This is a major, misunderstand strength of both Free and Open Software paradigms.
But isn't it pragmatic to consider the license as well as the functionality? I'd say that RMS is being very pragmatic. How "pragmatic" do people look when the BSA comes forcibly into a workplace and shuts down production?
"Maybe, in some sense, it could be argued that ideals ARE practical, because the long term consequences of going without them don't tend to be good." Also YES!
Don't forget hardware. IBM sells services and hardware. If copyright law was modified so that the label's distribution protection racket only lasted one month, would there be more or less MP3 players sold? Car stereos? Home stereos?
Actually there is a trend. In all cases, ignorance is expensive in the real world. Whether you are trying to deploy one of the BSDs, Solaris, Windows, Linux, or OS X, if you are ignorant it will most likely cost you.
His point was that I can ftp you my Debian CDs, but you can't ftp me your WinXP CDs. Hence, WinXP is ignoring a benefit of the networked world. Eventually market forces will do away with MS business model because it isn't as efficent for the market. It matters not that MS won't be making money, because the world will be saving much more. The market *itself* increases in value through the free exchange of ideas and information. Property is, of course, a different matter.
This came up in my Marketing class just this semester. It is illegal in the United States to price discriminate. However, this law doesn't apply to the case in question, because they aren't trying to sell for artifical prices in, say, California vs Kansas. Rather, they are discriminating against global geographic areas, which is beyound the jurisdistion of the US law. So it isn't illegal. (But it should be.)
Didn't corporations (ITT, I think) use fighter jets to shut down Chile's elected government after they nationalized the phone infrastructure within their borders?
"The photographer can hardly be accused of using such a tool to gain access outside of his rights."
Which is what is so insidius about DMCA: it doesn't matter whether you have a legal right to access the data. The minute you bypass an access system, you've violated federal law. There is no problem with accessing your data, per say, it is only in bypassing the access control. Access control is considered sepertely from the data it is controling access to...
Protection for IP is in place to give monetary incentive to people (or corporations) to create things (in order to drive the economy, make the world a better place, etc).
Constitution, which in article I, section 8, clause 8, gives Congress the power "
to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It is exactly the "limited Times" that seems to be forgotten. The purpose is not just to foster the creation of new things (to drive the economy), but to reward the creation of new things for the purpose of increasing the material in the public domain. Perhaps you've confused the incentive for the purpose?
Gotta disagree: balancing the rights of authors to their works and the right of the public to access those works
You are assuming that there is an inherent right of authors to their works. Rather than balancing a psuedo-right with a real right, copyright was the creation of an artifical, psuedo-right for the sole purpose of increasing the amount of material in the public domain.
What does it then mean to "balance" a force that exists to increase the amount of material in the public domain with the rights of the public to access those works? You are bootstrapping into existence rights that don't exist on their own into real rights, independent of the cause of their existence in the first place.
No, not an appropriate analogy. You want it to be that the gun is shooting people. But in reality, it is the use of the legal right to reverse engineer that triggered the shooting by McVoy. Thus, "I have the right to own a gun, and McVoy shot Torvalds because I used the right to own a gun to actually buy one".
Gotta call bullshit: I have the right to own a firearm (in the US). It doesn't mean I would be justified to conduct target practice at a shopping mall or woods near a highway.
This is more like: "I have the right to own a gun, but it doesn't mean I'm justified to *buy* a gun because the local drug dealers say that if anyone purchases a gun in this county, they are going on a rampage."
Slashdot Mirror
Stable is a relative term. It isn't just "stable" vs. "testing", really. It is only valid relative to any one given distribution.
Makes me wonder what the value of their assets are, and if one shouldn't evaluate the donated time as if it were a revenue stream (even though it isn't really liquid, it replaces what a commercial company would have to direct a portion of their revenue stream towards paying for). Their debt/equity ratio is probably zero :-) It is, at the very least, an incredible organizational experiment.
I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal. Or run mostly stable, and just upgrade select items to testing, and other select items to unstable. Hell, if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, CVS and compile and help with testing. I couldn't imagine anyone running debian stable unless it was critical to be *rock-solid* stable. Which means heavy load servers, in my mind.
:-)
I moved from Mandrake to Debian because I like estoeric math software. I ran into trouble with Mandrake where I could get some stuff from Mandrake's unstable, but I couldn't satisfy all the dependencies. What is the point of having an RPM if it can't be installed? Debian allowed me to install a ton of stuff with apt-get that I was having to download tarballs to try install. I admit I *love* debian
I wonder if there is a "time value of money" equation for the rate of evolution of technology. You have to innovate at least as fast as the "market rate" in order to stay current. If you could burn through a lot of cash (and still remain somewhat konstant (there are communication costs as the number of people in a project increases) in terms of value recieved) you would jump a generation or two ahead of the competition. Might this not be worth considering? What good would be getting DOS really really right, if it came in 2038? The perfect Win3.1 replacement in 2076?
I'm not saying it is needed, now. Just you prompted the thought, and I've never seen "time value of tech dev acceleration" equations...
Qrix, IANAL, but I think you could legally sell any regions DVDs in any other region, but you'd have trouble continuing to sell them after word got around that they wouldn't play in the DVD player the customer bought at Walmart. I seem to remember there was some sort of legal action to prevent the importation of another regions DVD players into Australia. Or perhaps it was a mod chip? Does region encoding imply DMCA?
It wouldn't be a problem if arbitrage worked in this case. The fact is that region encoding was established as an anti-arbitrage, and hence anti-market force. While disrupting market forces can lead to greater profit, I suggest that demand would be much higher at the lower cost point. The only way more product would be sold at the anti-market (inflated) price would be in the case of inelastic demand (say, insulin), which DVDs most certainly are *not*. When you consider the incredible cheap marginal cost of pressing just one more DVD, I doubt supply would have any trouble keeping up with the increased demand. I have trouble believing it is for any purpose other than maximizing profit.
:-)
All that said, I do admit it was in a Marketing class and not an Econ or Finace class.
I don't see how the Free/Open "duality" can be disputed in terms of existing as seperate categories. Open came later, and is a superset of Free. All Free Software is Open, but not all Open Software is Free. This is obvious from both the definitions, as well as from the compatible software lists both organizations make public.
"most people don't give a shit whether it is free as in anything " - which is not very pragmatic...
"as long as it does what they need" - but for how long, and with what hidden costs?
You were trolled, dude.
Gotta call bullshit: "to show hostile attitude that led to that event". Didn't happen that way that I read about.
"told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired" but it wasn't done on company time, or servers.
"he encouraged creation of Gnome because KDE was somehow not free enough for him." It wasn't free, and now it is. Thanks to RMS and Gnome.
"Now there is a massive duplication of effort when everyone could be working on making one thing better." Which is a *good* thing, not a bad thing. The diversity of an ecosphere leads to robustness, and parallel exploration of many paths. This is a major, misunderstand strength of both Free and Open Software paradigms.
"The right tool for the job." YES!
But isn't it pragmatic to consider the license as well as the functionality? I'd say that RMS is being very pragmatic. How "pragmatic" do people look when the BSA comes forcibly into a workplace and shuts down production?
"Maybe, in some sense, it could be argued that ideals ARE practical, because the long term consequences of going without them don't tend to be good." Also YES!
Don't forget hardware. IBM sells services and hardware. If copyright law was modified so that the label's distribution protection racket only lasted one month, would there be more or less MP3 players sold? Car stereos? Home stereos?
Isn't development a service? Aren't programmers really in a service industry?
Actually in MBA programs today "ethics" is a big issue. Remember Enron?
Actually there is a trend. In all cases, ignorance is expensive in the real world. Whether you are trying to deploy one of the BSDs, Solaris, Windows, Linux, or OS X, if you are ignorant it will most likely cost you.
His point was that I can ftp you my Debian CDs, but you can't ftp me your WinXP CDs. Hence, WinXP is ignoring a benefit of the networked world. Eventually market forces will do away with MS business model because it isn't as efficent for the market. It matters not that MS won't be making money, because the world will be saving much more. The market *itself* increases in value through the free exchange of ideas and information. Property is, of course, a different matter.
This came up in my Marketing class just this semester. It is illegal in the United States to price discriminate. However, this law doesn't apply to the case in question, because they aren't trying to sell for artifical prices in, say, California vs Kansas. Rather, they are discriminating against global geographic areas, which is beyound the jurisdistion of the US law. So it isn't illegal. (But it should be.)
Didn't corporations (ITT, I think) use fighter jets to shut down Chile's elected government after they nationalized the phone infrastructure within their borders?
"The photographer can hardly be accused of using such a tool to gain access outside of his rights."
Which is what is so insidius about DMCA: it doesn't matter whether you have a legal right to access the data. The minute you bypass an access system, you've violated federal law. There is no problem with accessing your data, per say, it is only in bypassing the access control. Access control is considered sepertely from the data it is controling access to...
Well I've had DLL incompatibility problems with Windows versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, win95, win 98SE, and win2k.
It is exactly the "limited Times" that seems to be forgotten. The purpose is not just to foster the creation of new things (to drive the economy), but to reward the creation of new things for the purpose of increasing the material in the public domain. Perhaps you've confused the incentive for the purpose?
Gotta disagree: balancing the rights of authors to their works and the right of the public to access those works
You are assuming that there is an inherent right of authors to their works. Rather than balancing a psuedo-right with a real right, copyright was the creation of an artifical, psuedo-right for the sole purpose of increasing the amount of material in the public domain.
What does it then mean to "balance" a force that exists to increase the amount of material in the public domain with the rights of the public to access those works? You are bootstrapping into existence rights that don't exist on their own into real rights, independent of the cause of their existence in the first place.
No, not an appropriate analogy. You want it to be that the gun is shooting people. But in reality, it is the use of the legal right to reverse engineer that triggered the shooting by McVoy. Thus, "I have the right to own a gun, and McVoy shot Torvalds because I used the right to own a gun to actually buy one".
Gotta call bullshit: I have the right to own a firearm (in the US). It doesn't mean I would be justified to conduct target practice at a shopping mall or woods near a highway.
This is more like: "I have the right to own a gun, but it doesn't mean I'm justified to *buy* a gun because the local drug dealers say that if anyone purchases a gun in this county, they are going on a rampage."
LOL...wouldn't it be funny if Linus didn't release GIT under the GPL? Then no one could use the code!