Torvalds, like most other people, has nothing to do with the FSF besides using their license for his OS kernel. He is not a Free Software advocate, he is an advocate of the open source development model.
I am certain that if a company approached him with an offer for a proprietary-licensed version of the Linux kernel, he would be more than happy to provide it, to the behest of RMS.
The guy in the article isn't confused at all, he simply doesn't see the profit.
He is confused because he insinuates, from his perception, that FS/OSS advocates are anti-profit or anti-business. This is not the case, and my point was that if that is how people are perceiving us, that perception needs to be repaired, and soon.
Certainly, there may be individual communists or socialists among our ranks, but by and large, the movement does not represent their views. It represents a software development and distribution model that strikes a better balance between the rights of the user and the rights of the producer. That's all.
You know, you sound an awful lot like a troll. As much as you spout off about reading comprehension like you're my superior or something in that regard, you're relying on one quote taken completely out of context to back your point up. That's not a good argument.
Maybe you should explain this quote from the Manifesto then...
"Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned."
If you read the preceding paragraphs, he mentions that programmers who share code will not be able to charge as much for that code. He doesn't say they will give it away for free, and he also enumerates some non-monetary benefits that programmers can receive from coding the "GNU Way".
In your out-of-context quote, he is not advocating banning high-paying jobs, which you may be claiming (I'm not sure!). But this is not what he is saying -- placed in context, he is simply stating a fact: that programmers are unhappy at low-paying jobs only when higher-paying ones are available to them. The example he used is one that was close to his heart, the programmers at the MIT AI lab. He claims they were perfectly happy while hacking at MIT, and were lured away by job offers where their happiness was not increased, only their money.
The whole section is a claim that money does not have to be constantly changing hands in order to motivate people to work. This has nothing to do at all with businesses capitalizing on free software as a product!
what if you went back to 1700? and you forced everyone in ANY country at that time to vote if slavery should be legal?
So what? It's not like slavery became illegal in the U.S. because the population wised up and voted for it; it was a unilateral action by Lincoln as a wartime measure.
hmmm... perhaps you should think a little more about that statement.
I don't get what the big deal is. A city requiring its citizens to participate in elections would be no more totalitarian than various other ordinances placed at the local and state levels.
Although I have to admit that it is easier for me to promote free software if I do not mention that I'm a socialist/communist.
Well, that's just it. I think the movement would succeed a lot more if we focused on the movement itself, and not tying it into other dogmas that we may hold.
This is a capitalist society at heart. If I present myself as a businessman, and promote free software on the basis of what it can do for my business, I will be much more well received than if I present it as a basis for a pro-communist or pro-socialist argument.
People will already be shocked by the notion of an alternative model to proprietary software, and that shock must be overcome for them to accept your argument; why saddle it with even more shock by tying another sociopolitical agenda to it?
I dissagree that there is a fundamental understanding. First, there are many FSF leaders who seem to have a semi-communisitic or more accurately a utopian philosophy which precludes the need for profiting or much profit.
Who are these "many FSF leaders"? Where have they said this?
Second, those who are part of the FSF and OSS movements generally believe that profiting is possible through means other than selling software.
You make it sound like the availability of other means of profit mutually excludes selling the software. It does not.
However, this has yet to be proven (arguably)
I would argue that there are already many companies out there embracing the demand for business built around free software, but I'd just get flamed and pointed out that none of them are as successful as Microsoft.
and therefore even those who think they believe in profiting practically don't because they are supporting an (again, arguably) not-for-profit movement.
Well, it seems that you're as confused as the guy in the article. There is nothing at all not-for-profit about free software or OSS development. Would you please provide me with some references that you used to reach the conclusion that you currently hold? I really hope you re-evaluate your opinions.
They are not. But if you want to shed that image you need to stop acting like Software Communists.
I don't get your point. Of course free software is about the ability to share.
Are you saying that RMS is speaking out against profiting from selling software? If so, you're wrong. RMS has always embraced companies that sell free software. To him, everything else but the freedom is irrelevant.
I think you may be falling into the same trap that these mainstream pundits fall into.
I'm no Linux user. I've never booted a distro of the OS in any of its flavors, and save for playing with it on a friend's machine, I've never spent much time in it. I am not an open source maverick, nor am I anti-business or anti-profit.
You know, if someone has to qualify their editorial claims by saying that they aren't part of those "open source mavericks" over there, or that they are not "anti-business or anti-profit", what does that say about us open-source mavericks as a desirable group of people to identify with?
I think the very idea that someone in the mainstream has gotten the idea that we are anti-business/anti-profit is very BAD, as it constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of the movement behind free software and the open source development model.
Who in the mainstream is going to align themselves with us, if we give them the impression that we're anarchists and commies?
My rights and my ability to access services I pay for are not dependent on the degree in which I participate in the voting process.
You're right. They're not. Who's arguing that?
The parent poster was advocating change to that scenario.
Irregardless as to whether I do vote or not, I shall not, under any circumstance, be compelled to vote by the Government.
I see. How about by your fellow citizens? It would be by their will that such a measure would come to pass.
If you like that sort of totalitarian clap-trap, son, then you're in the wrong country.
Right. I like the talking-down part, where you imply that he is your inferior "son". News for you, pal: it's not a totalitarian measure if people vote for it.
That's very true, but just de-regulating them won't exactly help either. All you'll get is fewer channels and higher prices.
Care to back this up? As it is now, we get more channels, and still higher prices. I couldn't care less about the number of channels; I want the prices to go down, and to pay for no more than the channels that I watch and/or desire to have in my house.
No, you need to keep your DirecTV service, and assist DirecTV in lobbying local governments to allow them to provide you cable service at lower prices than the monopolies.
How would you like me to discard the burnt remains of your straw man?
History has shown that completely deregulated markets lead to either a monopoly or a cartel.
Um, in case you haven't noticed, the cable companies are _already_ monopolies, granted by the government. This is the problem we are trying to solve!
The parent poster was not advocating repealing antitrust law, as you seem to have convinced yourself. He was simply saying that getting rid of regulation that grants the monopolies in the first place would foster competition in the cable access space, which would be beneficial to the consumer and to the progress of the industry as a whole.
Yah buddy.. let's deregulate everything so we can have MORE ENRONS!
Excuse me? Where did he say to "deregulate everything"? What I gathered from the post was that business in the cable service industry, from both the cable operators' and the consumers' perspective, would benefit from deregulation more than it would from Even More Regulation(TM). You didn't exactly refute his points.
Deregulation means one thing: Free-for-all for large corporations to trample consumer rights.
Wow, he may be right-wing, but you're pretty left of center. First of all, what are "consumer rights"? Second of all, how does allowing more competition in an industry "trample" on these "consumer rights"?
I had a PCMCIA kernel bug in RedHat 8 that I got all the support in the world for from RedHat bugzilla users. But many times I can sit in an IRC channel with 60 people and not get a single answer.
You disagree, but you restate my point exactly, in that paid support is typically going to be more helpful than free support. What do you mean?
Some projects I have found to support the community very well, but there really are quite a few people out there who tarnish the community image.
Which ones? If you don't come out and say who's being offensive, then how can anyone be expected to remedy the situation?
If believing in some Vast Remond Conspiracy makes you feel better about the world's failure to beat a path to your door, go with it. Just don't lie to yourself.
Um, did you reply to the right post? I have no idea what you are talking about.
Re:One man's fragmentation is another's variety .
on
Linux in the Workplace
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· Score: 2
Dude, I have thought the exact same thing from time to time, wrt immortalizing oneself in the hall of open source heroes. My hat's off to you.
a single, unified graphical interface which substantially eases progarmming issues
In regards to what? GUI applications?
Linux also needs the equivalent of Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) for true automated configuration of new hardware, especially "hot docked" external devices through the USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 interfaces.
Shrug, if you want hardware detection, choose a distro that does it for you, like Knoppix, Mandrake, etc. I prefer the choice to have exacting control over my system configuration.
Go into any non-small OSS project channel on IRC and have fun asking questions from a users perspective. It's very clique-ish. If you're not one of the "core" developers, most of the people won't listen to you. If they do, they don't "listen" and usually just say a cool statement like RTFM.
You know, every anti-OSS person I have run into seems to claim this, but I've never run into it myself. Maybe I take care to ask the right questions and do not demand an answer?
In any case, if you want good and/or patient support, perhaps you should pay for it rather than using others' valuable free time on public IRC channels, if the free support isn't living up to your expectations.
Also, you haven't any proof that these are actual developers who have harassed you or caused whatever bad experiences you had. It could just as easily have been some 13-year-old jumping into an IRC channel for some fun, acting all l33t, pissing you off to the point of frustration, and then getting kicked later when an op shows up.
They've completely failed to build a user and developer base on their own, so they instead go to the government for help.
Well, they seem to have at least a good enough idea of what they're doing to have gained MS as a customer; as evidenced by the contract which was signed by MS to distribute a spec-compatible JVM with Windows.
If you're claiming that the violation of that contract isn't grounds for Sun to sue Microsoft, you really should quit trolling. Breach of contract is clearly illegal under any circumstance where the contract itself is legal, which it obviously was in this case.
It becomes part of the antitrust suit because this particular breach of contract was performed as part of a strategy to horizontally expand a monopoly -- poison Java just enough to make it a pain in the ass to use on the monopoly platform while maintaining at least a semblance of compatibility for the sake of public opinion, while rolling out a red carpet for their own competing product, C#. The advantages that MS claims in C# over Java are largely "advantages" that only exist because their Java support was intentionally crippled to begin with.
Oh, and using the monopoly platform as leverage for _that_ rollout (through automatically installing it on systems by Windows Update and bundling with all new products).
Or maybe MS thought that browsers were so useful that users would want a browser with their OS?
You can bundle a product without tying it. Contrast the following scenarios for me, please:
distributing a copy of Internet Explorer for free, or free download, with each copy of Windows sold
integrating Internet Explorer into the very guts of Windows so that it would be very difficult if not impossible to remove, and present onerous licensing terms to OEMs that prevent them from shipping any other browser on Windows systems
Guess which one's legal? Guess which one MS did?
Re:Anything would be faster...
on
Bochs 2.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, DOSEMU usually works better, but AFAIK it only works on i386 and Linux (and maybe some BSDs).
BSD has their own "doscmd". Dosemu currently only works on Linux/i386, but they are adding a 386 emulated core that should eventually release the architecture restriction. It is, however, highly dependent on specific features that have been merged into the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
I am certain that if a company approached him with an offer for a proprietary-licensed version of the Linux kernel, he would be more than happy to provide it, to the behest of RMS.
He is confused because he insinuates, from his perception, that FS/OSS advocates are anti-profit or anti-business. This is not the case, and my point was that if that is how people are perceiving us, that perception needs to be repaired, and soon.Certainly, there may be individual communists or socialists among our ranks, but by and large, the movement does not represent their views. It represents a software development and distribution model that strikes a better balance between the rights of the user and the rights of the producer. That's all.
In your out-of-context quote, he is not advocating banning high-paying jobs, which you may be claiming (I'm not sure!). But this is not what he is saying -- placed in context, he is simply stating a fact: that programmers are unhappy at low-paying jobs only when higher-paying ones are available to them. The example he used is one that was close to his heart, the programmers at the MIT AI lab. He claims they were perfectly happy while hacking at MIT, and were lured away by job offers where their happiness was not increased, only their money.
The whole section is a claim that money does not have to be constantly changing hands in order to motivate people to work. This has nothing to do at all with businesses capitalizing on free software as a product!
This is a capitalist society at heart. If I present myself as a businessman, and promote free software on the basis of what it can do for my business, I will be much more well received than if I present it as a basis for a pro-communist or pro-socialist argument.
People will already be shocked by the notion of an alternative model to proprietary software, and that shock must be overcome for them to accept your argument; why saddle it with even more shock by tying another sociopolitical agenda to it?
Are you saying that RMS is speaking out against profiting from selling software? If so, you're wrong. RMS has always embraced companies that sell free software. To him, everything else but the freedom is irrelevant.
I think you may be falling into the same trap that these mainstream pundits fall into.
I think the very idea that someone in the mainstream has gotten the idea that we are anti-business/anti-profit is very BAD, as it constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of the movement behind free software and the open source development model.
Who in the mainstream is going to align themselves with us, if we give them the impression that we're anarchists and commies?
Heh, more preaching to the choir, but I happen to like it. :) You talk some good sense, my man.
The parent poster was advocating change to that scenario.
I see. How about by your fellow citizens? It would be by their will that such a measure would come to pass.Right. I like the talking-down part, where you imply that he is your inferior "son". News for you, pal: it's not a totalitarian measure if people vote for it.How would you like me to discard the burnt remains of your straw man?
The parent poster was not advocating repealing antitrust law, as you seem to have convinced yourself. He was simply saying that getting rid of regulation that grants the monopolies in the first place would foster competition in the cable access space, which would be beneficial to the consumer and to the progress of the industry as a whole.
Dude, I have thought the exact same thing from time to time, wrt immortalizing oneself in the hall of open source heroes. My hat's off to you.
In any case, if you want good and/or patient support, perhaps you should pay for it rather than using others' valuable free time on public IRC channels, if the free support isn't living up to your expectations.
Also, you haven't any proof that these are actual developers who have harassed you or caused whatever bad experiences you had. It could just as easily have been some 13-year-old jumping into an IRC channel for some fun, acting all l33t, pissing you off to the point of frustration, and then getting kicked later when an op shows up.
If you're claiming that the violation of that contract isn't grounds for Sun to sue Microsoft, you really should quit trolling. Breach of contract is clearly illegal under any circumstance where the contract itself is legal, which it obviously was in this case.
It becomes part of the antitrust suit because this particular breach of contract was performed as part of a strategy to horizontally expand a monopoly -- poison Java just enough to make it a pain in the ass to use on the monopoly platform while maintaining at least a semblance of compatibility for the sake of public opinion, while rolling out a red carpet for their own competing product, C#. The advantages that MS claims in C# over Java are largely "advantages" that only exist because their Java support was intentionally crippled to begin with.
Oh, and using the monopoly platform as leverage for _that_ rollout (through automatically installing it on systems by Windows Update and bundling with all new products).
Just what *isn't* wrong with this scenario?
ROFL. Thanks for the laugh! :)
My life, as I knew it, is over!!
Guess which one's legal? Guess which one MS did?