I know this has been done with the GNU toolchain. Also other bits. This is the big deal about GPL/FSF code: the copyright holder determines the license. Thus, the FSF can (and has) licensed GPL'd code to 3rd parties for commercial use.
This is a demonstrably false statement. Check the GNU GPL FAQ. There are a number of other places where rms states that the FSF does not and will not license GPL'ed code under non-free licenses. I challenge you to give documentation of an example of the FSF licensing code under non-free software licenses.
Thanks for the reference! I see a general description of commercial licensing, but so far I haven't been able to find the modifications to the GPL that assign all modifications back to the owners of Ghostscript. Could you provide a quote or specific pointer, and explain how informed consent for contributing changes works here?
As far as I know, there is no modification to the GPL for Ghostscript, Artifex simply does like the FSF and asks contributors politely to assign copyright contributions to them. In the FSF's case, see Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors.
I can't find such a provision for assignment of modifications in the Mozilla Public License. Again, could you please provide specifics, and explain how informed consent is obtained?
See Amendment V.2 of the Netscape Public License, the license under which Mozilla was released (my bad for confusing the two). There are plain-english interpretations of the NPL on mozilla.org that explain that by publishing modifications to Mozilla, you grant Netscape a 2-year license to use your code (again, my error, it's not an assignment of ownership.)
For one thing, if there is any community support of the GPLed version, third-party improvements to the GPLed version could not be covered by the commercial license. This includes any contributed changes that were incorporated into the main source branch by the original author -- they're all GPLed. That means there probably does not exist any "pure" version which could be commercially licensed. Any free software which has enough value that someone would wish to license it commercially (e.g., Mozilla, GCC, Linux kernel, Bison, Eazel, GNOME, KDE, etc.) has probably benefited from community participation, and so could not be commercially licensed.
It's possible if the primary author takes the pains to get ownership of improvements assigned to him, and the community is willing to do so. Ghostscript is an example of a GPL'ed Free Software program that provides its primary author with a source of revenue from proprietary licensing.
Software under Mozilla-style licenses requires ownership of published modifications to be assigned to the originator. Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner owns all modifications to Mozilla.
Business model is exactly the difference between free software and open source. You're quite right that RMS doesn't care about profit potential. He is opposed to the idea of making money by writing software. This quixotic viewpoint defines the free software movement. For a while, it largely gave way to the open source movement, which held that it was possible to make money by developing software and giving it away with source code for free. Now it's turning out that this concept doesn't work, which is why I wrote: "Hasn't the idea that open source generates major profit potential been pretty well refuted?" I'm not arguing here against the free software concept, only the open source concept.
Reread the GNU Manifesto (1985). RMS covers the business implications of the free software movement in it. I've never seen a statement by RMS that indicates he is opposed to the idea of making money by writing software. He seems to be very specifically offended by the fact that people are motivated by greed to sell proprietary software products with restrictive licenses.
In the GNU Manifesto, he suggests a number of ways that programmers could still make money in a world where all software was Free, primarily by selling support. This approach is identical to the "Open Source" business model as I understand it.
You need to distinguish between "making money", "getting rich", and "getting obscenely rich".
You can make money selling services around free software, or working for companies that want to use free software in their operations. You can maybe get rich doing that, or by hiring programmers who are willing to work for less to write free software. Because service companies don't scale like companies that stamp out products, I doubt we'll see an Oracle or a Microsoft emerge from the Open Source revolution. Hint: look at Red Hat's current market capitalization and compare it to the market capitalization of other professional service companies with comparable revenues. At $4/share and a market capitalization of 700 million, it's still drastically overvalued.
I'm the stereotypical candidate for prima donna syndrome: a few days shy of 21, dropped out of the engineering program at a state University because it was unchallenging and mediocre on its very best days, and dove into the IT field. I'm a Unix Sysadmin for a little company with scrambling and confused management - a glorified dot-com.
However, upper management (2 people, it's a small company) slowly builds an image of me being unfriendly and not helpful. Bad situation for me.
You're a system administrator. You're support staff. Your job is to be friendly and helpful to the people that do things that make money for the company. You're basically the technical equivalent of a receptionist, and don't realize it yet. Smile, buddy.
If you want a job as a programmer or as an engineer, bust your ass to get a job as a programmer or as an engineer. Go back to school and get a degree if you have to. Don't take an MIS support position and play make-believe. If you take an engineering position, don't volunteer to take up MIS support slack---could you see your upper management volunteering to man the front desk when the receptionist goes to the dentist?
Management looks at things in terms of investment, risk, and a few other things that I'm not overly attentive of... The merits of design are not the merits of finance and profit.
You're a sysadmin, not a designer. Your career will benefit enormously when you learn to be attentive to business issues. It might even really take off when you start paying attention to office politics.
The buzzword now is MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems), and there are a few real applications, like optical switching, TI's display technology, and some sensor technology.
In large part, though, MEMS is still a solution in search of a problem.
Also, "micro" is a rather different scale than "nano".
Yes, it is. If I buy Microsoft Office, I am buying software that works. If I download StarOffice, I am getting software that doesn't work. If I download some random utility from FreshMeat, I am downloading something that is almost guaranteed not to work and to be held together with hooks and bailing wire.
It is a bit disingenuous of you to choose Star Office as an example of a "Open Source" program.
Star Office is a second or third-rate also-ran that was released as Free Software after Sun bought it, sobered up, and realized they had no customers for it. As such, the bug you found in its installer as well as its poor user interface are both the result of mediocre commercial "closed-source" processes, not of a mediocre "open-source" effort. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to have improved any since Sun released it as Free Software.
Freshmeat is a real mixed bag, no question about it.
Denial about the flakiness of open source software is one of the most serious problems in the community.
Amen to that. I continue to be shocked by what the latest crop of linux weenies recommend as "pretty good". I haven't run into that kind of bozosity since I made the mistake of trying (for fun, thank God, not because I needed it to DO SOMETHING IMPORTANT) to bring an Amiga 2000 into the present back in 1998 or so... I have since recovered a little bit of my sanity, but the recommendations I received from Amiga nuts were um, often charmingly misguided.
There has been a little bit of a paradigm shift in the unix culture since the popularization of unix via Linux---there are a lot more people doing some kind of unix-for-unix's-sake kind of thing rather than interesting-things-that-are-most-easily-done-on-un ix.
One of most interesting things about the unix world is that people still develop large unix programs at universities and release them as free software. These provide other business cases for using free software, especially for one-shot or infrequent tasks:
If you want to learn about finite element analysis, do you shell out five figures for a single-seat ABAQUS license or do you download TOCHNOG or FELT? (admittedly, the mid-tier FE vendors will gladly send you demo versions of their code with tutorials, but the source code of analysis software is a learning resource in and of itself.)
If you need to do some numerical analysis from scratch maybe four times a year, often for as-yet-unfunded work, do you spend days humiliating yourself convincing your boss it's worthwhile to shell out four figures for MATLAB, or do you download GNU Octave and live with its limitations? (Most of the other Matlab clones out there, last time I looked, fell into the category of "software people have recommended to me as pretty good".)
If you write one FORTRAN program, maybe a thousand lines, a year, do you shell out for one of the superb commercial Fortran 90/95 implementations, and spend a month or so coming up to speed on all the new features of modern FORTRAN, or do you live with g77?
As an aside, TeX still certainly has a niche for production of the finest computer typesetting. For a different perspective on software quality in free software, I suggest you read Knuth's "The Errors of TeX".
The famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is not only in the public domain now, but it has been entered into ascii form as part of the Gutenberg project. They can't CALL it the Britannica, because that's still under trademark, but a comparison of the articles to the 11th edition on my shelf shows that's what it is. Good encyclopedia if a bit dated---and a great place to start.
Just think, if you have to write a little COM component that all it does is get something from an Access database and return it and it also has to be maintainable by the manager's teenage son/daughter...
"www.bushdidnthinkofthisone.org"... I am sure the 200 names Bush registered only represent a very small fraction of the possibilities. Forcing your opponents to be more creative is not always the best way to go.
Linus Pauling is a poor example for your argument; he did after all win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards nuclear disarmament as well as his Nodel Prize in Chemistry for working out the structure of proteins.
you forgot autofocus, image stabilized binoculars, a laser rangefinder, and an electronic compass. some kind of removable storage, if only digital video tapes, would be nice too.
Frankly, I wonder about that too. Anybody know why the FSF has not adopted PostgreSQL as its standard sql database? Used to be the FSF made decisions like that for technical reasons, because someone there or that they knew though they could do better than an existing free package...
You should've grabbed a copy of the last version of Generic CADD when Autodesk marked it down to a list price of $99. I had to special order it from a local software store and I think they charged me $80 for it. It works fine under DOSEmu. There was a point there during the ascendance of Windows where a lot of very good, stable DOS software was available for cheap...
Petty stereotyping of mac users is lame. Of the non-programmers I know who use computers most intelligently in their work, many are hardcore mac power users.
Well, Jon's right on the money as far as his assessment of the available linux books. For a really insightful and occasionally scathing analysis of the state of the computer publishing industry, check out The book behind the book behind the book..., on Philip Greenspun's Web Tools Review.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this has been done with the GNU toolchain. Also other bits. This is the big deal about GPL/FSF code: the copyright holder determines the license. Thus, the FSF can (and has) licensed GPL'd code to 3rd parties for commercial use.
This is a demonstrably false statement. Check the GNU GPL FAQ. There are a number of other places where rms states that the FSF does not and will not license GPL'ed code under non-free licenses. I challenge you to give documentation of an example of the FSF licensing code under non-free software licenses.
foog
Thanks for the reference! I see a general description of commercial licensing, but so far I haven't been able to find the modifications to the GPL that assign all modifications back to the owners of Ghostscript. Could you provide a quote or specific pointer, and explain how informed consent for contributing changes works here?
As far as I know, there is no modification to the GPL for Ghostscript, Artifex simply does like the FSF and asks contributors politely to assign copyright contributions to them. In the FSF's case, see Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors.
I can't find such a provision for assignment of modifications in the Mozilla Public License. Again, could you please provide specifics, and explain how informed consent is obtained?
See Amendment V.2 of the Netscape Public License, the license under which Mozilla was released (my bad for confusing the two). There are plain-english interpretations of the NPL on mozilla.org that explain that by publishing modifications to Mozilla, you grant Netscape a 2-year license to use your code (again, my error, it's not an assignment of ownership.)
Brent
For one thing, if there is any community support of the GPLed version, third-party improvements to the GPLed version could not be covered by the commercial license. This includes any contributed changes that were incorporated into the main source branch by the original author -- they're all GPLed. That means there probably does not exist any "pure" version which could be commercially licensed. Any free software which has enough value that someone would wish to license it commercially (e.g., Mozilla, GCC, Linux kernel, Bison, Eazel, GNOME, KDE, etc.) has probably benefited from community participation, and so could not be commercially licensed.
It's possible if the primary author takes the pains to get ownership of improvements assigned to him, and the community is willing to do so. Ghostscript is an example of a GPL'ed Free Software program that provides its primary author with a source of revenue from proprietary licensing.
Software under Mozilla-style licenses requires ownership of published modifications to be assigned to the originator. Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner owns all modifications to Mozilla.
foog
Business model is exactly the difference between free software and open source. You're quite right that RMS doesn't care about profit potential. He is opposed to the idea of making money by writing software. This quixotic viewpoint defines the free software movement. For a while, it largely gave way to the open source movement, which held that it was possible to make money by developing software and giving it away with source code for free. Now it's turning out that this concept doesn't work, which is why I wrote: "Hasn't the idea that open source generates major profit potential been pretty well refuted?" I'm not arguing here against the free software concept, only the open source concept.
Reread the GNU Manifesto (1985). RMS covers the business implications of the free software movement in it. I've never seen a statement by RMS that indicates he is opposed to the idea of making money by writing software. He seems to be very specifically offended by the fact that people are motivated by greed to sell proprietary software products with restrictive licenses.
In the GNU Manifesto, he suggests a number of ways that programmers could still make money in a world where all software was Free, primarily by selling support. This approach is identical to the "Open Source" business model as I understand it.
You need to distinguish between "making money", "getting rich", and "getting obscenely rich".
You can make money selling services around free software, or working for companies that want to use free software in their operations. You can maybe get rich doing that, or by hiring programmers who are willing to work for less to write free software. Because service companies don't scale like companies that stamp out products, I doubt we'll see an Oracle or a Microsoft emerge from the Open Source revolution. Hint: look at Red Hat's current market capitalization and compare it to the market capitalization of other professional service companies with comparable revenues. At $4/share and a market capitalization of 700 million, it's still drastically overvalued.
foog
I'm the stereotypical candidate for prima donna syndrome: a few days shy of 21, dropped out of the engineering program at a state University because it was unchallenging and mediocre on its very best days, and dove into the IT field. I'm a Unix Sysadmin for a little company with scrambling and confused management - a glorified dot-com.
However, upper management (2 people, it's a small company) slowly builds an image of me being unfriendly and not helpful. Bad situation for me.
You're a system administrator. You're support staff. Your job is to be friendly and helpful to the people that do things that make money for the company. You're basically the technical equivalent of a receptionist, and don't realize it yet. Smile, buddy.
If you want a job as a programmer or as an engineer, bust your ass to get a job as a programmer or as an engineer. Go back to school and get a degree if you have to. Don't take an MIS support position and play make-believe. If you take an engineering position, don't volunteer to take up MIS support slack---could you see your upper management volunteering to man the front desk when the receptionist goes to the dentist?
Management looks at things in terms of investment, risk, and a few other things that I'm not overly attentive of... The merits of design are not the merits of finance and profit.
You're a sysadmin, not a designer. Your career will benefit enormously when you learn to be attentive to business issues. It might even really take off when you start paying attention to office politics.
foog
The buzzword now is MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems), and there are a few real applications, like optical switching, TI's display technology, and some sensor technology.
In large part, though, MEMS is still a solution in search of a problem.
Also, "micro" is a rather different scale than "nano".
foog
It is a bit disingenuous of you to choose Star Office as an example of a "Open Source" program.
Star Office is a second or third-rate also-ran that was released as Free Software after Sun bought it, sobered up, and realized they had no customers for it. As such, the bug you found in its installer as well as its poor user interface are both the result of mediocre commercial "closed-source" processes, not of a mediocre "open-source" effort. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to have improved any since Sun released it as Free Software.
Freshmeat is a real mixed bag, no question about it.
Denial about the flakiness of open source software is one of the most serious problems in the community.
Amen to that. I continue to be shocked by what the latest crop of linux weenies recommend as "pretty good". I haven't run into that kind of bozosity since I made the mistake of trying (for fun, thank God, not because I needed it to DO SOMETHING IMPORTANT) to bring an Amiga 2000 into the present back in 1998 or so... I have since recovered a little bit of my sanity, but the recommendations I received from Amiga nuts were um, often charmingly misguided.
There has been a little bit of a paradigm shift in the unix culture since the popularization of unix via Linux---there are a lot more people doing some kind of unix-for-unix's-sake kind of thing rather than interesting-things-that-are-most-easily-done-on-u
One of most interesting things about the unix world is that people still develop large unix programs at universities and release them as free software. These provide other business cases for using free software, especially for one-shot or infrequent tasks:
If you want to learn about finite element analysis, do you shell out five figures for a single-seat ABAQUS license or do you download TOCHNOG or FELT? (admittedly, the mid-tier FE vendors will gladly send you demo versions of their code with tutorials, but the source code of analysis software is a learning resource in and of itself.)
If you need to do some numerical analysis from scratch maybe four times a year, often for as-yet-unfunded work, do you spend days humiliating yourself convincing your boss it's worthwhile to shell out four figures for MATLAB, or do you download GNU Octave and live with its limitations? (Most of the other Matlab clones out there, last time I looked, fell into the category of "software people have recommended to me as pretty good".)
If you write one FORTRAN program, maybe a thousand lines, a year, do you shell out for one of the superb commercial Fortran 90/95 implementations, and spend a month or so coming up to speed on all the new features of modern FORTRAN, or do you live with g77?
As an aside, TeX still certainly has a niche for production of the finest computer typesetting. For a different perspective on software quality in free software, I suggest you read Knuth's
"The Errors of TeX".
foog
The famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is not only in the public domain now, but it has been entered into ascii form as part of the Gutenberg project. They can't CALL it the Britannica, because that's still under trademark, but a comparison of the articles to the 11th edition on my shelf shows that's what it is. Good encyclopedia if a bit dated---and a great place to start.
you start working on your resume, because...
no.
"www.bushdidnthinkofthisone.org"...
I am sure the 200 names Bush registered only represent a very small fraction of the possibilities.
Forcing your opponents to be more creative is not always the best way to go.
Linus Pauling is a poor example for your argument; he did after all win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards nuclear disarmament as well as his Nodel Prize in Chemistry for working out the structure of proteins.
You forgot: "Didn't he write the Tarzan books?"
you forgot autofocus, image stabilized binoculars, a laser rangefinder, and an electronic compass.
some kind of removable storage, if only digital video tapes, would be nice too.
of course, you brits quit building computers when you couldn't figure out how to make them leak oil.
Frankly, I wonder about that too.
Anybody know why the FSF has not adopted PostgreSQL as its standard sql database?
Used to be the FSF made decisions like that for technical reasons, because someone there or that they knew though they could do better than an existing free package...
Star Raiders (Atari, 1979) on the classic Atari 8-bit computers has never been equalled.
Yeah, BRL-CAD looks interesting, but it is not free software.
You should've grabbed a copy of the last version of Generic CADD when Autodesk marked it down to a list price of $99. I had to special order it from a local software store and I think they charged me $80 for it. It works fine under DOSEmu. There was a point there during the ascendance of Windows where a lot of very good, stable DOS software was available for cheap...
grumble
Unix was largely written for DTP.
What do you think ed and nroff are for?
grumble grumble snicker snicker
oh, you're right. how embarassing.
it was Brian Kernighan, for crying out loud!!!
and the backdoor was in the AT&T C compiler for Unix!
Sheesh, if you're swapping you should add more RAM.
One of these would be great for your / partition though if you want to boot fast... then again, considering the prevalence of the uptime fetish...
Mesa doesn't really support hardware acceleration for OpenGL in a window under X. Yet. Yes, I know about the crufty Voodoo hack.
Petty stereotyping of mac users is lame. Of the non-programmers I know who use computers most intelligently in their work, many are hardcore mac power users.
Well, Jon's right on the money as far as his assessment of the available linux books. For a really insightful and occasionally scathing analysis of the state of the computer publishing industry, check out The book behind the book behind the book..., on Philip Greenspun's Web Tools Review.