I hear ya. It pisses me off I can't play Dreamcast games on my Playstation 2.
Well, it doesn't piss me off that I can't run SuperH binaries on my MIPS box, considering the architectures are completely different.
It does piss me off that there is no technical limitation besides Microsoft's proprietary software preventing me from viewing Microsoft-Proprietary-Media-1.0 on my Linux box.
And if you needed a JVM, the minute you brought a webpage with java you would be prompted to download it from Sun, you know just like Flash, Acrobat, and every other third party extension out there. Unfortunately Sun somehow got a judge to buy off on the fact that they think they are more important than any other third party extension producer.
What part of "Microsoft had a contract with Sun to distribute a compliant JRE with Windows" do you not understand?
Oh no, all those evil judiciary people interfering with a free market of fraud and violated contracts! They are obviously bought and paid for.
Hey, I don't mean to condescend or anything, but you might have your notions of libertarian philosophy a little confused. Libertarians do not believe that people should not help or support each other; they simply believe that we should not be forced to do so against our will. Taxing us to redistribute wealth elsewhere is causing us to donate money to other people against our will, and libertarians do not support that.
Personally, I'm not rich. But when I see friends or folk in need who seem deserving, I'm generous. The reason why I'm generous is because I know my money is going to a worthy subject and not someone who is just going to waste it on drugs or other pointless consumables. I'm much less generous (to the point of saying No) when I don't know to whom my money is going or what it will be used for.
I think you might be taking Libertarians as a whole to be cold-hearted bastards, and using that as a basis to argue for state-sponsored existences because you feel that poor people have no way to get money otherwise. I won't argue that there are cold-hearted bastards out there, but in a libertarian society, the poor people need to show that they are worthwhile recipients of charity (e.g. that they will use it to improve their state rather than piss it away) rather than expect a check every week from the all-encompassing government. Is there anything really wrong with that picture?
Obtuse? Bullshit. They make a profit on the razor, as well as the blades. It's different. That's a fact. It's only "obtuse" because it doesn't support your point like you had intended.
I seem to be making you angry. Let me try again with a few different examples that should not offend you. Inkjet printers are sold at a loss or given away through manufacturer rebates. The manufacturer still makes money because they control the distribution of replacement ink cartridges. The Xbox is (or has been) sold at a loss. The manufacturer makes money through the licensing of video games that are (ostensibly) required to make use of that box.
I definte noteworthy as profitable. Your examples of RedHat and SuSE are NOT examples.
This is utter nonsense. You define success by profit, and then reject examples of profitable companies as examples of success.
The discussion is about companies which develop a piece of software, then Open Source it.
Oh? I suppose you'd need to provide me with some examples where this strategy has failed, since I see nothing but success along this avenue. MySQL used to be a proprietary product and was subsequently opensourced. Sleepycat, the authors of Berkeley DB, maintain a commercial presence for their software which happens to be under a BSD license. Etc, etc, etc.
I'm not going to sit here and search for examples all day because your attitude seems to be that if I can't guarantee a profit from open source, nobody should touch it. It's a business strategy like any other, and no profit can be guaranteed in any case.
Neither RH nor SuSE did this, they're leeching off the product of someone else's work.
I can't sit here all day and refute clear falsehoods, but here's a few examples from the aforementioned: RH employs kernel engineers, SuSE employs ALSA, Wine, and Openoffice guys. It is in their best interests to improve the existing products because then they have a better product (as a sum of software, support, and maintenance) to sell to their customers.
Again, as I said, this works fine and dandy for informal hobbyist style projects
Excuse me? Apache? PostgreSQL? XFree86? Perl? Linux? BIND? Debian? Mozilla? gcc and glibc? These are "hobbyist style" projects to you??? You should read the mailing lists sometime and realize just how much management and structure has to exist for these projects to survive. Products like Red Hat, with thousands of stockholders' and employees livelihood on the line, are certainly not "hobbyist style" in any sense.
Just because these things aren't marketed as pure gold and sold in bite-size chunks doesn't imply that they are cheap hacks, any more than the fact that Microsoft spends billions on marketing implies that its products are top-notch quality.
you either play the services game and leech off somebody else's work, or you keep it closed in the hopes of making a real profit.
Sure, you keep it closed and hope for a profit. Just like you open your code and hope for a profit. See the similarity? There's no guarantee either way.
Two problems with this statement. 1) Not everyone's goal is to "get rich". Some people have a goal of building a better society. Others have a goal of building good software. In both cases, frequently people form corporations to pursue those goals.
Your argument that "nobody got rich from giving things away" is a tautology, because the richest people tend to be the ones that keep the tightest control over the production and distribution of their goods. If your goal is simply to be rich, then by all means your best option is to keep your code closed and hope people believe your marketing. However, being rich doesn't mean that you are influential or successful beyond pure financial benefit for yourself.
Playing a game you haven't paid for on said X-Box does, namely the $50 that Microsoft gets from people who DO pay for the game.
Mmm-hmm. And who said I was going to buy the game if I couldn't play it for free?
Microsoft does not lose $50 if I play a copied game without buying it. They only lose $50 if I play a copied game _instead of_ buying it. Simply playing a copied game doesn't imply that I would have bought it otherwise.
Oh, they do lose $50 if I would have bought the game, but instead I play the copied game, realize it's crap, and never touch it again. But in that case, were they really entitled to the $50?
Last time I checked, a reloadable razor was often far more expensive than it cost to produce, usually has the razor attachment/release mechanism patented,
Look, you're just being obtuse. You know precisely what I meant, in that the razor by itself is useful if you can manufacture your own blades in-house, but otherwise does you no good if you don't wish to do further business with the company. Some companies have the resources to make their own blades (support the razor), others would rather let someone else deal with it.
I merely pointed out that there are no good examples of this leading any business to noteworthy success.
Obviously, it depends how you define 'noteworthy'. I define noteworthy success in terms of the respect and admiration of the rest of the industry as well as their customers. Depending how starry-eyed you are, you could say Microsoft meets that criteria, but I don't. If you define 'noteworthy' in monetary terms only, then Red Hat and SuSE are examples of success, as both are turning a profit. Are they making as much as Microsoft? No. However, Microsoft had a 20-year head start on these guys. If they can sustain a profit and grow, then that's successful enough for me.
And all you have to do is browse/. and sourceforge to get a pretty clear idea, respectively, of how little that "community and goodwill" is actually worth. Hint: It won't make up for giving away the product of your labor.
Many companies who live by the "give away the razor, sell the blades" model would disagree with you. In addition, people hacking on a piece of software because they love it and demanding no pay in return is all the more value added to the product at no cost to the company.
As far as the service and support aspect being valuable: a source tarball is useless in and of itself. It requires time and effort to build a working, ready-to-rollout service from open source code.
Your company can either pay people to do that as well as in-house verification that everything compiled correctly, and maintenance for upgrades and all that, or pay for a support contract which will probably be far less than the number of full-time employees you'd need to maintain a program that you obtained "free-as-in-beer". In addition, with a support contract you have (ostensibly) knowledgeable experts to consult at any time, where without one you are depending on your programmers and admins having all the knowledge they need to quickly and reliably fix any problem they might run across.
The number of current successful companies is irrelevant to the question of whether free software can be capitalized upon or not. It's all about finding the right business model within a free software content that fits your particular product. So far, few have done so, but the numbers are growing, not declining.
What is this supposed to mean? Open source is more compatible with communism? That sounds like a subtle insult to me.
Well, it's been frequently insinuated in the past here on Slashdot even (check sheldon's posts, for instance), by Microsoft, and by various pundits and members of the media.
I think the quoted sentence was more of a "Hey, look here you closed-minded fools. Nyah!" way to open the story than an actual surprise to anyone.:)
That being said, I'd like to understand how you're going to solve the problem of receiving payment for software?
You don't receive payment for the software. It's that simple. It becomes a commodity.
How do you make money as a software company? Two ways. 1) Dual license GPL and sell a proprietary-friendly license. The GPL gets you the community, the proprietary-friendly license gets you the money. 2) Develop new features under contract. There are many ways to structure this, use your imagination. For example, customer wants a new database feature in MySQL. MySQL AB says "place a bid on it and we'll tell you if it's do-able or not". Customer says "$xx,xxx" and MySQL AB says yes or no based on that number and their development resources.
No, you don't maintain control over when and where your software gets distributed. That's the tradeoff you make to receive community effort and goodwill in return, towards building a better product and giving customers what they want.
I realize that you may not be willing to look at this objectively, but: There are some juicy Bill Gates quotes in this article.
You accuse others of rabid zealotry, but maybe you might want to sit back and consider the possibility that Microsoft really is using McCarthy-style propaganda and scare tactics, instead of competing in the marketplace. Sure, it's their right to do so, just as it's my right (and the collective right of the rest of their targets) to ridicule them for it.
Only when they make idiotic statements and hide behind anonymity to avoid retribution.
2. Unix IS on the way out. Has been for a decade.
Haha! So why is Apple's newest operating system one of the best Unix systems ever? Why does Microsoft, who wanted NT to be the anti-Unix, end up adding feature upon feature from Unix into NT in the end?
You've got blinders on, pal. Unix is the past and future of microcomputer operating systems, rolled into one.
You're biased toward X. It is old and needs to be replaced. You're like the last gasps of a dying regime.
This is insightful? I think John Dvorak was more insightful than this when he claimed a few years back that Unix was on its way out. Which isn't saying much for the parent AC.
it is not possible to use the GPL for library X and use some other license, or indeed no source code license at all, for the body of your program. The GPL itself prohibits this.
Huh? Yeah it is. You can release part of your program under the GPL and part of it under BSD or other more permissive free software license if you want.
There's a whole list of licenses whose terms are (by the FSF) supposed to be GPL-compatible; meaning that you can release software under those licenses linked with GPL software. (BSD, X11, LGPL, et al)
There's nothing that says you can only use GPL software with GPL software; the only problem is when software with a more restrictive license than the GPL is linked with GPL software and distributed. In that case, there is no way that the GPL can protect your rights as a user, so it is forbidden.
Re:not gnu
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 0, Redundant
No kidding. Why do the completely clueless posts invariably get modded up?
Actually, I don't think Microsoft designs or manufactures any of the hardware they sell. Most likely the same sort of deal they have with the X-box; pick an unknown 3rd party to do it that isn't interested in their own brand recognition.
Mainstream politicians and lobbyists will passionately argue for both of these courses, on the grounds that it will get big, bad government off business's back and encourage competition, and yet they will fail to point out that those businesses themselves have made an art-form out of restricting competition.
Yeah, but what do you do otherwise? Regulate them forever? Times change; just because they were a monopolist in 1980 doesn't mean they would do the same thing now. Fortunately, today we have many choices for telco service that would be difficult to destroy, and the Bells would be watched closely for evidence of regressive behavior.
That's the problem with the "free market". Choices are bad for business, and the average consumer can't build his own CD player (and if he could, there'd be a DMCA to stop him.)
Aha, but a market with the DMCA is not a "free market". A truly free market is one in which government only steps in to ensure its free-ness. In the case of the DMCA, the government has stepped in to protect a special interest from competition and elasticity of demand. That is BAD.
I wonder what happened to the great so called ideology "customer is the king" that these companies pretend to practice.
It went away when the "customers" became "consumers" and stopped caring about the quality of product and service that they received.
Capitalists respond to demand. If they can sell their product to people regardless of its quality, then why try to improve it? Obvious exceptions being companies with a real commitment to the customer and commitment to building a quality product, but you don't find those very often in publicly-traded corporations. Mostly because the price of quality would be slightly higher, which causes the consumers to go elsewhere and deal with a less scrupulous company save a buck. Thus, the board of directors demands that sales be raised at any costs, sets unrealistic expectations, and the company cuts corners to meet those expectations, resulting in a product that frequently meets no more than the minimum standards of marketability at best.
The blame can be placed on the poorly educated, dependent, and apathetic consuming public as much as it can on the soulless companies who'd sacrifice any aspect of their product or corporate karma, if it meant saving a dollar down the road. Don't take advertising at face value, don't buy products from people who won't let you examine them before purchase, and don't buy from companies who won't stand behind their products. That's the only way this situation will improve.
Slashdot Mirror
It does piss me off that there is no technical limitation besides Microsoft's proprietary software preventing me from viewing Microsoft-Proprietary-Media-1.0 on my Linux box.
Nice try.
Oh no, all those evil judiciary people interfering with a free market of fraud and violated contracts! They are obviously bought and paid for.
Personally, I'm not rich. But when I see friends or folk in need who seem deserving, I'm generous. The reason why I'm generous is because I know my money is going to a worthy subject and not someone who is just going to waste it on drugs or other pointless consumables. I'm much less generous (to the point of saying No) when I don't know to whom my money is going or what it will be used for.
I think you might be taking Libertarians as a whole to be cold-hearted bastards, and using that as a basis to argue for state-sponsored existences because you feel that poor people have no way to get money otherwise. I won't argue that there are cold-hearted bastards out there, but in a libertarian society, the poor people need to show that they are worthwhile recipients of charity (e.g. that they will use it to improve their state rather than piss it away) rather than expect a check every week from the all-encompassing government. Is there anything really wrong with that picture?
I seem to be making you angry. Let me try again with a few different examples that should not offend you. Inkjet printers are sold at a loss or given away through manufacturer rebates. The manufacturer still makes money because they control the distribution of replacement ink cartridges. The Xbox is (or has been) sold at a loss. The manufacturer makes money through the licensing of video games that are (ostensibly) required to make use of that box.
This is utter nonsense. You define success by profit, and then reject examples of profitable companies as examples of success.
Oh? I suppose you'd need to provide me with some examples where this strategy has failed, since I see nothing but success along this avenue. MySQL used to be a proprietary product and was subsequently opensourced. Sleepycat, the authors of Berkeley DB, maintain a commercial presence for their software which happens to be under a BSD license. Etc, etc, etc.
I'm not going to sit here and search for examples all day because your attitude seems to be that if I can't guarantee a profit from open source, nobody should touch it. It's a business strategy like any other, and no profit can be guaranteed in any case.
I can't sit here all day and refute clear falsehoods, but here's a few examples from the aforementioned: RH employs kernel engineers, SuSE employs ALSA, Wine, and Openoffice guys. It is in their best interests to improve the existing products because then they have a better product (as a sum of software, support, and maintenance) to sell to their customers.
Excuse me? Apache? PostgreSQL? XFree86? Perl? Linux? BIND? Debian? Mozilla? gcc and glibc? These are "hobbyist style" projects to you??? You should read the mailing lists sometime and realize just how much management and structure has to exist for these projects to survive. Products like Red Hat, with thousands of stockholders' and employees livelihood on the line, are certainly not "hobbyist style" in any sense.
Just because these things aren't marketed as pure gold and sold in bite-size chunks doesn't imply that they are cheap hacks, any more than the fact that Microsoft spends billions on marketing implies that its products are top-notch quality.
Sure, you keep it closed and hope for a profit. Just like you open your code and hope for a profit. See the similarity? There's no guarantee either way.
Two problems with this statement. 1) Not everyone's goal is to "get rich". Some people have a goal of building a better society. Others have a goal of building good software. In both cases, frequently people form corporations to pursue those goals.
Your argument that "nobody got rich from giving things away" is a tautology, because the richest people tend to be the ones that keep the tightest control over the production and distribution of their goods. If your goal is simply to be rich, then by all means your best option is to keep your code closed and hope people believe your marketing. However, being rich doesn't mean that you are influential or successful beyond pure financial benefit for yourself.
Many of
Microsoft does not lose $50 if I play a copied game without buying it. They only lose $50 if I play a copied game _instead of_ buying it. Simply playing a copied game doesn't imply that I would have bought it otherwise.
Oh, they do lose $50 if I would have bought the game, but instead I play the copied game, realize it's crap, and never touch it again. But in that case, were they really entitled to the $50?
As far as the service and support aspect being valuable: a source tarball is useless in and of itself. It requires time and effort to build a working, ready-to-rollout service from open source code.
Your company can either pay people to do that as well as in-house verification that everything compiled correctly, and maintenance for upgrades and all that, or pay for a support contract which will probably be far less than the number of full-time employees you'd need to maintain a program that you obtained "free-as-in-beer". In addition, with a support contract you have (ostensibly) knowledgeable experts to consult at any time, where without one you are depending on your programmers and admins having all the knowledge they need to quickly and reliably fix any problem they might run across.
The number of current successful companies is irrelevant to the question of whether free software can be capitalized upon or not. It's all about finding the right business model within a free software content that fits your particular product. So far, few have done so, but the numbers are growing, not declining.
I think the quoted sentence was more of a "Hey, look here you closed-minded fools. Nyah!" way to open the story than an actual surprise to anyone. :)
How do you make money as a software company? Two ways. 1) Dual license GPL and sell a proprietary-friendly license. The GPL gets you the community, the proprietary-friendly license gets you the money. 2) Develop new features under contract. There are many ways to structure this, use your imagination. For example, customer wants a new database feature in MySQL. MySQL AB says "place a bid on it and we'll tell you if it's do-able or not". Customer says "$xx,xxx" and MySQL AB says yes or no based on that number and their development resources.
No, you don't maintain control over when and where your software gets distributed. That's the tradeoff you make to receive community effort and goodwill in return, towards building a better product and giving customers what they want.
There are some juicy Bill Gates quotes in this article.
You accuse others of rabid zealotry, but maybe you might want to sit back and consider the possibility that Microsoft really is using McCarthy-style propaganda and scare tactics, instead of competing in the marketplace. Sure, it's their right to do so, just as it's my right (and the collective right of the rest of their targets) to ridicule them for it.
You've got blinders on, pal. Unix is the past and future of microcomputer operating systems, rolled into one.
There's a whole list of licenses whose terms are (by the FSF) supposed to be GPL-compatible; meaning that you can release software under those licenses linked with GPL software. (BSD, X11, LGPL, et al)
There's nothing that says you can only use GPL software with GPL software; the only problem is when software with a more restrictive license than the GPL is linked with GPL software and distributed. In that case, there is no way that the GPL can protect your rights as a user, so it is forbidden.
No kidding. Why do the completely clueless posts invariably get modded up?
How is it a good thing for a free society to let a monopoly corporation spend money to extend its control? Where would it end?
And why is it wrong for a group of independent citizens to spend money to further the things they believe in?
Carcasm? Is that some sort of vehicular accident?
Are you an idiot? He was referring to jocks in the "mindless brute" sense, not the "athlete" sense.
Capitalists respond to demand. If they can sell their product to people regardless of its quality, then why try to improve it? Obvious exceptions being companies with a real commitment to the customer and commitment to building a quality product, but you don't find those very often in publicly-traded corporations. Mostly because the price of quality would be slightly higher, which causes the consumers to go elsewhere and deal with a less scrupulous company save a buck. Thus, the board of directors demands that sales be raised at any costs, sets unrealistic expectations, and the company cuts corners to meet those expectations, resulting in a product that frequently meets no more than the minimum standards of marketability at best.
The blame can be placed on the poorly educated, dependent, and apathetic consuming public as much as it can on the soulless companies who'd sacrifice any aspect of their product or corporate karma, if it meant saving a dollar down the road. Don't take advertising at face value, don't buy products from people who won't let you examine them before purchase, and don't buy from companies who won't stand behind their products. That's the only way this situation will improve.