An IRC client called Diplomat has done this at least since 1998. Looks like the site is gone now, but can still be found using the way back machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.universe.c om
FSF, if anyone, should understand what it means to put their work under the GPL license. They are giving away a whole lot of rights to their work, including the right to name products based on that work.
Sounds like you have not understood the concept of scientific education. The point of it is _not_ to get you ready, or give you the skills for the job market. The point is to give you the skills needed in scientific work. That is, instead of teaching you to know the newest buzzword programming language, all the available protocols, or libraries, you are being tought to understand the underlying concepts, and to give them a sound firm basis. To give you the tools to analyze and reason about the concepts.
There is a difference between _knowing_ something, and _understanding_ something. When you know how to do something well, you are good in a craft. When you _understand_ why doing something one way is good, and in another way is bad (versus just knowing based on experience that one way works well, and the other works poorly), you are looking from a scientific point of view.
Most programmers excel in the crafty way, and ignore the science. You could say: So what, it works the way we are doing it. At the same time everyone is complaining about how badly software works, that they are full of bugs, security holes, etc..
Anyone saying the current trend in software development is in any way mature is just being ignorant. Open source development, where you have 1000 people fixing bugs in a cvs server helps make great products that work fairly well. But the bugs should not have been there in the first place! And you would rather be able to do it with the same quality without needing the 1000 people watching after you.
This is where the science comes in. It is trying to understand how we could program (or whatever activity you are doing) better, why those bugs happen, what we could do to stop them from happening in the first place. How we could automate things, why reuse works so poorly that we need 100 different ad hoc solutions for each problem, etc.
It seems there are many people who go through colleges and universities, who miss the point of what is being tought, and why it is being tought. This makes people who are saying: It was all a waste - we didn't learn anything. If you were looking to learn the newest widgets needed a job world, I'm sure you were dissapointed, and likely even resisted learning the stuff that was 'theoretical - nothing to do with real world - waste". Well, based on history, most of that waste will be the central concepts in 10-50 years, when the industry catches up.
Without science we'd still have blacksmiths do all our pots one at a time, each one working a bit differently from the previous. Without science, in 50 years, we'd still be programming software with the same 'ad hoc' methods we are using today.
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An IRC client called Diplomat has done this at least since 1998. Looks like the site is gone now, but can still be found using the way back machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.universe.c om
FSF, if anyone, should understand what it means to put their work under the GPL license. They are giving away a whole lot of rights to their work, including the right to name products based on that work.
Sounds like you have not understood the concept of scientific education. The point of it is _not_ to get you ready, or give you the skills for the job market. The point is to give you the skills needed in scientific work. That is, instead of teaching you to know the newest buzzword programming language, all the available protocols, or libraries, you are being tought to understand the underlying concepts, and to give them a sound firm basis. To give you the tools to analyze and reason about the concepts.
There is a difference between _knowing_ something, and _understanding_ something. When you know how to do something well, you are good in a craft. When you _understand_ why doing something one way is good, and in another way is bad (versus just knowing based on experience that one way works well, and the other works poorly), you are looking from a scientific point of view.
Most programmers excel in the crafty way, and ignore the science. You could say: So what, it works the way we are doing it. At the same time everyone is complaining about how badly software works, that they are full of bugs, security holes, etc..
Anyone saying the current trend in software development is in any way mature is just being ignorant. Open source development, where you have 1000 people fixing bugs in a cvs server helps make great products that work fairly well. But the bugs should not have been there in the first place! And you would rather be able to do it with the same quality without needing the 1000 people watching after you.
This is where the science comes in. It is trying to understand how we could program (or whatever activity you are doing) better, why those bugs happen, what we could do to stop them from happening in the first place. How we could automate things, why reuse works so poorly that we need 100 different ad hoc solutions for each problem, etc.
It seems there are many people who go through colleges and universities, who miss the point of what is being tought, and why it is being tought. This makes people who are saying: It was all a waste - we didn't learn anything. If you were looking to learn the newest widgets needed a job world, I'm sure you were dissapointed, and likely even resisted learning the stuff that was 'theoretical - nothing to do with real world - waste". Well, based on history, most of that waste will be the central concepts in 10-50 years, when the industry catches up.
Without science we'd still have blacksmiths do all our pots one at a time, each one working a bit differently from the previous. Without science, in 50 years, we'd still be programming software with the same 'ad hoc' methods we are using today.