The (GG)P post has structured his work as business work, not volunteer. Because he makes some money off of his OSS work, he can write off costs against that income (either actualized or dreamed of).
Did anybody else notice that (in contrast to the original article), the original response didn't mention writing off actual time?
Yeah, that's great.... But it doesn't work too well for the "I'll set up our 200 unit network for wireless in 2 hours" crowd. Those are the ones who are likely using WPA with PSK and easy-to-type-in passwords.
Not all that funny -- especially if you compare governments to corporations of the same size. -- I mean consider all of these big banks asking for a trillion-dollar handout. Just how efficient were they at taking care of our economy?
The city wasn't offered anything. The telco refused to help the city build the network, so city got the funding to go it their own.
BTW: Adam Smith (the grandfather of modern capitalism) didn't see any real difference between big government and big business..... at least with democratic big government, the people have the opportunity to call a wayward leadership to account.
Yeah, they have to compete, but now they've got a 1 year headstart on the city in terms of getting the network laid down and people signed up. -- all at the cost of a couple of hours of in-house lawyer time. It was pretty clear from looking at the original claim that they never expected to win the case.
They just wanted to lock down the funds for the network while they did some emergency fiber-laying.
The thing to remember here is that the city originally wanted to work with the company to get the network put down, but they told the city to go get themselves stuffed -- until the city got the OK to put out a bond issue to pay for laying the network themselves. Then, facing the possibility of some real competition, they suddenly get all civic about preventing the city network that they didn't want to work on.
Set your system to dual boot Windows/Linux. If you're really paranoid, have it boot off of USB first and the main hard drive second. Put the Linux/Grub boot on a USB key, and keep it separate. The system should default to a Windows boot.
When they boot the system, all they'll see is Windows. Windows will ignore the Linux partition(s). For anything other than an anal-probe search, this'll be enough to keep them at bay.
It's unlikely that they'll do an anal probe search unless they find something else on you that worries them.
yes, but it sounds like he's being asked to re-license and/or give them copyright on that code so that they can close source it and/or sue people who use it under the BSD license if they violate the strict requirements of that license (also to harass people using the BSD licensed code if they're so inclined).
The stuff that he's already released remains under the BSD license, but anything that he hasn't (yet) released would be probably expected to go to the company, and never again see the light of day in the FOSS world.
A lot of people who use the BSD license do share his values -- but they see the GPL as being 'impure'. They want the code to be as free as possible but they're not willing to pay the 'price' that the GPL does in putting legal limits on what you can do in order to keep the code free.
GPL gives maximum freedom to the code.
BSD gives maximum freedom to the programmer/corporation.
The big problem with the non-compete is that it's permanent, and includes his previous (unreleased?) work. There are possible problems with the non-compete like: What if the job doesn't work out, and he's left on the streets 3 months later? This isn't just about the work that he's going to do for them. They want him to give them the work that he's already done (not knowing that it would be for them). No matter what he chooses, there's a good deal of negotiation needed. If nothing else, How much is he going to charge them for his pre-hire work?
As to your question: I expect that not that many FOSS developers get hired away like this. Most companies recognize the value that the rest of the FOSS community brings to the project. These guys don't. That's going to discourage a lot of FOSS developers from dealing with this sort of company.
IF you take their offer, I would split it up into two pieces: One would be the value of the non-compete agreement, and the other would be the value of your time going forward.
Among other things, ask them for a bulk fee for taking your previous work off the market. and the non-compete agreement.
I can see two paths for this: One is that they're on the up and up and want to hire you for years to work on this project. That's fine, as long as you're willing to walk away from the people that you're working with in the Open Source world, their contributions, etc.
The other is that they hire you for a few months or a couple of years, cite 'creative differences', and then terminate your contract -- but hold you to the permanent non-compete.
This would allow them to torpedo your contribution to the project, leaving you without access to the OS community (and vice versa). They torpedo the project for cheap, and you get left holding the bag.
This is a bit different from a normal non-compete situation (for most programmers) where you go in, do their work and then agree to not compete with what they have you do. In this case you are effectively selling them your previous work. Charge them as if you'd been working exclusively for them for the entire time -- at a high consulting rate, because they already like the work you're doing (i.e. they're not paying you on spec, like is normally the case).
Remember: Until you sign the contract,everything is negotiable. You can ask for a house, a car and a weekend with the CEO's daughter. Whether they give that to you is an entirely different matter.
Once you put your signature to the contract, things are only negotiable within the confines of what you've put your signature to. (that works both ways)
Gnu/Linux isn't UNIX(tm) only in the trademark sense. You have to pay some POSIX organization to be able to use the UNIX trademark (I think that one or two LINUX distributions have actually done this). Other than that, however, It's been a very open point of the Linux and GNU community to make the OS comply to the POSIX UNIX standard to the point where if you read the manual pages for any classic UNIX command/library call, you'll find descriptions of any way in which that element is out of sync with the official POSIX standard.
To say that Linux isn't Unix is like saying that a Mandarin Orange isn't an orange because it's not a Naval Orange.
PJ, on Groklaw is pretty meticulous about documenting her claims -- pointin to the original document(s) and providing on-site backups, either in case the original is changed or deleted, or simply to make them easier to find.
If you call that 'lack of proof' and 'hogwash' then you might as well change your name to "Microsoft shill #732"
Most (all?) storage systems have an ECC (Error Correcting Code) system embeded in them. This means that you'd have to not only randomly flip bits, but flip them and the ECC bits in such a way that the change is not only not corrected, but not detected -- That's about a 4-billion to one improbability. Now multiply that by the probability of randomly flipping the vote count bits but not showing up in other strange ways and I figure you've got a better chance of beingg killed by a metorite (hint: hasn't happened yet in modern history).
We're talking about a thief here -- and a thief of opportunity, at that. This is no braniac master-criminal.
They guy probably didn't know enough to create a new account, much less reformat the machine. Hell, even slightly above-average users might have a problem with that idea.
I've seen a thief who was so stupid, that he stole a kid's bike from (directly!) across the back alley, and then left the stolen bike by the back door.
He was, apparently, both surprised and indignant when the father of the child whose bike was stolen came over for a visit.... wielding a baseball bat.
One shadow that isn't the same is the shadow cast by the statue of Lenin(?). It should fall on the people on the bottom of the face, but it got photoshopped out, too.
Well, if it was overcast when they had the concert, it may be that they timed it right for the satellite overpass, but the clouds made it almost useless for google's purposes. They just didn't realize that they needed to coordinate according to both satellite overpass times and weather forcasts.
I can take a picture with the dodgy camera in my cell phone and pay my cell phone provider $.50-$2 to upload it to my computer so I can see if it's even worth using, or:
I can use my digital camera, get a MUCH better quality picture, and download it to my computer for free.
It's not that I don't know how to use the camera on my phone (sometimes it even goes into camera mode by accident)... Its that I don't want to use the camera on my phone. -- and until I can use it for free, I'm going to continue to not want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anybody else notice that (in contrast to the original article), the original response didn't mention writing off actual time?
Does "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" sound familiar?
( Islam, by the way, inherits both the jewish old testament and the Christian new testament. )
Nothing that can't be fixed with a small tactical nuke (or even a large one).
If you're setting up a 200 device wireless network with WPA PSK, you're doing it wrong.
... And your point is????
Yeah, that's great.... But it doesn't work too well for the "I'll set up our 200 unit network for wireless in 2 hours" crowd. Those are the ones who are likely using WPA with PSK and easy-to-type-in passwords.
Not all that funny -- especially if you compare governments to corporations of the same size. -- I mean consider all of these big banks asking for a trillion-dollar handout. Just how efficient were they at taking care of our economy?
BTW: Adam Smith (the grandfather of modern capitalism) didn't see any real difference between big government and big business. .... at least with democratic big government, the people have the opportunity to call a wayward leadership to account.
They just wanted to lock down the funds for the network while they did some emergency fiber-laying.
The thing to remember here is that the city originally wanted to work with the company to get the network put down, but they told the city to go get themselves stuffed -- until the city got the OK to put out a bond issue to pay for laying the network themselves. Then, facing the possibility of some real competition, they suddenly get all civic about preventing the city network that they didn't want to work on.
When they boot the system, all they'll see is Windows. Windows will ignore the Linux partition(s). For anything other than an anal-probe search, this'll be enough to keep them at bay.
It's unlikely that they'll do an anal probe search unless they find something else on you that worries them.
The stuff that he's already released remains under the BSD license, but anything that he hasn't (yet) released would be probably expected to go to the company, and never again see the light of day in the FOSS world.
GPL gives maximum freedom to the code.
BSD gives maximum freedom to the programmer/corporation.
That last sentence is worth it's weight in gold.
As to your question: I expect that not that many FOSS developers get hired away like this. Most companies recognize the value that the rest of the FOSS community brings to the project. These guys don't. That's going to discourage a lot of FOSS developers from dealing with this sort of company.
I can see two paths for this: One is that they're on the up and up and want to hire you for years to work on this project. That's fine, as long as you're willing to walk away from the people that you're working with in the Open Source world, their contributions, etc.
The other is that they hire you for a few months or a couple of years, cite 'creative differences', and then terminate your contract -- but hold you to the permanent non-compete.
This would allow them to torpedo your contribution to the project, leaving you without access to the OS community (and vice versa). They torpedo the project for cheap, and you get left holding the bag.
This is a bit different from a normal non-compete situation (for most programmers) where you go in, do their work and then agree to not compete with what they have you do. In this case you are effectively selling them your previous work. Charge them as if you'd been working exclusively for them for the entire time -- at a high consulting rate, because they already like the work you're doing (i.e. they're not paying you on spec, like is normally the case).
Remember: Until you sign the contract, everything is negotiable. You can ask for a house, a car and a weekend with the CEO's daughter. Whether they give that to you is an entirely different matter.
To say that Linux isn't Unix is like saying that a Mandarin Orange isn't an orange because it's not a Naval Orange.
If you call that 'lack of proof' and 'hogwash' then you might as well change your name to "Microsoft shill #732"
Most (all?) storage systems have an ECC (Error Correcting Code) system embeded in them. This means that you'd have to not only randomly flip bits, but flip them and the ECC bits in such a way that the change is not only not corrected, but not detected -- That's about a 4-billion to one improbability. Now multiply that by the probability of randomly flipping the vote count bits but not showing up in other strange ways and I figure you've got a better chance of beingg killed by a metorite (hint: hasn't happened yet in modern history).
I've seen a thief who was so stupid, that he stole a kid's bike from (directly!) across the back alley, and then left the stolen bike by the back door.
He was, apparently, both surprised and indignant when the father of the child whose bike was stolen came over for a visit.... wielding a baseball bat.
One shadow that isn't the same is the shadow cast by the statue of Lenin(?). It should fall on the people on the bottom of the face, but it got photoshopped out, too.
Nice try, though.
They could have always camoed the stage..... But I kinda like the Alfred E. Neuman look.
Use rubber duckies in the cooling pool?
Arr matey. It seems yer either 'fraid of wimmin, or an idiot. In either case, yer not fer my crew.
I can take a picture with the dodgy camera in my cell phone and pay my cell phone provider $.50-$2 to upload it to my computer so I can see if it's even worth using, or: I can use my digital camera, get a MUCH better quality picture, and download it to my computer for free. It's not that I don't know how to use the camera on my phone (sometimes it even goes into camera mode by accident)... Its that I don't want to use the camera on my phone. -- and until I can use it for free, I'm going to continue to not want to.