Actually, I think that any (even rogue) state has enough power and money to buy (or steal) any software product (either sold or opensource).
Of course, some snesitive software are not easily available (like e.g. numerical codes used in weapons) but these are not commercially available (nor opensource) products.
So I really think that open-source is really a non-issue for bad nations. I mean that even today, poor nations can do a lot more harm than medium corporations or armies.
As a case in point, when the Soviet system (sort of) worked -eg in the 1970s- it was able to produce weapons (even if we know today that their cost and quality has been over-estimated by the US policy). And it did'nt need any opensource software...
Also, I would suppose (but I really don't know) that the former Iraqi army did not buy license for every Microsoft systems they have been running:-)
OCaml has also an interesting, safe, module system.
Some features are still missing (dependent types, more powerful functor, stagged metaprogramming,...) but are worked upon.
I disagree, at least from an European point of view.
BTW, I was a few days ago at the IST2004 European conference (The Hague Nederlands) and I heard the exact opposite view. Only high-value opensource tools would help Europe in not losing all its (unsufficient) IT industry.
Probably the US is in a different position: dominant corporations (including corporations behaving against laws and ethics, see recent anti-trust cases) - like MicroSoft- are american.
In all cases (and in all continents), the IT job market will evolve.
Drew wrote: We actually have a sort of two level system in the U.S....
I am not sure that this is equivalent to what I see in France. If I understand correctly, the first level you are talking about is the nomination of a single candidate in the two major parties (Democrats and Republicains).
Of course, the same happens in France also (thru a complex process, internal to each party). Each party designates only one candidate by its internal procedures (otherwise, this party would for sure loose the election). Usually, the candidate is somehow elected inside his party (but the details vary from one party to another).
The two French presidential rounds (the french word is tour) are really defined by the highest laws (by the Constitution of the 5th republic of France, article 7; see here in French).
Since the rule about these 2 rounds is carved in stone in the French Constitution,(actually, a single round is enough if the elected president has more than 50% of the votes on the first round - a very unlikely process, when dozens of candidates are available). I think this rule is not similar to the nomination inside your parties.
But I don't understand exactly how Kerry was choosen (inside the Democrat party); I thought that only people which are inside the US Democrats' party have (internally to the party) elected him. This is the way candidates are usually choosen in France, inside their parties. But in theory, you don't need in France to be a member of a party to be candidate to the presidential election (but there are a few limitations, like the 500 signatures...). In practice (for at least economical reasons) it is unthinkable to pretend to be a presidential candidate in France without the backup of a party (or similar political organisation), and in major parties this run starts many years before the election (for instance, both Fabius and StraussKahn are supposed to be candidate to the presidential candidature inside the Parti Socialiste).
Yes, I'm French... Feel free to ignore this post (but replying by bashing France in general would be off-topic).
I think that the main problem is not the voting technology. It is the electoral system (in the US, and sometimes elsewhere).
The 2-level presidential vote is not really democratic... The people should be able to choose from many candidates. FWIW, in France, the presidential vote is usually a 2 round vote: on the first round, dozens of candidates (with a small limitation: each candidate has to be approved by > 500 county majors or MPs from several regions). On the second round, only the two candidates with the biggest votes (on the 1st one). So in the first tour, you vote for whom you like. In the second one, you vote against whom you dislike the most.
The lack of several (more than 4) realistic candidates at US presidential elections.
Most importantly, the lack of real constraining limits on the budget of each american party. IMHO, there should be a strong legal limit (of about a few dollars per voter) on the electoral budget. Since a campaign costs much more than a billion dollar, each of your candidate has to sell himself to big corporations... There are such limitations in France, but I think they are not severe enough.
I prefer the 2-round system used in France for the presidential election. (and yes, I am ashamed it did not work very well on the last presidential election, when Chirac faced an ultra-right candidate LePen; and Chirac did not understood that he was not really elected by 80% of the voters. He should have resigned immediately after his election, to let start a real vote.).
No, I really think that having an open source driver is important. It can be adapted to other kernels (and even other free OSes), or hacked if needed. For example, experimental window systems (like http://fresco.org/ or http://www.y-windows.org/ for example) could re-use some portions of an open-source driver.
Likewise, an opensource driver can be ported to other architectures (eg PowerPC, Sparc, AMD64) or major kernel updates (with driver ABI changes). For binary drivers, you need the good will of the hardware maker.
So for me at least binary only drivers are always a problem. I want opensource (or free, i.e. libre) software.
I am considering buy a new AGP8X graphic card (rather low-cost, ie < 160 €), that I will use only under Linux (with an AMD64 processor). It seems that there are no more graphic cards with a fully opensource Linux driver which gives to Linux the same abilities as the Windows driver. I find this situation annoying.
As a customer, I want to support companies providing a fully opensource driver for their graphic cards. Binary only drivers for linux should be avoided and we customers should support with our dollars or euros hardware providers giving opensource drivers.
If you know about graphic cards with a supported, fully opensource (ie GPL or OSI accepted) driver, please tell.
The last Microsoft system I used was some version of MSDOS-3 (yes, I'm programming since 1976, I was a teenager then). I'm using Linux since the 0.99.15 kernel.
I'm not using MicroSoft products because they are not free (in the sense of libre, ie opensource) software.
An interesting question might be: would I use Windows if it where an open source (GPL or LGPL) system? (yes, I know it will never happen). My answer is that I might try it then, and I will probably find it disappointing.
The POESIA (an opensource internet content filter, partly funded by the European Commission, safer Internet Access Plan IAP2117/27572) project will have some opensourced NLP components (for English, Spanish, Italian...).
POESIA (Public Opensource Environment for a Safer Internet Access) aims to protect European youth (in educational institutions) against harmful or inappropriate Internet content, and use several techniques (including NLP, Image processing,...) to achieve this goal.
Of course NeWS had interesting ideas (but wasn't opensource, so died).
The Berlin server could have been an interesting alternative. Unfortunately, it seems stalled, and the design around CORBA might be wrong. I definitely think that a GUI server should be protocol based (like PicoGUI and X11)!
An alternative could be to write a widget server running under X11. I actually did code (under GPL) such a stuff see Guis and Guis page for details and downloading. Please send me any feedbacks!
Guis's main ideas are: requests from client to GUIS are on a pipe, carrying Lua script for GTK2. replies from GUIS to client are either XML or Lispy syntax.
Xemacs might claim to be (also) a widget server.
Actually, I also think that the current widgets available in toolkits are unappropriate. I am missing a generic structured editor widget (able to edit generic syntax trees, perhaps with an XML representation).
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Actually, I think that any (even rogue) state has enough power and money to buy (or steal) any software product (either sold or opensource). Of course, some snesitive software are not easily available (like e.g. numerical codes used in weapons) but these are not commercially available (nor opensource) products. So I really think that open-source is really a non-issue for bad nations. I mean that even today, poor nations can do a lot more harm than medium corporations or armies. As a case in point, when the Soviet system (sort of) worked -eg in the 1970s- it was able to produce weapons (even if we know today that their cost and quality has been over-estimated by the US policy). And it did'nt need any opensource software... Also, I would suppose (but I really don't know) that the former Iraqi army did not buy license for every Microsoft systems they have been running :-)
OCaml has also an interesting, safe, module system. Some features are still missing (dependent types, more powerful functor, stagged metaprogramming, ...) but are worked upon.
I disagree, at least from an European point of view.
BTW, I was a few days ago at the IST2004 European conference (The Hague Nederlands) and I heard the exact opposite view. Only high-value opensource tools would help Europe in not losing all its (unsufficient) IT industry.
Probably the US is in a different position: dominant corporations (including corporations behaving against laws and ethics, see recent anti-trust cases) - like MicroSoft- are american.
In all cases (and in all continents), the IT job market will evolve.
I am not sure that this is equivalent to what I see in France. If I understand correctly, the first level you are talking about is the nomination of a single candidate in the two major parties (Democrats and Republicains).
Of course, the same happens in France also (thru a complex process, internal to each party). Each party designates only one candidate by its internal procedures (otherwise, this party would for sure loose the election). Usually, the candidate is somehow elected inside his party (but the details vary from one party to another).
The two French presidential rounds (the french word is tour) are really defined by the highest laws (by the Constitution of the 5th republic of France, article 7; see here in French).
Since the rule about these 2 rounds is carved in stone in the French Constitution,(actually, a single round is enough if the elected president has more than 50% of the votes on the first round - a very unlikely process, when dozens of candidates are available). I think this rule is not similar to the nomination inside your parties.
But I don't understand exactly how Kerry was choosen (inside the Democrat party); I thought that only people which are inside the US Democrats' party have (internally to the party) elected him. This is the way candidates are usually choosen in France, inside their parties. But in theory, you don't need in France to be a member of a party to be candidate to the presidential election (but there are a few limitations, like the 500 signatures...). In practice (for at least economical reasons) it is unthinkable to pretend to be a presidential candidate in France without the backup of a party (or similar political organisation), and in major parties this run starts many years before the election (for instance, both Fabius and StraussKahn are supposed to be candidate to the presidential candidature inside the Parti Socialiste).
Regards.
Yes, I'm French... Feel free to ignore this post (but replying by bashing France in general would be off-topic).
I think that the main problem is not the voting technology. It is the electoral system (in the US, and sometimes elsewhere).
The 2-level presidential vote is not really democratic... The people should be able to choose from many candidates. FWIW, in France, the presidential vote is usually a 2 round vote: on the first round, dozens of candidates (with a small limitation: each candidate has to be approved by > 500 county majors or MPs from several regions). On the second round, only the two candidates with the biggest votes (on the 1st one). So in the first tour, you vote for whom you like. In the second one, you vote against whom you dislike the most.
The lack of several (more than 4) realistic candidates at US presidential elections.
Most importantly, the lack of real constraining limits on the budget of each american party. IMHO, there should be a strong legal limit (of about a few dollars per voter) on the electoral budget. Since a campaign costs much more than a billion dollar, each of your candidate has to sell himself to big corporations... There are such limitations in France, but I think they are not severe enough.
I prefer the 2-round system used in France for the presidential election. (and yes, I am ashamed it did not work very well on the last presidential election, when Chirac faced an ultra-right candidate LePen; and Chirac did not understood that he was not really elected by 80% of the voters. He should have resigned immediately after his election, to let start a real vote.).
Likewise, an opensource driver can be ported to other architectures (eg PowerPC, Sparc, AMD64) or major kernel updates (with driver ABI changes). For binary drivers, you need the good will of the hardware maker.
So for me at least binary only drivers are always a problem. I want opensource (or free, i.e. libre) software.
As a customer, I want to support companies providing a fully opensource driver for their graphic cards. Binary only drivers for linux should be avoided and we customers should support with our dollars or euros hardware providers giving opensource drivers.
If you know about graphic cards with a supported, fully opensource (ie GPL or OSI accepted) driver, please tell.
It is not a new idea. IIRC, the Soviets made (or at least designed) some similar prototypes just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, around 1989
I'm not using MicroSoft products because they are not free (in the sense of libre, ie opensource) software.
An interesting question might be: would I use Windows if it where an open source (GPL or LGPL) system? (yes, I know it will never happen). My answer is that I might try it then, and I will probably find it disappointing.
The Ocaml debugger (see the Caml site) has the ability to travel back in time.
Also, type inference of the Ocaml language find a lot of bugs at compile time.
I believe that higher level programming languages will lower the need of debuggers.
At last, as other comments show, many programs (e.g. servers, CGIs, ....) are difficult to debug with a debugger.
Human beings are not able to manage big projects. (This is true everwhere, in every country, both in private and public sectors, etc...).
So the initial hypothesis ("if better managed") is simply false.
The POESIA (an opensource internet content filter, partly funded by the European Commission, safer Internet Access Plan IAP2117/27572) project will have some opensourced NLP components (for English, Spanish, Italian...).
See POESIA site for details.
POESIA (Public Opensource Environment for a Safer Internet Access) aims to protect European youth (in educational institutions) against harmful or inappropriate Internet content, and use several techniques (including NLP, Image processing, ...) to achieve this goal.
Of course NeWS had interesting ideas (but wasn't opensource, so died).
The Berlin server could have been an interesting alternative. Unfortunately, it seems stalled, and the design around CORBA might be wrong. I definitely think that a GUI server should be protocol based (like PicoGUI and X11)!
An alternative could be to write a widget server running under X11. I actually did code (under GPL) such a stuff see Guis and Guis page for details and downloading. Please send me any feedbacks!
Guis's main ideas are: requests from client to GUIS are on a pipe, carrying Lua script for GTK2. replies from GUIS to client are either XML or Lispy syntax.
Xemacs might claim to be (also) a widget server.
Actually, I also think that the current widgets available in toolkits are unappropriate. I am missing a generic structured editor widget (able to edit generic syntax trees, perhaps with an XML representation).