Excellent point! I think the world needs to look at the fact that there CAN be a medium between capitalism and socialism. We need to, as a society, decide which of those things are to be distributed freely amongst ourselves, and which things are to be sold to the highest bidders. There is only one Mona Lisa. Hence it will exist in one place and be enjoyed by only it's owner. Alast! Someone bought it and displays it for all of the world to see freely. Or is it really free? The taxpayers of France are really footing the bill there. But it is THAT important. To great a thing to be held by one person or even a select few. We realize that now and collectively pay the price to stop that from happening. Collectively the price is very low. It boils down to economics. Taking on those big things collectively males them cheap, but still not free. That is also going to be the case with Healthcare and Education. Neither will ever be free, but collectively we can manage them. The problem is that Healthcare is not managed collectively in the US. Therefore it is bought only by those who can afford it. Software is managed under the same umbrella of capitalism. Perhaps we should not be looking to make it 'free', but to collectively manage the costs. Because making the resultant product(s) available to only those whop can afford it, is not acceptable to most of us. That IS what open source is about. Managing the task collectively and making the rewards of the solution available to all. It does not come without a cost, and to try to remove the cost is detrimental to all involved and will result in a poor product at the end.
1) I can 'copy' a computer readily. I built my own processor (CPU) as my final project in my college electronics course. Readily is a relative term and does not properly define where you are going to draw the line. Hence the BIG problem.
2) With out 'Intellectual' property, you wouldn't have things such as computers. You can't easily seperate the two. Tangibles are the direct result of that intellectual property. If you are making money on an invention that makes all injet printers use half of the ink by a new revolutionary way of interpreting the data received by the printer, should you not be renumerated for that? Why else would I want to share it with the rest of the world then.
"Screw you figure it out yourself" he said, know there was nothing in it for him.
The economic part of the picture has to be in place too, to not only cause the fostering of ideas to take place, but the distribution of them as well.
Well, I agree on the theoretical level, but I struggle with the reality of it. I, for one, make a living at software coding. Thankfully I have a lot of knowledge and seem to be pretty good at dispensing it. It has kept me employed when so many others have fallen into the ranks of unemployment or simply given up and found work elswhere (flipping burgers).
I believe in open source software,... to a point. I want to get paid for doing what I love to do and am good at. Stop paying me though, my love for it will decay quickly as I slowly starve. If I am good at it, (follow me hypothetically here anyways), the world will lose out on some good coding because I had to go flip burgers for a living instead. There has to be more to the equation than making it free and passing the burden of that on to the person who provides the product. The product is harmed substantially when you do that. There has to be, at least, some co-existance in the pay and free areanas here, IMHO.
I agree with you 100%. 110% actually. I really do beleive that somewhere along the line there has to be some socialism applied to things that have to be distributed evenly amongst the public in order to maintain morality in those services. Education, Healthcare are the too largest ones, which unfortunately neither of which are distributed evenly or freely in the US.
I also agree that scientific facts should undoubtably fall in there too, but there has to be a distinction between 'facts' and the tools used to find them. The tools themselves should not be free, or inovation with respect to those tools will die and the discovery of new 'facts' will die along with them.
...and those tangible things you refer to did not come from someone's ideas? What incentive would there ever be for me to spend days and weeks and years culminating in invention if the idea had to be 'open sourced'. None. There would be absolutely NO incentive and therefore progress would slow to a crawl. Economics plays a huge role in invention and progress. Ignoring it is silly and makes your arguement petty and small minded.
lol, these are the same pictures I actually doctored up for a friend two years ago in photoshop. We added the satellite images to the base booster images for a proposed game prelude. Funny to seem someone running with them like they were real. I wonder how many slashdotters will get sucked into this one.
I still have the layer psd files if you want to see them. rotflmao!!!
I like this free kick we are on. I think everything should be free. No one should be allowed to make or invent anything that isn't open source, (at least that I want to use). I would ever have to spend money again. Of course I couldn't make any money either, seeing as how everything is free. The up side is that I wouldn't have to work anymore because I don't have to pay for anything. But then who is working to make my bread if everything is free?
Somethings have to be possessions of an individual, so that we can charge others to use them and make money ourselves. Jealousy or envy is not a reason to force someone to give something up. If you can make a saleble product from the tools you need, then buy the tools. OTherwise I would venture to guess that it is not worth doing to begin with. Gosh, I had to buy a computer to write code with, what a horrible thing that I had to pay for a tool that should be free!
I agree. I live in Upstate NY and it is horrible here too. For every coding job here there are a few hundred people in the running for it. Because of that, employers are lowering pay and cutting benefits. I too am thankful that I have a good skill set to work from or I would be out there trying to shake down a crappy job with the other schmoos looking for work. For once my age and experience actually count for something, even if it's not better pay, shorter hours or benefits. For every employed coder there seem to be 3 more out there who's unemployment benefits are running out and they are panicking about how to make some money. Even friggin McDonalds isn't hiring around here! So this employer in this story is full of crap. There are hundreds and hundreds of unemployed Americans close to them who would do almost anything to land that job. Otherwise these people will be living in boxes under the local bridge.
If I had the money to buy it I would. If I don't have the money and download a pirate copy and get banned, so what. I wouldn't have the game anyway. No lose on my part anyway and I still am not going to have the money to buy it, so no gain on valve's part. I don't see any logic to valve doing this. I wouldn't rip it off anyway, because I would want to participate in the multiplayer part more than anything and a ripped off cd key is not going to get me there. The game has little value to me as a single player application. I think valve already recognizes this too from their effort to do online reg. and obvious past history of the first version of Half Life. IMHO
If people could take a step back and apply some common sense to the problem we would see two glaring things staring us in the face. One is, do we really think that storing this stuff above ground is safer than below ground? I, for one, would prefer to have this stuff below ground where some danged fool can't fly their airplane into it, or better yet easily steal it to make a 'dirty' bomb. At least underground access to it is minimized. So we have to watch the stuff for a long time. That fact doesn't change whether it's above or below ground, so throw that arguement out the window. The second thing is, just as the article states, let's reuse as much of this stuff as we can. We are the only country in the world that has nuclear power plants and doesn't recycle the waste. It's called a breeder reactor and it's as safe as a nuclear reactor is. The problem is that nobody wants to build one because they are afraid of what we did to the people who built the nuclear reactors in the first place. We bankrupted most of them by constantly changing the rules in the middle of the game. Each reactor built in this country faced exploding costs as the government made new laws and regulations and changed existing ones as they were being built and forced the owners to change their plans after the projects were already started. Costs skyrocketed by ten to one hundred times the original estimates. Nobody is going to go down that road again anytime soon unless some promises are made, and kept, by our own government. I can't see any politician winning an election on a platform of freezing nuclear safety laws anytime soon, so throw that one out the window.
Common sense says get the stuff underground and watch it the same as we do above ground. Simple 'patch' to a major problem we have, that continually gets worse over time. The recycling issue has too many politic hurdles to overcome to provide a timely answer. We all now how fast things get done in our government.
I am really sorry that I did not take the extra time, from work no less, to look up the correct spelling of the man's name. No disrespect was meant. I simply tried to spell it in a way that others would understand whom I was talking about.
You on the other hand have demonstrated that you have every intention of displaying disrespect, hatred and disgust for everything that isn't the way you want it. Get a life! The world IS NOT going to change for you. Learn how to live with others and their failings, or the hatred is going to eat you alive. Patience, fostering and care is going to turn a lot more heads and change more minds than cursing someone out for a simple mispelling of a name. I thought that I made it pretty obvious that I didn't know how to spell it when I wrote that I didn't know how. Lose the atitude dude. You are the troll here. Can't someone ask a question or is this club members only?
I thought what's his name, Linus Trerribald, or something like that, did the core management? Are they ripping it out of his hands? This move would make the Linux core a commercially drive product now wouldn't it? This doesn't sound like a positive thing to me for open source Linux.
you might have gotten a zero score for the comment, but you hit the nail on the head. We don't want smarter faster, we want do it again even if it's wrong.
Yea right, they could get their new line of processors to work worth a crap. News services are heralding the death of the Itantium. Intel had to adopt AMD instruction sets to stay alive and competative. Sounds to me more like its a "let's go back to something we no works, rebrand it and tell 'em all it's better" pitch. I hop ethis one backfires on them too. I have some old P3's I will sell you cheaper than their rebranded ones. Just send me your money!
Wow is that a convoluted set of logic or what. It doesn't even make sense. Did you read what you wrote?
Doesn't it make sense that if you search www.abc.com on msn and it returns nothing that they would go and crawl the site themselves? How does google even enter the picture at that point? Your arguement is full of holes dude. If Microsoft crawls a site that Google crawled before then MS msut be infringing on google somehow? What kind of nonsense is that?
I like your train of thought on that one. I do agree on the documentation part and would reinforce that by saying that even with documentation, the code can be so intense that it is almost impossible to follow, even well documented. I have code like that myself. Even I can't figure it out again after I have written it.
Let's hope that your economic picture holds true and over time we will be fully employed again. Maybe that will give us the leverage we need to push back on the employers for time to ourselves again. (or in my case health insurance and a better pay scale).
The problem right now is that it is too easy to replace you. There are a dozen people waiting at the door to work those 12 hour days to merit EA or any software company to back off from the. They can easily find someone else to do the work if you don't want to. There is a glut of coders in the US right now and we can't afford to push our agenda at all because of that. It's an employer's market right now and they are having a field day with it. My employer isn't making me work long hours, but they did cut my salary by 30% and took away my health benefits on top of that. There again, I can easily be replaced by someone who needs a paycheck to begin with. I could complain and get mad, but then I would be unemployed and probably not employable in the field because of my actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point! I think the world needs to look at the fact that there CAN be a medium between capitalism and socialism. We need to, as a society, decide which of those things are to be distributed freely amongst ourselves, and which things are to be sold to the highest bidders. There is only one Mona Lisa. Hence it will exist in one place and be enjoyed by only it's owner. Alast! Someone bought it and displays it for all of the world to see freely. Or is it really free? The taxpayers of France are really footing the bill there. But it is THAT important. To great a thing to be held by one person or even a select few. We realize that now and collectively pay the price to stop that from happening. Collectively the price is very low. It boils down to economics. Taking on those big things collectively males them cheap, but still not free. That is also going to be the case with Healthcare and Education. Neither will ever be free, but collectively we can manage them. The problem is that Healthcare is not managed collectively in the US. Therefore it is bought only by those who can afford it. Software is managed under the same umbrella of capitalism. Perhaps we should not be looking to make it 'free', but to collectively manage the costs. Because making the resultant product(s) available to only those whop can afford it, is not acceptable to most of us. That IS what open source is about. Managing the task collectively and making the rewards of the solution available to all. It does not come without a cost, and to try to remove the cost is detrimental to all involved and will result in a poor product at the end.
You are confusing me now. That is precisely what I have been saying all along.
Did I miss something here?
1) I can 'copy' a computer readily. I built my own processor (CPU) as my final project in my college electronics course. Readily is a relative term and does not properly define where you are going to draw the line. Hence the BIG problem. 2) With out 'Intellectual' property, you wouldn't have things such as computers. You can't easily seperate the two. Tangibles are the direct result of that intellectual property. If you are making money on an invention that makes all injet printers use half of the ink by a new revolutionary way of interpreting the data received by the printer, should you not be renumerated for that? Why else would I want to share it with the rest of the world then.
"Screw you figure it out yourself" he said, know there was nothing in it for him.
The economic part of the picture has to be in place too, to not only cause the fostering of ideas to take place, but the distribution of them as well.
Well, I agree on the theoretical level, but I struggle with the reality of it. I, for one, make a living at software coding. Thankfully I have a lot of knowledge and seem to be pretty good at dispensing it. It has kept me employed when so many others have fallen into the ranks of unemployment or simply given up and found work elswhere (flipping burgers).
... to a point. I want to get paid for doing what I love to do and am good at. Stop paying me though, my love for it will decay quickly as I slowly starve. If I am good at it, (follow me hypothetically here anyways), the world will lose out on some good coding because I had to go flip burgers for a living instead. There has to be more to the equation than making it free and passing the burden of that on to the person who provides the product. The product is harmed substantially when you do that. There has to be, at least, some co-existance in the pay and free areanas here, IMHO.
I believe in open source software,
I agree with you 100%. 110% actually. I really do beleive that somewhere along the line there has to be some socialism applied to things that have to be distributed evenly amongst the public in order to maintain morality in those services. Education, Healthcare are the too largest ones, which unfortunately neither of which are distributed evenly or freely in the US.
I also agree that scientific facts should undoubtably fall in there too, but there has to be a distinction between 'facts' and the tools used to find them. The tools themselves should not be free, or inovation with respect to those tools will die and the discovery of new 'facts' will die along with them.
...and those tangible things you refer to did not come from someone's ideas? What incentive would there ever be for me to spend days and weeks and years culminating in invention if the idea had to be 'open sourced'. None. There would be absolutely NO incentive and therefore progress would slow to a crawl. Economics plays a huge role in invention and progress. Ignoring it is silly and makes your arguement petty and small minded.
lol, these are the same pictures I actually doctored up for a friend two years ago in photoshop. We added the satellite images to the base booster images for a proposed game prelude. Funny to seem someone running with them like they were real. I wonder how many slashdotters will get sucked into this one.
I still have the layer psd files if you want to see them. rotflmao!!!
I like this free kick we are on. I think everything should be free. No one should be allowed to make or invent anything that isn't open source, (at least that I want to use). I would ever have to spend money again. Of course I couldn't make any money either, seeing as how everything is free. The up side is that I wouldn't have to work anymore because I don't have to pay for anything. But then who is working to make my bread if everything is free?
Somethings have to be possessions of an individual, so that we can charge others to use them and make money ourselves. Jealousy or envy is not a reason to force someone to give something up. If you can make a saleble product from the tools you need, then buy the tools. OTherwise I would venture to guess that it is not worth doing to begin with. Gosh, I had to buy a computer to write code with, what a horrible thing that I had to pay for a tool that should be free!
I agree. I live in Upstate NY and it is horrible here too. For every coding job here there are a few hundred people in the running for it. Because of that, employers are lowering pay and cutting benefits. I too am thankful that I have a good skill set to work from or I would be out there trying to shake down a crappy job with the other schmoos looking for work. For once my age and experience actually count for something, even if it's not better pay, shorter hours or benefits. For every employed coder there seem to be 3 more out there who's unemployment benefits are running out and they are panicking about how to make some money. Even friggin McDonalds isn't hiring around here! So this employer in this story is full of crap. There are hundreds and hundreds of unemployed Americans close to them who would do almost anything to land that job. Otherwise these people will be living in boxes under the local bridge.
I think Homer Simpson broke the first version of this in the second season didn't he?
"Hello World" is the contents of a variable and is copyrighted by Sun Corp as part of their Java manual, not Microsoft.
That's nothing. I think my sister has the patent on "IsSo".
If I had the money to buy it I would. If I don't have the money and download a pirate copy and get banned, so what. I wouldn't have the game anyway. No lose on my part anyway and I still am not going to have the money to buy it, so no gain on valve's part. I don't see any logic to valve doing this. I wouldn't rip it off anyway, because I would want to participate in the multiplayer part more than anything and a ripped off cd key is not going to get me there. The game has little value to me as a single player application. I think valve already recognizes this too from their effort to do online reg. and obvious past history of the first version of Half Life. IMHO
If people could take a step back and apply some common sense to the problem we would see two glaring things staring us in the face. One is, do we really think that storing this stuff above ground is safer than below ground? I, for one, would prefer to have this stuff below ground where some danged fool can't fly their airplane into it, or better yet easily steal it to make a 'dirty' bomb. At least underground access to it is minimized. So we have to watch the stuff for a long time. That fact doesn't change whether it's above or below ground, so throw that arguement out the window. The second thing is, just as the article states, let's reuse as much of this stuff as we can. We are the only country in the world that has nuclear power plants and doesn't recycle the waste. It's called a breeder reactor and it's as safe as a nuclear reactor is. The problem is that nobody wants to build one because they are afraid of what we did to the people who built the nuclear reactors in the first place. We bankrupted most of them by constantly changing the rules in the middle of the game. Each reactor built in this country faced exploding costs as the government made new laws and regulations and changed existing ones as they were being built and forced the owners to change their plans after the projects were already started. Costs skyrocketed by ten to one hundred times the original estimates. Nobody is going to go down that road again anytime soon unless some promises are made, and kept, by our own government. I can't see any politician winning an election on a platform of freezing nuclear safety laws anytime soon, so throw that one out the window.
Common sense says get the stuff underground and watch it the same as we do above ground. Simple 'patch' to a major problem we have, that continually gets worse over time. The recycling issue has too many politic hurdles to overcome to provide a timely answer. We all now how fast things get done in our government.
I am really sorry that I did not take the extra time, from work no less, to look up the correct spelling of the man's name. No disrespect was meant. I simply tried to spell it in a way that others would understand whom I was talking about.
You on the other hand have demonstrated that you have every intention of displaying disrespect, hatred and disgust for everything that isn't the way you want it. Get a life! The world IS NOT going to change for you. Learn how to live with others and their failings, or the hatred is going to eat you alive. Patience, fostering and care is going to turn a lot more heads and change more minds than cursing someone out for a simple mispelling of a name. I thought that I made it pretty obvious that I didn't know how to spell it when I wrote that I didn't know how. Lose the atitude dude. You are the troll here. Can't someone ask a question or is this club members only?
Ah! I didn't realize that. Thank you!
I thought what's his name, Linus Trerribald, or something like that, did the core management? Are they ripping it out of his hands? This move would make the Linux core a commercially drive product now wouldn't it? This doesn't sound like a positive thing to me for open source Linux.
NO, no no. It is for the Lunar Software Brochure. They were arguing over the who's logo goes first.
you might have gotten a zero score for the comment, but you hit the nail on the head. We don't want smarter faster, we want do it again even if it's wrong.
To bad they purchase the Chinese cards. If they had bought the ones made in the US, they work 99.9% of the time.
Yea right, they could get their new line of processors to work worth a crap. News services are heralding the death of the Itantium. Intel had to adopt AMD instruction sets to stay alive and competative. Sounds to me more like its a "let's go back to something we no works, rebrand it and tell 'em all it's better" pitch. I hop ethis one backfires on them too. I have some old P3's I will sell you cheaper than their rebranded ones. Just send me your money!
Wow is that a convoluted set of logic or what. It doesn't even make sense. Did you read what you wrote?
Doesn't it make sense that if you search www.abc.com on msn and it returns nothing that they would go and crawl the site themselves? How does google even enter the picture at that point? Your arguement is full of holes dude. If Microsoft crawls a site that Google crawled before then MS msut be infringing on google somehow? What kind of nonsense is that?
I like your train of thought on that one. I do agree on the documentation part and would reinforce that by saying that even with documentation, the code can be so intense that it is almost impossible to follow, even well documented. I have code like that myself. Even I can't figure it out again after I have written it.
Let's hope that your economic picture holds true and over time we will be fully employed again. Maybe that will give us the leverage we need to push back on the employers for time to ourselves again. (or in my case health insurance and a better pay scale).
The problem right now is that it is too easy to replace you. There are a dozen people waiting at the door to work those 12 hour days to merit EA or any software company to back off from the. They can easily find someone else to do the work if you don't want to. There is a glut of coders in the US right now and we can't afford to push our agenda at all because of that. It's an employer's market right now and they are having a field day with it. My employer isn't making me work long hours, but they did cut my salary by 30% and took away my health benefits on top of that. There again, I can easily be replaced by someone who needs a paycheck to begin with. I could complain and get mad, but then I would be unemployed and probably not employable in the field because of my actions.
I agree with that statement completely. Perhaps I did miss your point.