We live in a democracy. We should all be involved and there should be very careful controls on those who gain most from patents, because patents and copyrights in the short term are a zero-sum game - every dollar that an IP "owner" gains is a dollar that an IP "consumer" loses.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
We should have the foxes renovating the henhouse? News to me!
We have a patent system that does not serve the community at large precisely because it's been created by and for lawyers and IP parasites.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Yep, all the useless, minor stuff. Nothing of any importance. Not even worth the time to check let alone download, unless a journalist happens to recommend an update in a news item.
Yet another example of a company not having the best interests of the customer at heart, maximising profit and minimising customer benefit.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors
Bullshit yourself. M$ only makes a profit because we, the citizens, give them some rights to control copying i.e. copyright law. We do this because we, the citizens, think we will get a fair return in terms of price competition and product improvement. The M$ monopoly is currently taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for ten pieces of software it largely wrote more than a decade ago. That is an atrocious tradeoff.
Intellectual property law is completely broken at the moment. M$ gets maybe 10,000 times the reward for writing the same software that another company might write. I don't mind 10-100 times the reward to encourage true competition and inovation but law which allows more than that is wrong and unfair. Yes, the world is unfair but that doesn't mean that in a democracy we the people should deliberately make it more unfair.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
There is a difference between auto-update-by-default, what Joe Sixpack would use, and not being able to disable it. M$ is just being manipulative as usual, this time probably so they can force DRM lockins that they, not the user, require so as to improve their already obscene monopoly profit margins.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The competing products were worse partly because M$ could use it's monopoly revenue to cross-subsidize it's player development and also because the application developers had good access to the OS developers.
M$ and the competitors were writing the same thing but M$ is being paid a thousand times more for the same effort. Don't get me started about the player being "free" - if M$ wants to retain it's $35,000,000,000/year income stream for doing next to nothing it has to keep on locking out software competition it doesn't control.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't think it matters how much money the patent office gets. It is completely unrealistic to expect a small government department to properly assess all human knowledge for prior art. See some patent fixes.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed. I actively avoid all all Redhat releases now. The advertising+bug/functionality ratio is just too high compared to SuSE+Mandrake. Redhat appears to have become a bureaucratic company with poor quality control and dominated by marketing 'droids. Not as bad as Microsoft but heading in that direction.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you're in Stockholm and interested in the construction of the this robot check out the Swedish Technical Museum (No English web page). 6 months ago it had a room sized display with English description showing how the vacuum cleaner was designed and built. There was also a very cool display on robots in general with dozens of different working robots and hundreds of toys. A fun museum for geeks.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It is hugely expensive. If it was truly competitively priced it'd cost $9.95 and available in cornflake packets. Of course, a monopoly so no competition.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
While I agree with you in theory in practice it is just too easy to slightly pervert a standard to make it overall incompatible
Software is complex, a standard cannot mandate every detail and a malevolent company can use that fact to lock in the customer. For example, look at the M$Word implementation of XML and the use of embedded binary blobs to hold all useful information. Only open source can fix this problem.
--
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
There's no question in my mind that signed drivers lead to stable computers.
Depends on your point of view. If it doesn't run the piece of software/hardware you want at all (due to the signing not working because it is not in the M$ monopoly financial interest) that sounds 100% unstable to me.
The correct solution is for the M$ OS to popup a meaningful error message pointing the finger at the appropriate broken driver and manufacturer. Since most failures are access violations this would work a charm. It is the fault of M$ that they want to make other company's branding invisible and plaster their own brand everywhere. They want to claim responsibility for the good in other company products but not the bad. That is hypocritical.
My favourite bit of cheating was when a student handed in a printed computer assignment with the email header still on top. Gave the time, date and who it was copied from/to. Saved all the hassle of working out who copied who. This was so mind bogglingly stupid the instructor was at a loss what to do about it. Eventually gave them both zero and a warning.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
What, can a market analysis only be true if it comes out of Stallman's mouth?
Short answer? Yes. People have become far too innured to commercial propaganda masquerading as commentary. That's all it is. Propaganda. Selective quoting and sometimes complete untruths. The vast majority of commentary from industry "leaders" (90+%) is just self-serving crap with no attempt at balance. Generally, journalists are a little more objective though many are just marketting front men. At least Stallman thinks a little more deeply than most "commentators".
More specifically: I've used both Greenhills VxWorks and Linux on major projects. Linux leaves VxWorks for dead simply because it is open source. While Linux doesn't have the polish and finish of VxWorks the per-copy licensing of VxWorks and the need to deal with buggy, unfixable closed source binaries is a major pain that now puts in the bin as far as I'm concerned.
Their support is also a joke as well. They have a support website with login restrictions that make it impossible for a large company to use effectively. Why they need login restrictions for support of their own product is beyond me. And when you get in you find it's just a disorganised collection of essays, a minimum of downloads, a poor search engine and a completely useless support team - while they respond to emails they don't actually do anything useful, just do the search for related material that you've already done yourself. Heaven help you if you actually need any code fixed or changed - it'll take months.
More generally: I've been on the client end of dozens of different software support contracts while employed by large companies. Almost without exception they cost a bomb, provide a minimum of service, are completely inflexible, always assume a problem is your fault not theirs and have multi-month turn-around times. That experience has pushed me firmly into the open-source camp. Closed source software after-sales support is vastly overrated and I have the experience to prove it.
While your general point (closed source is sometimes a better option than open source) is of course true, it's true much less often than most commentary implies. Of the examples you gave I would say only OSX is the only potentially better closed source solution and that depends on the client. For all the others open source is better. For me, interroperability with existing software or hardware is pretty much the only reason left to get closed source.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
So my (insightful and informative) post above gets a flamebait mod. What do I do?
Wasn't me. It's arguable whether it's insightful and informative, you said nothing that hasn't been said many times before.
why would I include the academic community in the open source community?
Why not? It has the same ethos, methods and goals as the open source community. GNU was and arguably still is a research project. Many open source people are software students using open source to further their education.
Unless they're making open-source software, they're not in the open source community.
Pretty well every computer science, information technology and software engineering researcher on the planet writing software make it open source, Ever heard of publish or perish?
Most of 'em aren't.
For software researchers this is incorrect. In any case this affects my argument how?
Nyah.
Thank you for that thoughtful and considered comment. If you're a troll I'd suggest you get a life. If this is your idea of entertainment you need one.;-)
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Now tell me, when was the last time *you* actually downloaded some open source software, and instead of using it (a home user really has no user for custom government software designed to sort peoples tax returns or other similar jobs) you went through the code line per line looking for bugs.
You're imposing the commercial model on the open source world. I don't do this because I don't need to. I report bugs when I find them during normal usage. Occasionally I'll review in a small bit of the code that I think is important. Many thousand people do the same. Sometimes companies are involved too. Together with the core developers, we are often superior to the usually one person closed source commercial review team, if it exists at all. It works, deal with it.
Assuming you somehow got past question one by fudging the truth (i.e. you downloaded something OS for personal use, and seeing a "source" directory you spent 2 minutes randomly opening files for fun), when was the last time you actually identified a bug, and submitted it (20 bonus points if you actually produced a patch yourself)
I've been on a travelling holiday for the last six months. Before that I produced dozens of patches and reported dozens of bugs. I do not regard myself as an active OS developer.
Simply put, even with several million people world wide who have the equipment and skills (most of that 6 billion lives in poverty, and most of those rich enough to own computers usually don't even understand the concept of right click), there are not enough willing to give up their time to do code reviews, especially on a piece of software they personally will never use and will never care about.
I didn't say everybody was doing it. I said a statistically significant fraction were doing it. Big difference. A statistically significant fraction of 6,000,000,000 might be a few hundred developers for a major project, only one or two for a small project and maybe zero for niche projects. Plus all the users. The developer might be a teenager wanting to show how smart he his and also to socialise, a commercial programmer wanting a break from the cubical farm, a university researcher with an idea, a paid programmer with an open source company, a retiree wanting to have something to do and give something back to the community or a third world programmer wanting to make his name known in the first world to get a paid job. The world is a big, complex place.
To perhaps better highlight the flaw in your logic, shouldn't litter be non-existant? With 6 billion people on the planet there should be more than enough willing to volunteer their time to go out to parks and streets they don't ever visit and pickup trash. The reality of course is that even the people who use those streets almost never think to pick up a piece of litter.
Sorry, it's your logic that is flawed. While there are millions of people interested in keeping streets clean there are millions more making the litter. It cancels out.
Open source software is written once and if wanted copied and used by possibly millions. Each one of those millions has the potential to help all the others by feeding fixes and improvements back into the source. Conventional, commercial per-copy pricing tends to break that model because it restricts distribution and redistribution.
Open source is not a panacea but it is, almost by definition, superior to closed source software for the customer because every option available for closed source (apart from security through obscurity) is available for open source as well.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Except of course the fact that the opensource community rarely comes up with a patentable idea before a commercial product makes for some nice prior art.
A self-serving myth spread by commercial interests. If you include the academic community in the open source community, open source has more ideas hands down. Where do you think the internet, the web, email and the computer, were invented? Commercial interests are often good at development but their record is mixed on research, unless you regard innovation in marketing has positive.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
"So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers."
Care to tell me why this quote, not in the parent article, made it into your post?
While true it is offtopic and commercial. If you're trolling or an M$ astroturfer trying to distract people from a useful first post please get a life.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
I wonder why all this commercial propaganda on slashdot recently?
There are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a significant fraction of these will have both the means and the motivation to work on any commonly used piece of software, if it is accessible. ie. open source. Please remove your paid commercial blinkers.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP. User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Trying to create an anti-free, anti-share/cooperation meme?
There are more important things than dollars. Deal with it.
---
Open source works because of simple statistics. There are 6,300,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a small fraction of that population will have both the means and motivation to create free software. And once it's been created it can be copied millions of times. Software per-copy pricing is broken and doesn't recognise this. Reform IP law.
but wholesale copying of music, which is what is going on via kazaa etc, is just plain immorally wrong
Nope, it may be illegal but it's not immoral. IP law is totally broken at the moment and civil disobedience is entirely appropriate.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I was suggesting this to my boss hours after 9/11 happened. Kudos to UCB for actually doing it.
In addition I suggested:
Flight control hardware/software could only be disabled by radio by somebody on the ground via radio so the crew can't be threatened to override it. Hardware/software physically inaccessible while in the air.
Have many different flight zones with many different "wall" characteristics eg. below 100 ft radar altitude the aircraft is automatically forced up, going off course triggers a silent alarm, going near known tall buildings causes more forceful avoidance etc.
Allow various silent alarms by the crew. They're probably already doing that.
Have various fail safes for when you know it's going to fail. eg. Losing GPS lock, losing contact with the ground etc.
Allow remote control landing if the crew is disabled.
Make sure the bad guys know about it.
It's a bit like time delay safes. Allow pilots control, just not too much control.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The worst case scenaerio is that SCO manange to score retrospective compensation against any commercial organisation that has made use of linux during the last decade.
That problem applies to any software, not just Linux. Broken IP law and submarine patents means that any software may have this problem. And have you seen M$'s guarantee recently? Like most software they don't guarantee jack.
Whats at stake is the reputation of OSS, GNU, GPL, etc.
Again, reputation applies to any software, not just the Linux kernel. I think the market is a lot smarter than you give it credit. The dangers of M$ lockin are real, documented and obvious. The legal FUD you are talking about is just that. FUD. The market knows about FUD. Look at how they've reacted to the SCO case so far. Despite all the bullshit Daryl is generating, according to informal surveys he hasn't affected the purchase of Linux and Linux services at all.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
We live in a democracy. We should all be involved and there should be very careful controls on those who gain most from patents, because patents and copyrights in the short term are a zero-sum game - every dollar that an IP "owner" gains is a dollar that an IP "consumer" loses.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
We should have the foxes renovating the henhouse? News to me!
We have a patent system that does not serve the community at large precisely because it's been created by and for lawyers and IP parasites.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Yep, all the useless, minor stuff. Nothing of any importance. Not even worth the time to check let alone download, unless a journalist happens to recommend an update in a news item.
Yet another example of a company not having the best interests of the customer at heart, maximising profit and minimising customer benefit.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors
Bullshit yourself. M$ only makes a profit because we, the citizens, give them some rights to control copying i.e. copyright law. We do this because we, the citizens, think we will get a fair return in terms of price competition and product improvement. The M$ monopoly is currently taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for ten pieces of software it largely wrote more than a decade ago. That is an atrocious tradeoff.
Intellectual property law is completely broken at the moment. M$ gets maybe 10,000 times the reward for writing the same software that another company might write. I don't mind 10-100 times the reward to encourage true competition and inovation but law which allows more than that is wrong and unfair. Yes, the world is unfair but that doesn't mean that in a democracy we the people should deliberately make it more unfair.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
There is a difference between auto-update-by-default, what Joe Sixpack would use, and not being able to disable it. M$ is just being manipulative as usual, this time probably so they can force DRM lockins that they, not the user, require so as to improve their already obscene monopoly profit margins.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The competing products were worse partly because M$ could use it's monopoly revenue to cross-subsidize it's player development and also because the application developers had good access to the OS developers.
M$ and the competitors were writing the same thing but M$ is being paid a thousand times more for the same effort. Don't get me started about the player being "free" - if M$ wants to retain it's $35,000,000,000/year income stream for doing next to nothing it has to keep on locking out software competition it doesn't control.
---It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't think it matters how much money the patent office gets. It is completely unrealistic to expect a small government department to properly assess all human knowledge for prior art. See some patent fixes.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed. I actively avoid all all Redhat releases now. The advertising+bug/functionality ratio is just too high compared to SuSE+Mandrake. Redhat appears to have become a bureaucratic company with poor quality control and dominated by marketing 'droids. Not as bad as Microsoft but heading in that direction.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you're in Stockholm and interested in the construction of the this robot check out the Swedish Technical Museum (No English web page). 6 months ago it had a room sized display with English description showing how the vacuum cleaner was designed and built. There was also a very cool display on robots in general with dozens of different working robots and hundreds of toys. A fun museum for geeks.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It is hugely expensive. If it was truly competitively priced it'd cost $9.95 and available in cornflake packets. Of course, a monopoly so no competition.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
open standards
While I agree with you in theory in practice it is just too easy to slightly pervert a standard to make it overall incompatible
Software is complex, a standard cannot mandate every detail and a malevolent company can use that fact to lock in the customer. For example, look at the M$Word implementation of XML and the use of embedded binary blobs to hold all useful information. Only open source can fix this problem.
--
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
There's no question in my mind that signed drivers lead to stable computers.
Depends on your point of view. If it doesn't run the piece of software/hardware you want at all (due to the signing not working because it is not in the M$ monopoly financial interest) that sounds 100% unstable to me.
The correct solution is for the M$ OS to popup a meaningful error message pointing the finger at the appropriate broken driver and manufacturer. Since most failures are access violations this would work a charm. It is the fault of M$ that they want to make other company's branding invisible and plaster their own brand everywhere. They want to claim responsibility for the good in other company products but not the bad. That is hypocritical.
My favourite bit of cheating was when a student handed in a printed computer assignment with the email header still on top. Gave the time, date and who it was copied from/to. Saved all the hassle of working out who copied who. This was so mind bogglingly stupid the instructor was at a loss what to do about it. Eventually gave them both zero and a warning.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
Ah, not my day.
Green Hills Software, Inc.
Sorry, thanks for the correction.
The systems I was thinking of were using WindRiver VxWorks and GreenHill Systems AdaMulti. The comments about support apply more-or-less to both.
What, can a market analysis only be true if it comes out of Stallman's mouth?
Short answer? Yes. People have become far too innured to commercial propaganda masquerading as commentary. That's all it is. Propaganda. Selective quoting and sometimes complete untruths. The vast majority of commentary from industry "leaders" (90+%) is just self-serving crap with no attempt at balance. Generally, journalists are a little more objective though many are just marketting front men. At least Stallman thinks a little more deeply than most "commentators".
More specifically: I've used both Greenhills VxWorks and Linux on major projects. Linux leaves VxWorks for dead simply because it is open source. While Linux doesn't have the polish and finish of VxWorks the per-copy licensing of VxWorks and the need to deal with buggy, unfixable closed source binaries is a major pain that now puts in the bin as far as I'm concerned.
Their support is also a joke as well. They have a support website with login restrictions that make it impossible for a large company to use effectively. Why they need login restrictions for support of their own product is beyond me. And when you get in you find it's just a disorganised collection of essays, a minimum of downloads, a poor search engine and a completely useless support team - while they respond to emails they don't actually do anything useful, just do the search for related material that you've already done yourself. Heaven help you if you actually need any code fixed or changed - it'll take months.
More generally: I've been on the client end of dozens of different software support contracts while employed by large companies. Almost without exception they cost a bomb, provide a minimum of service, are completely inflexible, always assume a problem is your fault not theirs and have multi-month turn-around times. That experience has pushed me firmly into the open-source camp. Closed source software after-sales support is vastly overrated and I have the experience to prove it.
While your general point (closed source is sometimes a better option than open source) is of course true, it's true much less often than most commentary implies. Of the examples you gave I would say only OSX is the only potentially better closed source solution and that depends on the client. For all the others open source is better. For me, interroperability with existing software or hardware is pretty much the only reason left to get closed source.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/MPAA abuse.
So my (insightful and informative) post above gets a flamebait mod. What do I do?
Wasn't me. It's arguable whether it's insightful and informative, you said nothing that hasn't been said many times before.
why would I include the academic community in the open source community?
Why not? It has the same ethos, methods and goals as the open source community. GNU was and arguably still is a research project. Many open source people are software students using open source to further their education.
Unless they're making open-source software, they're not in the open source community.
Pretty well every computer science, information technology and software engineering researcher on the planet writing software make it open source, Ever heard of publish or perish?
Most of 'em aren't.
For software researchers this is incorrect. In any case this affects my argument how?
Nyah.
Thank you for that thoughtful and considered comment. If you're a troll I'd suggest you get a life. If this is your idea of entertainment you need one. ;-)
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Now tell me, when was the last time *you* actually downloaded some open source software, and instead of using it (a home user really has no user for custom government software designed to sort peoples tax returns or other similar jobs) you went through the code line per line looking for bugs.
You're imposing the commercial model on the open source world. I don't do this because I don't need to. I report bugs when I find them during normal usage. Occasionally I'll review in a small bit of the code that I think is important. Many thousand people do the same. Sometimes companies are involved too. Together with the core developers, we are often superior to the usually one person closed source commercial review team, if it exists at all. It works, deal with it.
Assuming you somehow got past question one by fudging the truth (i.e. you downloaded something OS for personal use, and seeing a "source" directory you spent 2 minutes randomly opening files for fun), when was the last time you actually identified a bug, and submitted it (20 bonus points if you actually produced a patch yourself)
I've been on a travelling holiday for the last six months. Before that I produced dozens of patches and reported dozens of bugs. I do not regard myself as an active OS developer.
Simply put, even with several million people world wide who have the equipment and skills (most of that 6 billion lives in poverty, and most of those rich enough to own computers usually don't even understand the concept of right click), there are not enough willing to give up their time to do code reviews, especially on a piece of software they personally will never use and will never care about.
I didn't say everybody was doing it. I said a statistically significant fraction were doing it. Big difference. A statistically significant fraction of 6,000,000,000 might be a few hundred developers for a major project, only one or two for a small project and maybe zero for niche projects. Plus all the users. The developer might be a teenager wanting to show how smart he his and also to socialise, a commercial programmer wanting a break from the cubical farm, a university researcher with an idea, a paid programmer with an open source company, a retiree wanting to have something to do and give something back to the community or a third world programmer wanting to make his name known in the first world to get a paid job. The world is a big, complex place.
To perhaps better highlight the flaw in your logic, shouldn't litter be non-existant? With 6 billion people on the planet there should be more than enough willing to volunteer their time to go out to parks and streets they don't ever visit and pickup trash. The reality of course is that even the people who use those streets almost never think to pick up a piece of litter.
Sorry, it's your logic that is flawed. While there are millions of people interested in keeping streets clean there are millions more making the litter. It cancels out.
Open source software is written once and if wanted copied and used by possibly millions. Each one of those millions has the potential to help all the others by feeding fixes and improvements back into the source. Conventional, commercial per-copy pricing tends to break that model because it restricts distribution and redistribution.
Open source is not a panacea but it is, almost by definition, superior to closed source software for the customer because every option available for closed source (apart from security through obscurity) is available for open source as well.
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User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Except of course the fact that the opensource community rarely comes up with a patentable idea before a commercial product makes for some nice prior art.
A self-serving myth spread by commercial interests. If you include the academic community in the open source community, open source has more ideas hands down. Where do you think the internet, the web, email and the computer, were invented? Commercial interests are often good at development but their record is mixed on research, unless you regard innovation in marketing has positive.
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User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
"So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers."
Care to tell me why this quote, not in the parent article, made it into your post?
While true it is offtopic and commercial. If you're trolling or an M$ astroturfer trying to distract people from a useful first post please get a life.
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User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
I wonder why all this commercial propaganda on slashdot recently?
There are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a significant fraction of these will have both the means and the motivation to work on any commonly used piece of software, if it is accessible. ie. open source. Please remove your paid commercial blinkers.
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User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Trying to create an anti-free, anti-share/cooperation meme?
There are more important things than dollars. Deal with it.
---Open source works because of simple statistics. There are 6,300,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a small fraction of that population will have both the means and motivation to create free software. And once it's been created it can be copied millions of times. Software per-copy pricing is broken and doesn't recognise this. Reform IP law.
but wholesale copying of music, which is what is going on via kazaa etc, is just plain immorally wrong
Nope, it may be illegal but it's not immoral. IP law is totally broken at the moment and civil disobedience is entirely appropriate.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I was suggesting this to my boss hours after 9/11 happened. Kudos to UCB for actually doing it.
In addition I suggested:
It's a bit like time delay safes. Allow pilots control, just not too much control.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The worst case scenaerio is that SCO manange to score retrospective compensation against any commercial organisation that has made use of linux during the last decade.
That problem applies to any software, not just Linux. Broken IP law and submarine patents means that any software may have this problem. And have you seen M$'s guarantee recently? Like most software they don't guarantee jack.
Whats at stake is the reputation of OSS, GNU, GPL, etc.
Again, reputation applies to any software, not just the Linux kernel. I think the market is a lot smarter than you give it credit. The dangers of M$ lockin are real, documented and obvious. The legal FUD you are talking about is just that. FUD. The market knows about FUD. Look at how they've reacted to the SCO case so far. Despite all the bullshit Daryl is generating, according to informal surveys he hasn't affected the purchase of Linux and Linux services at all.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.