There's a big difference. In this case, if you make donations, you get more code. In the case of Bill Gates, he gets more code.
Now, Eazel should realize that they need to make money, but users might feel that they want to support Eazel because the users get more benefits. They get just as many rights to the code as Eazel does.
Also, as far as maturity of belief, you act as if Slashdot had one set of beliefs. Here you will find many beliefs from many different angles, most of which will contradict each other because they are coming from different people.
What people miss about free software is that when you buy free software, you get _additional_ value - you get freedom to do what you want with it, which makes it more, not less, valuable. Now, this usually means that the software is available at no cost, and people start getting into the "you must give me handouts for free" mentality. This is the biggest problem. It's also the one that RMS has been trying to beat into people's minds - FREE DOES NOT MEAN "NO COST" BUT FREEDOM!
If you want to look at people who have gotten this concept successfully, have a look at Ada Core Technologies, Cygnus Solutions, and RedHat. Yes, I know Cygnus is now part of RedHat, they are also giving RedHat its profitability.
Anyway, the fundamental point of free software is to not have your freedoms taken away. Freedom is important in life, whether personal or business. Freedom is valuable and costly, but it is also vital, and worth its costs. So, to those looking for a hand-out, I say "grow up", and to those who think freedom is worth less that non-freedom, I say "go to China".
Re:The problem with both ximian and eazel ...
on
Eazel On The Ropes
·
· Score: 2
I think the idea behind Ximian is to have the companies producing the software pay Ximian to have the software packaged for them. For example, Sun might pay Ximian a few million to have a Sun GNOME channel, or a Sun kernel channel. Other companies will pay to have their software available through Red Carpet. They'll need to add an authentication method for use with proprietary software, but it could make them a lot of money, and they wouldn't have to charge the users a dime, just the suppliers.
This is only true if your business plan includes software sales. There are many ways to make money with free software. Take Ada Core Technologies, for example. They produce free software, and then do consulting with it. Why do people pay them for consulting? Because they _developed_ the technology. That's almost always a safe bet. It's the same reason that companies pay millions to Oracle consulting when they could have _hired_ twice as many people or more for the same price.
With Eazel, they planned on making money with the services that Nautilus made available. They planned on selling shared web space and upgrade services.
I think Ximian has a better method up their sleeve. With Red Carpet, where you have "channels", this can be ideal for distributing all kinds of software, both proprietary and free. Think of it, you would have IBM paying Ximian for providing their users access to the latest Domino for Linux or whatever. The would only need to add an authentication method to do this, and they would be good to go. This coul be worth a _lot_ of money.
The problem with Eazel is that they only had enough cash to get them _to_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before that? It was stupid, really. This is the same way AbiSource died. They cut funding _before_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before the 1.0 release? This is either a matter of
a) poor scheduling by the programmers
b) poor planning by the administrators
You should be able to sustain for a few months with no sales off the bat, or have another way to make money. You shouldn't expect customers to beat down your door with the first release of anything.
Bad business, open source or not, is what causes companies to fail.
They don't care what you do with their code, unless you take that right away from others. Ending IP would end the need for the GPL. As long as IP laws are around, someone else can take code I worked on, and use it in a freedom-limitting fashion, unless I've protected it with the GPL. Then I know that the user's freedom is always protected. Freedom doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. It means that you can do whatever you want except limit someone else's freedom, which is exactly what the GPL does (it has some additional restrictions, but those are to keep the freedom enforceable under current IP laws)
IBM's _are_ from open source, at least a lot of them. They said so themselves. The ability to run Linux on the S/390 has rejuvinated sales of that product. Especially in Japan, now a whole server farm can be run in one small section of floor space, rather than taking up multiple buildings. In addition, the power savings are enormous. It is estimated that replacing a room full of suns with an S/390 running lots of copies of Linux will save you $250,000/year in electricity alone. Not to mention the management costs. Large companies _are_ buying S/390s to run linux on them.
RHAT is doing just fine. VA isn't doing too shabby, they just spread themselves too thin (never trust stock prices. The stock prices for tech companies are always stupid because investors know crap about tech).
Also, you said If you could lose all your patents in unrelated fields becuase you dabbled in Open Source, who's going to risk it?. Where did you come up with a statement like that? How are companies using open source losing patents in unrelated fields?
Re:Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 2
What's in it for him is control over his data. The question is, should you sacrifice freedom for convenience?
If not, either use free software, or just go back to pen and paper.
There are almost always better routes to take than to use the government. Boycotts, consumer organizations, etc., prove much less harmful than law. Law always gets twisted away from its original meaning, screwing over the people it was designed to protect. Consumer organizations take much longer to get things done, but without the negative side of having laws about such things.
THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT. You can't make a software package that is good for everyone and still easy to use. That's like trying to make a single kitchen appliance that does everything a kitchen should do. Last I looked, real kitchens had a lot of disparate devices.
The problem is, current industry practices aren't quite compatible. For example, doing so, as you have pointed out, segments the market into a bunch of niche markets. However, that's not a real problem. In fact, it's more of an opportunity for new markets than anything else. Think about it, a _lot_ of people buy game consoles, even though they have computers. And there's not a lot of difference. The main difference is that the game consoles are geared to their users. It's much easier to just sit back and play a console game than to get one working on your computer.
For techies who want to do everything, there will always be a PC. However, I think people are finding out that a PC is just way too much computer for the average person. The key to reducing complexity is not having a giant operating system that takes care of it for you (and thus usually does a poor job), but to actually reduce complexity in the total system. I say this about both Windows and Linux. Having an "easy-to-use" Linux system will still be difficult to use for most people. Not because its Linux, but because PCs are too general to be simple.
I think this speaks to the whole idea of "Linux" being one thing. "Linux" is a technology, not an operating system. RedHat is an operating system. To say "Linux" is an operating system that should be compatible with every other "Linux" system is like saying "BSD" is an operating system that should be compatible with every other "BSD" system. When in fact this is not correct. There is no reason why Mac OS X should be compatible with FreeBSD even though they use the same Kernel. "BSD" is a technology used in OS X, but that doesn't mean that it should retain compatibility with anything else.
RedHat is an operating system. Mandrake is an operating system. SuSE is an operating system. Linux is not. The fact that you _can_ make an application run on all of these systems is an interesting side-effect of the fact that they use the same kernel. However, to think that this is absolutely necessary is silly.
This is called "Trickle Down" economics, and as was seen during the Reagan era, it doesn't work. The truth is, the rich will keep getting richer, and the poor will keep getting poorer.
I don't know whose numbers you were using, but during the Reagan era, there was far more "class mobility" (people moving up the economic ladder) than ever before him. Trickle-down actually did work.
An operating system is substantially different than a car or a toaster. Can you make your toaster do arbitrarily many things, or interact with arbitrary components? I don't think so. And, actually, in "appliance" settings, Linux does extremely well. Take the Tivo, for instance. Noone says the Tivo is hard to use. That's because, like a car or a toaster, it has only one use.
When you come to something inherently complex, trying to act as if it were simple causes more problems than it solves. Granted, Linux swings farther in the other direction than it should. However, when the OS starts doing things "for you", without telling you, it complicates the issues, and confuses the user even more. Users are very able to follow instructions. Surprisingly so. The problem is that when a system tries to out-guess you, you can't just hand someone instructions - they end up fighting the system.
What needs to happen, both in Windows and Linux, is to have a more "appliance-oriented" attitude. The OS, as it is currently conceived, is a total waste of time for the average consumer. What needs to happen is for many more specialized "appliance-type" computers/OSs to spring forth. Linux is the optimal system for this, because of its componentization and customizibility.
This is the concept of the iMac, and it is truly the best way to go. For example, you need a "Grandma" machine, that doesn't allow you to add any devices or software, and just incorporates the functionality a "grandma" would want. Also, it should be organized based on the use patterns of the average "grandma". The "grandma" should have no conception of a separation of software and hardware, it should just be a complete package.
The same can be done for business terminals, graphic artists, and so forth. If you insist on having a more "general", "pluggable" interface, well, that's for techies. Any attempt to dumb that down to the "idiot" level will cause more problems than it solves. That doesn't mean that we should make them as complex as possible, but "dumbing them down" isn't the solution either. Consumers just want to get things done. They don't want to mess around endlessly with their systems.
As for compiling programs, this is not a requirement for Linux users. I know a lot of Linux users who have no idea how to do this. If you are compiling from source, that probably means you are wanting a development version of some code, and thus classifies you as a techie. If you aren't a techie, just do what you would do for every other operating system - wait for the release.
You don't have to be a specialist to use Linux. Mandrake makes it fairly simple. The only confusing thing about Linux is where you should store your files. And that takes about 15 minutes to learn.
Actually, the main problem of MS's Java was that they had added methods to some interfaces. This might seem like it's not a problem, except that if you had a class that implemented an interface, but Microsoft added a function, then your code no longer works. I don't remember which ones they extended, but they were fairly out-of-the way and little used. However, the concept was quite alarming. In addition, their Visual J++ program would spit out non-Java code by default, unless the user specifically enabled pure Java output. This means that there wasn't any particular reason to not spit out Java code (since it was just a switch to turn it back on), but they decided to do it just the same.
As for JNI, that is very, _very_ important, especially if you develop Java extensions. Without a standard JNI, a software developer would have to develop extensions for multiple VMs on the _same_ platform. Blech.
RMI was also important to anyone wanting to do distributed development.
Yes, if you downloaded it yesterday, you would not have downloaded gnome-vfs, bonobo, nautilus, or the like. It is a little fuzzy, but basically its just that GNOME is a bunch of separate projects with a common roadmap. They all go their own directions, but meet up at McDonalds on highway 10 every few miles. The release marks the meeting point of the development versions of several different packages.
The difference is that with a regular wired LAN, you can have physical security - you can control the wires. With wireless you have a totally new can of worms, because the wires are no longer under your control.
The reason that there's normally not security in layer 2 is because it usually is a physical connection, and thus you use physical security. Logical connections require logical security. Since you don't have control of the "wires" in wireless LANs, you _do_ need security.
Actually, you miss several facts. First of all, much free software actually comes from outside the U.S. where economic conditions are much worse. Secondly, you will have companies more willing to contribute than before. For example, my company is considering hiring someone to modify HtDig to do what we want it to, rather than paying for a commercial search engine. Commercial search engines cost about $75Gs a year, while we can hire a part-time programmer for $15/hour. It will take longer, but the savings will be tremendous. I can see this happening a lot.
A GNOME release is much like a distribution release. It is just a collection of packages. The difference being that they've all been tested together. Why they decided to release GNOME 1.4 is that they've added several new things, and updated existing ones. They have added:
bonobo (component architecture)
gnome-vfs (allow anything to be viewed as part of a filesystem)
nautilus (new file manager)
xalf (launch feedback for panel launchers)
Some of these were around in beta form before the release, but the release of GNOME 1.4 marked the inclusion of these packages. It was a major change, so they had a package versinon number change.
However, the process isn't much different than that of a full distribution, only its covering only the desktop portion.
As far as corporate machines go, this is not the case. It is easy to use Linux in a corporate environment - you just have the SysAdmins set up everything the way you want it and mass-duplicate it. The hard thing about Linux is the install/configuration, which isn't an issue for corporations, where sysadmins take care of that. And, it is much easier for a sysadmin to install/configure linux than a Windows or Mac box. You can even use terminals to make your life even easier. My wife, having only experience with Win 3.1, was easily able to use Linux after marrying me after I set it up. She can use our digital camera, upload pictures (this is even easier than in Windows), write documents/spreadsheets/etc, browse the web. No problem.
Isn't it funny that when a bug is discovered in Microsoft software, it's a victory for Open Source, and when a bug is discovered in Open Source software, it's a victory for Open Source?
Although it seems kind of contradictory, it's basically the difference between owning a house and renting an apartment. If you own a house, when something breaks, you feel a sense of pride of ownership when you fix it. If you rent an apartment and something breaks, you only can think about how long the stupid manager is taking to fix the problem. That's one of the main reasons that people (me included) like Linux - the pride in ownership.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big difference. In this case, if you make donations, you get more code. In the case of Bill Gates, he gets more code.
Now, Eazel should realize that they need to make money, but users might feel that they want to support Eazel because the users get more benefits. They get just as many rights to the code as Eazel does.
Also, as far as maturity of belief, you act as if Slashdot had one set of beliefs. Here you will find many beliefs from many different angles, most of which will contradict each other because they are coming from different people.
What people miss about free software is that when you buy free software, you get _additional_ value - you get freedom to do what you want with it, which makes it more, not less, valuable. Now, this usually means that the software is available at no cost, and people start getting into the "you must give me handouts for free" mentality. This is the biggest problem. It's also the one that RMS has been trying to beat into people's minds - FREE DOES NOT MEAN "NO COST" BUT FREEDOM!
If you want to look at people who have gotten this concept successfully, have a look at Ada Core Technologies, Cygnus Solutions, and RedHat. Yes, I know Cygnus is now part of RedHat, they are also giving RedHat its profitability.
Anyway, the fundamental point of free software is to not have your freedoms taken away. Freedom is important in life, whether personal or business. Freedom is valuable and costly, but it is also vital, and worth its costs. So, to those looking for a hand-out, I say "grow up", and to those who think freedom is worth less that non-freedom, I say "go to China".
I think the idea behind Ximian is to have the companies producing the software pay Ximian to have the software packaged for them. For example, Sun might pay Ximian a few million to have a Sun GNOME channel, or a Sun kernel channel. Other companies will pay to have their software available through Red Carpet. They'll need to add an authentication method for use with proprietary software, but it could make them a lot of money, and they wouldn't have to charge the users a dime, just the suppliers.
This is only true if your business plan includes software sales. There are many ways to make money with free software. Take Ada Core Technologies, for example. They produce free software, and then do consulting with it. Why do people pay them for consulting? Because they _developed_ the technology. That's almost always a safe bet. It's the same reason that companies pay millions to Oracle consulting when they could have _hired_ twice as many people or more for the same price.
With Eazel, they planned on making money with the services that Nautilus made available. They planned on selling shared web space and upgrade services.
I think Ximian has a better method up their sleeve. With Red Carpet, where you have "channels", this can be ideal for distributing all kinds of software, both proprietary and free. Think of it, you would have IBM paying Ximian for providing their users access to the latest Domino for Linux or whatever. The would only need to add an authentication method to do this, and they would be good to go. This coul be worth a _lot_ of money.
The problem with Eazel is that they only had enough cash to get them _to_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before that? It was stupid, really. This is the same way AbiSource died. They cut funding _before_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before the 1.0 release? This is either a matter of
a) poor scheduling by the programmers
b) poor planning by the administrators
You should be able to sustain for a few months with no sales off the bat, or have another way to make money. You shouldn't expect customers to beat down your door with the first release of anything.
Bad business, open source or not, is what causes companies to fail.
They don't care what you do with their code, unless you take that right away from others. Ending IP would end the need for the GPL. As long as IP laws are around, someone else can take code I worked on, and use it in a freedom-limitting fashion, unless I've protected it with the GPL. Then I know that the user's freedom is always protected. Freedom doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. It means that you can do whatever you want except limit someone else's freedom, which is exactly what the GPL does (it has some additional restrictions, but those are to keep the freedom enforceable under current IP laws)
IBM's _are_ from open source, at least a lot of them. They said so themselves. The ability to run Linux on the S/390 has rejuvinated sales of that product. Especially in Japan, now a whole server farm can be run in one small section of floor space, rather than taking up multiple buildings. In addition, the power savings are enormous. It is estimated that replacing a room full of suns with an S/390 running lots of copies of Linux will save you $250,000/year in electricity alone. Not to mention the management costs. Large companies _are_ buying S/390s to run linux on them.
RHAT is doing just fine. VA isn't doing too shabby, they just spread themselves too thin (never trust stock prices. The stock prices for tech companies are always stupid because investors know crap about tech).
Also, you said If you could lose all your patents in unrelated fields becuase you dabbled in Open Source, who's going to risk it?. Where did you come up with a statement like that? How are companies using open source losing patents in unrelated fields?
What's in it for him is control over his data. The question is, should you sacrifice freedom for convenience?
If not, either use free software, or just go back to pen and paper.
I have a feeling that this is mostly hotmail/MSN people, which uses Passport for authentication.
There are almost always better routes to take than to use the government. Boycotts, consumer organizations, etc., prove much less harmful than law. Law always gets twisted away from its original meaning, screwing over the people it was designed to protect. Consumer organizations take much longer to get things done, but without the negative side of having laws about such things.
THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT. You can't make a software package that is good for everyone and still easy to use. That's like trying to make a single kitchen appliance that does everything a kitchen should do. Last I looked, real kitchens had a lot of disparate devices.
The problem is, current industry practices aren't quite compatible. For example, doing so, as you have pointed out, segments the market into a bunch of niche markets. However, that's not a real problem. In fact, it's more of an opportunity for new markets than anything else. Think about it, a _lot_ of people buy game consoles, even though they have computers. And there's not a lot of difference. The main difference is that the game consoles are geared to their users. It's much easier to just sit back and play a console game than to get one working on your computer.
For techies who want to do everything, there will always be a PC. However, I think people are finding out that a PC is just way too much computer for the average person. The key to reducing complexity is not having a giant operating system that takes care of it for you (and thus usually does a poor job), but to actually reduce complexity in the total system. I say this about both Windows and Linux. Having an "easy-to-use" Linux system will still be difficult to use for most people. Not because its Linux, but because PCs are too general to be simple.
I think this speaks to the whole idea of "Linux" being one thing. "Linux" is a technology, not an operating system. RedHat is an operating system. To say "Linux" is an operating system that should be compatible with every other "Linux" system is like saying "BSD" is an operating system that should be compatible with every other "BSD" system. When in fact this is not correct. There is no reason why Mac OS X should be compatible with FreeBSD even though they use the same Kernel. "BSD" is a technology used in OS X, but that doesn't mean that it should retain compatibility with anything else.
RedHat is an operating system. Mandrake is an operating system. SuSE is an operating system. Linux is not. The fact that you _can_ make an application run on all of these systems is an interesting side-effect of the fact that they use the same kernel. However, to think that this is absolutely necessary is silly.
I don't know whose numbers you were using, but during the Reagan era, there was far more "class mobility" (people moving up the economic ladder) than ever before him. Trickle-down actually did work.
An operating system is substantially different than a car or a toaster. Can you make your toaster do arbitrarily many things, or interact with arbitrary components? I don't think so. And, actually, in "appliance" settings, Linux does extremely well. Take the Tivo, for instance. Noone says the Tivo is hard to use. That's because, like a car or a toaster, it has only one use.
When you come to something inherently complex, trying to act as if it were simple causes more problems than it solves. Granted, Linux swings farther in the other direction than it should. However, when the OS starts doing things "for you", without telling you, it complicates the issues, and confuses the user even more. Users are very able to follow instructions. Surprisingly so. The problem is that when a system tries to out-guess you, you can't just hand someone instructions - they end up fighting the system.
What needs to happen, both in Windows and Linux, is to have a more "appliance-oriented" attitude. The OS, as it is currently conceived, is a total waste of time for the average consumer. What needs to happen is for many more specialized "appliance-type" computers/OSs to spring forth. Linux is the optimal system for this, because of its componentization and customizibility.
This is the concept of the iMac, and it is truly the best way to go. For example, you need a "Grandma" machine, that doesn't allow you to add any devices or software, and just incorporates the functionality a "grandma" would want. Also, it should be organized based on the use patterns of the average "grandma". The "grandma" should have no conception of a separation of software and hardware, it should just be a complete package.
The same can be done for business terminals, graphic artists, and so forth. If you insist on having a more "general", "pluggable" interface, well, that's for techies. Any attempt to dumb that down to the "idiot" level will cause more problems than it solves. That doesn't mean that we should make them as complex as possible, but "dumbing them down" isn't the solution either. Consumers just want to get things done. They don't want to mess around endlessly with their systems.
As for compiling programs, this is not a requirement for Linux users. I know a lot of Linux users who have no idea how to do this. If you are compiling from source, that probably means you are wanting a development version of some code, and thus classifies you as a techie. If you aren't a techie, just do what you would do for every other operating system - wait for the release.
You don't have to be a specialist to use Linux. Mandrake makes it fairly simple. The only confusing thing about Linux is where you should store your files. And that takes about 15 minutes to learn.
Actually, the main problem of MS's Java was that they had added methods to some interfaces. This might seem like it's not a problem, except that if you had a class that implemented an interface, but Microsoft added a function, then your code no longer works. I don't remember which ones they extended, but they were fairly out-of-the way and little used. However, the concept was quite alarming. In addition, their Visual J++ program would spit out non-Java code by default, unless the user specifically enabled pure Java output. This means that there wasn't any particular reason to not spit out Java code (since it was just a switch to turn it back on), but they decided to do it just the same.
As for JNI, that is very, _very_ important, especially if you develop Java extensions. Without a standard JNI, a software developer would have to develop extensions for multiple VMs on the _same_ platform. Blech.
RMI was also important to anyone wanting to do distributed development.
Yes, if you downloaded it yesterday, you would not have downloaded gnome-vfs, bonobo, nautilus, or the like. It is a little fuzzy, but basically its just that GNOME is a bunch of separate projects with a common roadmap. They all go their own directions, but meet up at McDonalds on highway 10 every few miles. The release marks the meeting point of the development versions of several different packages.
The difference is that with a regular wired LAN, you can have physical security - you can control the wires. With wireless you have a totally new can of worms, because the wires are no longer under your control.
The reason that there's normally not security in layer 2 is because it usually is a physical connection, and thus you use physical security. Logical connections require logical security. Since you don't have control of the "wires" in wireless LANs, you _do_ need security.
Actually, you miss several facts. First of all, much free software actually comes from outside the U.S. where economic conditions are much worse. Secondly, you will have companies more willing to contribute than before. For example, my company is considering hiring someone to modify HtDig to do what we want it to, rather than paying for a commercial search engine. Commercial search engines cost about $75Gs a year, while we can hire a part-time programmer for $15/hour. It will take longer, but the savings will be tremendous. I can see this happening a lot.
Hmmmm... where I live the rate is closer to $30 Gs/year for Linux people.
Actually, each of these are pushing Linux to the front. It's just that the predicted time period was (and is) much too short.
A GNOME release is much like a distribution release. It is just a collection of packages. The difference being that they've all been tested together. Why they decided to release GNOME 1.4 is that they've added several new things, and updated existing ones. They have added:
bonobo (component architecture)
gnome-vfs (allow anything to be viewed as part of a filesystem)
nautilus (new file manager)
xalf (launch feedback for panel launchers)
Some of these were around in beta form before the release, but the release of GNOME 1.4 marked the inclusion of these packages. It was a major change, so they had a package versinon number change.
However, the process isn't much different than that of a full distribution, only its covering only the desktop portion.
As far as corporate machines go, this is not the case. It is easy to use Linux in a corporate environment - you just have the SysAdmins set up everything the way you want it and mass-duplicate it. The hard thing about Linux is the install/configuration, which isn't an issue for corporations, where sysadmins take care of that. And, it is much easier for a sysadmin to install/configure linux than a Windows or Mac box. You can even use terminals to make your life even easier. My wife, having only experience with Win 3.1, was easily able to use Linux after marrying me after I set it up. She can use our digital camera, upload pictures (this is even easier than in Windows), write documents/spreadsheets/etc, browse the web. No problem.
It's not disabling active stuff, you also have to disable downloads, that's right, downloads. Not executables, not active crap, just downloads.
Although it seems kind of contradictory, it's basically the difference between owning a house and renting an apartment. If you own a house, when something breaks, you feel a sense of pride of ownership when you fix it. If you rent an apartment and something breaks, you only can think about how long the stupid manager is taking to fix the problem. That's one of the main reasons that people (me included) like Linux - the pride in ownership.