"Thousands of people have used updates I've built; nobody has ever emailed to ask 'who are you, and why should I trust you?'"
Does the FreeBSD community recommend your site to others as a source of FreeBSD binaries? Are you generally known within the community. I'm willing to assume that you are not unknown to those who use your services, and have thus garnered a reasonable sense of trust over time.
If you were to modify the source maliciously and distribute binaries based on that malicious source, you would be found out soon enough and shunned from the community. You would no longer be trusted, and your binaries would all but cease to be distributed (except as evidence).
There is no 100% security against malice, both in Open Source and proprietary software. However, Open Source software provides the benefit of the scientific peer review process. Any programmer anywhere in the world has the potential to discover and fix these problems.
With closed source software, you are entirely at the mercy of a few highly stressed people to review each other's code. Since these people are working for the same company, they probably just trust each other and don't bother reviewing each other (with occasional exceptions within some companies).
The Linux TCP wrappers was (not too long ago) victimized in this way, but the peer review process caught it and removed it almost instantly. If this had happened to a proprietary operating system, it probably wouldn't have been found for a very long time.
"It is rather regrettable that justified or not, anything related to certain companies, ideas or processes is mostly automatically shunned and villified just at the mention of it."
Have you not read Microsoft's Halloween Documents? They specifically state that Microsoft can harm Linux most effectively with software patents. Every time Microsoft gains another software patent (and they are all completely unworthy of patent status), it gains another weapon with which to deny market access to Linux.
Since we know that Microsoft's end goal is the destruction of Linux, we are absolutely right to be highly skeptical of everything Microsoft does.
"For that will need to be done by tax paying citizens taking up torches and pitchforks and decending upon Washington in an orgy of blood lust. Then maybe we might see Congress decide to "review" the patent application process."
That won't happen. For the average citizen to revolt against Congress, some severe problem must exist that directly and adversely affects the citizen.
Patent problems only affect inventors, not consumers. The United States predominately consists of consumers who are not directly affected by patents one way or the other. Hence they don't care one bit about patent problems.
If you sat them down and explained to them, perhaps in terms even a child could understand, they would shrug their shoulders and wonder what the big deal is. The vast majority are completely uncaring about what they perceive to be not their problem. Don't count on them to even understand, much less care.
Something has changed. This customer will not have to go out of his way to get Qt/KDE onto his systems, as Perens LLC will make sure that they are preloaded.
We all should be painfully aware of the power of preloads vs. the weakness of non-preloads. All desktop systems should be have both GNOME and KDE preloaded and ready, as neither desktop has a lock on desirable applications, and both desktops have higly useful applications.
The only predictable result of not doing so is a large segment of somewhat pissed users who will claim that Linux is hard because it makes users work too hard to get the basic libraries in place for the applications they want to run.
"It's incompatable with the STL. But not standard C++."
I use the STL with Qt on both Linux and Windows, compiled with Borland's free command line compiler. Stay away from Visual C++ and you'll get excellent code compatibility between gcc and Borland's compiler (the "long long" datatype being noticeable absent from Borland), and you'll be able to use the STL.
"I ask anyone who's developed in either/both of GTK/Qt, and even those with Win32 experience. What advantages does Qt have over the other choices?"
I haven't programmed directly in the Win32 API beyond making a few calls from VB (back when I was forced to use that steaming pile...), but the general gist is that it is comparable to Xlib (which I have used a lot in the last year or so). Xlib, and therefore Win32 API, are quite painful to use extensively. Qt is light years easier and friendlier to use than either of the raw APIs mentioned above.
I had started GUI programming under Linux with GTK+. I used it (and it's C++ counterpart called GTK--, which was the whole reason I learned C++) as much as I could for a couple years before discovering Qt. I have been a Qt programmer since late 1998/early 1999 (or whenever version 1.44 was mainstream).
Qt, with its support applications (Qt Designer being the cream of the crop); its incredible documentation; and it's thoroughly well-designed API, was a dramatic step forward from GTK+/GTK--. It is, all by itself, a compelling reason to learn C++ if you don't already know it.
The point that Joel was making was to not apply for every job that his company is offering. He wasn't saying that you shouldn't send a hundred resumes to a hundred different companies. He was saying that if his company has 100 job openings, don't apply for them all. It makes you look desperate, which is not flattering to you. If you look desperate, then you're probably lying on your resume in order to get -anything-. Perceived liars don't get job interviews.
I live in the sticks where satellite is currently the only possible form of broadband available, despite living less than five miles from a local ISP. Wireless is still not an option because of the tall hills and signficant woodage between me and the ISP (and Mandrake dies hard whenever I plug in my USB wireless cards).
I had three separate dialup accounts (one for each person in the house), which ran between $40-$60 a month depending on the ISP.
The initial $200 setup fee was waived by DirecWay both for the initial one-way installation (which cost me $200 for the equipment), and the two-way DW 4000 upgrade (which cost me $400 just for the transmitter).
I had to commit to a year of service with the two-way, and it required a Windows box to act as the household Internet server. The Windows-based server reduced the satellite capabilities by roughly 25-30 percent over what it provided directly to the Windows machine. It is excruciatingly painful under these circumstances, which is why I had cancelled it a year ago (after my contract expired).
I recently signed back up after finding out about the DW 6000 (which has yet to arrive), and after my dialup provider had one outage too many. The cost of finding another dialup provider for three dialup connections was just a few dollars short of the satellite service.
The service with the DW 6000 is on a monthly billing cycle (no long term commitments), and I get a $100 rebate when I send back my current DW 4000 modems (gladly!). I would have gotten another $100 rebate if I agreed to the 15-month commitment (I will never do such a foolish thing as getting locked into a multi-month agreement again). I pay $65/month since I own the hardware outright.
I visit a small number web sites, so most images are cached in Konqueror. Site like Slashdot load faily quick, though the latency is definitely noticable. I unplug everything during thunderstorms, so signal interference from storms in a non-issue. I have maintained an 84 signal strength in a blizzard (30+ is the minumum needed), and the run of the mill local heavy rains and snow have had zero effect on my signal.
My largest single-session downloads have been the SUN JDK + docs (~50 megs) and FlightGear (78 megs). I have never been FAP'd, as I don't download ISOs (I buy all my distributions directly from Mandrake). I download lots of little things, usually under a meg each, and only a few large things over 10 megs.
My only problems stem from that fuckin' Windows Box(TM) acting (poorly) as the gateway. This will go away when the DW 6000 arrives. I haven't tried in in the context of a VPN (my workplace uses a Symantec VPN, which I don't think is Linux compatible), but that would just be icing on the cake rather than an actual need. I also don't play online games, so that's not a problem.
The bottom line is that the satellite is a great deal for a family of three sharing the connection. Except for that Fuckin' Windows Box(TM), it beats dialup by a wide margin for my house.
"There may be some of that, I suppose, but speaking as someone who is strongly advocating a rewrite for a new version, it's also a matter of just seeing vastly better ways of doing things now that you've had the benefit of the experience of v1.0."
I've done (and still do) regular rewrites. In my case, it frequently ends up being rewritten because Management didn't accept my initial recommendations on development and/or back-end technology. Their chosen technology, which I am compelled to use, fails to adapt to easily foreseen circumstances and I have to rewrite my stuff to target the new technology.
I can't blame them in the short run, though (even if the long run is certainly going to be very painful), as they had to get -something- up and running in just a few weeks, and the really bad technology was the only thing that was close enough to the desired target functionality to meet the deadline.
Sometimes I rewrite old applications because they cannot possibly adapt to desired criteria or just perform so badly that they just scream for a redesign. All my existing VB apps fall into this category.
Even without reviewing the specific alleged violations, one can be fairly sure that the allegations have merit when the alleged violator's major response is to attack the license under which the original software is distributed.
"I guess considering the current government is relatively fiscally socialist (yes, the Likud gov't is more to the left than most people think) they could probably find better use for the money such as education, health care or other emergency medical services that are unfortunately needed due to the recent situation."
Exactly. That 120 million used to just line Microsoft's bank vaults. Perhaps a bit of it trickled back to the local economy, but rest assured the vast majority of it went directly to Redmond.
Now the vast majority of it will make it back into the local economy.
"Again, I ask, with all honesty, just how do products like these benefit the OS community;"
The benefits are tangential but important. As an OSS developer, the ones that immediately spring to mind:
1) It lends the OSS development model credibility in the eyes of the business community; this helps achieve widespread use of OSS software, the benefits of which are self-evident.
2) A big motivator for OSS development is recognition for one's work. Companies that use OSS as a basis for commercial products, and then provide the source for the derived products, are giving recognition that the OSS software is of high quality. This is a big ego boost that encourages further development.
3) OSS developers can put it on their resumes to show concrete examples of their skills. My early OSS projects, long before OSS was formalized, were the catalyst that landed my current job (which I've had for just over 2 1/2 years).
"my understanding is that the cost for the source simply can't be more than the cost for the program."
The parent was correct. The free for providing the source cannot exceed the costs for physically transferring the source. See GPL section 3b:
" b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;..."
However, I may have discovered a loophole that allows the charges to be extremely high, and here it is:
The GPL does not state that fees cannot exceed the cost of physically distributing that copy of the source, but merely that the fee cannot exceed the cost of source distribution.
Suppose your primary method of source distribution is Internet based and you maintain your own T3 (for example). You could theoretically and arbitrarily assign a large portion of the total T3 maintenance cost to providing bandwidth for source distribution for all the programs you provide in binary-only form.
Then you provide your binaries with the written offer for the source, but you charge each recipient, for each source package, the assigned costs of maintaining your T3. This can easily run into thousands of dollars per source package.
Common sense would suggest that the intent of the GPL applies not to your cost to provide source as a whole, but the cost of transferring just that one copy of the source. However, the GPL is somewhat ambiguous in that regard.
"If that's too much work, get some caffeine pills and figure out how many equal one cup of coffee."
The packaging on Vivarin and the generic clones all say that one pill is the equivilent to one cup of coffee.
I agree with those who say that cold turkey is the only way to go. I was a heavy Mt. Dew drinker for years, with all the psychological ups and downs that go with it.
I decided to just stop drinking soda just because of the high caloric content. An interesting, and I hoped at the time predictable, side effect of stopping was that the alertness ups and down levelled out after a couple weeks.
I still like to reach for something to drink when I work, so I freeze a large bottle of water at night and take it to work in the morning. That gives me something to reach for when I'm thirsty (for all the smart-asses: yes, the ice melts during the course of the day). I don't miss soda one bit anymore.
For a while after not drinking soda, I had used caffeine pills (one per day in the morning). The day came when I realized I had forgotten to take any for the entire week.
I never got headaches for not drinking soda, so I wasn't addicted, but I still think just stopping cold is the best approach.
I've seen my father, a smoker for about 40 years and a self-confessed addict, decide last Christmas that he was just going to stop smoking cold -- and succeed. He had quit gradually a dozen times before, but this time it worked.
"Harsh as it may sound, perhaps it would be better if they couldn't get over having SCO on their resume."
That won't work. If SCO employees can't find other jobs because they currently work at SCO, then they will realize that they are in an all-or-nothing situation. If they fail, they are ruined. That means their entire future depends upon SCO winning.
SCO is in a desperate situation, and desperate people do desperate things. SCO employees would then have nothing to lose by lying, cheating, stealing, threatening, and all forms of crime just to make sure they are not utterly ruined.
A better alternative would be for other companies to entice SCO employees away from SCO. Without employees, SCO dies faster than is already evident. However, SCO employees are probably under an employment contract that requires them to play or pay.
"Both Nautilus and Konqueror are a real PITA (one crashes and both require passwords to be entered for each and every directory -- even when the passwords are 'saved')."
I've been a big KDE fan since about the 1999/2000 time frame. Konqueror is a wonderful piece of work, and I can't live without it. However, the smb:// IOSlave is unreliable at best (and practically useless most of the time).
This has been a sore spot for a long time. Fortunately I can at least use LinNeighborhood to mount the shares and then use them from Konqueror. I'm not knocking the work that has gone into the IOSlave (I'm very happy that someone is at least working on it), despite whining about it here, but I would have thought that it would have been fixed long ago.
There is another usability issue I can't believe still exists within Konqueror (those people have done a miraculous job, so I have very high expectations). When I am logged in as normal user and then try to move files from my user account to another user's account (or vice-versa) on my machine (even if the other user is myself under a different account), Konqueror just won't allow it (which is mostly good). A better behavior would be to popup a kdesu window and ask for password authentication to allow the operation.
Your nit about saved passwords not really being saved is also a good one. They are only saved for that session, but are promptly forgotten when Konqueror is shut down.
Konqueror is mostly a dream come true for me, but there are several important small to medium issue that need to be addressed.
As much as I thought Kaplan was a raging idiot for his DVD reasoning, this one is not so clear cut. The 11th District appeals court decision that adding a search engine on a DVD collection targets a new product at a new market rather than just being a revision is shakey.
The same people who would order the collection in printed form with a printed searchable index would probably prefer to have the collection in electronic form with an electronically searchable index. To me that is the same market.
Since adding a printed searchable index to an existing publication is considered a revision, and not a new product, and a CD collection that retains the exact same context as its original printed version is also considered to be a mere revision, then I have to agree with Kaplan that adding an electronically searchable index to a CD collection that retains the same context as the original printed version is also just a mere revision.
"And I have to ask, what makes him seem like a caring guy? The fact that he's willing to risk the nest egg and lifestyle that his disabled wife is depending on to make a fast buck?"
No, that makes him stupid (read my original post). He seemes genuinely caring because he seems to want to believe the best in (non-governmental) people.
Don't misinterpret my compassion for his situation as an excuse for his idiocy. The point that my analogy was trying to make, though, is that idiocy on the victim's part does not excuse fraud on the perpetrator's part. Neither does greed on the victim's part excuse fraud on the perpetrator's part.
If some business had sold him $320,000 in products that he didn't actually want or need, but didn't mislead him as to what the products did, then this guy would be 100% at fault for the whole thing. But fraud changes the balance of blame.
"Most people are happy with a 4 year old system that lets them check their e-mail, save the pictures people send them, view web pages, and maybe word processing and a spreadsheet."
There are a LOT of people in this situation, and they are the perfect candidates for using Linux. They have a fixed set of needs. Give them a preinstalled and preconfigured Linux box, and they treat it like a fixed-function appliance.
I'll skip the long details, but my 57 year-old mother got so fed up with Windows' unreliability back in 2000 that she pestered me for weeks to wipe Windows and install Linux. I'd been running it for years and raving to her about its stability and reliability, so she was ready.
Her needs were and are simple. She wants web access for online purchases, she wants email, and she wants word processing. She also wants my nephew to be able to use her computer to play the games that I have on my computer.
I did the backup Windows data/install Linux/restore Windows data to Linux routine with Mandrake 9.0, configured her icons, set up her Internet connection and showed her how to activate it, transferred her email to Mozilla (at her request; she likes the all-in-one feature of Mozilla), showed her how to use AbiWord (which she loves) and put the necessary icons on her desktop.
After a few brief explanations on where Linux was different from Windows (in terms that were useful to her) and how that benefitted her, she was able to use Mandrake for her everyday tasks.
I keep intending to upgrade her to Mandrake 9.1 (and now 9.2) because the old sound driver from Mandrake 9.0 is flakey, but I keep forgetting to do it. Her system is 100% reliable for her, and Mandrake 9.0 is still chugging along now as it was back in 2000.
I haven't had to deal with and computer problems on her system, while my dad's Windows system still needs frequent babysitting. If Yahoo Messenger weren't using a proprietary audio CODED, but used something like Ogg Vorbis instead, he would dump Windows in a heartbeat. He used to be a die-hard Windows user, but even he has finally been broken by Microsoft. He just has that one application.
Slashdot Mirror
"Thousands of people have used updates I've built; nobody has ever emailed to ask 'who are you, and why should I trust you?'"
Does the FreeBSD community recommend your site to others as a source of FreeBSD binaries? Are you generally known within the community. I'm willing to assume that you are not unknown to those who use your services, and have thus garnered a reasonable sense of trust over time.
If you were to modify the source maliciously and distribute binaries based on that malicious source, you would be found out soon enough and shunned from the community. You would no longer be trusted, and your binaries would all but cease to be distributed (except as evidence).
There is no 100% security against malice, both in Open Source and proprietary software. However, Open Source software provides the benefit of the scientific peer review process. Any programmer anywhere in the world has the potential to discover and fix these problems.
With closed source software, you are entirely at the mercy of a few highly stressed people to review each other's code. Since these people are working for the same company, they probably just trust each other and don't bother reviewing each other (with occasional exceptions within some companies).
The Linux TCP wrappers was (not too long ago) victimized in this way, but the peer review process caught it and removed it almost instantly. If this had happened to a proprietary operating system, it probably wouldn't have been found for a very long time.
"It is rather regrettable that justified or not, anything related to certain companies, ideas or processes is mostly automatically shunned and villified just at the mention of it."
Have you not read Microsoft's Halloween Documents? They specifically state that Microsoft can harm Linux most effectively with software patents. Every time Microsoft gains another software patent (and they are all completely unworthy of patent status), it gains another weapon with which to deny market access to Linux.
Since we know that Microsoft's end goal is the destruction of Linux, we are absolutely right to be highly skeptical of everything Microsoft does.
"They were a Linux vendor, how well are they 'backing' what they have sold in the past?"
But they only sell Unix; Linux Is Not UniX, so they think they have an excuse. Oops, they're claiming that Linux -is- Unix. So much for that excuse.
"For that will need to be done by tax paying citizens taking up torches and pitchforks and decending upon Washington in an orgy of blood lust. Then maybe we might see Congress decide to "review" the patent application process."
That won't happen. For the average citizen to revolt against Congress, some severe problem must exist that directly and adversely affects the citizen.
Patent problems only affect inventors, not consumers. The United States predominately consists of consumers who are not directly affected by patents one way or the other. Hence they don't care one bit about patent problems.
If you sat them down and explained to them, perhaps in terms even a child could understand, they would shrug their shoulders and wonder what the big deal is. The vast majority are completely uncaring about what they perceive to be not their problem. Don't count on them to even understand, much less care.
"The temporary names are ununtrium and ununpentium [emphasis added] until the experiment has been duplicated and verified in another lab."
Or until Intel sues for using the name "pentium" in any form of communication without paying a fine to Intel.
"What is this trick? Miss-direction."
We should get her together with Miss-match, and charge admission.
"So really, nothing has changed."
Something has changed. This customer will not have to go out of his way to get Qt/KDE onto his systems, as Perens LLC will make sure that they are preloaded.
We all should be painfully aware of the power of preloads vs. the weakness of non-preloads. All desktop systems should be have both GNOME and KDE preloaded and ready, as neither desktop has a lock on desirable applications, and both desktops have higly useful applications.
The only predictable result of not doing so is a large segment of somewhat pissed users who will claim that Linux is hard because it makes users work too hard to get the basic libraries in place for the applications they want to run.
"Anyway, is it possible to pass a string to a Qt class and have is implicitly changed to a QString?"
You can pass a character array to a Qt class that expects a QString, and the conversion from (char *) to (QString) will occur automatically.
"It's incompatable with the STL. But not standard C++."
I use the STL with Qt on both Linux and Windows, compiled with Borland's free command line compiler. Stay away from Visual C++ and you'll get excellent code compatibility between gcc and Borland's compiler (the "long long" datatype being noticeable absent from Borland), and you'll be able to use the STL.
"I ask anyone who's developed in either/both of GTK/Qt, and even those with Win32 experience. What advantages does Qt have over the other choices?"
I haven't programmed directly in the Win32 API beyond making a few calls from VB (back when I was forced to use that steaming pile...), but the general gist is that it is comparable to Xlib (which I have used a lot in the last year or so). Xlib, and therefore Win32 API, are quite painful to use extensively. Qt is light years easier and friendlier to use than either of the raw APIs mentioned above.
I had started GUI programming under Linux with GTK+. I used it (and it's C++ counterpart called GTK--, which was the whole reason I learned C++) as much as I could for a couple years before discovering Qt. I have been a Qt programmer since late 1998/early 1999 (or whenever version 1.44 was mainstream).
Qt, with its support applications (Qt Designer being the cream of the crop); its incredible documentation; and it's thoroughly well-designed API, was a dramatic step forward from GTK+/GTK--. It is, all by itself, a compelling reason to learn C++ if you don't already know it.
The point that Joel was making was to not apply for every job that his company is offering. He wasn't saying that you shouldn't send a hundred resumes to a hundred different companies. He was saying that if his company has 100 job openings, don't apply for them all. It makes you look desperate, which is not flattering to you. If you look desperate, then you're probably lying on your resume in order to get -anything-. Perceived liars don't get job interviews.
I live in the sticks where satellite is currently the only possible form of broadband available, despite living less than five miles from a local ISP. Wireless is still not an option because of the tall hills and signficant woodage between me and the ISP (and Mandrake dies hard whenever I plug in my USB wireless cards).
I had three separate dialup accounts (one for each person in the house), which ran between $40-$60 a month depending on the ISP.
The initial $200 setup fee was waived by DirecWay both for the initial one-way installation (which cost me $200 for the equipment), and the two-way DW 4000 upgrade (which cost me $400 just for the transmitter).
I had to commit to a year of service with the two-way, and it required a Windows box to act as the household Internet server. The Windows-based server reduced the satellite capabilities by roughly 25-30 percent over what it provided directly to the Windows machine. It is excruciatingly painful under these circumstances, which is why I had cancelled it a year ago (after my contract expired).
I recently signed back up after finding out about the DW 6000 (which has yet to arrive), and after my dialup provider had one outage too many. The cost of finding another dialup provider for three dialup connections was just a few dollars short of the satellite service.
The service with the DW 6000 is on a monthly billing cycle (no long term commitments), and I get a $100 rebate when I send back my current DW 4000 modems (gladly!). I would have gotten another $100 rebate if I agreed to the 15-month commitment (I will never do such a foolish thing as getting locked into a multi-month agreement again). I pay $65/month since I own the hardware outright.
I visit a small number web sites, so most images are cached in Konqueror. Site like Slashdot load faily quick, though the latency is definitely noticable. I unplug everything during thunderstorms, so signal interference from storms in a non-issue. I have maintained an 84 signal strength in a blizzard (30+ is the minumum needed), and the run of the mill local heavy rains and snow have had zero effect on my signal.
My largest single-session downloads have been the SUN JDK + docs (~50 megs) and FlightGear (78 megs). I have never been FAP'd, as I don't download ISOs (I buy all my distributions directly from Mandrake). I download lots of little things, usually under a meg each, and only a few large things over 10 megs.
My only problems stem from that fuckin' Windows Box(TM) acting (poorly) as the gateway. This will go away when the DW 6000 arrives. I haven't tried in in the context of a VPN (my workplace uses a Symantec VPN, which I don't think is Linux compatible), but that would just be icing on the cake rather than an actual need. I also don't play online games, so that's not a problem.
The bottom line is that the satellite is a great deal for a family of three sharing the connection. Except for that Fuckin' Windows Box(TM), it beats dialup by a wide margin for my house.
"There may be some of that, I suppose, but speaking as someone who is strongly advocating a rewrite for a new version, it's also a matter of just seeing vastly better ways of doing things now that you've had the benefit of the experience of v1.0."
I've done (and still do) regular rewrites. In my case, it frequently ends up being rewritten because Management didn't accept my initial recommendations on development and/or back-end technology. Their chosen technology, which I am compelled to use, fails to adapt to easily foreseen circumstances and I have to rewrite my stuff to target the new technology.
I can't blame them in the short run, though (even if the long run is certainly going to be very painful), as they had to get -something- up and running in just a few weeks, and the really bad technology was the only thing that was close enough to the desired target functionality to meet the deadline.
Sometimes I rewrite old applications because they cannot possibly adapt to desired criteria or just perform so badly that they just scream for a redesign. All my existing VB apps fall into this category.
Even without reviewing the specific alleged violations, one can be fairly sure that the allegations have merit when the alleged violator's major response is to attack the license under which the original software is distributed.
"If it does not find somebody on the first pass then their will be no need for the second as it will crush them into oblivion."
Look at the bottom of that picture. It may suck for rescuing people, but it would make a killer snowplow for those of us who live in the sticks.
"I guess considering the current government is relatively fiscally socialist (yes, the Likud gov't is more to the left than most people think) they could probably find better use for the money such as education, health care or other emergency medical services that are unfortunately needed due to the recent situation."
Exactly. That 120 million used to just line Microsoft's bank vaults. Perhaps a bit of it trickled back to the local economy, but rest assured the vast majority of it went directly to Redmond.
Now the vast majority of it will make it back into the local economy.
"Again, I ask, with all honesty, just how do products like these benefit the OS community;"
The benefits are tangential but important. As an OSS developer, the ones that immediately spring to mind:
1) It lends the OSS development model credibility in the eyes of the business community; this helps achieve widespread use of OSS software, the benefits of which are self-evident.
2) A big motivator for OSS development is recognition for one's work. Companies that use OSS as a basis for commercial products, and then provide the source for the derived products, are giving recognition that the OSS software is of high quality. This is a big ego boost that encourages further development.
3) OSS developers can put it on their resumes to show concrete examples of their skills. My early OSS projects, long before OSS was formalized, were the catalyst that landed my current job (which I've had for just over 2 1/2 years).
I'm sure others can contribute more.
"my understanding is that the cost for the source simply can't be more than the cost for the program."
The parent was correct. The free for providing the source cannot exceed the costs for physically transferring the source. See GPL section 3b:
" b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;..."
However, I may have discovered a loophole that allows the charges to be extremely high, and here it is:
The GPL does not state that fees cannot exceed the cost of physically distributing that copy of the source, but merely that the fee cannot exceed the cost of source distribution.
Suppose your primary method of source distribution is Internet based and you maintain your own T3 (for example). You could theoretically and arbitrarily assign a large portion of the total T3 maintenance cost to providing bandwidth for source distribution for all the programs you provide in binary-only form.
Then you provide your binaries with the written offer for the source, but you charge each recipient, for each source package, the assigned costs of maintaining your T3. This can easily run into thousands of dollars per source package.
Common sense would suggest that the intent of the GPL applies not to your cost to provide source as a whole, but the cost of transferring just that one copy of the source. However, the GPL is somewhat ambiguous in that regard.
"If that's too much work, get some caffeine pills and figure out how many equal one cup of coffee."
The packaging on Vivarin and the generic clones all say that one pill is the equivilent to one cup of coffee.
I agree with those who say that cold turkey is the only way to go. I was a heavy Mt. Dew drinker for years, with all the psychological ups and downs that go with it.
I decided to just stop drinking soda just because of the high caloric content. An interesting, and I hoped at the time predictable, side effect of stopping was that the alertness ups and down levelled out after a couple weeks.
I still like to reach for something to drink when I work, so I freeze a large bottle of water at night and take it to work in the morning. That gives me something to reach for when I'm thirsty (for all the smart-asses: yes, the ice melts during the course of the day). I don't miss soda one bit anymore.
For a while after not drinking soda, I had used caffeine pills (one per day in the morning). The day came when I realized I had forgotten to take any for the entire week.
I never got headaches for not drinking soda, so I wasn't addicted, but I still think just stopping cold is the best approach.
I've seen my father, a smoker for about 40 years and a self-confessed addict, decide last Christmas that he was just going to stop smoking cold -- and succeed. He had quit gradually a dozen times before, but this time it worked.
"Harsh as it may sound, perhaps it would be better if they couldn't get over having SCO on their resume."
That won't work. If SCO employees can't find other jobs because they currently work at SCO, then they will realize that they are in an all-or-nothing situation. If they fail, they are ruined. That means their entire future depends upon SCO winning.
SCO is in a desperate situation, and desperate people do desperate things. SCO employees would then have nothing to lose by lying, cheating, stealing, threatening, and all forms of crime just to make sure they are not utterly ruined.
A better alternative would be for other companies to entice SCO employees away from SCO. Without employees, SCO dies faster than is already evident. However, SCO employees are probably under an employment contract that requires them to play or pay.
"Why can't we make a set of librarys per archetecture, per UI, so that the application is transparent to the UI?"
You've just described Qt, GTK+, and WxWindows.
"Both Nautilus and Konqueror are a real PITA (one crashes and both require passwords to be entered for each and every directory -- even when the passwords are 'saved')."
I've been a big KDE fan since about the 1999/2000 time frame. Konqueror is a wonderful piece of work, and I can't live without it. However, the smb:// IOSlave is unreliable at best (and practically useless most of the time).
This has been a sore spot for a long time. Fortunately I can at least use LinNeighborhood to mount the shares and then use them from Konqueror. I'm not knocking the work that has gone into the IOSlave (I'm very happy that someone is at least working on it), despite whining about it here, but I would have thought that it would have been fixed long ago.
There is another usability issue I can't believe still exists within Konqueror (those people have done a miraculous job, so I have very high expectations). When I am logged in as normal user and then try to move files from my user account to another user's account (or vice-versa) on my machine (even if the other user is myself under a different account), Konqueror just won't allow it (which is mostly good). A better behavior would be to popup a kdesu window and ask for password authentication to allow the operation.
Your nit about saved passwords not really being saved is also a good one. They are only saved for that session, but are promptly forgotten when Konqueror is shut down.
Konqueror is mostly a dream come true for me, but there are several important small to medium issue that need to be addressed.
As much as I thought Kaplan was a raging idiot for his DVD reasoning, this one is not so clear cut. The 11th District appeals court decision that adding a search engine on a DVD collection targets a new product at a new market rather than just being a revision is shakey.
The same people who would order the collection in printed form with a printed searchable index would probably prefer to have the collection in electronic form with an electronically searchable index. To me that is the same market.
Since adding a printed searchable index to an existing publication is considered a revision, and not a new product, and a CD collection that retains the exact same context as its original printed version is also considered to be a mere revision, then I have to agree with Kaplan that adding an electronically searchable index to a CD collection that retains the same context as the original printed version is also just a mere revision.
I don't think NGS did any wrong in this case.
"And I have to ask, what makes him seem like a caring guy? The fact that he's willing to risk the nest egg and lifestyle that his disabled wife is depending on to make a fast buck?"
No, that makes him stupid (read my original post). He seemes genuinely caring because he seems to want to believe the best in (non-governmental) people.
Don't misinterpret my compassion for his situation as an excuse for his idiocy. The point that my analogy was trying to make, though, is that idiocy on the victim's part does not excuse fraud on the perpetrator's part. Neither does greed on the victim's part excuse fraud on the perpetrator's part.
If some business had sold him $320,000 in products that he didn't actually want or need, but didn't mislead him as to what the products did, then this guy would be 100% at fault for the whole thing. But fraud changes the balance of blame.
"Most people are happy with a 4 year old system that lets them check their e-mail, save the pictures people send them, view web pages, and maybe word processing and a spreadsheet."
There are a LOT of people in this situation, and they are the perfect candidates for using Linux. They have a fixed set of needs. Give them a preinstalled and preconfigured Linux box, and they treat it like a fixed-function appliance.
I'll skip the long details, but my 57 year-old mother got so fed up with Windows' unreliability back in 2000 that she pestered me for weeks to wipe Windows and install Linux. I'd been running it for years and raving to her about its stability and reliability, so she was ready.
Her needs were and are simple. She wants web access for online purchases, she wants email, and she wants word processing. She also wants my nephew to be able to use her computer to play the games that I have on my computer.
I did the backup Windows data/install Linux/restore Windows data to Linux routine with Mandrake 9.0, configured her icons, set up her Internet connection and showed her how to activate it, transferred her email to Mozilla (at her request; she likes the all-in-one feature of Mozilla), showed her how to use AbiWord (which she loves) and put the necessary icons on her desktop.
After a few brief explanations on where Linux was different from Windows (in terms that were useful to her) and how that benefitted her, she was able to use Mandrake for her everyday tasks.
I keep intending to upgrade her to Mandrake 9.1 (and now 9.2) because the old sound driver from Mandrake 9.0 is flakey, but I keep forgetting to do it. Her system is 100% reliable for her, and Mandrake 9.0 is still chugging along now as it was back in 2000.
I haven't had to deal with and computer problems on her system, while my dad's Windows system still needs frequent babysitting. If Yahoo Messenger weren't using a proprietary audio CODED, but used something like Ogg Vorbis instead, he would dump Windows in a heartbeat. He used to be a die-hard Windows user, but even he has finally been broken by Microsoft. He just has that one application.