Linux is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. This imposes a few restrictions and says that the code may not be distributed linked to any code that imposes more restrictions, nor can any derived works impose any more restrictions than are present in the license.
FreeBSD is released under the 2-clause BSD license, which says, basically, do what you want with this, just don't sue me if it doesn't work and don't claim you wrote it.
OpenSolaris was released under the CDDL, which is generally less restrictive than the GPL (no restrictions on what you can link it to), but adds some anti-patent clauses that are not present in the GPL. Because these restrictions are not present in the GPL, the GPL prevents CDDL code from being linked against it. This means that if ZFS or DTrace were ever ported to Linux by anyone other than the copyright holder they would not be allowed to distribute Linux along with their port.
In FreeBSD, ZFS and DTrace are optional kernel modules, so you can still build a system without them, but they are loadable if you are happy to accept the terms of the CDDL when you distribute FreeBSD. There's no technical reason why either couldn't be ported to any system (well, the Linux storage stack is a mess, so adding ZFS would be a bit harder, but it could be done), but few people are motivated to produce a port when they are not legally allowed to redistribute it.
What is wrong with you people? I specifically said that GSM is better than a mix of GSM and CDMA, independently of whether GSM or CDMA is better in isolation. Yet, so far, almost all of the replies have been telling me that CDMA is better than GSM, as if I claimed that GSM is better than CDMA and needed educating.
As I said, it was a recession. The company was doing badly because the set of people who could afford their services had shrunk. It had three choices:
Keep employing people at the current rate, use up its cash reserves, and file for bankruptcy
Fire some employees
Institute pay cuts
Option 1 is clearly a bad idea. Option 2 was possible, but the company wasn't doing badly because of underperforming employees, it was doing badly because the economy was crap. Given the state of the economy, employees who were made redundant would have had a hard time finding work - not because they were bad, but because no one was hiring.
What sort of density are you getting 20-80Mb/s with? 20Mb/s in rural areas would be nice (better than the 1Mb/s my mother gets through ADSL...), but 20Mb/s in urban areas with lots of users would be impressive. What sort of cell size (i.e. subscribers per cell) gives you that kind of real-world throughput?
This is what happens when you let the free market decide on standards with geographical monopolies. This is why a particular protocol is mandated with spectrum sales in most of the world. Irrespective of the relative technical merits of GSM versus CDMA, it's pretty clear that GSM is superior to CDMA and GSM with incompatible client devices for the two networks and customers locked in to one or the other depending on what phone they bought. It appears that the USA didn't learn from this mistake the first time around...
That depends on the company. During the recession in the '80s, the managers at my father's company were the first to take pay cuts. When they were still making a loss, they gave the employees a choice of shifting to part time, taking a pay cut, or having some redundancies. The employees opted for a mixture of the first two. When the economy recovered, there were bonuses for the people who'd stayed and the old pay rates were reinstated, with the management pay rate being the last to return to its pre-recession value.
If you're certain that the company that you work for wouldn't do something like this in times of financial difficulty, then maybe you should consider moving elsewhere now, rather than when they get someone cheaper to do your job...
Depends on the industry. If you leave a company like in a situation like that then there are two things that may happen. One is that the company really couldn't afford to lose you at that time, and goes bust. You'll then have a company that went bankrupt on your CV, which doesn't look great, especially if the next person hiring you knows why. The second is that your former manager may be friends with the next person you want to hire you, and lets them know that you left them in the lurch.
Given the description in the summary, I would definitely take the job, but there are several ways of doing it. First, talk to both managers. See if you can get a bit more time before you move. Also see if the new company would be willing to subcontract you out to the old company for a day or two a month for the next year to ease the transition. This gives the new company some extra income and gives the old company the time to finish training your replacements.
The difference there is that these are shows funded by the UK taxpayer. As a UK taxpayer, I'm not terribly upset if the BBC doesn't go out of its way to make a profit, as long as the quality of its output doesn't suffer. On the other hand, I'd expect the shareholders of a for-profit company to be up in arms if the company is intentionally acting in a way that reduces profits...
To be fair you'd still get a quite a few cinema tickets for a good projector, sound system
I bought my 5.1 surround sound system for £100 almost a decade ago - it seems you can get cheaper ones now. My projector cost £150 three years ago, with a new bulb (rated for 3,000 hours, replacements cost about £30). That's £250. My local cinema costs £10 to see a film. That's 25 movies. The company I rent DVDs from has a two rental a month package for £5/month, which is their cheapest one (it gets better value per film with the more expensive ones). If you watch two movies a month, then you're saving £15/month by watching them at home, rather than going to the cinema. That means that after 17 months, it's cheaper including capital costs. And that's assuming that you're single. If you're a couple, then you're saving £25/month (it costs twice as much for two people to go to the cinema but the same amount for two people to watch films at home), so it only takes 10 months.
As well as being cheaper:
You can pause the film when you want to go to the toilet
You can eat or drink what you like instead of overpriced cinema food
You can start the film when you want, rather than at a few fixed times
You can have friends watch it with you without it costing them anything (or, better, get them to bring food / booze)
You can go straight to be after the film, you don't have a long walk or drive home afterwards
It takes up a little bit of space in your house, but not much. The speakers are each quite small and sit in the corners of the room. The projector goes on a shelf when it's not in use. Projectors that make DVDs look good have been cheap for a while. HD projectors are just starting to drop in price.
iTunes was the only game in town because the iPod had something like 80% market share when the iTunes Music Store launched, and the iPod could play DRM-free MP3s, DRM-free AAC, and Fairplay DRM'd AAC. Apple owned Fairplay and refused to license it. A competing music store needed to offer DRM-free music for it to be playable on the iPod, but the labels would only allow their music to be sold with DRM. There were competing music stores, but they all used Microsoft's DRM, which didn't work with the dominant portable music player. It wasn't until they allowed Amazon to sell DRM-free music that there was a competitor that worked with the iPod.
That's not so important, as long as there's interoperability. If you make an MPEG-4 video container available, then it will play on pretty much any device, from a mobile phone up to a TV. If I have to go to a TV or movie studio's site to grab the file, I don't care - the web is one big store front. If you try to tie your product to one specific playback mechanism, then that's a lot more irritating than having to click on a couple more hyperlinks to get to your site...
It sounds like you're American, because you don't seem familiar with that notice. If someone posts a link to, for example, The Daily Show or some other Comedy Central link on Slashdot, it only works for people in the USA. Everyone else sees the 'not available in your region' message that the grandparent alludes to. An increasing number of GooTube clips have this as well. This is simply inexcusable on the Internet.
Where do you live the $1.99 isn't affordable for a movie?!
I pay about $18 (in the UK) for a two-disks at once rental package. I can watch 4 DVDs a week, so 16 a month. That puts it close to $1 per DVD, but also includes unlimited streaming (although the quality is pretty poor). I prefer to pay a monthly fee for as much as I can watch than pay for each individual one - psychologically, even if the a la carte approach is cheaper, it means I'm thinking about the cost when I choose to watch something.
- Streaming is fine but I also want a download-to-own option, so that I can take movies along on my tablet when I travel
And that's even more important now than it was. A couple of years ago, I only had one device that could reasonably play back decent quality video on the go, and its battery life wasn't great. Now I have two that have a long enough battery live to watch a couple of films on the train, and both were cheap. Streaming is okay for watching at home, but downloading is essential for watching while mobile. Even if I have a 3G connection with no caps, it will drop out when I go through a tunnel...
I would love to see copyright made dependent on a bona fide effort to distribute. If you are not distributing a work in a region, then it should be possible to file to have the copyright lapse. The copyright owner would then have 30 days to demonstrate that they were making an effort to distribute it, and if not it should enter the public domain.
So? Newsflash: DVDs and BluRays end up on torrent servers as soon as they're released too. Some people pirate because they have an entitlement mentality. You can probably stop them pirating if you make every copy you sell locked down with invasive DRM, but getting them to pay is a lot harder and you'll probably piss off a lot of paying customers in the process. Some people pirate because you are not selling them what they want. Sell them DRM-free downloads at a reasonable price and they'll become paying customers.
But then, we're talking about the movie industry. Their entire business model is 'don't give the customer what they want'. They delay DVD releases because 'it would cannibalise cinema revenue'. This, translated, means 'a lot of people would rather buy the DVD than go to the cinema'. Not really surprising given how small the quality difference between a half decent (but still cheap) home cinema setup and a real cinema is these days. So, having identified a market, they intentionally don't fill it. The result? People who want to see the film during the time when the studio is hyping the crap out of it with millions of dollars of advertising but don't want to go to the cinema pirate it.
American TV shows are even worse. The region 1 DVD release is usually 6 months after the end and the region 2 release comes even later. That means that there's a year-long window between the show becoming available to pirate and it becoming available to watch (rent or buy) legally. Dollhouse Season 2, from 2010, is still not available to rent on DVD in the UK. I can only assume that this means that Fox really wants to see it pirated. I rented season 1, but they apparently don't want my money for season 2.
Think of a resturant. Imagine if they adopted a "pay if you want" policy. Would some people pay?
I only know of two restaurants that have done this, one in London and one in Salt Lake City (I've only been to the latter). Both reported that that their profits increased after instituting this policy.
People need to get paid. And the only way to get paid is to force people that use your stuff to pay for it. Give them the choice and often as not they'll stiff you.
You have a very low opinion of people, and a deficit of imagination. And, judging by your reply to the grandparent post, no sense of humour. You are therefore eminently qualified as a record executive.
Without ownership of your content why do I have to pay you for it?
Because content is not of equal value. New content is generally of greater subjective value. Compare the number of people who will watch a new TV show to the number that will watch reruns. How do TV shows get funded now? A network pays - in advance - for a season. They then make it available for free, and sell adverts. The bit that needs fixing is not how the studio gets paid, it's how the distributer gets paid. And the fix is to remove the distributor. If you want to make a show, you fund the development of a pilot and make it available for free. You get people who liked it to invest $10 each. Once enough have invested, you make a season and make it available for free, asking people to invest in the next season. From the studio's perspective, the funding is the same. From the consumer's perspective, they're paying for what they want directly and can directly influence how long it lasts (how many shows have been cancelled because an executive thought the time slot could make more profit with another show, even though there were millions of fans wanting it to continue?).
In any creative work, there are two steps. One is creating it. This is difficult, and often expensive. The other is copying it. This has become increasingly cheap. Any teenager with a couple of hundred dollars of computer can now duplicate almost any creative work ever created. Your model is saying that people should do the first step for free and then charge for the second step. For some reason, you express surprise at people who regard this view as insane and unsustainable.
You said Linux (which is a tiny project with about 70 regular contributors) compared to *BSD. I picked another project. If you're talking about the entire ecosystem, then you might consider things like the entire Apache ecosystem, which are more permissively licensed than the GPL, things like OpenOffice (LGPL), the Mozilla family (triple licensed, MPL, LGPL, and GPL), X11 (MIT license). Even things like GTK and Qt and the core libraries for common desktop environments are LGPL, not GPL'd.
Ugh. Well, I was going to put a disclaimer in my post saying my nuclear physics is a bit rusty - apparently it was obvious in the post. It's been about a decade since I learned about the CNO cycle, and it completely slipped my mind.
If a F/OSS project goes to the wall, however, you're pretty much on your own.
Only if you're the only user of the project. If you're the only user of a piece of proprietary code, no one is going to care about you when the company goes bust - the best you can hope for is being able to buy the code outright from the receivers. If you're the only user of a piece of F/OSS code, then you may want to invest some money in maintaining it.
If there are lots of users, then you won't be the only one with a vested interest in seeing it not die. At least some of these would probably find it cheaper to put some money into funding development than to migrate to something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. This imposes a few restrictions and says that the code may not be distributed linked to any code that imposes more restrictions, nor can any derived works impose any more restrictions than are present in the license.
FreeBSD is released under the 2-clause BSD license, which says, basically, do what you want with this, just don't sue me if it doesn't work and don't claim you wrote it.
OpenSolaris was released under the CDDL, which is generally less restrictive than the GPL (no restrictions on what you can link it to), but adds some anti-patent clauses that are not present in the GPL. Because these restrictions are not present in the GPL, the GPL prevents CDDL code from being linked against it. This means that if ZFS or DTrace were ever ported to Linux by anyone other than the copyright holder they would not be allowed to distribute Linux along with their port.
In FreeBSD, ZFS and DTrace are optional kernel modules, so you can still build a system without them, but they are loadable if you are happy to accept the terms of the CDDL when you distribute FreeBSD. There's no technical reason why either couldn't be ported to any system (well, the Linux storage stack is a mess, so adding ZFS would be a bit harder, but it could be done), but few people are motivated to produce a port when they are not legally allowed to redistribute it.
I doubt it. My MEP is a member of that group, and she's an active FFII member and has campaigned for this sort of thing for several years.
Wait, you're expecting people making hiring decisions to be rational?
What is wrong with you people? I specifically said that GSM is better than a mix of GSM and CDMA, independently of whether GSM or CDMA is better in isolation. Yet, so far, almost all of the replies have been telling me that CDMA is better than GSM, as if I claimed that GSM is better than CDMA and needed educating.
Note: If you read an entire sentence before replying to it, then you are less likely to look like an idiot.
Option 1 is clearly a bad idea. Option 2 was possible, but the company wasn't doing badly because of underperforming employees, it was doing badly because the economy was crap. Given the state of the economy, employees who were made redundant would have had a hard time finding work - not because they were bad, but because no one was hiring.
So, what's the 4G service like in Delaware?
What sort of density are you getting 20-80Mb/s with? 20Mb/s in rural areas would be nice (better than the 1Mb/s my mother gets through ADSL...), but 20Mb/s in urban areas with lots of users would be impressive. What sort of cell size (i.e. subscribers per cell) gives you that kind of real-world throughput?
This is what happens when you let the free market decide on standards with geographical monopolies. This is why a particular protocol is mandated with spectrum sales in most of the world. Irrespective of the relative technical merits of GSM versus CDMA, it's pretty clear that GSM is superior to CDMA and GSM with incompatible client devices for the two networks and customers locked in to one or the other depending on what phone they bought. It appears that the USA didn't learn from this mistake the first time around...
That depends on the company. During the recession in the '80s, the managers at my father's company were the first to take pay cuts. When they were still making a loss, they gave the employees a choice of shifting to part time, taking a pay cut, or having some redundancies. The employees opted for a mixture of the first two. When the economy recovered, there were bonuses for the people who'd stayed and the old pay rates were reinstated, with the management pay rate being the last to return to its pre-recession value.
If you're certain that the company that you work for wouldn't do something like this in times of financial difficulty, then maybe you should consider moving elsewhere now, rather than when they get someone cheaper to do your job...
Depends on the industry. If you leave a company like in a situation like that then there are two things that may happen. One is that the company really couldn't afford to lose you at that time, and goes bust. You'll then have a company that went bankrupt on your CV, which doesn't look great, especially if the next person hiring you knows why. The second is that your former manager may be friends with the next person you want to hire you, and lets them know that you left them in the lurch.
Given the description in the summary, I would definitely take the job, but there are several ways of doing it. First, talk to both managers. See if you can get a bit more time before you move. Also see if the new company would be willing to subcontract you out to the old company for a day or two a month for the next year to ease the transition. This gives the new company some extra income and gives the old company the time to finish training your replacements.
The difference there is that these are shows funded by the UK taxpayer. As a UK taxpayer, I'm not terribly upset if the BBC doesn't go out of its way to make a profit, as long as the quality of its output doesn't suffer. On the other hand, I'd expect the shareholders of a for-profit company to be up in arms if the company is intentionally acting in a way that reduces profits...
To be fair you'd still get a quite a few cinema tickets for a good projector, sound system
I bought my 5.1 surround sound system for £100 almost a decade ago - it seems you can get cheaper ones now. My projector cost £150 three years ago, with a new bulb (rated for 3,000 hours, replacements cost about £30). That's £250. My local cinema costs £10 to see a film. That's 25 movies. The company I rent DVDs from has a two rental a month package for £5/month, which is their cheapest one (it gets better value per film with the more expensive ones). If you watch two movies a month, then you're saving £15/month by watching them at home, rather than going to the cinema. That means that after 17 months, it's cheaper including capital costs. And that's assuming that you're single. If you're a couple, then you're saving £25/month (it costs twice as much for two people to go to the cinema but the same amount for two people to watch films at home), so it only takes 10 months.
As well as being cheaper:
It takes up a little bit of space in your house, but not much. The speakers are each quite small and sit in the corners of the room. The projector goes on a shelf when it's not in use. Projectors that make DVDs look good have been cheap for a while. HD projectors are just starting to drop in price.
iTunes was the only game in town because the iPod had something like 80% market share when the iTunes Music Store launched, and the iPod could play DRM-free MP3s, DRM-free AAC, and Fairplay DRM'd AAC. Apple owned Fairplay and refused to license it. A competing music store needed to offer DRM-free music for it to be playable on the iPod, but the labels would only allow their music to be sold with DRM. There were competing music stores, but they all used Microsoft's DRM, which didn't work with the dominant portable music player. It wasn't until they allowed Amazon to sell DRM-free music that there was a competitor that worked with the iPod.
That's not so important, as long as there's interoperability. If you make an MPEG-4 video container available, then it will play on pretty much any device, from a mobile phone up to a TV. If I have to go to a TV or movie studio's site to grab the file, I don't care - the web is one big store front. If you try to tie your product to one specific playback mechanism, then that's a lot more irritating than having to click on a couple more hyperlinks to get to your site...
It sounds like you're American, because you don't seem familiar with that notice. If someone posts a link to, for example, The Daily Show or some other Comedy Central link on Slashdot, it only works for people in the USA. Everyone else sees the 'not available in your region' message that the grandparent alludes to. An increasing number of GooTube clips have this as well. This is simply inexcusable on the Internet.
Where do you live the $1.99 isn't affordable for a movie?!
I pay about $18 (in the UK) for a two-disks at once rental package. I can watch 4 DVDs a week, so 16 a month. That puts it close to $1 per DVD, but also includes unlimited streaming (although the quality is pretty poor). I prefer to pay a monthly fee for as much as I can watch than pay for each individual one - psychologically, even if the a la carte approach is cheaper, it means I'm thinking about the cost when I choose to watch something.
- Streaming is fine but I also want a download-to-own option, so that I can take movies along on my tablet when I travel
And that's even more important now than it was. A couple of years ago, I only had one device that could reasonably play back decent quality video on the go, and its battery life wasn't great. Now I have two that have a long enough battery live to watch a couple of films on the train, and both were cheap. Streaming is okay for watching at home, but downloading is essential for watching while mobile. Even if I have a 3G connection with no caps, it will drop out when I go through a tunnel...
I would love to see copyright made dependent on a bona fide effort to distribute. If you are not distributing a work in a region, then it should be possible to file to have the copyright lapse. The copyright owner would then have 30 days to demonstrate that they were making an effort to distribute it, and if not it should enter the public domain.
So? Newsflash: DVDs and BluRays end up on torrent servers as soon as they're released too. Some people pirate because they have an entitlement mentality. You can probably stop them pirating if you make every copy you sell locked down with invasive DRM, but getting them to pay is a lot harder and you'll probably piss off a lot of paying customers in the process. Some people pirate because you are not selling them what they want. Sell them DRM-free downloads at a reasonable price and they'll become paying customers.
But then, we're talking about the movie industry. Their entire business model is 'don't give the customer what they want'. They delay DVD releases because 'it would cannibalise cinema revenue'. This, translated, means 'a lot of people would rather buy the DVD than go to the cinema'. Not really surprising given how small the quality difference between a half decent (but still cheap) home cinema setup and a real cinema is these days. So, having identified a market, they intentionally don't fill it. The result? People who want to see the film during the time when the studio is hyping the crap out of it with millions of dollars of advertising but don't want to go to the cinema pirate it.
American TV shows are even worse. The region 1 DVD release is usually 6 months after the end and the region 2 release comes even later. That means that there's a year-long window between the show becoming available to pirate and it becoming available to watch (rent or buy) legally. Dollhouse Season 2, from 2010, is still not available to rent on DVD in the UK. I can only assume that this means that Fox really wants to see it pirated. I rented season 1, but they apparently don't want my money for season 2.
Think of a resturant. Imagine if they adopted a "pay if you want" policy. Would some people pay?
I only know of two restaurants that have done this, one in London and one in Salt Lake City (I've only been to the latter). Both reported that that their profits increased after instituting this policy.
People need to get paid. And the only way to get paid is to force people that use your stuff to pay for it. Give them the choice and often as not they'll stiff you.
You have a very low opinion of people, and a deficit of imagination. And, judging by your reply to the grandparent post, no sense of humour. You are therefore eminently qualified as a record executive.
Without ownership of your content why do I have to pay you for it?
Because content is not of equal value. New content is generally of greater subjective value. Compare the number of people who will watch a new TV show to the number that will watch reruns. How do TV shows get funded now? A network pays - in advance - for a season. They then make it available for free, and sell adverts. The bit that needs fixing is not how the studio gets paid, it's how the distributer gets paid. And the fix is to remove the distributor. If you want to make a show, you fund the development of a pilot and make it available for free. You get people who liked it to invest $10 each. Once enough have invested, you make a season and make it available for free, asking people to invest in the next season. From the studio's perspective, the funding is the same. From the consumer's perspective, they're paying for what they want directly and can directly influence how long it lasts (how many shows have been cancelled because an executive thought the time slot could make more profit with another show, even though there were millions of fans wanting it to continue?).
In any creative work, there are two steps. One is creating it. This is difficult, and often expensive. The other is copying it. This has become increasingly cheap. Any teenager with a couple of hundred dollars of computer can now duplicate almost any creative work ever created. Your model is saying that people should do the first step for free and then charge for the second step. For some reason, you express surprise at people who regard this view as insane and unsustainable.
You said Linux (which is a tiny project with about 70 regular contributors) compared to *BSD. I picked another project. If you're talking about the entire ecosystem, then you might consider things like the entire Apache ecosystem, which are more permissively licensed than the GPL, things like OpenOffice (LGPL), the Mozilla family (triple licensed, MPL, LGPL, and GPL), X11 (MIT license). Even things like GTK and Qt and the core libraries for common desktop environments are LGPL, not GPL'd.
Ugh. Well, I was going to put a disclaimer in my post saying my nuclear physics is a bit rusty - apparently it was obvious in the post. It's been about a decade since I learned about the CNO cycle, and it completely slipped my mind.
If a F/OSS project goes to the wall, however, you're pretty much on your own.
Only if you're the only user of the project. If you're the only user of a piece of proprietary code, no one is going to care about you when the company goes bust - the best you can hope for is being able to buy the code outright from the receivers. If you're the only user of a piece of F/OSS code, then you may want to invest some money in maintaining it.
If there are lots of users, then you won't be the only one with a vested interest in seeing it not die. At least some of these would probably find it cheaper to put some money into funding development than to migrate to something else.