Interpreted code is fine for many aspects of games. Of course, you can't use it in hard real time embedded systems (though I used Ruby for doing scripting to support my programming on those boxes).
I think we'll see the end of native code for "large" systems one day, given how well optimizing JITs are getting. I seem to remember that some time back HP even optimized PA-RISC by running a PA-RISC emulator with JIT on top of PA-RISC...
Professional table users use template systems to do the separation of layout and content, so the parent's point is gone. Professional table users also use CSS where they see CSS as useful, and use tables for the rest.
This may be because I'm still not good enough at CSS use, yet I still find the combination of templates, CSS, and tables much faster to both design and redesign than pure CSS designs. The pure CSS designs has a beautiful cleanness to them - it's just that they're a pain to actually mod.
By enforcing those "rights", you're taking away the rights of the users to get the risk-adjusted best software they can get (which require somebody to take the experimental risk of incremental development and be paid back by user community).
In a way, the reality of the world sucks - I'd love to be able to say "Give me all your changes and let me do whatever I want" about all software, yet legislating that denies most users (those that can't program or don't have time to write the kind of software they need) the ability to use standard economics to get hold of what they need (in their evaluation) without taking on undue risk.
If I license my own codebase under a license creating the requirements you say, I effectively create a local law applying to my codebase removing this right from them.
I hate removing rights. I remove those I absolutely have to - I add a license so I can disclaim all liability - and let the users keep the rest.
Free, Net, Open, and DragonFlyBSD also cover this, with care about a license-clean base system.
NetBSD has even done a lot of work to minimize the number of license formulations, making it easy to embed. When you've got different formulations of the BSD license - even the 3 clause variant - you have to reproduce all the formulations in the documentation for the product. This can be a real hazzle[1].
Eivind.
[1] I also see this as making it a GPL license violation to combine GPLv2 code with BSD licensed code, even when the BSD license has few clauses.
In case you're not aware/remembering: Copyleft and OSS are significantly different. I support OSS, I support free software, and I despise copyleft (for, in my evaluation, hurting free software.)
To let the market sort it out may require labelling laws.
A "perfect market" - the kind of market that goes in there and sorts things out, optimally - requires that all actors are perfectly rational and have perfect information, and that there are no transaction costs. I don't know about you, but I'm definately not rational. Oh, and while I'm a quick shopper, I'm not instant. Fortunately, I'm clairvoiant, so that part is taken care of - the labels may be a bad idea after all. They just help all you normals...
I think MySQL ended up in this niche for the same reason as PHP: It's quite tolerant of careless programming, doing something that is almost but not quite what you want. For non-professionals that's often what you want - "I'll just do this sloppily and it will work" (for some definition of work). For professionals, I think it usually isn't what you want - because professionals find it fairly take full control of validation and handle errors, and it's better to get an error and fix the problem than to not get an error and have it halfway work.
While I saw the other reply, I'll give a slightly different definition: Distributed branching. People can do branching without having access to the main repository at the time. Whether you have a repository per branch or every workspace is a branch or you can run many branches in a single repository is mostly irrelevant; the main thing is being able to do full development without having access to the main repository.
For a limited version of this, you can just mirror the repository (as open source projects frequently do using CVS and cvsup). This at least allows inspection of differences and history with only local access.
Oh, and my personal view is that distributed branching and proper handling of diffs is critical for getting the next boost in open source productivity, and that SVN ended up just delaying proper implementation of distributed branching, and overall being harmful:-/
Eivind.
Re:How to make sure your data is not readable
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
One of my friends used to work as a service tech for a large company with security requirements; they used shred to mm size, then burn at several thousand degrees.
Eivind.
Re:How to make sure your data is not readable
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Unforunately, the writethrough flag often don't work correctly. At least hard disk manufacturers used to ignore it routinely in order to get better benchmarks, and those that made real high-availability systems (think telephone companies and big databases) had to order drives with special firmware.
Compared to public domain software or BSD license, it is restricting the ability of developers to add features to the software they use and sell those features. Remember: Adding and selling is NOT taking freedom away - the original codebase is still available.
The above is a point often missed in discussions of the GPL - people tend to think of "releasing a proprietary derivate" as "removing freedom", yet it isn't - the original open source code is still there, and if it is being actively developed, it is probably receiving changes back from the proprietary derivate.
The freedom the GPL aspires to protect is the freedom of users to modify the software they use. What I'm talking about is the freedom to modify *and get the economic benefit from risk taking in connection with* software they use.
Of course, in the event of a semi-monopoly created from the GPL - which is what the GPL aims towards - this effectively kill the ability of developers to create proprietary software. For instance, if you're to develop for GNOME you need to use GTK, which is restrictively licensed (LGPL, which for all effective purposes is the GPL). Or if you want to sell compilers for Unix these days: You more or less can't.
As for "voluntary choosing": The world ain't that simple. I personally despise mysql, and I'm still "forced" to use it every day. Voluntary is a matter of degrees - neither the GPL nor Microsoft's licenses stop me from doing anything, they just mean that there may be guys with guns trying to force me to comply.
Apart from stealing my first name and almost copying one of my email addresses;), you've also bought into Stallmann's rethoric. Stallmann does not defend all freedoms - he defend a particular set of freedoms he see as important, and restrict other freedoms to defend the ones he likes.
In particular, he restricts the freedom of the potential end user to allow others to handle risk for him or her. He also restricts the freedom of developers to use code that mostly originate with them. This was also the original inspiration for the GPL: The AI lab died because people took their own projects commercial, and abandoned the free version of their code bases.
I'm not at the moment going to judge whether most of RMS' ideas are good or not, but I'll definately judge them as misrepresented by most of his fans. Oh, and I think he's inconsistent in his difference in goal between copyright in non-functional areas - optimizing everything for societal wealth - and his position on copyright of functional works - "we have shown that it is possible for this to work at some level". I think we should optimize for societal wealth everywhere, with a broad definition of "wealth" (and personal freedom is certainly wealth.)
You talk about the old Unix forks, with "kernel forks" as real forks, while userland forks ("distributions") as of little relevance. This is the opposite of how I remember my experience of those days, and the opposite of what my theory indicate to me should happen.
The kernel is fairly much irrelevant for portability. Userland headers, C library compatibility, file locations, compiler options, linker options, Bourne shell incompatibilities, C compiler incompatibilities, C compiler and library bugs, word size, etc/passwd handling,... - those mattered. The differences in the kernel itself are fairly irrelevant.
The kernel has generally communicated with the userland through a fairly narrow range of paths: Mostly the syscalls and the ioctls, and making available data through filesystems. The narrowness of these paths has meant that it has been fairly easy to deal with the differences, at least compared to the userland differences.
OK. msmith@(FreeBSD.org, but we usually don't write that) was another FreeBSD developer and now work for Apple, and I would be a little surprised if he had changed to liking the GPL, though not THAT surprised.
why the BSD license usually is MORE efficient for getting changes back
As far as I am aware, the BSD license was not designed with this goal in mind. The GPL was designed with the goal of keeping the source code available to the developer community.
Neither the BSD nor the GPL was designed with the goal of getting as many changes back as possible. And I believe the GPL was designed with a slightly different goal than you describe. Both the GPL and the BSD license keep the source code available to the developer community. What the GPL does is block commercial development and, with it, the temptation of the people that write code of using that code commercially. If you look at the history of the GPL, it originated after most of the AI lab at MIT started working commercially, removing Stallmann's beloved sociotechnical arena. This happened when the people that worked on various projects decided to take those projects commercial, and so the "open source" version was stuck at the previous version.
Whether this goal is achieved is debatable, but I think the GPL (or licenses similar to it) deliver the best chance of keeping systems open as we move into a heavily DRM'd world.
Maybe. I'd have to do a proper analysis of the different economic modes here, and so far I feel there's too many variables for it to be possible to do properly. I'm sure that a world where we're forced to use the GPL for open source is a poorer world, at least - it lose us a lot of positive economic modes.
BTW: Are you the same Michael Smith I know as msmith@ ?
No, I replied to the one where you had the naive idea that we (BSD developers) have zero value in our work, and that we get "ripped off". Of course, your naivety is sort of excusable - the GPL contains propaganda to encourage it, it is common among the GPL people, and parrotting your peer group is easy.
However, if you read the signature to my previous reply, you'll find a crucial clue for why the BSD license usually is MORE efficient for getting changes back (with the occasional generic closed derivate as a result; SunOS was the last one we didn't get much back from, AFAIK.)
Apart from the public release of Darwin, we (FreeBSD) have gotten changes back from that. Not an infinite amount of changes, yet still noticable value.
So, let me get this right, in your world you get ZERO value from utilization of code, and you get ZERO value from having people contribute changes back, ALL your value is from "not getting ripped off"?
That's one hell of an emotional world.
I'm glad I don't live in that world, and can be a FreeBSD developer instead;)
Eivind, who recognize that when people develop things based on his code, he's got a chance of getting things back, and when they choose another codebase because his is GPL-licensed, he has ZERO chance of getting anything back.
The question isn't of "One man's theory" - it's of which set of arguments you find most convincing, including evalution of the background of those that come with those arguments, and the context those arguments are presented in.
This is the standard way that science works today. And in this case, I find professor Cromer's case so well argued and referenced that the lack of peer review is acceptable to me - especially since the claim he's making isn't one that's particularly contested. I've not seen a single negative review (and I've searched), and there's a ton of positive ones, including Nature. Well, actually, there is ONE negative review, but the author has since retracted the review and replaced it with a glowing one (see here).
Your presupposition (that science is natural for humans) is throughly pounded into the ground. Belief in magic is the natural state of humans. Which is why any tendency to go backwards (e.g, the anti-evolution campaign in the US) is so scary.
The last number I saw for effictive literacy (ability to read and utilize the instructions for how to use a washing machine) was 87%. The International Adult Literacy Study, a functional test, place 20.7% of the US adult population in the lowest literacy bracket.
Based on this and many other sources I've seen over the years, I'm sceptical of the CIA world factbook number - it is way higher than most, and the only case I've seen that was in the ballpark (a 98% somehwhere) has defined "literacy" as "ability to recognize letters".
"Economy" is the science of optimizing scarce resources. Bits are not scarce.
Copying is creation of wealth. In some cases, it is illegal, in an effort to reward the use of scarce resources (time of people doing writing/editing/acting/etc) in invention of bit patterns. However, wealth is not created at this point. Wealth is created when the invention is USED - in other words, when the bits are copied, or even better, read.
Oh, and your basic statements would work against the existance of public libraries, too.
How does it translate in terms of RSI problems? I'm willing to handle a learning curve, though I'm a bit worried about the fact that I use editors remotely in shell windows most of the time now.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we'll see the end of native code for "large" systems one day, given how well optimizing JITs are getting. I seem to remember that some time back HP even optimized PA-RISC by running a PA-RISC emulator with JIT on top of PA-RISC...
Eivind.
This may be because I'm still not good enough at CSS use, yet I still find the combination of templates, CSS, and tables much faster to both design and redesign than pure CSS designs. The pure CSS designs has a beautiful cleanness to them - it's just that they're a pain to actually mod.
Eivind.
In a way, the reality of the world sucks - I'd love to be able to say "Give me all your changes and let me do whatever I want" about all software, yet legislating that denies most users (those that can't program or don't have time to write the kind of software they need) the ability to use standard economics to get hold of what they need (in their evaluation) without taking on undue risk.
If I license my own codebase under a license creating the requirements you say, I effectively create a local law applying to my codebase removing this right from them.
I hate removing rights. I remove those I absolutely have to - I add a license so I can disclaim all liability - and let the users keep the rest.
Eivind.
NetBSD has even done a lot of work to minimize the number of license formulations, making it easy to embed. When you've got different formulations of the BSD license - even the 3 clause variant - you have to reproduce all the formulations in the documentation for the product. This can be a real hazzle[1].
Eivind.
[1] I also see this as making it a GPL license violation to combine GPLv2 code with BSD licensed code, even when the BSD license has few clauses.
Eivind.
A "perfect market" - the kind of market that goes in there and sorts things out, optimally - requires that all actors are perfectly rational and have perfect information, and that there are no transaction costs. I don't know about you, but I'm definately not rational. Oh, and while I'm a quick shopper, I'm not instant. Fortunately, I'm clairvoiant, so that part is taken care of - the labels may be a bad idea after all. They just help all you normals...
Eivind.
Eivind.
For a limited version of this, you can just mirror the repository (as open source projects frequently do using CVS and cvsup). This at least allows inspection of differences and history with only local access.
Oh, and my personal view is that distributed branching and proper handling of diffs is critical for getting the next boost in open source productivity, and that SVN ended up just delaying proper implementation of distributed branching, and overall being harmful :-/
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
The above is a point often missed in discussions of the GPL - people tend to think of "releasing a proprietary derivate" as "removing freedom", yet it isn't - the original open source code is still there, and if it is being actively developed, it is probably receiving changes back from the proprietary derivate.
The freedom the GPL aspires to protect is the freedom of users to modify the software they use. What I'm talking about is the freedom to modify *and get the economic benefit from risk taking in connection with* software they use.
Of course, in the event of a semi-monopoly created from the GPL - which is what the GPL aims towards - this effectively kill the ability of developers to create proprietary software. For instance, if you're to develop for GNOME you need to use GTK, which is restrictively licensed (LGPL, which for all effective purposes is the GPL). Or if you want to sell compilers for Unix these days: You more or less can't.
As for "voluntary choosing": The world ain't that simple. I personally despise mysql, and I'm still "forced" to use it every day. Voluntary is a matter of degrees - neither the GPL nor Microsoft's licenses stop me from doing anything, they just mean that there may be guys with guns trying to force me to comply.
Eivind.
In particular, he restricts the freedom of the potential end user to allow others to handle risk for him or her. He also restricts the freedom of developers to use code that mostly originate with them. This was also the original inspiration for the GPL: The AI lab died because people took their own projects commercial, and abandoned the free version of their code bases.
I'm not at the moment going to judge whether most of RMS' ideas are good or not, but I'll definately judge them as misrepresented by most of his fans. Oh, and I think he's inconsistent in his difference in goal between copyright in non-functional areas - optimizing everything for societal wealth - and his position on copyright of functional works - "we have shown that it is possible for this to work at some level". I think we should optimize for societal wealth everywhere, with a broad definition of "wealth" (and personal freedom is certainly wealth.)
Eivind.
Eivind.
The kernel is fairly much irrelevant for portability. Userland headers, C library compatibility, file locations, compiler options, linker options, Bourne shell incompatibilities, C compiler incompatibilities, C compiler and library bugs, word size, etc/passwd handling, ... - those mattered. The differences in the kernel itself are fairly irrelevant.
The kernel has generally communicated with the userland through a fairly narrow range of paths: Mostly the syscalls and the ioctls, and making available data through filesystems. The narrowness of these paths has meant that it has been fairly easy to deal with the differences, at least compared to the userland differences.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Maybe. I'd have to do a proper analysis of the different economic modes here, and so far I feel there's too many variables for it to be possible to do properly. I'm sure that a world where we're forced to use the GPL for open source is a poorer world, at least - it lose us a lot of positive economic modes.
BTW: Are you the same Michael Smith I know as msmith@ ?
Eivind.
However, if you read the signature to my previous reply, you'll find a crucial clue for why the BSD license usually is MORE efficient for getting changes back (with the occasional generic closed derivate as a result; SunOS was the last one we didn't get much back from, AFAIK.)
Eivind.
Eivind.
That's one hell of an emotional world.
I'm glad I don't live in that world, and can be a FreeBSD developer instead ;)
Eivind, who recognize that when people develop things based on his code, he's got a chance of getting things back, and when they choose another codebase because his is GPL-licensed, he has ZERO chance of getting anything back.
This is the standard way that science works today. And in this case, I find professor Cromer's case so well argued and referenced that the lack of peer review is acceptable to me - especially since the claim he's making isn't one that's particularly contested. I've not seen a single negative review (and I've searched), and there's a ton of positive ones, including Nature. Well, actually, there is ONE negative review, but the author has since retracted the review and replaced it with a glowing one (see here).
Eivind.
Your presupposition (that science is natural for humans) is throughly pounded into the ground. Belief in magic is the natural state of humans. Which is why any tendency to go backwards (e.g, the anti-evolution campaign in the US) is so scary.
Eivind.
Based on this and many other sources I've seen over the years, I'm sceptical of the CIA world factbook number - it is way higher than most, and the only case I've seen that was in the ballpark (a 98% somehwhere) has defined "literacy" as "ability to recognize letters".
Eivind.
Copying is creation of wealth. In some cases, it is illegal, in an effort to reward the use of scarce resources (time of people doing writing/editing/acting/etc) in invention of bit patterns. However, wealth is not created at this point. Wealth is created when the invention is USED - in other words, when the bits are copied, or even better, read.
Oh, and your basic statements would work against the existance of public libraries, too.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.