Using FreeBSD'ss kernel doesn't make sense. You're aware that it's notpossible to retract the present open license to the Darwin kernel?
In my opinion, the relevant kernel would be the open Darwin kernel, which is what is presently used in OSX. If a proprietary branch is made, it is only necessary to keep the open source codebase compatible.
I would estimate the continual cost of keeping compatibility in itself at less than half a programmer, probably significantly less, assuming reasonable development speed for the kernel. Reasonable development speed for the kernel, on the other hand, requires at least 10x that (probably significantly more, it depends quite a bit on the programmers and the context).
That's why I said that I believe binary compatibility isn't the important part of the problem.
Since I am the community (I'm a FreeBSD developer) and you are not, I get to define "leeching" (and spell it right).
My friends Mike, Jordan, and the rest of the guys at Apple are welcome to use the stuff I write. And if they use the stuff I write, they're more likely to create stuff that's useable as part of stuff I work on. And they do so. Even when my friends at Whistle Communications (now a part of IBM) branched the entire OS and went proprietary, they were contributing a bunch back, for a series of reasons. Which they couldn't have done if our codebase was licensed differently.
The GPL isn't a two way street - it's a "don't go here painting the fences, or we'll shoot you" sign at the top of the street. The BSD license is a "come on in and participate if you want to" sign, where a company may or may not paint the fences - however, they're at least in the street.
Please contemplate the difference between approving of a certain direction of change and dictating it.
It will be because the vast majority of folks LIKE the stuff that's currently playing on the radio, TV and in the theaters - and now they won't be able to get that stuff.
... and if that stuff isn't available, they will like something else. Humans are quite adaptable animals of habit.
I have - of course - contemplated the perspective of people losing the stuff they like. That's a freakin' trivial and obvious perspective. People also like smoking cigarettes and drinking to excess often. I would also think it wonderful if people stopped smoking cigarettes and stopped drinking to excess. It doesn't mean I want to prohibit either - yet I think that people will be better off if they don't indulge in that behaviour, and if developments in the world makes it less likely they do these, I'll applaud.
If popular behaviour in a free market (without artificial restrictions like copyright) end up making dumb culture unprofitable and thus move people to culture they get more out of, I'll think it a good development and applaud. I know how hard it is to kick the popular culture habit - I've worked hard to get rid of the bad parts of it myself. If other people get support in doing this more easily - I'm happy for them. I would think it wonderful that they get more out of life - because I think they will.
And that's my opinion *after having tried out the different alternatives*. Have YOU tried out the different alternatives, or are you just talking out of your ass?
For Linux overall, I agree with Sun's estimate. For Darwin, I think it's much less of a problem. Darwin has a much more tightly controlled development environment, and can achieve binary compatibility much much cheaper. And as I said, I believe MS is paying for old "shoddy" engineering (which probably was right business-wise at that point.)
And what I disagreed with was your claim that it's "effectively making it fully proprietary". I don't think there will be that large issues with running a different kernel and keeping binary compatibility. We (FreeBSD) do so for e.g. Linux binaries. Libraries are a different beast - keeping up with library development is probably effectively impossible.
DMCA trumps everything and creates privilege (private law). You're not allowed to break "effective protection", so whatever they can technically set up screws you over.
Oh, I missed a fallacy you came with: "But, if you use torrent sites to get free copies of things you can't afford because you want them - well now you're just pawning off your weak economic status onto those who labored to create the item you so covet."
No. It makes ABSOLUTELY ZERO DIFFERENCE to them. The ONLY case where it makes a difference is if the person would otherwise purchase a copy of some of the content copied, and does not purchase said contents because she copied it. This is the ONLY case that matters.
I'm spending my weekend to do my part to bring down the movie studios: I'm making an independent movie.
Eivind (who actually mostly makes movies for fun, yet if it can hurt MPAA, that's an added bonus.)
Not participating in the popular culture is associated with a significant personal cost (lack of conversation topics etc). While I personally have chosen to take that cost - I don't watch TV, I don't listen to popular music, etc - I do not see it as reasonable to require that people take that cost for laws or groups they disagree with.
It is like the "You shall not make pictures in God's image" in the bible - why should I, as an atheist, follow that? (Excepting the fact that there may be religious fanatics that come running after me.)
The real threat is that the content may stopped being produced because the people paying for the production arent seeing a return on investment.
No. The real threat is that the people that do production of "content" for love may be unable to do so because the people that try to grab a profit are afraid of people jumping their boat, raping their women, and throwing their employees to the sharks - oops, I meant copying "their" content without reimbursing them.
I for one would think it WONDERFUL if Hollywood and RIAA went out of business, especially if they took the soaps with them. The non-commercial stuff makes for more challenging culture - and also more interesting culture. There is nothing that indicates to me that "society will be a significantly worse off without the mainstream canned commercial entertainment" - and there is lots that point to it maybe being a significantly better off. There's also lots that point to society being worse off with DRM in place.
Technical discussions are not meant to be won - they are meant to find out the truth. To help you improve your skill at this, I'll detail below how you are doing rethorical moves that get in the way of this:
]
You're changing the frame of reference - you were talking about continued OSX binary compatibility. I used FreeBSD as an example of the workload. This is a case where I actually have almost a decade of experience as part an operating systems vendor, including how to do binary compatibility for completely foreign operating systems, and how to do binary compatibility from release to release.
Second, the number of users of FreeBSD compared to OSX is a red herring. We were talking about the workload of binary compatibility compared to the workload for other parts of operating system maintenance. This is related almost exclusively to the "width" of the call gates you have to maintain. The number of calls, the normalization of the parameters, etc. Good engineering can keep this fairly small, especially for the kernel/userland gating. The BSD gating Apple has inherited is fairly decent, and keeping compatibility *at this layer* should be a fairly small task, compared to the rest of the stuff that's necessary to do.
WRT binary compatibility in practice: I've had no problem using programs compiled for FreeBSD 2.x and upwards; I think 1.x programs also worked, not sure about that. There's been some explictly unsupported APIs that hasn't kept compatibility, most of those have since been stabilized.
Your only relevant argument was the Sun and Microsoft cost. Unfortunately, it is also targetted at another problem (but without experience in the area, I don't think you could be expected to see that). Sun and Microsoft does not spend billons keeping compatibility in this layer. I know Microsoft spend really large amounts overall, even if I'd be surprised if it was billions. That's due to Microsoft's choice of initial engineering, driven by their business model. I highly doubt Sun spends anywhere near that much - instead, they carefully engineer for this up front. And again, the kernel layer isn't where the problems are - the problems are in the libraries.
BTW, I just thought of an advantage OpenDarwin has in the area, apart from having a fairly narrowly designed kernel/userland gate. This is an open source OS with a specifically targetted for *those that modify source code*. This means that it is much less critical that the backwards compatibility be perfect than e.g. for Windows - instead, it's possible to just add good debug tools for compatibility problems, and have the beta-testers which tend use the system for actually doing stuff report/fix problems as they come up. It's not ideal, yet it offload the cost to somebody that can probably handle it much much cheaper than MS, overall. (MS explictly tests thousands of old applications inhouse, as they have to keep very careful compatibility for a changing set of libraries.)
Im just about making ends meet as a software develoepr, and one of my games is available as a torrent. No doubt this isnt exactly helping sales.
High amount of doubt. There are network marketing effects, people chosing to buy stuff because they've sampled it, etc.
I personally have never bought as much CDs as when I pirated lots, and I've never bought as much games as when there were a ton of pirate copies around me. I've stopped pirating music because nowadays it's too much hazzle (including risk), and I've mostly stopped playing games (buying maybe one a year, occasionally borrowing one off a friend) - yet the end result is that I buy significantly less, not more.
What is 100% certain now is that the Linux NTFS code will not get any changes back from Apple.
If Apple had used that code, there would be X chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back, where X is larger than 0. Now that Apple has to use another codebase, the chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back is 0.
Of course, it may be emotionally satisfying to say "Screw you" - whether that momentary feeling is worth it compared to throwing away the chance of getting fixes and improvements is up to each developer to decide.
It is the GPL that is being heavy handed. The GPL is, from what I can tell, not compatible with *anything*, and a lot of BSD licensed code (without advertising clauses) is brought under the GPL in violation.
This is based on my experience with how onerous the reproduction clauses of the BSD license actually can be. It is an extra restriction, with actual impact. Ask anybody that has done embedded systems based on the BSD codebases.
Let's say Oracle buys MySQL. MySQL is then dead for the open source community - at least to the same degree as OpenDarwin may be now, and probably more.
What this goes to show is that relying on an open source project that's primarily developed inhouse at a single company can screw you almost as easily as relying on closed source. The process is important, not just the license.
I'm very tempted to insert a suitable flame about relying on and repeating propaganda here. With words that my mother told me not to use. Since I'm a polite person, I'll let you think up your own instead.
Keeping binary compatibility is a fairly small problem. I'm a FreeBSD developer - we've got four or five different binary APIs. Our own, Linux, SCO, Alpha (Digital Unix), MS-DOS,... NetBSD has more. Maintaining these during continued development is a non-issue. It's a bit of effort, but really a non-issue. Adding support for more stuff is also generally fairly easy.
A problem that's an order of magnitude larger is drivers; that can get really sticky with new hardware. Fortunately, I think the OSX architecture may avoid the problem - assuming no DRM on drivers.
I think you're taken in a bit by the easy conclusion - happens with all of us from time to time. What should be important to you is how many CDs you sell. The number of CDs that gets copied is irrelevant.
In my personal experience, if I get a private copy of a CD that will increase the chance that I buy something from that artist by a factor of at least 10. Sometimes I buy that CD, to support the artist and get nice covers etc. Sometimes I buy another CD because I want more music from that artist.
After Napster shut down, I had a period of several years where I did not get any music outside of purchasing it. In this period, I bought a total of maybe 5 CDs, instead of my usual 3-4 per month. And the statistics seems to indicate that this is common (purchases go up with increased downloads, down with decreased downloads).
They were busted for explictly destroy DR-DOS by adding incompatibility code to Windows. They were busted for illegal monopoly manipulation of DOS (and Windows, I think) through "per CPU" licensing. They were busted for their use of monopolies in their SMB protocol.
And even if we ignore that for a moment, something being legal is not the same as something being ethical.
Don't you mean that the Cato institute did a study to find evidence for the conclusion that property rights, more than any other singe variable where the key to long term stability and prosperity?
Sure, and still many (maybe most) increases in civil rights comes from people violating bad laws.
I personally have refused the draft on the basis of it being applied to only about 1/3 of the population. I expected to go to jail for it, and the clearly most convenient thing for me would have been to enter the military (free food, new experiences, etc). However, I won't support slavery, *even if not supporting slavery is illegal and inconvenient*.
And yes, I think refusing to support slavery makes me a "good guy", at least on that issue.
Parts of the BSD and Linux kernels, I'd guess. Apart from that, it's fairly seldom we look at code unless it's to change it, and the standard review count may be 4-5 people (if that much).
I personally think there are other reasons for why Open Source is so effective, having to do with lack of time pressure, chosing not to do something if it is too complicated, and the feedback that review give on coding style.
Part of the reason MySQL succeeded in the first place is that for huge numbers of small or mid-level users, databases are a solved problem. Sure, faster is better, but any modern database is Good Enough. MySQL lagged in significant functionality befind Postgres for years, but MySQL was Good Enough (and happened to be easier to set up that Postgres) so people deployed it.
Easier setup and a period of higher speed and a period where there were a few icky bugs in PostgreSQL, plus "fake" benchmarks (MySQL censored the benchmarks, actually publishing *different* benchmarks against each competitor, only showing those where MySQL was faster.)
I formulated myself badly above: What I was thinking of when I said "killing it market-wise" was from the view of enterprise deployment, and from the view of development. I don't think working on the MySQL codebase would be particularly attractive, given the overall higher capability and easier use for development of the PostgreSQL codebase. I also think people would associate MySQL with an unstable development process.
That's just my guess, though, and may be wishful thinking. I've been forced to work a lot with MySQL (due to previous deployment choices at my present employer), and I have developed a strong antipathy towards it after all the pain it has caused me. I much prefer working with PostgreSQL.
MySQL could well not be delayed by the present moves (Oracle buying out InnoDB and Berkeley DB). However, there is no way that MySQL would not be delayed by the abrupt removal of MySQL AB - in effect, removing all the developers that are presently capable of working on MySQL. The question is only how much it would be delayed, and whether that would be a permanent delay, or development pace would pick up with a new kind of community.
My (conditional) estimate is that an abrupt removal would require about two years to recoup development speed, assuming transition to a normal open source form. This is the time necessary for new people to learn the codebase, adjustments of the culture to mesh with those people, etc. If a significant number of different companies employed people to work on this, and some of them were brilliant leaders, things might mesh faster. If a single employer hired a high quality team to work on this (staying with an open source codebase with a closed process), things might mesh faster. However, no matter what happened, there'd be a period where development speed was significantly lower.
The background I have for making the estimates is having seen how other open source projects have worked out, having participated in large open source projects (I'm a fairly inactive FreeBSD committer), having specifically studied the team dynamics of open source projects, having seen how the MySQL community is, having programmed for over 20 years, the last 13 of them full time, including having done my stint as a consultant for fixing development teams.
There is no silver bullet. MySQL would be hit for a period of time. It might come out stronger or it might diminish significantly. Having spent years catering to the whims of MySQL, I personally would hope the latter - I believe PostgreSQL would serve most of us better (preferably with some forceful personality or resourceful uncle making upgrades easier.)
Ha ha ha ha. MySQL is an open source RELEASE - it is not an open source COMMUNITY. Effectively everybody that can hack MySQL work for MySQL AB, and the development process is run inside MySQL AB - it isn't set up to run as a community process. So, the transition would take a lot of time - and losing maybe two years of forward progress on this would most likely kill MySQL, market-wise.
Building the same software is no longer a sustainable business model. Then again, when has it been?
The software landscape is changing so fast that I think there will always be new niches where it's possible to build software and earn money - and open source will continually replace it. The only case where this may be blocked is if GPL divides the world into two, one part the is "pure proprietary" and one part that is "free software". And I think the world would be way poorer for it.
Thank you for standing up and saying this, even with the people going for you with stereotypes. It's needed, and while I say it IRL, I don't think it'd help much if I said it on Slashdot (as a white atheist with only a couple of muslim friends.)
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, the relevant kernel would be the open Darwin kernel, which is what is presently used in OSX. If a proprietary branch is made, it is only necessary to keep the open source codebase compatible.
I would estimate the continual cost of keeping compatibility in itself at less than half a programmer, probably significantly less, assuming reasonable development speed for the kernel. Reasonable development speed for the kernel, on the other hand, requires at least 10x that (probably significantly more, it depends quite a bit on the programmers and the context).
That's why I said that I believe binary compatibility isn't the important part of the problem.
Eivind.
My friends Mike, Jordan, and the rest of the guys at Apple are welcome to use the stuff I write. And if they use the stuff I write, they're more likely to create stuff that's useable as part of stuff I work on. And they do so. Even when my friends at Whistle Communications (now a part of IBM) branched the entire OS and went proprietary, they were contributing a bunch back, for a series of reasons. Which they couldn't have done if our codebase was licensed differently.
The GPL isn't a two way street - it's a "don't go here painting the fences, or we'll shoot you" sign at the top of the street. The BSD license is a "come on in and participate if you want to" sign, where a company may or may not paint the fences - however, they're at least in the street.
Eivind.
It will be because the vast majority of folks LIKE the stuff that's currently playing on the radio, TV and in the theaters - and now they won't be able to get that stuff.
I have - of course - contemplated the perspective of people losing the stuff they like. That's a freakin' trivial and obvious perspective. People also like smoking cigarettes and drinking to excess often. I would also think it wonderful if people stopped smoking cigarettes and stopped drinking to excess. It doesn't mean I want to prohibit either - yet I think that people will be better off if they don't indulge in that behaviour, and if developments in the world makes it less likely they do these, I'll applaud.
If popular behaviour in a free market (without artificial restrictions like copyright) end up making dumb culture unprofitable and thus move people to culture they get more out of, I'll think it a good development and applaud. I know how hard it is to kick the popular culture habit - I've worked hard to get rid of the bad parts of it myself. If other people get support in doing this more easily - I'm happy for them. I would think it wonderful that they get more out of life - because I think they will.
And that's my opinion *after having tried out the different alternatives*. Have YOU tried out the different alternatives, or are you just talking out of your ass?
Eivind.
And what I disagreed with was your claim that it's "effectively making it fully proprietary". I don't think there will be that large issues with running a different kernel and keeping binary compatibility. We (FreeBSD) do so for e.g. Linux binaries. Libraries are a different beast - keeping up with library development is probably effectively impossible.
Eivind.
Eivind.
No. It makes ABSOLUTELY ZERO DIFFERENCE to them. The ONLY case where it makes a difference is if the person would otherwise purchase a copy of some of the content copied, and does not purchase said contents because she copied it. This is the ONLY case that matters.
I'm spending my weekend to do my part to bring down the movie studios: I'm making an independent movie.
Eivind (who actually mostly makes movies for fun, yet if it can hurt MPAA, that's an added bonus.)
It is like the "You shall not make pictures in God's image" in the bible - why should I, as an atheist, follow that? (Excepting the fact that there may be religious fanatics that come running after me.)
Eivind.
No. The real threat is that the people that do production of "content" for love may be unable to do so because the people that try to grab a profit are afraid of people jumping their boat, raping their women, and throwing their employees to the sharks - oops, I meant copying "their" content without reimbursing them.
I for one would think it WONDERFUL if Hollywood and RIAA went out of business, especially if they took the soaps with them. The non-commercial stuff makes for more challenging culture - and also more interesting culture. There is nothing that indicates to me that "society will be a significantly worse off without the mainstream canned commercial entertainment" - and there is lots that point to it maybe being a significantly better off. There's also lots that point to society being worse off with DRM in place.
Eivind.
] You're changing the frame of reference - you were talking about continued OSX binary compatibility. I used FreeBSD as an example of the workload. This is a case where I actually have almost a decade of experience as part an operating systems vendor, including how to do binary compatibility for completely foreign operating systems, and how to do binary compatibility from release to release.
Second, the number of users of FreeBSD compared to OSX is a red herring. We were talking about the workload of binary compatibility compared to the workload for other parts of operating system maintenance. This is related almost exclusively to the "width" of the call gates you have to maintain. The number of calls, the normalization of the parameters, etc. Good engineering can keep this fairly small, especially for the kernel/userland gating. The BSD gating Apple has inherited is fairly decent, and keeping compatibility *at this layer* should be a fairly small task, compared to the rest of the stuff that's necessary to do.
WRT binary compatibility in practice: I've had no problem using programs compiled for FreeBSD 2.x and upwards; I think 1.x programs also worked, not sure about that. There's been some explictly unsupported APIs that hasn't kept compatibility, most of those have since been stabilized.
Your only relevant argument was the Sun and Microsoft cost. Unfortunately, it is also targetted at another problem (but without experience in the area, I don't think you could be expected to see that). Sun and Microsoft does not spend billons keeping compatibility in this layer. I know Microsoft spend really large amounts overall, even if I'd be surprised if it was billions. That's due to Microsoft's choice of initial engineering, driven by their business model. I highly doubt Sun spends anywhere near that much - instead, they carefully engineer for this up front. And again, the kernel layer isn't where the problems are - the problems are in the libraries.
BTW, I just thought of an advantage OpenDarwin has in the area, apart from having a fairly narrowly designed kernel/userland gate. This is an open source OS with a specifically targetted for *those that modify source code*. This means that it is much less critical that the backwards compatibility be perfect than e.g. for Windows - instead, it's possible to just add good debug tools for compatibility problems, and have the beta-testers which tend use the system for actually doing stuff report/fix problems as they come up. It's not ideal, yet it offload the cost to somebody that can probably handle it much much cheaper than MS, overall. (MS explictly tests thousands of old applications inhouse, as they have to keep very careful compatibility for a changing set of libraries.)
Eivind.
I personally have never bought as much CDs as when I pirated lots, and I've never bought as much games as when there were a ton of pirate copies around me. I've stopped pirating music because nowadays it's too much hazzle (including risk), and I've mostly stopped playing games (buying maybe one a year, occasionally borrowing one off a friend) - yet the end result is that I buy significantly less, not more.
Eivind.
If Apple had used that code, there would be X chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back, where X is larger than 0. Now that Apple has to use another codebase, the chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back is 0.
Of course, it may be emotionally satisfying to say "Screw you" - whether that momentary feeling is worth it compared to throwing away the chance of getting fixes and improvements is up to each developer to decide.
Eivind.
It is the GPL that is being heavy handed. The GPL is, from what I can tell, not compatible with *anything*, and a lot of BSD licensed code (without advertising clauses) is brought under the GPL in violation.
This is based on my experience with how onerous the reproduction clauses of the BSD license actually can be. It is an extra restriction, with actual impact. Ask anybody that has done embedded systems based on the BSD codebases.
Eivind.
Let's say Oracle buys MySQL. MySQL is then dead for the open source community - at least to the same degree as OpenDarwin may be now, and probably more.
What this goes to show is that relying on an open source project that's primarily developed inhouse at a single company can screw you almost as easily as relying on closed source. The process is important, not just the license.
I'm very tempted to insert a suitable flame about relying on and repeating propaganda here. With words that my mother told me not to use. Since I'm a polite person, I'll let you think up your own instead.
Eivind.
A problem that's an order of magnitude larger is drivers; that can get really sticky with new hardware. Fortunately, I think the OSX architecture may avoid the problem - assuming no DRM on drivers.
Eivind.
In my personal experience, if I get a private copy of a CD that will increase the chance that I buy something from that artist by a factor of at least 10. Sometimes I buy that CD, to support the artist and get nice covers etc. Sometimes I buy another CD because I want more music from that artist.
After Napster shut down, I had a period of several years where I did not get any music outside of purchasing it. In this period, I bought a total of maybe 5 CDs, instead of my usual 3-4 per month. And the statistics seems to indicate that this is common (purchases go up with increased downloads, down with decreased downloads).
Eivind.
And even if we ignore that for a moment, something being legal is not the same as something being ethical.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I personally have refused the draft on the basis of it being applied to only about 1/3 of the population. I expected to go to jail for it, and the clearly most convenient thing for me would have been to enter the military (free food, new experiences, etc). However, I won't support slavery, *even if not supporting slavery is illegal and inconvenient*.
And yes, I think refusing to support slavery makes me a "good guy", at least on that issue.
Eivind.
I personally think there are other reasons for why Open Source is so effective, having to do with lack of time pressure, chosing not to do something if it is too complicated, and the feedback that review give on coding style.
Eivind.
Easier setup and a period of higher speed and a period where there were a few icky bugs in PostgreSQL, plus "fake" benchmarks (MySQL censored the benchmarks, actually publishing *different* benchmarks against each competitor, only showing those where MySQL was faster.)
I formulated myself badly above: What I was thinking of when I said "killing it market-wise" was from the view of enterprise deployment, and from the view of development. I don't think working on the MySQL codebase would be particularly attractive, given the overall higher capability and easier use for development of the PostgreSQL codebase. I also think people would associate MySQL with an unstable development process.
That's just my guess, though, and may be wishful thinking. I've been forced to work a lot with MySQL (due to previous deployment choices at my present employer), and I have developed a strong antipathy towards it after all the pain it has caused me. I much prefer working with PostgreSQL.
Eivind.
My (conditional) estimate is that an abrupt removal would require about two years to recoup development speed, assuming transition to a normal open source form. This is the time necessary for new people to learn the codebase, adjustments of the culture to mesh with those people, etc. If a significant number of different companies employed people to work on this, and some of them were brilliant leaders, things might mesh faster. If a single employer hired a high quality team to work on this (staying with an open source codebase with a closed process), things might mesh faster. However, no matter what happened, there'd be a period where development speed was significantly lower.
The background I have for making the estimates is having seen how other open source projects have worked out, having participated in large open source projects (I'm a fairly inactive FreeBSD committer), having specifically studied the team dynamics of open source projects, having seen how the MySQL community is, having programmed for over 20 years, the last 13 of them full time, including having done my stint as a consultant for fixing development teams.
There is no silver bullet. MySQL would be hit for a period of time. It might come out stronger or it might diminish significantly. Having spent years catering to the whims of MySQL, I personally would hope the latter - I believe PostgreSQL would serve most of us better (preferably with some forceful personality or resourceful uncle making upgrades easier.)
Eivind.
Eivind.
The software landscape is changing so fast that I think there will always be new niches where it's possible to build software and earn money - and open source will continually replace it. The only case where this may be blocked is if GPL divides the world into two, one part the is "pure proprietary" and one part that is "free software". And I think the world would be way poorer for it.
Eivind.
Eivind.