Why the hell should red hat, IBM, SuSE etc make money from selling software (OK support) but the people who actually produced it get nothing?
Don't you feel guilty for making money modifying software where the original author probably got nothing? I know I would.
No, and you shouldn't, because let's be frank -- would Linus Torvalds' brand new Operating System be what it is today without the literally thousands of hours of development time ploughed into it by Red Hat and IBM? Of course not! (For a good comparison, look at the progress of GNU/Hurd.)
By running a business around Open Source software, IBM, Novell and Red Hat have significant expenses. Not just development expenses, but expenses in support, payroll, marketing and sales.
They are putting up *real money* and exposing themselves to the risk that their business based around Open Source will fail.
Now compare their position to that of Linus, as an end-user. He has full rights to enjoy the results of their development work, and he sure as hell has a better operating system than he could ever have produced by himself. And what is his risk in all this? Nil, zip, nada, zilch(*).
As far as I'm concerned, Rule 101 of business is that those who assume the risk deserve to be given the profits. By that measure, Red Hat and IBM deserve everything they get.
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base. Updates will be available for two to three months after the release of the subsequent version; that is, updates for Fedora Core 1 will be provided for two to three months after the release of Fedora Core 2, and so forth.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
==== (note 1) So we get the updates, but without an SLA. Were we getting one with RHN anyway?
(note 2) To all the universities that want external support for their systems, might I suggest you start up your own RHN-equivalent? If you all band together, you will certainly have the bandwidth and the budget needed!
"Third, while I know you are correct about fertility rates, if you look further, you'll also find that WHO and other health agencies consistently report that five year survival rates of the children of teenagers are much lower than for women in their mid-twenties."
Just out of interest:
Has anyone worked out whether this is because women are more likely to conceive a healthy baby at 25, or because the woman is more likely to have the financial resources (husband, job, whatever) to support the baby properly?
This will probably get lost in the sea of other comments, but I have to try and say it anyway:
Linux will never dominate the desktop market. (Neither will GNU/Linux, for FSF diehards.) Why? Because for desktop/consumer operating systems, the interface is all people care about.
Do most Mac OS X users think they're running BSD? No, of course not. As far as any non-techie is concerned, the Aqua interface defines their operating system. You might even say it is their operating system.
A desktop OS must be familiar to everyone. Ignoring theming, certain key elements must easily recognised and used (eg. 'Start' button). Once there are enough non-cosmetic differences, you've got a new OS.
I believe Lindows is a different desktop OS to Red Hat/Blue Curve. Mandrake, despite being heavily based on Red Hat, is a different OS again, because it's UI is substantially different. Each presents a different set of rules that users must learn to efficiently use the OS.
KDE or Gnome are best described currently as 'incomplete' desktop OSes (which each distro currently supplements into a 'complete' OS). They could become a proper desktop OS if they developed Admin tools that covered all day-to-day user tasks.
Accordingly, desktop adoption must be measured by which desktop UI is being used, not by Linux as an aggregate.
Of course, that argument doesn't work in reverse, otherwise next time a Government organisation switches to 'Mac OS X', you should really say they are switching to 'BSD':-)
I agree with the parent. The Mozilla Public License seems an excellent fit for what the poster requires.
The only caveat here would be that your clients must have their proprietary code contained entirely in separate files. Any soon as their proprietary code is 'mixed in' with MPL-ed code, it becomes MPL code as well.
Interested bystanders will note that Mozilla uses a complicated system of overlay files when adding new buttons or other functionality. This was partly for ease of use, but mostly to ensure that Netscape could embed proprietary extensions into the Mozilla GUI without violating the terms of the MPL.
For those who haven't already found the divine nectar that is rpm --root, I found this option very enlightening:
rpm --root DIRECTORY
Use the file system tree rooted at DIRECTORY for all operations. Note that this means the database within DIRECTORY will be used for dependency checks and any scriptlet(s) (e.g. %post if installing, or %prep if building, a package) will be run after a chroot(2) to DIRECTORY.
In other words:
Once your RPM installation screws up, boot from your Red Hat CD and type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt.
Mount your system image under/mnt/sysimage as read-write by selecting 'Continue' when prompted.
freedom n.
1. The condition of being free of restraints.
Fundamentally, anarchy means that you are free of moral restraints on your actions. So yes, anarchy is a kind of freedom.
There are other meanings of freedom as well, of course. But calling capitalism a 'free society' is pure propaganda. No doubt Communist Russians considered themselves 'free' of the capitalistic manipulations of Western societies.
In reality, freedom does not exist as an absolute; there are just different sets of rules.
Presumably you think that you're from a "free society".
However, any Western country has mountains of legislation and volumes of common law that decide what you can and cannot do, or must and must not do.
If you're from a 'three branches of government' country, it's more or less guaranteed that at least one of these branches has members in it that are chosen without any interaction from it's constituents?
This is freedom?
Civilisation is antithetical to freedom. Civilisations are defined by the limits prescribed on people within that civilisation (eg. no killing people, no stealing things that belong to other people).
Your definition of freedom needs some work, my friend. The only 'pure' freedom is that of anarchy, which is certainly not the same thing as capitalism or free enterprise.
Absolutely correct -- the owner of the code can license his/her code under any terms and conditions that they feel is appropriate.
That's how MySQL is able to distribute both under GPL and commercial licenses. That's also how Smoothwall is able to release both a GPL version of their software and simultaneously keep "advanced" features for their paying customers.
If a project is genuinely collaborative, then pure GPL is generally the only practical option (unless copyrights are always assigned to one entity), but if you're the main developer of a project, remember that you always have the option to modify your licensing terms and conditions on subsequent releases of your product.
eg. You release ProjectX 1.0 under GPL. As of ProjectX 2.5, you think that there's a real chance of companies licensing your product. You stop offering GPL licensing from version 2.6. Anyone can take 2.5 and legally fork it as a GPL project (but they cannot change its GPL licensing). On the other hand, you continue to have the option of remaining under a proprietary license or re-licensing code under the GPL at a later stage.
Spot on! An imperfect clone will always be seen as being lesser than a new creation.
I mean, which would you rather buy? The rather poor forgery of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or an entirely original artwork by a little known artist? Particularly if that artist shows promise?
I would be very surprised if people who use Macs (who aren't Mac fanatics) complain that "the Dock doesn't look like the Start bar". It's bloody obvious they don't look similar! And as the parent points out, as a result users don't panic that things work differently, because that's their expectation.
This might be part of the reason why I tend to prefer KDE over Gnome -- it is unapologetic about the fact that it is different from Windows ("Well, of course we are! Why should we imitate an inferior system?")
That said, the nature of OSS means that a we'll probably never end up with a single set of guidelines. I suspect as Linux commoditizes on the desktop market, what will happen is that we will end up with a couple of dominant application 'subsets' (eg. KApps, OpenOffice, etc) which will all adhere to a published standard, and then authors will write their app to conform to one of those standards.
Agreed, and one way to make spam unprofitable is to make it a civil or criminal offence.
Fundamentally, spam is a business. Once enough legislation is in place to damage spam's business fundamentals, less people will participate in it, just like the black market for pirated CDs decreases once the penalties against selling them increase.
And as someone who bought a WAP-enabled phone in the forlorn hope that someone might have developed decent WAP content, I was extremely pleased (but not surprised) to note that Google is the only site I am aware of that offers a HTML-to-WAP gateway that allows mobile phone users to access otherwise broken sites on WAP:)
I think Linux people have to accept that Red Hat is a company that aims for commercial adoption, rather than for the home user.
Yes, I know they are creating a Desktop Edition, but even that is done so that a company has the option of rolling out Red Hat on all desktops...
Red Hat aims to provide high-quality, reliable support for corporations. I believe Red Hat releases, and will continue to release, ISOs for each version for the mindshare it gains as a result, *but* home users must realise that that isn't where Red Hat's focus lies at the present.
The only reason that the Open Source community survives *at all* is that people share each other's work, thus cutting development and marketing costs while developing a superior product.
If Red Hat feels it can ignore the Open Source community by, eg. implementing substantial proprietary additions to their Linux system that are necessary for programs to run -- then it is a sure sign that the Open Source movement has failed.
As soon as Red Hat goes proprietary, it loses the open-source advantage. It *certainly* won't give up that position without a helluva lot of thought.
Give Red Hat a chance. I still think they're doing a fantastic job.
Note that this has already happened for the Blender3D toolkit. Not under the O-STEP license, of course, but using a similar scheme -- raising enough funds, then open-sourcing the product.
There was also an abortive attempt for a while to open source the GoBe Productivity suite. That cost a bit too much to purchase though, apparently.
Actually, this just confirms my opinion of where Open Source/Intellectual Property meets.
The thing about a software package is that you develop it once, then it works forever & a day. Okay, sure, you may have to upgrade it to add features that you forgot the first time, but once it's done right, there's not really any compelling reason to upgrade any more. (Look at MS Office, or even Windows for that matter.)
On the other hand, creating an artistic work on the scale of a Hollywood picture takes an enormous amount of effort and person-hours. And once the box-office takings & video releases are done, that's pretty much it for the life of the picture. You have to start from scratch for the next one! Any large-scale effort that bypasses official distribution channels (eg. pirate DVDs) greatly reduces final movie profits.
This is (IMHO) why we'll never see heaps of high-quality, free open-source games. The community may band together to build one or two good ones, but unless the game has an extreme replayability factor, people will get bored and move on to something else. It's not a good return for the investment of your time, unless (say) Apache, where people are able to use your server continuously for years on end.
Free, open source development and distribution of OSes, toolkits and applications makes sense (because the total development costs are shared among many people). Doing the same for Hollywood pictures makes no sense at all.
Well, I don't know about "what's the point?", but documentaries will have a bias.
They have to, because the act of editing introduces bias whether you want to or not. If nothing else, the bias is on *what the producer thinks is important*. (Think of the Michael Jackson 'documentary' that's causing all the fuss at the moment.)
The only way you can avoid bias in a documentary is to run a camera non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And even then, you're biased -- how did you decide where to point the camera??
Slashdot Mirror
You can also play the games using the Mozilla PopCap Loader plugin, although it is still, sadly, Windows-only.
I'm with you - I haven't tried the package yet, but if the sound quality is still good after change pitch/tempo, that is FANTASTIC!
Well done to the crew of Audacity!
Why the hell should red hat, IBM, SuSE etc make money from selling software (OK support) but the people who actually produced it get nothing?
Don't you feel guilty for making money modifying software where the original author probably got nothing? I know I would.
No, and you shouldn't, because let's be frank -- would Linus Torvalds' brand new Operating System be what it is today without the literally thousands of hours of development time ploughed into it by Red Hat and IBM? Of course not! (For a good comparison, look at the progress of GNU/Hurd.)
By running a business around Open Source software, IBM, Novell and Red Hat have significant expenses. Not just development expenses, but expenses in support, payroll, marketing and sales.
They are putting up *real money* and exposing themselves to the risk that their business based around Open Source will fail.
Now compare their position to that of Linus, as an end-user. He has full rights to enjoy the results of their development work, and he sure as hell has a better operating system than he could ever have produced by himself. And what is his risk in all this? Nil, zip, nada, zilch(*).
As far as I'm concerned, Rule 101 of business is that those who assume the risk deserve to be given the profits. By that measure, Red Hat and IBM deserve everything they get.
(*) Yes, I'm ignoring SCO.
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base. Updates will be available for two to three months after the release of the subsequent version; that is, updates for Fedora Core 1 will be provided for two to three months after the release of Fedora Core 2, and so forth.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
====
(note 1) So we get the updates, but without an SLA. Were we getting one with RHN anyway?
(note 2) To all the universities that want external support for their systems, might I suggest you start up your own RHN-equivalent? If you all band together, you will certainly have the bandwidth and the budget needed!
"Third, while I know you are correct about fertility rates, if you look further, you'll also find that WHO and other health agencies consistently report that five year survival rates of the children of teenagers are much lower than for women in their mid-twenties."
Just out of interest:
Has anyone worked out whether this is because women are more likely to conceive a healthy baby at 25, or because the woman is more likely to have the financial resources (husband, job, whatever) to support the baby properly?
This will probably get lost in the sea of other comments, but I have to try and say it anyway:
Linux will never dominate the desktop market. (Neither will GNU/Linux, for FSF diehards.) Why? Because for desktop/consumer operating systems, the interface is all people care about.
Do most Mac OS X users think they're running BSD? No, of course not. As far as any non-techie is concerned, the Aqua interface defines their operating system. You might even say it is their operating system.
A desktop OS must be familiar to everyone. Ignoring theming, certain key elements must easily recognised and used (eg. 'Start' button). Once there are enough non-cosmetic differences, you've got a new OS.
I believe Lindows is a different desktop OS to Red Hat/Blue Curve. Mandrake, despite being heavily based on Red Hat, is a different OS again, because it's UI is substantially different. Each presents a different set of rules that users must learn to efficiently use the OS.
KDE or Gnome are best described currently as 'incomplete' desktop OSes (which each distro currently supplements into a 'complete' OS). They could become a proper desktop OS if they developed Admin tools that covered all day-to-day user tasks.
Accordingly, desktop adoption must be measured by which desktop UI is being used, not by Linux as an aggregate.
Of course, that argument doesn't work in reverse, otherwise next time a Government organisation switches to 'Mac OS X', you should really say they are switching to 'BSD' :-)
Distros are far more important than people think.
Well done, Mr. Anonymous Coward!
I agree with the parent. The Mozilla Public License seems an excellent fit for what the poster requires.
The only caveat here would be that your clients must have their proprietary code contained entirely in separate files. Any soon as their proprietary code is 'mixed in' with MPL-ed code, it becomes MPL code as well.
Interested bystanders will note that Mozilla uses a complicated system of overlay files when adding new buttons or other functionality. This was partly for ease of use, but mostly to ensure that Netscape could embed proprietary extensions into the Mozilla GUI without violating the terms of the MPL.
For those who haven't already found the divine nectar that is rpm --root, I found this option very enlightening:
In other words:
- Once your RPM installation screws up, boot from your Red Hat CD and type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt.
- Mount your system image under
/mnt/sysimage as read-write by selecting 'Continue' when prompted.
- Attempt to fix your rpm problem either with: or use the option soup of your choice.
Enjoy!freedom
n.
1. The condition of being free of restraints.
Fundamentally, anarchy means that you are free of moral restraints on your actions. So yes, anarchy is a kind of freedom.
There are other meanings of freedom as well, of course. But calling capitalism a 'free society' is pure propaganda. No doubt Communist Russians considered themselves 'free' of the capitalistic manipulations of Western societies.
In reality, freedom does not exist as an absolute; there are just different sets of rules.
Presumably you think that you're from a "free society".
However, any Western country has mountains of legislation and volumes of common law that decide what you can and cannot do, or must and must not do.
If you're from a 'three branches of government' country, it's more or less guaranteed that at least one of these branches has members in it that are chosen without any interaction from it's constituents?
This is freedom?
Civilisation is antithetical to freedom. Civilisations are defined by the limits prescribed on people within that civilisation (eg. no killing people, no stealing things that belong to other people).
Your definition of freedom needs some work, my friend. The only 'pure' freedom is that of anarchy, which is certainly not the same thing as capitalism or free enterprise.
Absolutely correct -- the owner of the code can license his/her code under any terms and conditions that they feel is appropriate.
That's how MySQL is able to distribute both under GPL and commercial licenses. That's also how Smoothwall is able to release both a GPL version of their software and simultaneously keep "advanced" features for their paying customers.If a project is genuinely collaborative, then pure GPL is generally the only practical option (unless copyrights are always assigned to one entity), but if you're the main developer of a project, remember that you always have the option to modify your licensing terms and conditions on subsequent releases of your product.
eg. You release ProjectX 1.0 under GPL. As of ProjectX 2.5, you think that there's a real chance of companies licensing your product. You stop offering GPL licensing from version 2.6. Anyone can take 2.5 and legally fork it as a GPL project (but they cannot change its GPL licensing). On the other hand, you continue to have the option of remaining under a proprietary license or re-licensing code under the GPL at a later stage.
Spot on! An imperfect clone will always be seen as being lesser than a new creation.
I mean, which would you rather buy? The rather poor forgery of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or an entirely original artwork by a little known artist? Particularly if that artist shows promise?I would be very surprised if people who use Macs (who aren't Mac fanatics) complain that "the Dock doesn't look like the Start bar". It's bloody obvious they don't look similar! And as the parent points out, as a result users don't panic that things work differently, because that's their expectation.
This might be part of the reason why I tend to prefer KDE over Gnome -- it is unapologetic about the fact that it is different from Windows ("Well, of course we are! Why should we imitate an inferior system?")
That said, the nature of OSS means that a we'll probably never end up with a single set of guidelines. I suspect as Linux commoditizes on the desktop market, what will happen is that we will end up with a couple of dominant application 'subsets' (eg. KApps, OpenOffice, etc) which will all adhere to a published standard, and then authors will write their app to conform to one of those standards.
why would he take such a high profile case unless he thought he could win?
Hmm. For the money?
Agreed, and one way to make spam unprofitable is to make it a civil or criminal offence.
Fundamentally, spam is a business. Once enough legislation is in place to damage spam's business fundamentals, less people will participate in it, just like the black market for pirated CDs decreases once the penalties against selling them increase.
Yeah, but just because a company says something is illegal doesn't automatically make it so.
Think all the legal wrangling we've have over 'shrink-wrap' licensing agreements.
And as someone who bought a WAP-enabled phone in the forlorn hope that someone might have developed decent WAP content, I was extremely pleased (but not surprised) to note that Google is the only site I am aware of that offers a HTML-to-WAP gateway that allows mobile phone users to access otherwise broken sites on WAP :)
Google. Is there anything better?
I think Linux people have to accept that Red Hat is a company that aims for commercial adoption, rather than for the home user.
Yes, I know they are creating a Desktop Edition, but even that is done so that a company has the option of rolling out Red Hat on all desktops...
Red Hat aims to provide high-quality, reliable support for corporations. I believe Red Hat releases, and will continue to release, ISOs for each version for the mindshare it gains as a result, *but* home users must realise that that isn't where Red Hat's focus lies at the present.
The only reason that the Open Source community survives *at all* is that people share each other's work, thus cutting development and marketing costs while developing a superior product.
If Red Hat feels it can ignore the Open Source community by, eg. implementing substantial proprietary additions to their Linux system that are necessary for programs to run -- then it is a sure sign that the Open Source movement has failed.
As soon as Red Hat goes proprietary, it loses the open-source advantage. It *certainly* won't give up that position without a helluva lot of thought.
Give Red Hat a chance. I still think they're doing a fantastic job.
I think even more than that, Serkis doesn't want to tell little 6-year old Elizabeth that Gollum would go and slit everyone's throat...
Note that this has already happened for the Blender3D toolkit. Not under the O-STEP license, of course, but using a similar scheme -- raising enough funds, then open-sourcing the product.
There was also an abortive attempt for a while to open source the GoBe Productivity suite. That cost a bit too much to purchase though, apparently.
*shrug* So it can work sometimes...
Actually, this just confirms my opinion of where Open Source/Intellectual Property meets.
The thing about a software package is that you develop it once, then it works forever & a day. Okay, sure, you may have to upgrade it to add features that you forgot the first time, but once it's done right, there's not really any compelling reason to upgrade any more. (Look at MS Office, or even Windows for that matter.)
On the other hand, creating an artistic work on the scale of a Hollywood picture takes an enormous amount of effort and person-hours. And once the box-office takings & video releases are done, that's pretty much it for the life of the picture. You have to start from scratch for the next one! Any large-scale effort that bypasses official distribution channels (eg. pirate DVDs) greatly reduces final movie profits.
This is (IMHO) why we'll never see heaps of high-quality, free open-source games. The community may band together to build one or two good ones, but unless the game has an extreme replayability factor, people will get bored and move on to something else. It's not a good return for the investment of your time, unless (say) Apache, where people are able to use your server continuously for years on end.
Free, open source development and distribution of OSes, toolkits and applications makes sense (because the total development costs are shared among many people). Doing the same for Hollywood pictures makes no sense at all.
It depends on the ISP. In my experience, you can choose between flat-rate ISPs, and ISPs offering cost + per MB download.
I also know of ISPs that offer more or less restrictive conditions on what you can do with your link.
Of course, all of the above probably depends on what country you live in (Australia in this case).
Er, I think they probably meant 8 hexadecimal digits.
Well, I don't know about "what's the point?", but documentaries will have a bias.
They have to, because the act of editing introduces bias whether you want to or not. If nothing else, the bias is on *what the producer thinks is important*. (Think of the Michael Jackson 'documentary' that's causing all the fuss at the moment.)
The only way you can avoid bias in a documentary is to run a camera non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And even then, you're biased -- how did you decide where to point the camera??
Basically, life is subjective. Deal with it.