Code rots. Any real programmer can tell you this. That's why the GPL is necessary in this context- it operates within the assumption that code is NOT ever finished, and will continue to adapt to new environments, the old code rotting and becoming useless.
Quite relevant in an age where we have titanic multinational corporations not merely wishing but conniving with feral intensity hitherto unknown to bit-twiddlers to grab control of anything they can and reduce it to a proprietary yet indispensable status, and quite willing to do 'inefficient' things like code in time-bombs and checks for proprietary hooks in order to get their way, or even lobby governments. If Foo is public domain but Microsoft Foo is not, only works with other Microsoft Foo, and you need to have Microsoft Foo in order to file your Foo Returns with the government, the fact that the original Foo was public domain is of only academic interest since the one you have to actually use is closed as closed can be.
Hence, the GPL is the only proper license for government work as only it guarantees continued access for ALL citizens, even to the point of bureaucratically cutting off some of your uglier options.:)
Counterargument: Why should your government, to which you pay too much in taxes, permit anyone ever to take the fruits of this work and close it, taking it away from you? You paid for it, it needs to be under terms that guarantee access for you ALWAYS.
Hence, GPL. Not even you can close access. After all you are only ONE citizen.
That's a peculiar point of view, since the only thing the GPL does (and it does it very thoroughly) is require that the code and ALL DERIVATIONS remain out there and accessible in a practical sense. That is ALL that is being required. It, and anything you do with it, cannot be bottled up. All the things done with it must remain not merely accessible but AVAILABLE.
By contrast it's child's play to make closed software unavailable, even if it is to some extent accessible. One result can be that the dominant form of software can be completely unavailable and still block out other software from getting serious mindshare.
Is war peace and freedom slavery, too? I'm sure many people will read your remark about GPL having 'much less' freedom and nod foolishly because that's what they want to believe, but in a practical sense only the GPL is really effective in competing against closed software. And what is wrong with competing against closed software? I thought that was the whole point for the proprietary guys?
Lots of good artists left mp3.com when it began turning into a hellish Vivendi-owned RIAA-affiliated complete ripoff and waste of time, though:)
You should also be looking at ampcast.com and besonic.com and so on- Ampcast and Besonic are NOT RIAA at all.
My best music was done after I left mp3.com. Anyone you know on mp3.com is being ripped off- it's good to support your friends but you might suggest to them to find a better hosting solution:)
What would be great, for people who can't afford a serious operation like Ampcast, would be for some Slashdotters to get together and offer just HUGE BANDWIDTH and storage for indie musicians, so they don't have to resort to mp3.com and giving money to the RIAA just to have a net presence. There's practically nobody doing free music hosting anymore because it is so costly.
Absolutely. I use the GPL on purpose, every time, because I would rather have people NOT use my code than use it in a manner that allows them to leech. There is nothing kindly about this. I would like to see the proprietary software people starve- or failing that, they can just compete (since they MUST compete) against the entire body of GPL-using coders.
To adapt a phrase from older commies, what part of 'WE WILL BURY YOU' don't you understand?
I love how people keep angsting about how obviously none of those people could POSSIBLY have UNDERSTOOD how the GPL limits one's ability to rip off the code and build proprietary stuff out of it, holding the software ideas hostage in exchange for money as so many companies have done in the past. Cry me a river, guys. If that's the world you want, write your own code.
My desire to cooperate with other cooperators (those who will place this above all other motivations) in no way obligates me to be nice to you 'how do you expect me to make a living writing code' guys.
"No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!":D
If you can't outcompete a world of unpaid GPL-using idea-cooperators, I expect your job to die:)
Let's see them thrown in jail with lots of publicity- provided the WHOLE story is told.
In news today, terrorist group The Yes Men are threatened with jail for impersonating representatives of Dow Chemical. The Yes Men sent email and built a web site parodying Dow's recent lawsuit against Bhopal survivors.
The lawsuit was brought when 200 women survivors of the Bhopal chemical disaster brought toxic waste to Dow corporate offices in Bombay. The protest was said to be peaceful and nonviolent. Under Indian law, Dow inherits responsibility for criminal acts of Union Carbide, which it acquired. The survivors have been in fruitless negotiations with Dow headquarters in Mumbai for over a year, in efforts to persuade the company to undertake cleanup of the disaster site.
The disaster of almost 20 years ago left tonnes of toxic waste on the plant site, which still remains and is leaching into the ground water of the area. Union Carbide did not clean up the toxic waste, though they did pay a settlement to the Indian government in 1989 that amounted to a few hundred dollars for each person affected, injured or killed by the continuing disaster. Health care costs for those living in the area with the toxic waste have rapidly passed this figure. Dow has expressed its regret and states that it cannot justify the expense of a cleanup of the disaster site.
Back in the US, the Yes Men are looking at jail sentences for their activities- which largely consist of putting cruder words in the mouths of Dow representatives to justify actions Dow is actually taking. The lesson for all of us- it's not what you say, it's how you say it!
Over to you, Binky...
Who says it can't be both? I think it's both. I'd do it... except that I'm not sedentary enough and haven't had enough massages or fancy feed. So I expect I'd be tough and gamy:)
There's a Slashdot poll for you:
If you were used as steak, what would you be?
Tough and gamey- I'm too lean!
I eat too many hormones and twinkies
I eat fine granola and get lots of massages- I belong in a Kobe steakhouse!
It is a requirement for Linux to be impossible to kill or neutralize in the Operating System (or any) business.
There's no kind of guarantee that it'll succeed, but that does permanently leave open the possibility of succeeding in the long run.
Free Software (to a lesser extent Open Source, which is more business-goals-identified) is specifically about guaranteeing access to everyone who wants it, without exception. No business mistake or IP shift can stop that, no change in underlying hardware platform can marginalize the Free Software- worst comes to worst, you abandon a closed hardware platform, take your Free Software and go make a computer that you can use it with. There isn't a situation where it can be taken away from you.
So, by being based on Free Software, Linux cannot be taken OUT of the Operating System business. That's not a guarantee of success but it's worth a hell of a lot... there's a value to that kind of availability.
The trouble with communism is that man oppresses his fellow man. With capitalism it is the reverse;)
You seem to have communism confused with fascism. An understandable mistake, considering that our own leaders have a hard time telling the difference between capitalism and fascism! Still, you might consider being more quiet about things that you only have a 'Schoolhouse Rock' understanding of.
And don't look at me that way- I'm an anarchist, meaning that I don't trust you, Stalin, the assembled CEOs of the (ha!) 'free market', or even myself if you gave me that kind of power. You're all conning yourselves into thinking you have the magic bullet, 'do things this way and you'll never have to come to agreements with people you don't like because everything will happen perfectly thereafter'. Yeah right! Your 'free market' is just as corrupt as the worst Stalinist excesses, if you give it the same amount of power. And you're busy convincing yourself that you're the wise and enlightened one and you (or at least the policies you suggest) are most fit to rule.
Your view of democratic capitalism is based on the idea that crime does not pay:) too late!
You can still say communism is evil, though. As long as you concede that capitalism is equally evil:)
"Jobs like thes" can damage legitimate, real businesses simply by being another lowballing competitor.
(1) operate company while not paying workers
(2) kill off competitor who DOES pay workers by lowballing 'em
(3) go out of freakin' business because you have to be an idiot to make a business plan where you don't pay your own people, you just gamble on being bought up lock stock and barrel
(4) LOSE! Everybody loses!
It's amazing how dot-com, corporate, stock-option-capitalist gibberish and insanity can STILL be doing damage years after the dotcom era collapsed! My god, what's it gonna take? Anyone care to start arguing that we should seek out bosses with big leather whips to physically beat us with, on the grounds that being tortured makes us work harder which produces more profit for the company?
I just know that I'm going to stick with those who aren't totally crazy- and I _run_ a business, thank you. It's not computer tech, thank God. I'm just going to build it incrementally like I've been doing all along, with solid value and no debt and the ability to pay my suppliers and fulfil my orders, and I'm going to do that regardless of who else is in the arena with me- you can't hurt me via undercutting and suicidal moneylosing stupidity if I can KEEP OPERATING regardless, scaling back my needs in tough times. You can only put me out of business if I overextend to the point that I can't keep operating without X amount of income.
These guys are worse than the damn lottery. There's no reality in what they're doing. Even a Harvard MBA would smack them upside the head for this- but what they really need isn't a Harvard MBA. They need to be given a good talking to by a hot dog stand owner...
The High End amplifier designer Mark Levinson has similar opinions about CD sound, if I'm not mistaken. Levinson has more to lose from being labelled a loony- he runs a business- so he's cagier about it.
It's like this: the ear is able to pull a lot of information out of natural, acoustic sound. There's regular features to such sounds that are distinctly different from plain random noise. The ear can dig into the random noise very deeply to get information out.
What these guys are saying is this: with certain types of distortion, the noise becomes opaque, the information just ain't there when the ear tries to dig for it. Soon it stops trying- or just gets out of practice. It atrophies.
There are a few points that are established (some recently) to support this, though the whole chain of evidence isn't there, and in fact it's a bit alarmist.
(1) Ears do adjust. If your hearing isn't symmetrical, your brain WILL construct a coherent picture from the sound field, despite the ear inputs not matching.
(2) Digital noise floors are NOT the same as natural white noise.
That last helps to support these wilder theories, but nobody that I know of had tested it until recently. I got in an argument on Usenet where I had to establish this. The argument was that dithering and truncation produced a noise floor different from the same signal with exactly equivalent white noise overlaid onto it. Basically, that quantization can be heard as a distinct character to the noise floor.
I had people very huffy about me even arguing this, because their digital audio theory demanded that dithered digital was perfect in every respect, and specifically that it behaved the same as analog noise w.r.t. detail retrieval beneath the noise floor.
I was given matching files- one being signal plus random-amplitude noise, and one being the same thing but quantized to the level of the noise, resulting in a normal TPDF noise floor, entirely uncorrelated. There was a 2 bit and a 4 bit example for me to try, because I was arguing that this difference was obvious at coarse levels, not that I could consistently hear it at 16 bits or something.
I did a computer ABX double-blind test, using both the examples, and got 40 out of 40 trials correct, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that these types of noise DO sound different. It's not even subject to debate anymore- that's what ABX is for- not asserting a negative but proving a positive beyond serious doubt. Dithered noise floors measure a lot like broad-band noise, and they may be uncorrelated, but they are absolutely not the same as simple random-amplitude noise (like you use for the dither signal prior to quantization).
I'm not aware of anyone doing this test before, but now it's been done and the point proved.
I am inclined to agree with the lunatic fringe here that it's the results of these very 'unnatural' processes which cause problems- they damage musical enjoyment, and they're part of why modern music is so commodified and worthless. The only serious mass media formats are prone to these problems. As a result, mass media itself seems less important- a self-destroying process. The sound alone contributes to a lessening of interest.
That said- anyone who had their hearing actually damaged by this effect would have to either live in an anechoic chamber or wear Walkman headphones every waking moment. The world is FULL of acoustic sounds- hell, traffic alone is an acoustic sound quite capable of 'recalibrating' the ear, and any face-to-face human contact often involves sound, which also 'recalibrates' the ear. So the alarmism is entirely foolish. Maybe Mark Levinson lives in an environment entirely free of any outside sound, I don't know:)
Strange way to put it. Actually, a very revealingly strange way to put it...
If you put something out under the GPL, no recipient can possibly go into anything but cooperation with you. Anything they do with it, you can have back. That's the whole reason why people throw a fit that it's not BSD-like: there are people out there who can't understand cooperation and only want to take your stuff and go into competition with you and beat you.
The real concern is not how to restrict people from cooperating with you, the real concern is what else you can offer that's worth something- and how well you can budget, so you can stay in business on a shoestring. You CANNOT play the free software development game by capitalist rules.
Rather than figure out how to soak people for $80, figure out how you can continue operating despite only being paid 80 cents. Accept that you'll never, ever be able to corner the market, but you will be able to build relationships and that's just what you need to be doing. Barter stuff. Get creative. Most of all, build what you need to have, not what you think would win the market competition- because in the free software arena there ISN'T a competition.
You're all just fishermen in the fleet, and your efforts are worth something- but you can be replaced by the next fisherman along! The point is, the whole fleet is necessary- no individual fisherman 'wins' the 'race'.
YES IT IS! You NEVER run out of cash! Geez, this is one of the very most basic, street-level business things. This is such a primitive, such a fundamental concept that to ignore it is unforgivable.
I'm quite socialist in outlook as far as society in general goes, but I draw the line at maintaining businesses that are losers. Businesses aren't people, and I'm a lot more inclined to assert that a business should go tits-up without being bailed out by society, than I am to suggest that people should find no societal safety net. I see it as different- businesses are like a codified system of concepts and practices, and they are immortal in the human sense. They can end up so defined by their own practices that they can't change- I see Mandrake doing just this, building the begging for money into their 'corporate culture' and eventually, into their budget...
Running out of cash is fatal for a REASON. It means you totally misread the market and screwed up your projections- but worse, it illustrates a complete failure to operate with a reasonable break-even point, and a tendency to piss away loads of money wastefully. To bail that sort of situation out with money only encourages it.
Let Mandrake go- and if there's something special and great about it, let's see a new company arise from the ashes to do that. And if the special and great was nothing but dot-com talking-big foolishness, what's lost?
I don't care who you are, if you intend to do business you are playing with live ammo and if you blow your own foot off the world does NOT owe you a new foot.
I speak from experience- 8 years ago I wanted to build guitar effects pedals, and I didn't have the distribution. I accepted that, and fell back and regrouped. Now, there's the net, and UPS and the mail can take up a lot of the slack- and I'm doing the guitar boxes again, this time with balanced transformer outputs and capable of running into balanced XLR inputs (with an adapter cable I can throw in). I'm selling them for $100, have sold two already thanks to a good review in Tape Op, and you know what? I have parts to make more, have a handle on how many parts are needed for further inventory, am stocked up very well on some of the less expensive parts, and I'm not out of cash. I survived the sunk costs of getting the operation rolling, by being patient enough to do it one step at a time and belt-tightening, and in a practical sense I've already broken even and will not have to run out of cash, whatever happens.
It's not cool for Mandrake to keep doing this. For them to have run up so much debt is not okay, even if they're not doing stupid things now. Do you want them to keep on doing this? If you're a guitar or bass player and were torn between helping Mandrake and getting one of my boxes with your $100, do you really see it as the moral thing to give it to Mandrake even if you don't use their stuff, as opposed to giving it to me when I'd GIVE you something useful and tangible for that?
I suppose that depends on whether you believed Mandrake genuinely was fixing their problems and learning better. On the other hand, if they can do this, why should they?
It's pretty harmless for me to rant this way because I doubt many slashdotters are guitar players and potential customers. I really feel for the Xiph.org guys though- their work is WAY closer to the slashdotter heart, but for that very reason they know better than to rant, "You idiots! Give us that money instead, we make better use of it and we're more important than having one more linux dist!" I can rant that way because it's mostly hypothetical;)
In fact, unless you're a guitar player and all that, I think you should take the $100 that me and Mandrake are hypothetically fighting over, and give it to Xiph:) I would myself- except that I'm not gonna run out of cash, let's have someone with disposable income who's not trying to launch a business do it;)
You're nuts to think artists get paid $2.50 an album from the RIAA. I don't think you'd find anyone in the industry who'd deny that 99.99% of the artists are never paid anything at all. Instead, they are sent into another recording studio with the label picking up the tab and charging it against future artist royalties.
I tell you, if you can't believe a game show host about the real issues threatening America, who can you believe? O_O
Wait, something wrong there, let's try rephrasing it. "If you can't believe a lawyer about..." no. Um...
I'll say this, though, I like his point #4. I approve of working hard and I approve of thrift, and I can see how this is not rewarded by our society though I strongly disagree with his notions of how society is to be fixed.
I also like #5, wanting to punish corporate crime more severely. Funny how Ben's OTHER opinions indicate that on the other hand, he wants the corporate upper class to have more money, to be able to wield it in society and in the legal arena more freely, and that he wants them to leave it all to their children, furthering the steady shift from class society to flat-out caste system. According to Ben, if you ARE in the wealth caste, at all costs you should be protected from the lower classes using society's mechanisms to get a share. Oh, but if you are naughty you should be punished! Assuming you don't simply use your money and power to evade justice, which of course you will, what else would you do?
Never trust a man who is both a lawyer AND a game show host. QED;)
What happened there was more complicated: Ferdinand Porsche had always been hot for a 'people's car', way before Hitler. He came up with the Volkswagen design for personal reasons, because it was the car he most wanted to build, the coolest thing he could think of.
Hitler was hot to industrialize Germany- very few people owned cars, and he wanted to build roads, get lots of Germans into cars, basically modernize the country. This too was a personal reason- German industrialists did not always believe Hitler when he wanted 'cheap people's' this and that, but they learned the hard way.
Porsche had to bid for the contract to be the one to build the 'people's car' and he did it by selling Hitler on the Volkswagen design with an amazing half-jargon half-layman spiel which basically convinced Hitler that the future VW was a brilliant, unorthodox, superior design (which it was, as they learned when trying to improve it later)
Having secured Hitler's support, Porsche then totally ignored everything in politics and got back to his work- this would be the moral lapse, even though he did not actively support the Nazis. Things would happen, like Porsche getting a letter saying "The Fuehrer wishes the greatest German auto designer to become a German citizen" and shrugging and saying (translated) "Well, I suppose nothing can be done about it- see that this is taken care of" and ignoring politics again. Passive support and failing to resist in any way.
Hitler never got any Volkswagens built for the German people- the plant was bombed and the economy collapsed. The VW plant fell into the hands of the British, whose opinion of the matter was, "this is a great car, these are great workers and designers who aren't responsible for the sins of their leaders, this plant belongs to the German people and we are here to see that it is returned to them, and flourishes". With their determined support, the first VWs started coming out in spite of terrible supply shortages, technical problems (like shattering torsion bars in the suspensions) were solved, and the story of the VW was underway no thanks to Hitler (it wasn't his idea, it was Porsche's, it just played into his populist tendencies)
I have this very neat book, 'Small Wonder', about it all...
Actually, this is more of a glimpse into why Belluzzo is a more adaptable businessman than anyone at Microsoft, apparently. It seems he has the capacity to negotiate and build relationships. That's valuable, and it also seems like Microsoft thoroughly lack this quality.
It's like, if you don't do what Microsoft wants, on some level they will throw a fit- their basic response is screaming and ranting like a two-year old. They are not in the slightest bit interested about why you might want something non-Microsoft- not on an emotional level- their only real interest is in making you behave according to what they want, and you are to succeed and thrive on THEIR terms and in the way they expect. This is limiting.
Belluzzo seems more inclined to be inquisitive- more likely to figure out what a customer's real terms are. That does not mean that he has more clout or power than Microsoft, because Microsoft's approach is geared to a straight power struggle in which they can generally win by sheer force. Belluzzo is more likely to win people's loyalty, and build relationships.
It's rather telling that the qualities of building loyalty and relationships are sorely devalued in modern-day corporate capitalism: in fact, the way things work today, Belluzzo's skills are 'worthless'. Yet at the same time this same value system is producing a self-destructive downward spiral of reduced functionality (see the thread on worsening consumer electronics!) which is unstoppable under the corporate capitalist 'rules', and to a point will continue to be rewarded just as, to a point, the dot-com excess was rewarded.
Belluzzo apparently adheres to an older school- one that has difficulty competing in the winner-take-everything corporate capitalist arena, but which has hidden advantages.
Basically, this is the guy who winds up with all your customers- when you push the profit motive too far and slip up. You can go corporate Darwinist and produce junk and rig the market so there's no choice and get yourself in an IBM-like position where you're the only option, but all this really does is starve potential competitors of the ability to thrive with largish marketshares. Instead they become like Apple, thriving with a splinter. When you slip up, or your contempt for your customers becomes too great, guys like Belluzzo are there building loyalties and relationships and they are positioned to capitalize on your mistakes.
The next guy who comes around leveraging the market and jumping up and down on tables screaming when he doesn't get his way- that guy might well grab those customers away from Belluzzo again. But not for long- only until he too screws up.
That isn't true of all GPLed audio stuff- I write Mastering Tools for classic MacOS, and that is GPLed and is primarily about wordlength reduction. It is NOT about SRC, unfortunately- when I have that working properly it will be included. For some years I've been concentrating on the wordlength reduction. It's a very deep problem, really- another guy's recent work with a dither called MegaBitMax caused me to get to work again, and sure enough there was more to do if I wanted to continue to be on the cutting edge of modern high performance wordlength reduction.
I'm hoping to get up and running on MacOSX in January, and undertake the fairly major task of porting the software and revising it to the new environment. If I can do that, the resulting still-GPLed software will be more easily ported to Linux.
One of the Linux DAW projects (I forget which) once asked me to teach them about dithering and why it mattered. I can only say that if the tendency of Linux audio software to be consumer-level 16-bit stuff bugs you, I can't do anything about that directly but I will say this again- I'm always ready to drop everything and help out a Linux audio project with this stuff. I know what the professional studios and mastering houses require, in terms of resolution handling, and what kind of internal bussing and processing are required. For instance, Pro Tools suffers badly simply because all internal processing involves repeated truncation to 24 bit linear, and the 2-buss requires submixes that themselves involve more truncation. You wouldn't be able to hear any of it as just one stage (maybe sense it vaguely) but it's cumulative.
I can say that and expound about how TPDF decorrelates additional moments of distortion but I haven't got a clue how to code GTK interfaces or anything like that:) it's all a matter of what you devote time to doing, I guess. But I wanted to take a moment to say again that if anyone wishes to add dither and noise shaping to their Linux audio project, I'd love to help teach this stuff...
If you want mastering (really) you'd probably be talking Sonic Solutions, or Sadie. There is good reason to consider doing work towards a turnkey Linux mastering system- PC-based mastering systems are often ALREADY turn-key, for instance Sadie (I forget the odd capitalisation they like). Other systems like Pro Tools (known as Alsihad in real pro circles, because it has major sonic problems due to poor internal resolution handling and expensive, proprietary, inferior converters) or Ensoniq Paris (no longer being made) are also effectively turnkey systems.
Get stuff working with serious hardware, like RME Hammerfall cards, and there is every reason to expect good results. You may not get the 'Guitar Center' crowd, but many pro audio people are pretty clueful about what they actually need. Downside: they'll know what they need better than you. In fact, if you're not also a pro audio nerd, sound engineer, mastering geek etc. you haven't a hope of writing relevant software.
...which is why I wonder what the heck 'tracktor' is. Is that relevant to mastering? Or is it 'Toast'? (note I didn't say 'Jam', which burns disc-at-once and has provisions for burning in ISRC codes and extensive PQ code editing)
I think it would be quite reasonable to conclude that they are working to support and expand the 'evil empire', because in spite of a great deal of evidence they don't consider it evil, and they want more of it.
This would explain why Microsoft are not actively combating 'Mono'. Why fight what you can co-opt? MS are not stupid. They have these guys doing their work for them, and they don't even have to pay 'em. Why stop them?
Slashdot Mirror
Quite relevant in an age where we have titanic multinational corporations not merely wishing but conniving with feral intensity hitherto unknown to bit-twiddlers to grab control of anything they can and reduce it to a proprietary yet indispensable status, and quite willing to do 'inefficient' things like code in time-bombs and checks for proprietary hooks in order to get their way, or even lobby governments. If Foo is public domain but Microsoft Foo is not, only works with other Microsoft Foo, and you need to have Microsoft Foo in order to file your Foo Returns with the government, the fact that the original Foo was public domain is of only academic interest since the one you have to actually use is closed as closed can be.
Hence, the GPL is the only proper license for government work as only it guarantees continued access for ALL citizens, even to the point of bureaucratically cutting off some of your uglier options. :)
Hence, GPL. Not even you can close access. After all you are only ONE citizen.
By contrast it's child's play to make closed software unavailable, even if it is to some extent accessible. One result can be that the dominant form of software can be completely unavailable and still block out other software from getting serious mindshare.
Is war peace and freedom slavery, too? I'm sure many people will read your remark about GPL having 'much less' freedom and nod foolishly because that's what they want to believe, but in a practical sense only the GPL is really effective in competing against closed software. And what is wrong with competing against closed software? I thought that was the whole point for the proprietary guys?
You should also be looking at ampcast.com and besonic.com and so on- Ampcast and Besonic are NOT RIAA at all.
My best music was done after I left mp3.com. Anyone you know on mp3.com is being ripped off- it's good to support your friends but you might suggest to them to find a better hosting solution :)
What would be great, for people who can't afford a serious operation like Ampcast, would be for some Slashdotters to get together and offer just HUGE BANDWIDTH and storage for indie musicians, so they don't have to resort to mp3.com and giving money to the RIAA just to have a net presence. There's practically nobody doing free music hosting anymore because it is so costly.
To adapt a phrase from older commies, what part of 'WE WILL BURY YOU' don't you understand?
I love how people keep angsting about how obviously none of those people could POSSIBLY have UNDERSTOOD how the GPL limits one's ability to rip off the code and build proprietary stuff out of it, holding the software ideas hostage in exchange for money as so many companies have done in the past. Cry me a river, guys. If that's the world you want, write your own code.
My desire to cooperate with other cooperators (those who will place this above all other motivations) in no way obligates me to be nice to you 'how do you expect me to make a living writing code' guys.
"No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!" :D
If you can't outcompete a world of unpaid GPL-using idea-cooperators, I expect your job to die :)
And that's not a parody at all...
There's a Slashdot poll for you:
If you were used as steak, what would you be?
One day, this may not be a joke
Invisible hand? Is that somehow related to the famous Invisible Pink Unicorn of story and song (well, maybe someone sang about it once)? :)
There's no kind of guarantee that it'll succeed, but that does permanently leave open the possibility of succeeding in the long run.
Free Software (to a lesser extent Open Source, which is more business-goals-identified) is specifically about guaranteeing access to everyone who wants it, without exception. No business mistake or IP shift can stop that, no change in underlying hardware platform can marginalize the Free Software- worst comes to worst, you abandon a closed hardware platform, take your Free Software and go make a computer that you can use it with. There isn't a situation where it can be taken away from you.
So, by being based on Free Software, Linux cannot be taken OUT of the Operating System business. That's not a guarantee of success but it's worth a hell of a lot... there's a value to that kind of availability.
The trouble with communism is that man oppresses his fellow man. With capitalism it is the reverse ;)
You seem to have communism confused with fascism. An understandable mistake, considering that our own leaders have a hard time telling the difference between capitalism and fascism! Still, you might consider being more quiet about things that you only have a 'Schoolhouse Rock' understanding of.
And don't look at me that way- I'm an anarchist, meaning that I don't trust you, Stalin, the assembled CEOs of the (ha!) 'free market', or even myself if you gave me that kind of power. You're all conning yourselves into thinking you have the magic bullet, 'do things this way and you'll never have to come to agreements with people you don't like because everything will happen perfectly thereafter'. Yeah right! Your 'free market' is just as corrupt as the worst Stalinist excesses, if you give it the same amount of power. And you're busy convincing yourself that you're the wise and enlightened one and you (or at least the policies you suggest) are most fit to rule.
Your view of democratic capitalism is based on the idea that crime does not pay :) too late!
You can still say communism is evil, though. As long as you concede that capitalism is equally evil :)
"Jobs like thes" can damage legitimate, real businesses simply by being another lowballing competitor.
(1) operate company while not paying workers
(2) kill off competitor who DOES pay workers by lowballing 'em
(3) go out of freakin' business because you have to be an idiot to make a business plan where you don't pay your own people, you just gamble on being bought up lock stock and barrel
(4) LOSE! Everybody loses!
It's amazing how dot-com, corporate, stock-option-capitalist gibberish and insanity can STILL be doing damage years after the dotcom era collapsed! My god, what's it gonna take? Anyone care to start arguing that we should seek out bosses with big leather whips to physically beat us with, on the grounds that being tortured makes us work harder which produces more profit for the company?
I just know that I'm going to stick with those who aren't totally crazy- and I _run_ a business, thank you. It's not computer tech, thank God. I'm just going to build it incrementally like I've been doing all along, with solid value and no debt and the ability to pay my suppliers and fulfil my orders, and I'm going to do that regardless of who else is in the arena with me- you can't hurt me via undercutting and suicidal moneylosing stupidity if I can KEEP OPERATING regardless, scaling back my needs in tough times. You can only put me out of business if I overextend to the point that I can't keep operating without X amount of income.
These guys are worse than the damn lottery. There's no reality in what they're doing. Even a Harvard MBA would smack them upside the head for this- but what they really need isn't a Harvard MBA. They need to be given a good talking to by a hot dog stand owner...
Merry Xmas and tux bless us EVERY one ;)
It's like this: the ear is able to pull a lot of information out of natural, acoustic sound. There's regular features to such sounds that are distinctly different from plain random noise. The ear can dig into the random noise very deeply to get information out.
What these guys are saying is this: with certain types of distortion, the noise becomes opaque, the information just ain't there when the ear tries to dig for it. Soon it stops trying- or just gets out of practice. It atrophies.
There are a few points that are established (some recently) to support this, though the whole chain of evidence isn't there, and in fact it's a bit alarmist.
(1) Ears do adjust. If your hearing isn't symmetrical, your brain WILL construct a coherent picture from the sound field, despite the ear inputs not matching.
(2) Digital noise floors are NOT the same as natural white noise.
That last helps to support these wilder theories, but nobody that I know of had tested it until recently. I got in an argument on Usenet where I had to establish this. The argument was that dithering and truncation produced a noise floor different from the same signal with exactly equivalent white noise overlaid onto it. Basically, that quantization can be heard as a distinct character to the noise floor.
I had people very huffy about me even arguing this, because their digital audio theory demanded that dithered digital was perfect in every respect, and specifically that it behaved the same as analog noise w.r.t. detail retrieval beneath the noise floor.
I was given matching files- one being signal plus random-amplitude noise, and one being the same thing but quantized to the level of the noise, resulting in a normal TPDF noise floor, entirely uncorrelated. There was a 2 bit and a 4 bit example for me to try, because I was arguing that this difference was obvious at coarse levels, not that I could consistently hear it at 16 bits or something.
I did a computer ABX double-blind test, using both the examples, and got 40 out of 40 trials correct, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that these types of noise DO sound different. It's not even subject to debate anymore- that's what ABX is for- not asserting a negative but proving a positive beyond serious doubt. Dithered noise floors measure a lot like broad-band noise, and they may be uncorrelated, but they are absolutely not the same as simple random-amplitude noise (like you use for the dither signal prior to quantization).
I'm not aware of anyone doing this test before, but now it's been done and the point proved.
I am inclined to agree with the lunatic fringe here that it's the results of these very 'unnatural' processes which cause problems- they damage musical enjoyment, and they're part of why modern music is so commodified and worthless. The only serious mass media formats are prone to these problems. As a result, mass media itself seems less important- a self-destroying process. The sound alone contributes to a lessening of interest.
That said- anyone who had their hearing actually damaged by this effect would have to either live in an anechoic chamber or wear Walkman headphones every waking moment. The world is FULL of acoustic sounds- hell, traffic alone is an acoustic sound quite capable of 'recalibrating' the ear, and any face-to-face human contact often involves sound, which also 'recalibrates' the ear. So the alarmism is entirely foolish. Maybe Mark Levinson lives in an environment entirely free of any outside sound, I don't know :)
This profitability you speak of is income minus expenses.
Explain why they need 4 million dollars in operating expenses?
WHY is it right or proper to accept their notion of a suitable budget when it's that damn high? It seems to me like a very inappropriate figure.
If you put something out under the GPL, no recipient can possibly go into anything but cooperation with you. Anything they do with it, you can have back. That's the whole reason why people throw a fit that it's not BSD-like: there are people out there who can't understand cooperation and only want to take your stuff and go into competition with you and beat you.
The real concern is not how to restrict people from cooperating with you, the real concern is what else you can offer that's worth something- and how well you can budget, so you can stay in business on a shoestring. You CANNOT play the free software development game by capitalist rules.
Rather than figure out how to soak people for $80, figure out how you can continue operating despite only being paid 80 cents. Accept that you'll never, ever be able to corner the market, but you will be able to build relationships and that's just what you need to be doing. Barter stuff. Get creative. Most of all, build what you need to have, not what you think would win the market competition- because in the free software arena there ISN'T a competition.
You're all just fishermen in the fleet, and your efforts are worth something- but you can be replaced by the next fisherman along! The point is, the whole fleet is necessary- no individual fisherman 'wins' the 'race'.
I'm quite socialist in outlook as far as society in general goes, but I draw the line at maintaining businesses that are losers. Businesses aren't people, and I'm a lot more inclined to assert that a business should go tits-up without being bailed out by society, than I am to suggest that people should find no societal safety net. I see it as different- businesses are like a codified system of concepts and practices, and they are immortal in the human sense. They can end up so defined by their own practices that they can't change- I see Mandrake doing just this, building the begging for money into their 'corporate culture' and eventually, into their budget...
Running out of cash is fatal for a REASON. It means you totally misread the market and screwed up your projections- but worse, it illustrates a complete failure to operate with a reasonable break-even point, and a tendency to piss away loads of money wastefully. To bail that sort of situation out with money only encourages it.
Let Mandrake go- and if there's something special and great about it, let's see a new company arise from the ashes to do that. And if the special and great was nothing but dot-com talking-big foolishness, what's lost?
I don't care who you are, if you intend to do business you are playing with live ammo and if you blow your own foot off the world does NOT owe you a new foot.
I speak from experience- 8 years ago I wanted to build guitar effects pedals, and I didn't have the distribution. I accepted that, and fell back and regrouped. Now, there's the net, and UPS and the mail can take up a lot of the slack- and I'm doing the guitar boxes again, this time with balanced transformer outputs and capable of running into balanced XLR inputs (with an adapter cable I can throw in). I'm selling them for $100, have sold two already thanks to a good review in Tape Op, and you know what? I have parts to make more, have a handle on how many parts are needed for further inventory, am stocked up very well on some of the less expensive parts, and I'm not out of cash. I survived the sunk costs of getting the operation rolling, by being patient enough to do it one step at a time and belt-tightening, and in a practical sense I've already broken even and will not have to run out of cash, whatever happens.
It's not cool for Mandrake to keep doing this. For them to have run up so much debt is not okay, even if they're not doing stupid things now. Do you want them to keep on doing this? If you're a guitar or bass player and were torn between helping Mandrake and getting one of my boxes with your $100, do you really see it as the moral thing to give it to Mandrake even if you don't use their stuff, as opposed to giving it to me when I'd GIVE you something useful and tangible for that?
I suppose that depends on whether you believed Mandrake genuinely was fixing their problems and learning better. On the other hand, if they can do this, why should they?
It's pretty harmless for me to rant this way because I doubt many slashdotters are guitar players and potential customers. I really feel for the Xiph.org guys though- their work is WAY closer to the slashdotter heart, but for that very reason they know better than to rant, "You idiots! Give us that money instead, we make better use of it and we're more important than having one more linux dist!" I can rant that way because it's mostly hypothetical ;)
In fact, unless you're a guitar player and all that, I think you should take the $100 that me and Mandrake are hypothetically fighting over, and give it to Xiph :) I would myself- except that I'm not gonna run out of cash, let's have someone with disposable income who's not trying to launch a business do it ;)
Why?
Or do you mean specifically Open Source (tm) as opposed to Free Software (rm(s))? ;)
You're nuts to think artists get paid $2.50 an album from the RIAA. I don't think you'd find anyone in the industry who'd deny that 99.99% of the artists are never paid anything at all. Instead, they are sent into another recording studio with the label picking up the tab and charging it against future artist royalties.
Wait, something wrong there, let's try rephrasing it. "If you can't believe a lawyer about..." no. Um...
I'll say this, though, I like his point #4. I approve of working hard and I approve of thrift, and I can see how this is not rewarded by our society though I strongly disagree with his notions of how society is to be fixed.
I also like #5, wanting to punish corporate crime more severely. Funny how Ben's OTHER opinions indicate that on the other hand, he wants the corporate upper class to have more money, to be able to wield it in society and in the legal arena more freely, and that he wants them to leave it all to their children, furthering the steady shift from class society to flat-out caste system. According to Ben, if you ARE in the wealth caste, at all costs you should be protected from the lower classes using society's mechanisms to get a share. Oh, but if you are naughty you should be punished! Assuming you don't simply use your money and power to evade justice, which of course you will, what else would you do?
Never trust a man who is both a lawyer AND a game show host. QED ;)
What happened there was more complicated: Ferdinand Porsche had always been hot for a 'people's car', way before Hitler. He came up with the Volkswagen design for personal reasons, because it was the car he most wanted to build, the coolest thing he could think of.
Hitler was hot to industrialize Germany- very few people owned cars, and he wanted to build roads, get lots of Germans into cars, basically modernize the country. This too was a personal reason- German industrialists did not always believe Hitler when he wanted 'cheap people's' this and that, but they learned the hard way.
Porsche had to bid for the contract to be the one to build the 'people's car' and he did it by selling Hitler on the Volkswagen design with an amazing half-jargon half-layman spiel which basically convinced Hitler that the future VW was a brilliant, unorthodox, superior design (which it was, as they learned when trying to improve it later)
Having secured Hitler's support, Porsche then totally ignored everything in politics and got back to his work- this would be the moral lapse, even though he did not actively support the Nazis. Things would happen, like Porsche getting a letter saying "The Fuehrer wishes the greatest German auto designer to become a German citizen" and shrugging and saying (translated) "Well, I suppose nothing can be done about it- see that this is taken care of" and ignoring politics again. Passive support and failing to resist in any way.
Hitler never got any Volkswagens built for the German people- the plant was bombed and the economy collapsed. The VW plant fell into the hands of the British, whose opinion of the matter was, "this is a great car, these are great workers and designers who aren't responsible for the sins of their leaders, this plant belongs to the German people and we are here to see that it is returned to them, and flourishes". With their determined support, the first VWs started coming out in spite of terrible supply shortages, technical problems (like shattering torsion bars in the suspensions) were solved, and the story of the VW was underway no thanks to Hitler (it wasn't his idea, it was Porsche's, it just played into his populist tendencies)
I have this very neat book, 'Small Wonder', about it all...
It's like, if you don't do what Microsoft wants, on some level they will throw a fit- their basic response is screaming and ranting like a two-year old. They are not in the slightest bit interested about why you might want something non-Microsoft- not on an emotional level- their only real interest is in making you behave according to what they want, and you are to succeed and thrive on THEIR terms and in the way they expect. This is limiting.
Belluzzo seems more inclined to be inquisitive- more likely to figure out what a customer's real terms are. That does not mean that he has more clout or power than Microsoft, because Microsoft's approach is geared to a straight power struggle in which they can generally win by sheer force. Belluzzo is more likely to win people's loyalty, and build relationships.
It's rather telling that the qualities of building loyalty and relationships are sorely devalued in modern-day corporate capitalism: in fact, the way things work today, Belluzzo's skills are 'worthless'. Yet at the same time this same value system is producing a self-destructive downward spiral of reduced functionality (see the thread on worsening consumer electronics!) which is unstoppable under the corporate capitalist 'rules', and to a point will continue to be rewarded just as, to a point, the dot-com excess was rewarded.
Belluzzo apparently adheres to an older school- one that has difficulty competing in the winner-take-everything corporate capitalist arena, but which has hidden advantages.
Basically, this is the guy who winds up with all your customers- when you push the profit motive too far and slip up. You can go corporate Darwinist and produce junk and rig the market so there's no choice and get yourself in an IBM-like position where you're the only option, but all this really does is starve potential competitors of the ability to thrive with largish marketshares. Instead they become like Apple, thriving with a splinter. When you slip up, or your contempt for your customers becomes too great, guys like Belluzzo are there building loyalties and relationships and they are positioned to capitalize on your mistakes.
The next guy who comes around leveraging the market and jumping up and down on tables screaming when he doesn't get his way- that guy might well grab those customers away from Belluzzo again. But not for long- only until he too screws up.
I'm hoping to get up and running on MacOSX in January, and undertake the fairly major task of porting the software and revising it to the new environment. If I can do that, the resulting still-GPLed software will be more easily ported to Linux.
One of the Linux DAW projects (I forget which) once asked me to teach them about dithering and why it mattered. I can only say that if the tendency of Linux audio software to be consumer-level 16-bit stuff bugs you, I can't do anything about that directly but I will say this again- I'm always ready to drop everything and help out a Linux audio project with this stuff. I know what the professional studios and mastering houses require, in terms of resolution handling, and what kind of internal bussing and processing are required. For instance, Pro Tools suffers badly simply because all internal processing involves repeated truncation to 24 bit linear, and the 2-buss requires submixes that themselves involve more truncation. You wouldn't be able to hear any of it as just one stage (maybe sense it vaguely) but it's cumulative.
I can say that and expound about how TPDF decorrelates additional moments of distortion but I haven't got a clue how to code GTK interfaces or anything like that :) it's all a matter of what you devote time to doing, I guess. But I wanted to take a moment to say again that if anyone wishes to add dither and noise shaping to their Linux audio project, I'd love to help teach this stuff...
If you want mastering (really) you'd probably be talking Sonic Solutions, or Sadie. There is good reason to consider doing work towards a turnkey Linux mastering system- PC-based mastering systems are often ALREADY turn-key, for instance Sadie (I forget the odd capitalisation they like). Other systems like Pro Tools (known as Alsihad in real pro circles, because it has major sonic problems due to poor internal resolution handling and expensive, proprietary, inferior converters) or Ensoniq Paris (no longer being made) are also effectively turnkey systems.
Get stuff working with serious hardware, like RME Hammerfall cards, and there is every reason to expect good results. You may not get the 'Guitar Center' crowd, but many pro audio people are pretty clueful about what they actually need. Downside: they'll know what they need better than you. In fact, if you're not also a pro audio nerd, sound engineer, mastering geek etc. you haven't a hope of writing relevant software.
This would explain why Microsoft are not actively combating 'Mono'. Why fight what you can co-opt? MS are not stupid. They have these guys doing their work for them, and they don't even have to pay 'em. Why stop them?
What difference would it make if they publically stated something? PR releases aren't necessarily legally binding. And look who you're dealing with...