Actually, region encoding is protected by copyright law. It falls
under the distribution clause as it limits distribution in certain geographical areas of the world as per the wishes of the copyright holder.
Bzzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. Once I've purchased a piece of copyrighted material (be it a book, cd, dvd, or something else), I'm free to distribute the one, original, legal copy I have where I like. I can send it off to my friend in Europe or Asia to enjoy. I can take it with me for my trip to South America and watch it there. That's the right of first sale. Excepting is broken DMCA law, I'm free to disable region coding.
I just wish people would stop believing that any company exists for
any reason other than to increase the wealth of its shareholders. Sorry folks,
this is just the American way.
The American way is the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness. The American way is that no law shall abridge free of speech or of
the press.
"The only law shalt be maximixe your stock price at all costs" is part of
something worse. It isn't even part of the Capitalist way, for true capitalism
only works with wide availability of information and strong competition. This
is the inbred freak son of Capitalism and Greed. The is the way of life of
scam artists, shysters, hucksters, thieves. This is the Monopolist's Way.
I understand perfectly well that "thou shalt increase your stock price or
face lawsuits," but I don't have to like it. It's a corruption of everything
America, freedom, and true capitalism. I have every right to name it beast and
call for it to be cast into the fires.
I'd actually like to see someone take the Onion's kids explanation of why the Sept. terrorist attacks happened seriously.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the article "Talking To Your Child About the WTC Attack" is online. In fact, their entire "Holy Fucking Shit: America Under Attack" It's the single most brilliant issue of the Onion ever. It captured the fear, the uncertainly, the random lashing out. It reflected America in a way that no other news source had done. It managed to be respectful and sad, yet very funny. It was exactly what America needed.
Macromedia Flash is $499.00, Adobe Photoshop is $609.00, and 3ds Max is $3495.00. Hell, Times New Roman, that ubiquitous font, costs $95.99. I fail to see how a quality word processor, a tool as specialized as any of these others, should not cost as much.
Specialization of the tool is irrelevant. More relevent is the cost to develop the software, the cost to reproduce the software, and finally the number of users whom those costs are divided amoung. Few users, higher price to recoup costs. Lots of users, lower price. (And if the price isn't low enough, and the famous "invisible hand" is working, a competitor will emerge. Sadly, there are lots of things prevents the invisible hand for working...) Flash, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max are extremely specialized in terms of their market. The market for a general office package is orders of magnatude larger.
Mind you, not knowing how much it cost Microsoft to develop Office, I can't say whether Microsoft Office is overpriced. My point is simply that comparing it to products with significantly smaller markets is a bad idea.
...the same people who whine about attempts to keep people from "pirating/breaking license agreements" will be the same ones who blast Sony for not following the GPL to the letter.
That would be people like me, and it's not hypocritical.
If you get some GPL software, by sale or for free, you're free to do with it as you like, within the restrictions of copyright law. You don't even need to look at the GPL. As a special bonus, you can do things normally prohibited by copyright law, but there are some special rules you need to pay attention to. It seems perfectly reasonable to have to follow the rules to the letter in exchange for the extra bonus grants.
Conversely, once I've gotten some "licensed" software, I'm not free to do what I like with it. I usually don't see the license until I've already spend the time and effort to purchase the software and brought it home. The license tries to take away rights that I already have. Software licenses are a slimy trick that try to rewrite the copyright balance against citizens. By agreeing to this license I've lost rights (to make copies for personal use, to examine or modify products I own, in some cases to resell property that I own).
These two cases have almost nothing to do with each other.
90 day or unlimited trial only...In other words, pretty much give it away for free. (90 days apart to uninstall/reinstall or in some cases reformat is not much of a pain in the ass.) Not that this surprises me coming from Slashdot, News for People Who Don't Want To Pay.
Thanks for assuming we're all thieves. Do you work for the RIAA?
I've run into 30 day limits all too often while evaluating products for professional use. I'll evaluate the product for a day or two, then get swamped with real work for a few weeks. I finally get back to evaluating the software and discover that I've only got a few days to examine it. This is frustrating for many programs and effectively negates the value of the evaluation for programs you need to use pervasively for a few weeks to try (development environments are a good example). Sure, I can usually request an additional key to unlock it for another 30 days, but that's frustrating. Free Sales Tip: Don't frustrate potential customers.
This isn't the case for personal software, but for professional software you don't need to worry constantly about pirated use. Companies using software can afford to pay for it. They certainly can't afford the risk of getting caught. Put in nags and give long demo periods.
(One improvement that I've seen several products use is to limit you to 30 days of use. So if I get interrupted for a few weeks in the middle, I'll still have a few weeks to examine the software.)
...if you're downloading a trial of a professional software package it's more professional, in my opinion, if after downloading it you get an e-mail from Bob Soandso and his phone number if you have any questions about how to use the software, etc.
My experience with professional software development packages is that I often end up on the offering companies bulk email advertising lists. I had this experience five years ago (Rational), I had this experience three years ago (Several dongle manufacturers), and I had this experience last year (several ActiveX control suppliers). The "best" I've ever gotten is a clear form letter with my name stuck into it. Gee, real professional. Getting this junk email really lowers my opinion of the senders. Unfortunately, I'm often forced to report, "Product X is really good, but their sales people are rude and spammed me." Management orders the product and the stupid sales people are left with the impression that their nasty tactics worked. Grrr.
Anyway, as a result I'm very hesitant to check out professional software. If I need to evaluate the software ("Culd you evaluate memory leak detection tools and tell me which one to buy for the team I'll do it."), I'll enter my email address with a warning attached. ("username@example.com DO NOT CONTACT ME"). If it's personal investigation, ("Hey, this product might help me with my work"), I'll generally pass unless there is a clear, english promise to not spam me. If you insist on an email address, you migh lose me as a potential customer.
Hey, how old are you kid? Isn't Slashdot a bit mature for you? Heck, if you were browsing the web at 12, the oldest you could possibly be is... erm... uh.. oh. 20.
With all of these endless/. posts about how Linux will rule the world, I have yet to see a single post explaining how programmers will ever get paid.
1. Most professional (ie, paid) programmers, aren't writing software that is traditionally "sold". As I was recently considering other job opportunities, I was struck that most of the programming jobs were developing strictly internal software. Billing software for use inside of a large insurance company. Drivers for a piece of medical hardware. Document management software for use inside a large bank. For all of these industries, the existance or lack of open source is irrelevant. The companies still need the specialized software and will still hire programmers to write the software. This sort of work dominates the industry. The death of commercial software may shrink the number of programmers needed, but it won't put everyone out of business.
2. Open source creates some market for programmers to customize and modify software. This is similar to point 1, but creates a new job market. Instead of paying for 10,000 copies of Windows, a company might use Linux and hire a few people fix whatever problems they run into. It may be a small job market, but it will exist. And if you're the primary author of a package in demand, I expect many companies will be interested in hiring you (the developer most knowledgable about the prodcut) to customize it for them. This sort of work probably won't completely make up for the jobs lost due to people and companies no longer buying software, but it will reduce the damage.
3. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if we get paid to program. I am a professional programmer. For my last few jobs, I've paid to write commericial (sold) software. If there were strong open source products in the fields I was working, I would have been out of the job. But ultimately, that doesn't matter. If the world moves on and decides it doesn't need us anymore, who are we to demand that it keep paying us? Sometimes industries are killed by progress. I'd rather keep my job, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume that I'm indispensible. Printing innovations removed the need for scribes. Modern software has dramatically cut down on the need for accountants. Robots have cut down on the number of people involved in manufacturing. Giant corporate farms and farming technology drove small farms out of business. These things sucked for the people involved, but times change and the world moved on.
When you do your homework, you find that C# is actually quite different the Java:
Even as someone who doesn't like Java, I can see that some of your "differences" are just superficial techniques and syntactic sugar. You have some real interesting differences between Java and C#, don't muddy them with these bad examples:
+ C# is completely OO - even an Int32 is an Object. Java uses primitive types.
It would be more accurate to say that Java has primitive types. If you want a primitive integer value, declare an "int". If you want an object, declare an "Integer". Java gives you the option of (sometimes) a more simple representation. C# doesn't. It's a bit of a weak argument to claim that C# isn't strongly derivative of Java because it has fewer options.
+ C# supports the use of Properties instead of Getter and Setter methods.
A property is syntactic sugar for Getters and Setters. It's a real nice feature, but strictly superficial. The existence of properties isn't going to change the fundamental design of any program.
+ C# supports namespaces. Unlike Java's packages, namespaces do not rely on a file/folder structure.
Again, handy syntactic sugar, but not a really core change. It's nice to have the option, but no one is going to change their programming techniques because of it.
Most RTOS's prioritize device interrupts so that important interrupts ("shut down the reactor NOW!") are serviced first and lower priority interrupts ("time to make the doughnuts") are serviced later.
Clearly, most RTOS designers have their priorities backwards.
If you have a problem with trying to stop this type of activity, then you also probably think it would be OK to run phone line from your house to your neighbor's house, since you "pay for the bandwidth and can do whatever you wish with it."
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's wrong with sharing my phone line with my neighbors? Assuming my neighbor splits the phone bill, I get a smaller phone bill in exchange for the hassle of having to share the line. And working out the long distance calls would likely be a pain. Hmm, thinking about it, it sounds alot like what happened when I was sharing an apartment. What's the difference if the person I'm sharing with lives next door or in the next bedroom?
(There may be a law of some sort against it, but I don't see any sort of ethical problems with such a situation.)
If Id released the source for RtCW today, they wouldn't make a penny on their retail sales. Somone would get the source code, edit one line, stick it on an FTP server, and make it available to the world free (as in beer), and most people would get it from there. There would be no legal reason to stop them...
Of course, RtCW is pretty worthless without levels to play through. The engine without levels is of no value to your average gamer. Just because you open source your engine doesn't mean you need to open source your levels, models, textures, sounds, and other data.
There are risks of making your engine open source (As you point out, Id makes money selling its engine to other developers, open sourcing their current engine would kill this model. Also, competing companies could take the engine, saving software development time and focus on developing levels, effectively allowing your competition to leach your work.). But the threat that no one would buy your game isn't there. I buy a game for well crafted, fun levels. The engine is just the foundation that those levels are built on.
I definately agree I'd love to see out of date source made available. I have a number of games I own that I can't play because they're too old (MS-DOS based). I'm perfectly willing to take a stab at updating them, but it's practically impossible to do without the source. There is a risk that this would hurt sales (as I spent time playing old games instead of new games), but I suspect the drop is sales would be minimal (I like shiny new games too much to just stop buying them).
Would you guys just grow up? Did it ever occure to you that it is the responsibility of every employee, executive, and board member of a company to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition?
Did it ever occur to you that it is the responsibility of every thug, capo, and don of a mob family to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition?
It's just as silly of a statement for Microsoft. (If you don't like the comparison to crime, you can easily rewrite it for Taliban members preventing women from attending school, or Nazis during World War II, or slave traders, or any other number of activities.)
Just because someone else has a responsibility to take certain actions doesn't mean I have to agree with them. Furthermore, you're ignoring the responsibilities citizens should have to their fellow citizens and their country. It's as a concerned citizen with a responsibility to my fellow citizens that I feel I must criticize Microsoft.
Or more specifically, Tog is overgeneralizing. His research quite reasonably focuses on casual users of software. This does't make sense for people who make heavy use of a particular piece software. Moving your hand off the keyboard when doing heavy duty text data entry is a huge speed hit. It's a big speed hit for transcription, for entering order information, for typing source code, for writing a novel.
Mice are great. Going back to the keyboard only days is a hideous mistake. But keyboard shortcuts can provide a very real speed boost for frequent operations.
...there is just no way in hell that they are going to be able to developing something as huge and fastmoving as DX for only 100.000 a month.
You're missing some obvious points. The Wine project is doing a reasonable job chasing DirectX with almost no support right now. It's not perfect, and there is alot of work to do, but there is a strong foundation. There are DirectX games working right now under Wine. Transgaming isn't starting from scratch, they're starting with the Wine project's excellent code base.
By contributing work back to the Wine project, other people will have incentive to help maintain their additions.
Furthermore, they're not trying to support every game all at once, part of what you get for subscribing is a vote in which games are supported next. Supporting every game and all of DirectX is a huge task. Adding support for one game at a time is much more reasonable.
Given these more reasonable requirements, I think you could be successful with fewer than 20 developers. If they're careful in picking reasonable projects, a game a month would seem reasonable. If you've got a small team working for the love of the effort, you won't need much of a support staff. Sure, they'll be a bit more disorganized, and would have problems scaling up, but it's worked for dozens of garage startups before. For $100,000 a month, you get 12 full time staff (Assuming $48,000 salary and that much again in overhead.) Eight skilled, smart programmers working for the love of the project and 4 administrative staff should be able to get a great deal done.
You're suspicious of being able to get skill programmers for $4,000 a month. I think you underestimate the draw of open source and game programming. I know skilled game programmers working for that right now. They accept the low wages in exchange for working on their love, games. Ditto for open source, lots of programmers would be willing to take a salary cut if they knew their work would eventually be open source. I know I could collect a half dozen highly skilled programmers to work on this for $48,000 a year.
Of course, all of the above is my theory. Can it really work? I don't know. I certainly hope it does.
Freedom is a lack of obligation; the GPL does not define "freedom", it forces obligations on people, and uses the very Copyright they despise as a tool for control.
The GPL gives you everything that copyright does and more. If you're willing to yield copyright fundamentally restricts freedom, then yes, the GPL also restricts freedom.
The GPL doesn't "force" any obligations. If you don't redistribute the resulting software, you have no obligations. Is this less than completely free? Sure, but copyright normally doesn't allow you to redistribute it at all.
Knowledge doesn't want to be free -- knowledge has no desires of any kind.
Stop being so literal. If I said "Water wants to run downhill," would you complain that water doesn't have any desires? It's a quotable way of summarizing a more complex situation.
If it bothers you so much, change "wants" to the more accurate "tends." "Water tends to run downhill," and "Knowledge tends to be free." And since free is a potentially confusing word, perhaps a further tweak, "Knowledge tends to spread out of control." (Not a perfect tweak, but I don't see an improvement right now.)
No one will contest that water tends to run downhill (I hope). Knowledge certainly spreads out of control. If I share with you a secret, say my recipe for cookies, I'd be hard pressed to stop you from sharing that knowledge further. If you've got a good memory, I can't take it away from you, and you are physically able to reproduce it and share it at will. As a race, we've continuously worked to make it easier to share knowledge. Writing. Printing. Photocopying. Faxing. Web pages. Email.
Sure, we've passed laws on copyright and trade secrets to try and restrict the flow of information. But in the absence of such laws I can't really stop you (short of physically detaining you) from spreading knowledge I've given you. Even with the laws, it's quite easy for someone willing to make an unauthorized copy to do so.
We're tried technical measures. Macrovision, copy protections. But ultimately you show the movie, book, or music to a person. A person with a video camera can reproduce the work. For text a person with a pad of paper and a pencil can slowly copy it down. All it takes is one person to acquire a non-technically restricted copy before the it can be widely and easy copied using modern technology.
People like to spread knowledge. It's hard wired into humanity. Knowledge wants to be free because people want to spread it.
Then the solution is a standardized "skinning" platform. Then Winamp and Netscape could leverage the same skins. Anything like this exist or in the works? You would think Microsoft in all it's glory would have thought it up.
Exactly. Gnome/GTK has this functionality right now under the name "Themes". I believe KDE/Qt has similar functionality. You can get a third party product for Microsoft Windows (WindowBlinds) to accomplish this. The neat thing is that if the software developer uses the standard user interface API, the end user can gain this benefit.
How is skin technology "rolling your
own user interface?"
Microsoft Windows, Gnome/GTK, KDE/Qt, and
Motif all provide standard user interface
widgets. Buttons, menus, edit boxes, drop
lists, trees, and the like. Because
developers use one of these standard
interface libraries, your applications look
and behave similarly.
Mozilla and Netscape 6.x don't use the
standard interface widgets for it's various
platforms. It doesn't quite match the rest
of the system.
If you don't like the skin Mozilla
ships with, change it to the Classic skin.
The classic skin approximates the
old Netscape interface. It still uses
non-standard user interface controls. They
don't quite behave like native controls on
Microsoft Windows, and they certainly don't
look like Motif controls under X-Windows. If
the system's standard interface library is
updated with a new look or behavoir the
skinned application won't get those updates.
It would be smart to allow skin
techonology to pick up global color/font
settings (if it doesnt already). Then we
could please folks like yourself, which I am
sure there are a bunch of.
What would really please me is the ability
to move all of the skinning to a global
location. Gnome and KDE are moving in this
direction. I tell Gnome in one place that I
want an MacOS Aqua like look, or a Microsoft
Windows like look, or something strange and
unique. Instantly, dozens of applications
immediately adjust. My system remains
consistent.
However, if I want WinAmp, and Netscape
6.x to match under Microsoft Windows, I need
to create custom skins for each. If I want
QuickTime and Media Player to match, well,
I'm SOL. If I want XMMS, Mozilla, XMovie,
and OMS, to match under Linux I have a lot of
work ahead of me.
I use some Gnu tools and many more non-gnu-licensed tools with my linux kernels. I'm not gonna say Gnu/Apache/Perl/BSD/etc/Linux, and neither should anyone else. Yeah, the system would be less useful without gnu tools, it'd also not be what it is without all the other pieces of software on it.
The point isn't that the GNU tools are a major part of a standard Linux distribution.
In the early 1990s, the GNU project had everything you needed for a baseline operating system. Compiler, assembler, linker, C library, shell. Everything except a kernel. Linus took those tools and added the final piece, the kernel. Linus didn't need X-Windows or Perl. Apache didn't exist. Linus needed a compiler, a linker, an assembler, a C library, and a shell. He used the GNU project's tools. Linux is built upon a foundation of GNU tools.
That's why the Stallman can claim the GNU project has a valid claim to share the Linux title. Why bother? Politics. Stallman is pushing a political and ethical agenda. Free Software or nothing. Part of his job is to spread the word, and getting the GNU name used is a great way to do it. Every user who says "What's the GNU thing in front of Linux?" is an opportunity to spread the word.
That said, I'm not sure I agree that it should be called GNU/Linux. It seems a bit pushy to me. But don't make the mistake that he wants it called GNU/Linux just because the GNU tools are part of the typical package. He wants it added to help spread the Free Software word. His claim is that the GNU tools where the foundation.
So you say it's a "problem" for people to complain about RMS's speech, but it's fine for RMS to complain about other people.
I didn't say it was a problem at all. I disagreed with Stickerboy and posted what I felt was a correction. That's my point. Disagreeing with him doesn't mean I'm trying to limit his speech. I'm trying to change his mind, and the mind of anyone else reading it. Stallman is doing the same thing. He's not a hypocrite for insisting on GNU/Linux instead of Linux. He's trying to change people's minds.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to complain loudly about other's speech. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to be as anal and vitrolic as you want. So what's the problem?
The Winner [for "The Look"]: Mozilla, hands down. It's terrific that someone decided to take the route away from the greys.
Oh goody. I was tired of all my applications looking the same and behaving the same. I love guessing which color means disabled for each different application. I like having my system wide colors that I've carefully chosen to minimize eye strain thrown out the window.
System wide colors and looks are feature. If you're sick of living in grey land, change it globally. Gnome supports this. KDE supports this. Windows supports this.
Mozilla is a great browser, but their decision to roll their own user interface was a mistake. Fortunately Mozilla is modular, and as the core engine stabilizes I plan on moving to a more system friendly browser using that engine. Probably Galeon or Skipstone.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more likely, you've seem forged email that isn't really from SpamCop
Bzzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. Once I've purchased a piece of
copyrighted material (be it a book, cd, dvd, or something else), I'm free to
distribute the one, original, legal copy I have where I like. I can send it
off to my friend in Europe or Asia to enjoy. I can take it with me for my trip
to South America and watch it there. That's the right
of first sale. Excepting is broken DMCA law, I'm free to disable region
coding.
The American way is the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. The American way is that no law shall abridge free of speech or of the press.
"The only law shalt be maximixe your stock price at all costs" is part of something worse. It isn't even part of the Capitalist way, for true capitalism only works with wide availability of information and strong competition. This is the inbred freak son of Capitalism and Greed. The is the way of life of scam artists, shysters, hucksters, thieves. This is the Monopolist's Way.
I understand perfectly well that "thou shalt increase your stock price or face lawsuits," but I don't have to like it. It's a corruption of everything America, freedom, and true capitalism. I have every right to name it beast and call for it to be cast into the fires.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the article "Talking To Your Child About the WTC Attack" is online. In fact, their entire "Holy Fucking Shit: America Under Attack" It's the single most brilliant issue of the Onion ever. It captured the fear, the uncertainly, the random lashing out. It reflected America in a way that no other news source had done. It managed to be respectful and sad, yet very funny. It was exactly what America needed.
Specialization of the tool is irrelevant. More relevent is the cost to develop the software, the cost to reproduce the software, and finally the number of users whom those costs are divided amoung. Few users, higher price to recoup costs. Lots of users, lower price. (And if the price isn't low enough, and the famous "invisible hand" is working, a competitor will emerge. Sadly, there are lots of things prevents the invisible hand for working...) Flash, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max are extremely specialized in terms of their market. The market for a general office package is orders of magnatude larger.
Mind you, not knowing how much it cost Microsoft to develop Office, I can't say whether Microsoft Office is overpriced. My point is simply that comparing it to products with significantly smaller markets is a bad idea.
That would be people like me, and it's not hypocritical.
If you get some GPL software, by sale or for free, you're free to do with it as you like, within the restrictions of copyright law. You don't even need to look at the GPL. As a special bonus, you can do things normally prohibited by copyright law, but there are some special rules you need to pay attention to. It seems perfectly reasonable to have to follow the rules to the letter in exchange for the extra bonus grants.
Conversely, once I've gotten some "licensed" software, I'm not free to do what I like with it. I usually don't see the license until I've already spend the time and effort to purchase the software and brought it home. The license tries to take away rights that I already have. Software licenses are a slimy trick that try to rewrite the copyright balance against citizens. By agreeing to this license I've lost rights (to make copies for personal use, to examine or modify products I own, in some cases to resell property that I own).
These two cases have almost nothing to do with each other.
Thanks for assuming we're all thieves. Do you work for the RIAA?
I've run into 30 day limits all too often while evaluating products for professional use. I'll evaluate the product for a day or two, then get swamped with real work for a few weeks. I finally get back to evaluating the software and discover that I've only got a few days to examine it. This is frustrating for many programs and effectively negates the value of the evaluation for programs you need to use pervasively for a few weeks to try (development environments are a good example). Sure, I can usually request an additional key to unlock it for another 30 days, but that's frustrating. Free Sales Tip: Don't frustrate potential customers.
This isn't the case for personal software, but for professional software you don't need to worry constantly about pirated use. Companies using software can afford to pay for it. They certainly can't afford the risk of getting caught. Put in nags and give long demo periods.
(One improvement that I've seen several products use is to limit you to 30 days of use. So if I get interrupted for a few weeks in the middle, I'll still have a few weeks to examine the software.)
My experience with professional software development packages is that I often end up on the offering companies bulk email advertising lists. I had this experience five years ago (Rational), I had this experience three years ago (Several dongle manufacturers), and I had this experience last year (several ActiveX control suppliers). The "best" I've ever gotten is a clear form letter with my name stuck into it. Gee, real professional. Getting this junk email really lowers my opinion of the senders. Unfortunately, I'm often forced to report, "Product X is really good, but their sales people are rude and spammed me." Management orders the product and the stupid sales people are left with the impression that their nasty tactics worked. Grrr.
Anyway, as a result I'm very hesitant to check out professional software. If I need to evaluate the software ("Culd you evaluate memory leak detection tools and tell me which one to buy for the team I'll do it."), I'll enter my email address with a warning attached. ("username@example.com DO NOT CONTACT ME"). If it's personal investigation, ("Hey, this product might help me with my work"), I'll generally pass unless there is a clear, english promise to not spam me. If you insist on an email address, you migh lose me as a potential customer.
Hey, how old are you kid? Isn't Slashdot a bit mature for you? Heck, if you were browsing the web at 12, the oldest you could possibly be is... erm... uh.. oh. 20.
I feel so very old...
1. Most professional (ie, paid) programmers, aren't writing software that is traditionally "sold". As I was recently considering other job opportunities, I was struck that most of the programming jobs were developing strictly internal software. Billing software for use inside of a large insurance company. Drivers for a piece of medical hardware. Document management software for use inside a large bank. For all of these industries, the existance or lack of open source is irrelevant. The companies still need the specialized software and will still hire programmers to write the software. This sort of work dominates the industry. The death of commercial software may shrink the number of programmers needed, but it won't put everyone out of business.
2. Open source creates some market for programmers to customize and modify software. This is similar to point 1, but creates a new job market. Instead of paying for 10,000 copies of Windows, a company might use Linux and hire a few people fix whatever problems they run into. It may be a small job market, but it will exist. And if you're the primary author of a package in demand, I expect many companies will be interested in hiring you (the developer most knowledgable about the prodcut) to customize it for them. This sort of work probably won't completely make up for the jobs lost due to people and companies no longer buying software, but it will reduce the damage.
3. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if we get paid to program. I am a professional programmer. For my last few jobs, I've paid to write commericial (sold) software. If there were strong open source products in the fields I was working, I would have been out of the job. But ultimately, that doesn't matter. If the world moves on and decides it doesn't need us anymore, who are we to demand that it keep paying us? Sometimes industries are killed by progress. I'd rather keep my job, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume that I'm indispensible. Printing innovations removed the need for scribes. Modern software has dramatically cut down on the need for accountants. Robots have cut down on the number of people involved in manufacturing. Giant corporate farms and farming technology drove small farms out of business. These things sucked for the people involved, but times change and the world moved on.
Even as someone who doesn't like Java, I can see that some of your "differences" are just superficial techniques and syntactic sugar. You have some real interesting differences between Java and C#, don't muddy them with these bad examples:
It would be more accurate to say that Java has primitive types. If you want a primitive integer value, declare an "int". If you want an object, declare an "Integer". Java gives you the option of (sometimes) a more simple representation. C# doesn't. It's a bit of a weak argument to claim that C# isn't strongly derivative of Java because it has fewer options.
A property is syntactic sugar for Getters and Setters. It's a real nice feature, but strictly superficial. The existence of properties isn't going to change the fundamental design of any program.
Again, handy syntactic sugar, but not a really core change. It's nice to have the option, but no one is going to change their programming techniques because of it.
Clearly, most RTOS designers have their priorities backwards.
Mmmm, donuts.
If you have a problem with trying to stop this type of activity, then you also probably think it would be OK to run phone line from your house to your neighbor's house, since you "pay for the bandwidth and can do whatever you wish with it."
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's wrong with sharing my phone line with my neighbors? Assuming my neighbor splits the phone bill, I get a smaller phone bill in exchange for the hassle of having to share the line. And working out the long distance calls would likely be a pain. Hmm, thinking about it, it sounds alot like what happened when I was sharing an apartment. What's the difference if the person I'm sharing with lives next door or in the next bedroom?
(There may be a law of some sort against it, but I don't see any sort of ethical problems with such a situation.)
If Id released the source for RtCW today, they wouldn't make a penny on their retail sales. Somone would get the source code, edit one line, stick it on an FTP server, and make it available to the world free (as in beer), and most people would get it from there. There would be no legal reason to stop them...
Of course, RtCW is pretty worthless without levels to play through. The engine without levels is of no value to your average gamer. Just because you open source your engine doesn't mean you need to open source your levels, models, textures, sounds, and other data.
There are risks of making your engine open source (As you point out, Id makes money selling its engine to other developers, open sourcing their current engine would kill this model. Also, competing companies could take the engine, saving software development time and focus on developing levels, effectively allowing your competition to leach your work.). But the threat that no one would buy your game isn't there. I buy a game for well crafted, fun levels. The engine is just the foundation that those levels are built on.
I definately agree I'd love to see out of date source made available. I have a number of games I own that I can't play because they're too old (MS-DOS based). I'm perfectly willing to take a stab at updating them, but it's practically impossible to do without the source. There is a risk that this would hurt sales (as I spent time playing old games instead of new games), but I suspect the drop is sales would be minimal (I like shiny new games too much to just stop buying them).
Would you guys just grow up? Did it ever occure to you that it is the responsibility of every employee, executive, and board member of a company to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition?
Did it ever occur to you that it is the responsibility of every thug, capo, and don of a mob family to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition?
It's just as silly of a statement for Microsoft. (If you don't like the comparison to crime, you can easily rewrite it for Taliban members preventing women from attending school, or Nazis during World War II, or slave traders, or any other number of activities.)
Just because someone else has a responsibility to take certain actions doesn't mean I have to agree with them. Furthermore, you're ignoring the responsibilities citizens should have to their fellow citizens and their country. It's as a concerned citizen with a responsibility to my fellow citizens that I feel I must criticize Microsoft.
Tog is wrong.
Or more specifically, Tog is overgeneralizing. His research quite reasonably focuses on casual users of software. This does't make sense for people who make heavy use of a particular piece software. Moving your hand off the keyboard when doing heavy duty text data entry is a huge speed hit. It's a big speed hit for transcription, for entering order information, for typing source code, for writing a novel.
A mouse is a great and important invention. But it's not a silver bullet. Tog has made the mistake of generalizing his fairly specific research into faulty universal solutions. When I saw Tog's article on how traffic engineers are stealing his life I realized that his ego was completely out of control. The man has grown too comfortable living on his prior research. He's become closed minded, a mistake in a field that is still very young.
Mice are great. Going back to the keyboard only days is a hideous mistake. But keyboard shortcuts can provide a very real speed boost for frequent operations.
You're missing some obvious points. The Wine project is doing a reasonable job chasing DirectX with almost no support right now. It's not perfect, and there is alot of work to do, but there is a strong foundation. There are DirectX games working right now under Wine. Transgaming isn't starting from scratch, they're starting with the Wine project's excellent code base.
By contributing work back to the Wine project, other people will have incentive to help maintain their additions.
Furthermore, they're not trying to support every game all at once, part of what you get for subscribing is a vote in which games are supported next. Supporting every game and all of DirectX is a huge task. Adding support for one game at a time is much more reasonable.
Given these more reasonable requirements, I think you could be successful with fewer than 20 developers. If they're careful in picking reasonable projects, a game a month would seem reasonable. If you've got a small team working for the love of the effort, you won't need much of a support staff. Sure, they'll be a bit more disorganized, and would have problems scaling up, but it's worked for dozens of garage startups before. For $100,000 a month, you get 12 full time staff (Assuming $48,000 salary and that much again in overhead.) Eight skilled, smart programmers working for the love of the project and 4 administrative staff should be able to get a great deal done.
You're suspicious of being able to get skill programmers for $4,000 a month. I think you underestimate the draw of open source and game programming. I know skilled game programmers working for that right now. They accept the low wages in exchange for working on their love, games. Ditto for open source, lots of programmers would be willing to take a salary cut if they knew their work would eventually be open source. I know I could collect a half dozen highly skilled programmers to work on this for $48,000 a year.
Of course, all of the above is my theory. Can it really work? I don't know. I certainly hope it does.
If you're looking for the company that ports games to link, you don't want lokisoft.com, you want lokigames.com
Freedom is a lack of obligation; the GPL does not define "freedom", it forces obligations on people, and uses the very Copyright they despise as a tool for control.
The GPL gives you everything that copyright does and more. If you're willing to yield copyright fundamentally restricts freedom, then yes, the GPL also restricts freedom.
The GPL doesn't "force" any obligations. If you don't redistribute the resulting software, you have no obligations. Is this less than completely free? Sure, but copyright normally doesn't allow you to redistribute it at all.
Knowledge doesn't want to be free -- knowledge has no desires of any kind.
Stop being so literal. If I said "Water wants to run downhill," would you complain that water doesn't have any desires? It's a quotable way of summarizing a more complex situation.
If it bothers you so much, change "wants" to the more accurate "tends." "Water tends to run downhill," and "Knowledge tends to be free." And since free is a potentially confusing word, perhaps a further tweak, "Knowledge tends to spread out of control." (Not a perfect tweak, but I don't see an improvement right now.)
No one will contest that water tends to run downhill (I hope). Knowledge certainly spreads out of control. If I share with you a secret, say my recipe for cookies, I'd be hard pressed to stop you from sharing that knowledge further. If you've got a good memory, I can't take it away from you, and you are physically able to reproduce it and share it at will. As a race, we've continuously worked to make it easier to share knowledge. Writing. Printing. Photocopying. Faxing. Web pages. Email.
Sure, we've passed laws on copyright and trade secrets to try and restrict the flow of information. But in the absence of such laws I can't really stop you (short of physically detaining you) from spreading knowledge I've given you. Even with the laws, it's quite easy for someone willing to make an unauthorized copy to do so.
We're tried technical measures. Macrovision, copy protections. But ultimately you show the movie, book, or music to a person. A person with a video camera can reproduce the work. For text a person with a pad of paper and a pencil can slowly copy it down. All it takes is one person to acquire a non-technically restricted copy before the it can be widely and easy copied using modern technology.
People like to spread knowledge. It's hard wired into humanity. Knowledge wants to be free because people want to spread it.
Then the solution is a standardized "skinning" platform. Then Winamp and Netscape could leverage the same skins. Anything like this exist or in the works? You would think Microsoft in all it's glory would have thought it up.
Exactly. Gnome/GTK has this functionality right now under the name "Themes". I believe KDE/Qt has similar functionality. You can get a third party product for Microsoft Windows (WindowBlinds) to accomplish this. The neat thing is that if the software developer uses the standard user interface API, the end user can gain this benefit.
How is skin technology "rolling your own user interface?"
Microsoft Windows, Gnome/GTK, KDE/Qt, and Motif all provide standard user interface widgets. Buttons, menus, edit boxes, drop lists, trees, and the like. Because developers use one of these standard interface libraries, your applications look and behave similarly.
Mozilla and Netscape 6.x don't use the standard interface widgets for it's various platforms. It doesn't quite match the rest of the system.
If you don't like the skin Mozilla ships with, change it to the Classic skin.
The classic skin approximates the old Netscape interface. It still uses non-standard user interface controls. They don't quite behave like native controls on Microsoft Windows, and they certainly don't look like Motif controls under X-Windows. If the system's standard interface library is updated with a new look or behavoir the skinned application won't get those updates.
It would be smart to allow skin techonology to pick up global color/font settings (if it doesnt already). Then we could please folks like yourself, which I am sure there are a bunch of.
What would really please me is the ability to move all of the skinning to a global location. Gnome and KDE are moving in this direction. I tell Gnome in one place that I want an MacOS Aqua like look, or a Microsoft Windows like look, or something strange and unique. Instantly, dozens of applications immediately adjust. My system remains consistent.
However, if I want WinAmp, and Netscape 6.x to match under Microsoft Windows, I need to create custom skins for each. If I want QuickTime and Media Player to match, well, I'm SOL. If I want XMMS, Mozilla, XMovie, and OMS, to match under Linux I have a lot of work ahead of me.
I use some Gnu tools and many more non-gnu-licensed tools with my linux kernels. I'm not gonna say Gnu/Apache/Perl/BSD/etc/Linux, and neither should anyone else. Yeah, the system would be less useful without gnu tools, it'd also not be what it is without all the other pieces of software on it.
The point isn't that the GNU tools are a major part of a standard Linux distribution.
In the early 1990s, the GNU project had everything you needed for a baseline operating system. Compiler, assembler, linker, C library, shell. Everything except a kernel. Linus took those tools and added the final piece, the kernel. Linus didn't need X-Windows or Perl. Apache didn't exist. Linus needed a compiler, a linker, an assembler, a C library, and a shell. He used the GNU project's tools. Linux is built upon a foundation of GNU tools.
That's why the Stallman can claim the GNU project has a valid claim to share the Linux title. Why bother? Politics. Stallman is pushing a political and ethical agenda. Free Software or nothing. Part of his job is to spread the word, and getting the GNU name used is a great way to do it. Every user who says "What's the GNU thing in front of Linux?" is an opportunity to spread the word.
That said, I'm not sure I agree that it should be called GNU/Linux. It seems a bit pushy to me. But don't make the mistake that he wants it called GNU/Linux just because the GNU tools are part of the typical package. He wants it added to help spread the Free Software word. His claim is that the GNU tools where the foundation.
So you say it's a "problem" for people to complain about RMS's speech, but it's fine for RMS to complain about other people.
I didn't say it was a problem at all. I disagreed with Stickerboy and posted what I felt was a correction. That's my point. Disagreeing with him doesn't mean I'm trying to limit his speech. I'm trying to change his mind, and the mind of anyone else reading it. Stallman is doing the same thing. He's not a hypocrite for insisting on GNU/Linux instead of Linux. He's trying to change people's minds.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to complain loudly about other's speech. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to be as anal and vitrolic as you want. So what's the problem?
The Winner [for "The Look"]: Mozilla, hands down. It's terrific that someone decided to take the route away from the greys.
Oh goody. I was tired of all my applications looking the same and behaving the same. I love guessing which color means disabled for each different application. I like having my system wide colors that I've carefully chosen to minimize eye strain thrown out the window.
System wide colors and looks are feature. If you're sick of living in grey land, change it globally. Gnome supports this. KDE supports this. Windows supports this.
Mozilla is a great browser, but their decision to roll their own user interface was a mistake. Fortunately Mozilla is modular, and as the core engine stabilizes I plan on moving to a more system friendly browser using that engine. Probably Galeon or Skipstone.