Since they don't have firearms are they well trained in martial arts, typically?
That depends, but even speaking as someone who happens to have a lot of MA background, I'd say that sort of thing is pretty much the last resort anyway. Most security guys will know how to handle themselves well enough if it does get ugly; certainly this is true for a lot of guys who work on the door of bars and such. But in many contexts, e.g., store detectives, your priority is just to surround someone with so many people that they give up without a fight and let you escort them off the premises; violence is usually unnecessary.
If a whack-job came into an office building slashing people with a katana I know I'd want a security guard who could do more than use the telephone.
If a whack job comes into an office building with a katana and knows much about how to use it then one guy with a pistol doesn't exactly have great odds anyway, particularly if he's wearing a shiny uniform saying "please kill me first you maniac" on the shirt.:-/
I'm reminded of the first time I was taught some unarmed techniques to defend against a katana. To make the point that it was really just an exercise, my instructor's first words were "OK, I'll be honest. If someone comes at you with one of these, you're probably going to die."
As it happens, those techniques actually work pretty well against things like baseball bats. Of course, an attack with a bat tends to have a lot more momentum behind it and/or leave the attacker much more exposed to counters than a skilled slash with a katana, and trapping a baseball bat doesn't get you cut to shreds if your attacker rips it back again...
Stay out of the way and call the cops. Using a gun in a crime over here is quite rare, and basically a personal request for about half the local police including large numbers of specialist firearms officers to chase you until they've got you.
There are certainly pros and cons to the firearms debate, but as of right now, the self-defence against weapons argument is probably the weakest argument for allowing carrying over here.
You forgot the security guard's gun, of all things.
No, I work in a country where guns are pretty much illegal. If a security guard is running around with a gun over here, he has a lot more to worry about than losing his job: a mandatory prison sentence of at least 5 years for illegal possession of a firearm, for example.
But few of these other positions can wipe out vast swaths of your companies data/lifeblood with a few keystrokes upon being notified that they are being terminated.
Of course, if anyone can do that much damage that fast, even a sysadmin, then your IT staff are pretty incompetent. I'd fire them and get new ones if I were you.
And a certain percentage of them will risk retaliation simply because they are assholes, regardless of your treatment of your staff.
That's true, of course, but hopefully we at least aim for that percentage to be 0% by not hiring anyone likely to be an asshole. I've personally never known anyone let go with a reasonable explanation to take any sort of retaliatory action afterwards; they might be sad or disappointed, but they haven't been hostile.
Giving people reasonable notice and a decent redundancy package if you do have to fire them through no fault of their own also goes a long way to both keeping things civil between you and your ex-staff and developing your company's reputation as an employer who looks after its people as best it can, both of which help keep the asshole rate minimised.
The blog post also notes that 86 percent held technical positions at the companies: '...if you're going to fire someone (particularly company geeks who have the motive, means and access to inflict pain on your computer systems) make double sure you cut off their e-mail and network access at the same time you hand them their walking papers.'
Also, if you're going to fire an accountant, it's a good idea to audit the accounts they dealt with particularly carefully, and if you're going to fire a security guard it's a good idea to collect their pass and master keys as they leave.
Of course, not screwing staff so badly that they are prepared to risk retaliation is also a good move.
And encourage producers to make higher quality programming that people actually WANT to watch!?!? We just can't have that!
Well, not reliably, no. This is one of the obvious flaws in the usual anti-copyright arguments. For every high quality and/or popular product that comes out of a media business, the "do-nothing middlemen" have typically invested significant amounts in many others that failed to get anywhere. No-one can predict ahead of time which shows are going to be the big hits, with very few exceptions.
(OK, so in the music biz they often also screw those failures to avoid losing their own money, playing both sides off against the middle, which is pretty despicable. That doesn't usually apply in TV/movie terms, though.)
I look at the big movie/TV studios more like VCs: they invest in a wide range of products with some potential, and they look to realise a greater return on their investment for those whose potential is realised than they lose for those whose potential is illusory.
Quite simply, HTML allows for newsletters (and even normal correspondence) to be displayed in a more readable fashion than a text email would be.
I'm sure the marketing morons at my employer think the same. However, they'd probably think it less if they realised that the standard masthead they attach to all our "from the CEO" reports displayed slightly differently in several common mail clients that don't start with the letters "MS O", with unfortunate consequences for the caption under his photograph.
(In case anyone's wondering, a couple of letters basically get clipped because the layout in Gecko-based rendering isn't quite the same, and those missing letters leave rather entertaining -- unless you're the CEO, I suppose -- alternative wording...)
And of course, for normal plain email correspondance, bold, italics, underlines, bulleted lists, and even hyperlinks are all vitally useful.
That's funny; I send e-mails in plain text format all the time, and don't seem to miss them. If you can't do it with a:-) or possibly a little *obvious emphasis* then it's probably not worth doing in an e-mail anyway.
Of course, the fact that you even mentioned underlining and italics demonstrates one of the biggest problems with HTML e-mail immediately: most people go for the whizzy effects, without a clue as to the reduction in readability they're creating.
Hint #1: Underlining is almost always a design error. It obscures descenders and draws the eye away from the text, breaking reading flow. Moreover, in HTML-style documents, it commonly denotes hyperlinks, and using it in other contexts is likely to confuse readers.
Hint #2: Italics should be used cautiously when viewing on a screen is expected. If your message is likely to be read by people with poorly-configured or low-resolution screens, the italics will look terrible. For example, I use them on Slashdot where I expect pretty much everyone reading my posts to have a decent video set-up, but I use alternatives on a few other boards where this might not be the case.
That must be why newspapers have a single size and type font without images, why people go to movie theaters to read screenplays, and why we're all reading gopher://slashdot.org.
Newspapers neither cost more nor take longer to read the more images they contain.
Going to a movie theatre doesn't include a hidden bug at the start of the movie that confirms to some marketing droid that I'm a real person and they should feel free to spam my future visits with an extra 30 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.
And speaking as a former modem user who hasn't had broadband for that long, I promise you Slashdot is perfectly usable and just as informative/interesting with images disabled.
The grandparent was right on the money. E-mail is a text medium. If you can't tell me something through that medium, then chances are I don't want your e-mail. In fact, and this is a very good reason that businesses should not send HTML e-mails without an explicit request, your e-mail will get a huge negative score on my Bayesian anti-spam filter just for having it. That applies whether it's alone or combined with a separate text-only version, though if the text-only version matches the HTML content closely the penalty isn't so great. Moreover, even if it gets through the filter, it'll get rendered as plain text anyway, and therefore probably look worse than it would have done if you'd just sent me that in the first place. It's not exactly likely to improve your sales/feedback level/customer satisfaction/whatever on either count...
I've spent many afternoons reading and at least partially understanding printed matter that says "proceedings" or "journal" or "SIG" somewhere on the cover.
I had a brief academic CS career: I read mathematics for my undergrad degree, but also studied for a CS diploma to make sure I had some grasp of the academic side of things before going into industry. Now I write mathematical software for a living, so I too have spent a few days reading academic papers.
Today, I've basically gave up on academic research in IT. Most of the papers I found were poorly written and/or poorly researched, even compared to the "trade rags" (in my case, articles in software development magazines). It's true that some academics really are very good at both doing research and informing others about it, but sadly they're a small minority, and either without the other is close to worthless. Hence the only papers I tend to read nowadays are those recommended by someone whose opinion I respect; it's just not worth the time and/or money to try and find the few gems among the dross otherwise.
True, and if I wanted to write using those (and I do write using both, from time to time) then I'd choose a more appropriate tool. That doesn't change the fact that for the other languages I mentioned, the Visual Studio IDE is a vastly superior tool to anything I've ever seen hacked together using Emacs and scripts, or for that matter to any other F/OSS tools I've encountered.
I look at it this way: I work in an office that develops C++ code that must run on literally dozens of different platforms. The development staff basically have their choice of tools, on their choice of development platform, as long as they're productive when it comes to getting the job done. I think one guy in the whole office uses a Linux-based system and Emacs as his primary development environment. Everyone else uses one version or another of Visual C++ for most of their work, and in case anyone missed the hint, this is an office with more than its fair share of *nix hackers and the odd Apple fan too. As someone who knows the guys in question and the nature of the work, that tells me a lot.
So, Visual Studio is more powerful than GNU Emacs?
Um... Yes.
Emacs is a glorified text editor or an underpowered programming language, depending on your point of view.
Visual Studio is an IDE. It comes with some of the best compiler technology around, and by far the best integrated debugging software in the game.
To answer your question about languages, VS obviously has native support for C++, Visual Basic, C#, etc. Its support for HTML and such is as good as many specialised web dev apps (not that that's really saying much, since there are few areas where the general suckiness of the tools is as high as web dev). There's also a well-known add-in for doing Perl that drops right into the VS environment.
Actually, we were taken over by one of them around a year ago. We've remained somewhat autonomous, but have plenty of exposure to the big company politics. Even so, we still manage to remain quite efficient at dealing customer feedback, as do the various other teams within the larger company that we now encounter from time to time.
I'm guessing that you've simply worked for a large company with bad management (and, to be fair, large companies attract bad management like nothing else) and extrapolated a little too far. It's not the closed source, proprietary nature of this that's the problem, it's good old fashioned sh*t flowing downhill when the guys at the top are full of it.
Why would we pretend at all when they're pretty much the same now. OO Writer is better than Word at this point, as it has all the functionality of word and runs faster too
Huh?! Sorry, but as a regular user of both, I can't even relate to that statement. OpenOffice Writer has a list of usability flaws a mile long, and is at least five years behind Word on this count (and I don't mean it hasn't grown the annoying paperclip yet). Its formatting tools are error-prone, its mail merge inflexible and buggy, its stylesheet support flaky, its import/export of Word DOC files unreliable, and those are just the things that I hit today. I've found it considerably more likely to crash and/or lose data than recent versions of MS Word as well.
Don't get me wrong. I like OpenOffice, including Writer. It's a good effort with a lot of potential, and I'm grateful to those who give it away so I can have a reasonable WP on my home PC legally and free. The new version, when it's ready, looks to be another big step forward. But really, it's still several years behind Word for anything beyond typing a simple letter.
The OO Spreadsheet is about the same as Excel.
Except for the numerous bugs in the graphing tools, and "help" that took me 30 minutes just to work out how to perform simple look-up operations I identified in 30 seconds using Excel, for example?
I have used Photoshop. I have used the GIMP. What's the difference? Not a whole lot actually.
Again, for basic photo retouching and such, the GIMP seems to be reasonably usable (though I've always found the Windows version to have hideous stability problems, which has kept me away for serious projects even though they seem to have fixed that God-awful interface in the more recent incarnations). However, for the sort of serious work a professional graphic designer/electronic artist will be doing, well... If you can find me anyone in that business who uses the GIMP in preference, I'll be impressed. That pretty much says it all.
I've never seen anything that was even close to the power of Visual Studio's integrated debugger, which is a huge advantage to VS, and the editor itself has a lot of nice features too. What is it about Eclipse/Java that you found so much better than Visual C++?
Hell, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a bug fixed inside of six to twelve months!
We're only a small business with many large businesses as customers, yet our typical turn-around time for any fatal bug is same-day, and customer feature requests directly affect what gets into our next version six months down the line.
But of course, we're writing proprietary code and don't give the source away for free, so we're evil, our code is insecure, we never fix bugs, and we absolutely don't listen to customers.
That's funny, I installed WinXP on my home box almost three years ago, installed a couple of the usual tools in a few minutes, and now it just prompts me to approve security updates, virus definition files etc. every now and then, which is exactly what I'd want it to do. I've never had a single piece of spyware on my machine, nor seen a BSOD, since installing this OS. Then again, I did RTFM on Windows at least enough to know how to set it up properly; maybe if you're incompetent you see these things more often, but that's hardly MS's fault.
More often than not the programs are NOT of equal quality, thats why many people and businesses use open source.
Indeed. And it's why many more people and businesses use the same sort of proprietary apps they've been using for years.
I like the Open Source idea, and if people are kind enough to give their work away for free then I thank them for that. However, let's not start pretending OpenOffice is anywhere close to as polished or as powerful as MS Office, nor that the GIMP is up to professional graphics standards, nor that any of the popular OS programming IDEs is as powerful as Visual Studio, OK? One day, maybe, perhaps even one day this decade, but not yet.
Replacements are already there, e.g. koffice, but they could do with more developers and users.
I think you've touched on something at the heart of the argument there.
OOo is open source, so anyone who doesn't like the way it's going is free to fork it and develop it themselves if they want to. Of course, since very few people who aren't Sun employees are actually contributing to OOo and everyone else simply takes advantage of it, this is unlikely to happen.
I'm afraid the hype supporting many of the claimed advantages of OSS just came crashing down around the evangelists in spectacular fashion. This whole argument is just a lot of people who want high quality software for free bitching when those kind enough to provide it decide they actually want to do something their own way. If Stallman et al don't like it, they're free to try and do better: it's step up or shut up time.
Surely its not copying that causes the GPL violation, its distributing a modified version of the result as part of your own product.
Agreed.
So I don't see how that definition of fair use would break the GPL.
If the definition of infringement is tied to whether or not anyone lost any money, and that person had given the software away for free (but with other strings attached, as with the GPL), then there's no case that financial damage was done. However, distribution without the accompanying usual format source code (say) would clearly violate the permission given by the original creator of the work.
In this case, at present, copyright law might provide for an injunction requiring those breaking the distribution rules to comply and/or to stop distributing the work, regardless of the absence of financial damage. Under the proposal here, I don't see how that would be the case. There is nothing to require anyone receiving code that's given away at no financial cost to honour the requirements of the creator, and thus no incentive for the creator to release the work in the first place.
If an infringment of copyright doesn't result in a loss of money for the copyright holder (based on previous tangible experiences) then its not a problem and is legal fair use.
What if someone's motivation for distributing their work isn't financial? The GPL is a somewhat poor example here, since Stallman's usual argument is that without copyright you wouldn't need the GPL, but in that case the key thing is that if you redistribute the material, you may only do so together with offering certain rights along with it. Here copyright provides protection for a moral position, not a financial one.
I think the proposal in question has merit as a practical measure, but it's slightly missing the deeper issue: the point of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of new works, by encouraging those who create such works to distribute them in exchange for some sort of "return on investment". There's nothing in that argument, either legally or morally, that requires such a return to be financial.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends, but even speaking as someone who happens to have a lot of MA background, I'd say that sort of thing is pretty much the last resort anyway. Most security guys will know how to handle themselves well enough if it does get ugly; certainly this is true for a lot of guys who work on the door of bars and such. But in many contexts, e.g., store detectives, your priority is just to surround someone with so many people that they give up without a fight and let you escort them off the premises; violence is usually unnecessary.
If a whack job comes into an office building with a katana and knows much about how to use it then one guy with a pistol doesn't exactly have great odds anyway, particularly if he's wearing a shiny uniform saying "please kill me first you maniac" on the shirt. :-/
I'm reminded of the first time I was taught some unarmed techniques to defend against a katana. To make the point that it was really just an exercise, my instructor's first words were "OK, I'll be honest. If someone comes at you with one of these, you're probably going to die."
As it happens, those techniques actually work pretty well against things like baseball bats. Of course, an attack with a bat tends to have a lot more momentum behind it and/or leave the attacker much more exposed to counters than a skilled slash with a katana, and trapping a baseball bat doesn't get you cut to shreds if your attacker rips it back again...
Stay out of the way and call the cops. Using a gun in a crime over here is quite rare, and basically a personal request for about half the local police including large numbers of specialist firearms officers to chase you until they've got you.
There are certainly pros and cons to the firearms debate, but as of right now, the self-defence against weapons argument is probably the weakest argument for allowing carrying over here.
Blockquoth the AC:
No, I work in a country where guns are pretty much illegal. If a security guard is running around with a gun over here, he has a lot more to worry about than losing his job: a mandatory prison sentence of at least 5 years for illegal possession of a firearm, for example.
Blockquoth the AC:
Of course, if anyone can do that much damage that fast, even a sysadmin, then your IT staff are pretty incompetent. I'd fire them and get new ones if I were you.
Oh...
That's true, of course, but hopefully we at least aim for that percentage to be 0% by not hiring anyone likely to be an asshole. I've personally never known anyone let go with a reasonable explanation to take any sort of retaliatory action afterwards; they might be sad or disappointed, but they haven't been hostile.
Giving people reasonable notice and a decent redundancy package if you do have to fire them through no fault of their own also goes a long way to both keeping things civil between you and your ex-staff and developing your company's reputation as an employer who looks after its people as best it can, both of which help keep the asshole rate minimised.
Also, if you're going to fire an accountant, it's a good idea to audit the accounts they dealt with particularly carefully, and if you're going to fire a security guard it's a good idea to collect their pass and master keys as they leave.
Of course, not screwing staff so badly that they are prepared to risk retaliation is also a good move.
Well, not reliably, no. This is one of the obvious flaws in the usual anti-copyright arguments. For every high quality and/or popular product that comes out of a media business, the "do-nothing middlemen" have typically invested significant amounts in many others that failed to get anywhere. No-one can predict ahead of time which shows are going to be the big hits, with very few exceptions.
(OK, so in the music biz they often also screw those failures to avoid losing their own money, playing both sides off against the middle, which is pretty despicable. That doesn't usually apply in TV/movie terms, though.)
I look at the big movie/TV studios more like VCs: they invest in a wide range of products with some potential, and they look to realise a greater return on their investment for those whose potential is realised than they lose for those whose potential is illusory.
Nah. Number Six is hot. Starbuck is cool, making her way more attractive.
I'm sure the marketing morons at my employer think the same. However, they'd probably think it less if they realised that the standard masthead they attach to all our "from the CEO" reports displayed slightly differently in several common mail clients that don't start with the letters "MS O", with unfortunate consequences for the caption under his photograph.
(In case anyone's wondering, a couple of letters basically get clipped because the layout in Gecko-based rendering isn't quite the same, and those missing letters leave rather entertaining -- unless you're the CEO, I suppose -- alternative wording...)
That's funny; I send e-mails in plain text format all the time, and don't seem to miss them. If you can't do it with a :-) or possibly a little *obvious emphasis* then it's probably not worth doing in an e-mail anyway.
Of course, the fact that you even mentioned underlining and italics demonstrates one of the biggest problems with HTML e-mail immediately: most people go for the whizzy effects, without a clue as to the reduction in readability they're creating.
Hint #1: Underlining is almost always a design error. It obscures descenders and draws the eye away from the text, breaking reading flow. Moreover, in HTML-style documents, it commonly denotes hyperlinks, and using it in other contexts is likely to confuse readers.
Hint #2: Italics should be used cautiously when viewing on a screen is expected. If your message is likely to be read by people with poorly-configured or low-resolution screens, the italics will look terrible. For example, I use them on Slashdot where I expect pretty much everyone reading my posts to have a decent video set-up, but I use alternatives on a few other boards where this might not be the case.
Newspapers neither cost more nor take longer to read the more images they contain.
Going to a movie theatre doesn't include a hidden bug at the start of the movie that confirms to some marketing droid that I'm a real person and they should feel free to spam my future visits with an extra 30 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.
And speaking as a former modem user who hasn't had broadband for that long, I promise you Slashdot is perfectly usable and just as informative/interesting with images disabled.
The grandparent was right on the money. E-mail is a text medium. If you can't tell me something through that medium, then chances are I don't want your e-mail. In fact, and this is a very good reason that businesses should not send HTML e-mails without an explicit request, your e-mail will get a huge negative score on my Bayesian anti-spam filter just for having it. That applies whether it's alone or combined with a separate text-only version, though if the text-only version matches the HTML content closely the penalty isn't so great. Moreover, even if it gets through the filter, it'll get rendered as plain text anyway, and therefore probably look worse than it would have done if you'd just sent me that in the first place. It's not exactly likely to improve your sales/feedback level/customer satisfaction/whatever on either count...
I had a brief academic CS career: I read mathematics for my undergrad degree, but also studied for a CS diploma to make sure I had some grasp of the academic side of things before going into industry. Now I write mathematical software for a living, so I too have spent a few days reading academic papers.
Today, I've basically gave up on academic research in IT. Most of the papers I found were poorly written and/or poorly researched, even compared to the "trade rags" (in my case, articles in software development magazines). It's true that some academics really are very good at both doing research and informing others about it, but sadly they're a small minority, and either without the other is close to worthless. Hence the only papers I tend to read nowadays are those recommended by someone whose opinion I respect; it's just not worth the time and/or money to try and find the few gems among the dross otherwise.
True, and if I wanted to write using those (and I do write using both, from time to time) then I'd choose a more appropriate tool. That doesn't change the fact that for the other languages I mentioned, the Visual Studio IDE is a vastly superior tool to anything I've ever seen hacked together using Emacs and scripts, or for that matter to any other F/OSS tools I've encountered.
I look at it this way: I work in an office that develops C++ code that must run on literally dozens of different platforms. The development staff basically have their choice of tools, on their choice of development platform, as long as they're productive when it comes to getting the job done. I think one guy in the whole office uses a Linux-based system and Emacs as his primary development environment. Everyone else uses one version or another of Visual C++ for most of their work, and in case anyone missed the hint, this is an office with more than its fair share of *nix hackers and the odd Apple fan too. As someone who knows the guys in question and the nature of the work, that tells me a lot.
Um... Yes.
Emacs is a glorified text editor or an underpowered programming language, depending on your point of view.
Visual Studio is an IDE. It comes with some of the best compiler technology around, and by far the best integrated debugging software in the game.To answer your question about languages, VS obviously has native support for C++, Visual Basic, C#, etc. Its support for HTML and such is as good as many specialised web dev apps (not that that's really saying much, since there are few areas where the general suckiness of the tools is as high as web dev). There's also a well-known add-in for doing Perl that drops right into the VS environment.
Actually, we were taken over by one of them around a year ago. We've remained somewhat autonomous, but have plenty of exposure to the big company politics. Even so, we still manage to remain quite efficient at dealing customer feedback, as do the various other teams within the larger company that we now encounter from time to time.
I'm guessing that you've simply worked for a large company with bad management (and, to be fair, large companies attract bad management like nothing else) and extrapolated a little too far. It's not the closed source, proprietary nature of this that's the problem, it's good old fashioned sh*t flowing downhill when the guys at the top are full of it.
Huh?! Sorry, but as a regular user of both, I can't even relate to that statement. OpenOffice Writer has a list of usability flaws a mile long, and is at least five years behind Word on this count (and I don't mean it hasn't grown the annoying paperclip yet). Its formatting tools are error-prone, its mail merge inflexible and buggy, its stylesheet support flaky, its import/export of Word DOC files unreliable, and those are just the things that I hit today. I've found it considerably more likely to crash and/or lose data than recent versions of MS Word as well.
Don't get me wrong. I like OpenOffice, including Writer. It's a good effort with a lot of potential, and I'm grateful to those who give it away so I can have a reasonable WP on my home PC legally and free. The new version, when it's ready, looks to be another big step forward. But really, it's still several years behind Word for anything beyond typing a simple letter.
Except for the numerous bugs in the graphing tools, and "help" that took me 30 minutes just to work out how to perform simple look-up operations I identified in 30 seconds using Excel, for example?
Again, for basic photo retouching and such, the GIMP seems to be reasonably usable (though I've always found the Windows version to have hideous stability problems, which has kept me away for serious projects even though they seem to have fixed that God-awful interface in the more recent incarnations). However, for the sort of serious work a professional graphic designer/electronic artist will be doing, well... If you can find me anyone in that business who uses the GIMP in preference, I'll be impressed. That pretty much says it all.
I've never seen anything that was even close to the power of Visual Studio's integrated debugger, which is a huge advantage to VS, and the editor itself has a lot of nice features too. What is it about Eclipse/Java that you found so much better than Visual C++?
Perhaps, but since super-elite users make up approximately 100% of the Linux user base, doesn't that demonstrate how fair the comparison is(n't)?
I'm new here. What does 1337 mean?
We're only a small business with many large businesses as customers, yet our typical turn-around time for any fatal bug is same-day, and customer feature requests directly affect what gets into our next version six months down the line.
But of course, we're writing proprietary code and don't give the source away for free, so we're evil, our code is insecure, we never fix bugs, and we absolutely don't listen to customers.
That's funny, I installed WinXP on my home box almost three years ago, installed a couple of the usual tools in a few minutes, and now it just prompts me to approve security updates, virus definition files etc. every now and then, which is exactly what I'd want it to do. I've never had a single piece of spyware on my machine, nor seen a BSOD, since installing this OS. Then again, I did RTFM on Windows at least enough to know how to set it up properly; maybe if you're incompetent you see these things more often, but that's hardly MS's fault.
Indeed. And it's why many more people and businesses use the same sort of proprietary apps they've been using for years.
I like the Open Source idea, and if people are kind enough to give their work away for free then I thank them for that. However, let's not start pretending OpenOffice is anywhere close to as polished or as powerful as MS Office, nor that the GIMP is up to professional graphics standards, nor that any of the popular OS programming IDEs is as powerful as Visual Studio, OK? One day, maybe, perhaps even one day this decade, but not yet.
I think you've touched on something at the heart of the argument there.
OOo is open source, so anyone who doesn't like the way it's going is free to fork it and develop it themselves if they want to. Of course, since very few people who aren't Sun employees are actually contributing to OOo and everyone else simply takes advantage of it, this is unlikely to happen.
I'm afraid the hype supporting many of the claimed advantages of OSS just came crashing down around the evangelists in spectacular fashion. This whole argument is just a lot of people who want high quality software for free bitching when those kind enough to provide it decide they actually want to do something their own way. If Stallman et al don't like it, they're free to try and do better: it's step up or shut up time.
You should laugh instead. It's better for your soul...
Agreed.
If the definition of infringement is tied to whether or not anyone lost any money, and that person had given the software away for free (but with other strings attached, as with the GPL), then there's no case that financial damage was done. However, distribution without the accompanying usual format source code (say) would clearly violate the permission given by the original creator of the work.
In this case, at present, copyright law might provide for an injunction requiring those breaking the distribution rules to comply and/or to stop distributing the work, regardless of the absence of financial damage. Under the proposal here, I don't see how that would be the case. There is nothing to require anyone receiving code that's given away at no financial cost to honour the requirements of the creator, and thus no incentive for the creator to release the work in the first place.
What if someone's motivation for distributing their work isn't financial? The GPL is a somewhat poor example here, since Stallman's usual argument is that without copyright you wouldn't need the GPL, but in that case the key thing is that if you redistribute the material, you may only do so together with offering certain rights along with it. Here copyright provides protection for a moral position, not a financial one.
I think the proposal in question has merit as a practical measure, but it's slightly missing the deeper issue: the point of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of new works, by encouraging those who create such works to distribute them in exchange for some sort of "return on investment". There's nothing in that argument, either legally or morally, that requires such a return to be financial.