If you go with the SCO claim, they claim ownership of a whole hoard of header files and other key source files.
Software is soft. Nothing is so key that it cannot be replaced. Linux is the unix standard now (there are now more linux users than all other unix users put together) and at worst some standards may need to change. That might not even be a bad thing.
Besides, SCO is saying that they own all derivatives of UNIX.
Code ownership is viral? That's a new one on me!
Linux is a clone, not a derivative, of the original Unix. This has been well documented. Since [almost] all the Linux code was not written by SCO for them to claim anything at all about this code is spurious. They might have some patent claims but those can be worked around.
Remember, you can sue anybody for anything, but winning is another matter entirely. As has been previously discussed SCO is probably just running interference for M$.
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.
So what's the solution?
In the near term shorten copyright and patent terms, actually enforce the innovation condition on patents and force the patent office to deal with the fact that is impossible for a small government office to rationally evaluate all human knowledge.
In the medium term have much more sophisticated ideas and laws about what it means to own intellectual property. I cringe at how simplistic current law is on ownership of IP. Amongst many other problems it has no recognition of the intangible inputs that go into IP (eg. a stable, supportive society), no recognition of the identical effort but differing rewards small and large organisations get for writing and selling IP (by many orders of magnitude eg. $70M to Arnie for a movie, $10K to another actor for identical effort and almost identical result on a similar movie), no recognition of the economic network effect (it has value and should be taxed), no recognition of partial ownership (IP is not discrete, whatever lawers might think) and no recognition that ideas "whose time has come" lead to simultaneous or new but un-innovative invention.
At a minimum patents should be splittable amongst multiple near simultaneous inventors, there should be a cap on how many copies of a piece of IP can be sold before it returns to the public domain, court cases should not only be win or lose but explicitly proportional (eg. he wrote 70% of the software but she added 30% of value). The list goes on and on. Lawyers and law makers are asleep at the wheel at the moment and somebody needs to give them a kick up the backside.
In the long term we need new legal forms unrelated to the traditional patents and copyrights to deal with this new, soft "universe" our generation is creating. Remember, software is anything we want it to be. How we structure it will have impacts on future generations we can only guess at but let's structure software and the law surrounding it (also software!) for human beings, not vice versa.
Get real. SCO did not write almost all the code in Linux, it does not own almost all the code in Linux, it cannot control almost all the code in Linux. Whatever files are found that are SCO's, if any, will be replaced virtually instantly and it will be business as usual.
To say Linux will "become illegal" is childish and silly. Just as likely, illegal software will be found in M$Windows and M$ will have to stop shipping. Fat chance.
---
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.
(* voting is compulsory in Aussie. Very democratic, that).
No, it's compulsory to turn up to the polling station. It's not compulsory to vote.
No mate, Aussie is in the same league as the US of A.
Yes, unfortunately. The way things are going Australia is likely to be the 51st state soon. I find it unbelievable that the Australian government actually wants a free trade agreement with the USA. It's reputed to be Australia's reward for supporting the Iraq war.
---
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!
Nonsense. They got to be #1 primarily because of the economic network effect. Nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of their products. They simply got in in on the ground floor of the microcomputer revolution and it snowballed from there. eg. If you have an office with 5 PC's and 1 Mac, what's going to happen to the Mac, even if it is technically superior?
---
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.
It may be primarily a display problem but it gets a lot more complicated when you start mixing left-right, right-left and up-down languages in the same document, even more so in the same line. This is not uncommon. Issues include sentence justification, sentence termination, input methods, context sensitive characters (like Korean) and searching.
---
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.
What else do you call acquiring things of value that you didn't pay for?
Civil disobedience. The law is an ass
and I have absolutely no problem ignoring
it. If you think it's reasonable that M$ should
be paid $35,000,000,000 per year for ten programs
it mostly wrote more than a decade ago you need
your head examined. Note that this payment is
solely because of broken law and an opportunistic company. The "natural"
state would be no law, no copyright and everybody
copying as they please. See also this item.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
What a disingenuous pair of astroturfing M$ posts!
They are not trying to stop Linux booting. They are trying to break interoperability.
Once a large enough percentage of EFI PC's are installed M$ will bring out various "trusted computing" "patches" and gradually interoperability will stop working. Documents will become unreadable in Linux because they are encrypted, dual booting with Linux will stop working because the boot sector is checked by the "trusted" OS, file systems will become unreadable because they are encrypted (and patented) for "security", "improperly" signed documents (emails and wordprocessor) from the Linux world will have big error popups. The list goes on. And the DMCA will stop any attempts to bypass it. There strategy is clear enough, it's just difficult for a layman to understand which is why they're getting away with it. So far anyway.
And if they can break interoperability they can break Linux, because almost no Linux site will be able to interroperate with M$ sites; commercial partners, universities, you name it.
As usual, M$ will do it gradually, but there history is that they will do it. Intel is cooperating because it is they regard it as a compromise for the RIAA/MPAA "content" industries. Linux is small beer compared to M$ and the entertainment industries.
Don't block ports unless you have a specific reason to. I'm continually irritated by control freak administrators who think they know better than me what I want to be use the network for. Do you know how many different network programs there are out there? You can't possibly know them all. eg. Traceroute uses a sequence of arbitrary ports and is a useful tool when you're having network problems to determine where the problem is.
More generally, denying services just because you can is the sign of an administrator who doesn't understand that the common case is normal operation, not breakin.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
The "free market" is a myth. Every
market has rules, both written and unwritten,
to encourage positive competitive behaviour
(building your product up, e.g. copyrights,
patents, contract law etc.) and
discourage negative competitive behaviour
(dragging your competitor's product down e.g.
truth in advertising, shooting your
competitor, banning protection rackets,
fit for merchanteable purpose, anti-trust
etc.)
The difficult bit is deciding what rules
create a good market. At the moment intellectual
property law is broken.
A true "free market" is simply warlordism
ie. might makes right. Nobody except the
warlord wants that.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
True. What's that got to do with whether
software is commercial or not?
Also note that it must be real
competition. I don't think "innovation"
in marketing and underhanded tactics
is what you had in mind.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an intellectual property 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$/RIAA rort.
The zealotry on the M$ side is the idea
that it is okay that a company should
be paid $35,000,000,000 per year
for a few programs it largely wrote more
than a decade ago. If you think that's
reasonable you need your head examined.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an intellectual property creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work,for exactly the same reasons.Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA rort.
They may crash if you use them in an unexpected way (and since you are just randomly clicking around, it is hard to generate a bugreport).
I think test suites will help but
not fix the "GUI reliability problem".
The problem is that a large fraction
of the programmer population have a poor
or non-existent idea of what a race
condition is and how to avoid it.
Test suites usually don't test race conditions.
Since GUI's are intrinsically one
big mess of race conditions with
essentially random timing injected by user
events it's unsurprising that GUI's fail.
There aren't many GUI programs out there
that can't be crashed by moderately fast
mouse or keyboard clicking. M$ windows
GUI programs are particularly bad.
The fix? Better programmer training
and better tools and techniques for
controlling race conditions.
To those programmers of you who don't
know what a race condition is, shame
on you. It is core to any program
with multi-processing or multiple threads,
including non-preemptive threading and that's
essentially all non-trivial programs these
days.
I get a bit irritated by those whoe
expound long and deeply about esoteric
object programming philosophies while
basic stuff like this still isn't being
done right.
A race condition is a situation
where changes in the relative timing between
different threads in a program causes different
behaviour (e.g. causing events to be delivered
in a different order). That includes
all "threads" such as the user, the network and the disk driver.
The fix is easy to understand but sometimes
hard to do. For every line of
code you write, ask yourself the question: What
other actions could possibly happen while
this line of code is executing and could they
cause a problem? Simple, but not enough
programmers do it.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property
creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an intellectual property 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$/RIAA rort.
Just admit it, X is slow compared to Windows on similar systems *every time*. It makes me think "Who the hell is developing these video drivers for X? Must be a guy in his basement, not the company who made the hardware."
Nonsense. I've used dozens, may be hundreds, of different M$ Windows and X windows machines. It varies depending on the amount of main memory, the amount of video memory, the quality of the video driver, the quality of the disk driver and the quality of the application.
In general M$ Windows applications have marginally faster window operations, not every time, probably due to, on average, better quality video drivers. On the other hand application quality and speed, particularly useless disk access, are generally worse on M$ Windows machines. It's getting worse too as M$ Windows applications feel the need to go to disk for every mouse click and the disk drivers still feel the need to lock up the machine for significant periods of time.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for a piece of work. It's equally wrong that an intellectual property creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.Reform IP law and stop the rort by M$.
In at least some cases the security clearance
is tied to the job/contract. When you lose
the job/contract you lose the security clearance
and have to apply for it again when needed.
Also keep in mind that in addition to
a good start, talent, luck, hard work
etc. etc. all else being equal an unethical
person will at least break even with an
ethical person because an unethical person
has the option of acting ethically. The
ethical person does not have the option
of acting unethically.
---
"The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
-- George Burns
Of course M$'s employees are treated well.
The amount of money M$ receives per employee
is extraordinary, probably the highest in the
world. It is being paid $35,000,000,000+/year
for a few programs it largely wrote more than
a decade ago.
---
It is wrong that an intellectual
property (IP) creator should not be rewarded
for their work. It is 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 curtail
business excesses.
Easy fix. Put a large promininment
"verify" button on the CD/DVD vending
kiosk that checks the checksum of a
patron's CD/DVD. Make sure the message
it displays is informative:
This CD/DVD has been verified
okay. While almost all PC's can read it,
if it does not work in your PC it is
possible you have an incompatible PC.
Sorry, you will need to pay for
professional assistance as the library
can't possibly support all the different
computers out there.
Library staff would also need to be
trained to point patrons at the kiosk verify
button.
Seriously, while it's wrong that an
intellectual property creator should not
be paid for their work, it's equally
wrong that they should be paid too many
times for the one piece of work,
for exactly the same reasons.
Downloaders intuitively understand this.
While broken law continues to allow
effectively infinite profit from one
song by effectively creating infinite
copyright I have no problem with
people ignoring attempts by cartels
to milk the system.
Copyright is a
privilege granted by law,
not a right, despite the name. I
for one would like to see
intellectual property law reformed.
Till then, piracy is the way to go.
And Yes, the Apple I schematics were available, too. In response to the recent article about the freely available chip design from opencores.org implemented by Flextronics, Henry Keultjes offers a reminder that this is not the first time chip whose internals have been open for inspection:
"Happened quite some time ago with PowerPC. That's the essence of Microsoft's deal with IBM because without that Open Architecture Microsoft would have had to buy a lot more than it did.
This for example is used in a roughly $150 French set-top box that has USB and, according to a friend in the UK who has tried that, runs just fine as a PC with the attached USB HDD, KB and rodent."
Check out the link. The above comment
has nothing to do with open chip cores.
While it may be a simple error by a non-
hardware person the unnecessary mention
of M$, which normally has little to do
with PowerPC's, suggests an M$
astroturfer/troll in action.
The link shows nothing more than a
high level chip diagram. This has nothing
to do with open chip designs.
You're a troll and probably an M$ astroturfer
but I'll bite so those new here won't be
fooled:
The source of the OS matters just as much
as for application, but for reasons you haven't
mentioned. These include:
Documentation - it is impossible for
API documentation to be complete. Source
is frequently needed to make clear what will
happen under rare circumstances eg. virtual
memory traps during a strcpy() in a device
driver.
Back doors - without source it is impossible
for the government to make sure that public data
is not being used for private purposes. "Trust
me" is not good enough for any non-trivial
project. eg. voting
Unusual circumstances - Governments are
large organisations with many specialised
operations. To say one size fits all is
simply wrong. Source is not a panacea
but can help solve problems that closed
source vendors won't even look at. eg.
support for military spec hardware.
Forking - Closed source software
forks every bit as much as open source
source software and in addition
will always eventually no
longer be supported. With open source
software an customer can make their
own choices about when to drop support
and not be beholden to a vendor trying
to maximise profit.
---
I sometimes think that closed source
vendors are engaged in 1984 style double-think
when it comes to closed source API's. By
definition an open source API, assuming
all else is equal, will allow a customer
at least all the options of a
closed source API.
Political rah-rah-rah is entirely appropriate.
You name an area of your life that is not
affected by software and IP rights. Everything
from supermarkets to credit cards to car
engine computers depend totally on software.
No problem, until self-serving
multi-nationals like M$ start using DRM
(Digital Restrictions Management) to
bypass the democratic legal system
(eg. first sale doctrine) and control
people's lives.
You're damn right Gnome would be reported differently.
Why is Longhorn being reported on slashdot
at all?
- Longhorn is still vapourware.
- When it is finally realized it will be
designed not to be hackable.
- M$ has more than enough front organisations
to market its products without open source
sites like slashdot supporting them.
Slashdot editors should try harder
to avoid being suckered by the M$ marketing
machine. It needs to cancel out the insane
amount of M$ marketing drivel on the net
and elsewhere to make the net as a whole
more balanced.
The M$ people who say slashdot should
give equal time to M$ are talking nonense.
Such people should go back to microsoft.com
where they belong.
Slashdot Mirror
If you go with the SCO claim, they claim ownership of a whole hoard of header files and other key source files.
Software is soft. Nothing is so key that it cannot be replaced. Linux is the unix standard now (there are now more linux users than all other unix users put together) and at worst some standards may need to change. That might not even be a bad thing.
Besides, SCO is saying that they own all derivatives of UNIX.
Code ownership is viral? That's a new one on me!
Linux is a clone, not a derivative, of the original Unix. This has been well documented. Since [almost] all the Linux code was not written by SCO for them to claim anything at all about this code is spurious. They might have some patent claims but those can be worked around.
Remember, you can sue anybody for anything, but winning is another matter entirely. As has been previously discussed SCO is probably just running interference for M$.
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.
So what's the solution?
In the near term shorten copyright and patent terms, actually enforce the innovation condition on patents and force the patent office to deal with the fact that is impossible for a small government office to rationally evaluate all human knowledge.
In the medium term have much more sophisticated ideas and laws about what it means to own intellectual property. I cringe at how simplistic current law is on ownership of IP. Amongst many other problems it has no recognition of the intangible inputs that go into IP (eg. a stable, supportive society), no recognition of the identical effort but differing rewards small and large organisations get for writing and selling IP (by many orders of magnitude eg. $70M to Arnie for a movie, $10K to another actor for identical effort and almost identical result on a similar movie), no recognition of the economic network effect (it has value and should be taxed), no recognition of partial ownership (IP is not discrete, whatever lawers might think) and no recognition that ideas "whose time has come" lead to simultaneous or new but un-innovative invention.
At a minimum patents should be splittable amongst multiple near simultaneous inventors, there should be a cap on how many copies of a piece of IP can be sold before it returns to the public domain, court cases should not only be win or lose but explicitly proportional (eg. he wrote 70% of the software but she added 30% of value). The list goes on and on. Lawyers and law makers are asleep at the wheel at the moment and somebody needs to give them a kick up the backside.
In the long term we need new legal forms unrelated to the traditional patents and copyrights to deal with this new, soft "universe" our generation is creating. Remember, software is anything we want it to be. How we structure it will have impacts on future generations we can only guess at but let's structure software and the law surrounding it (also software!) for human beings, not vice versa.
Get real. SCO did not write almost all the code in Linux, it does not own almost all the code in Linux, it cannot control almost all the code in Linux. Whatever files are found that are SCO's, if any, will be replaced virtually instantly and it will be business as usual.
To say Linux will "become illegal" is childish and silly. Just as likely, illegal software will be found in M$Windows and M$ will have to stop shipping. Fat chance.
---
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.
(* voting is compulsory in Aussie. Very democratic, that).
No, it's compulsory to turn up to the polling station. It's not compulsory to vote.
No mate, Aussie is in the same league as the US of A.
Yes, unfortunately. The way things are going Australia is likely to be the 51st state soon. I find it unbelievable that the Australian government actually wants a free trade agreement with the USA. It's reputed to be Australia's reward for supporting the Iraq war.
---
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!
Nonsense. They got to be #1 primarily because of the economic network effect. Nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of their products. They simply got in in on the ground floor of the microcomputer revolution and it snowballed from there. eg. If you have an office with 5 PC's and 1 Mac, what's going to happen to the Mac, even if it is technically superior?
---
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.
It may be primarily a display problem but it gets a lot more complicated when you start mixing left-right, right-left and up-down languages in the same document, even more so in the same line. This is not uncommon. Issues include sentence justification, sentence termination, input methods, context sensitive characters (like Korean) and searching.
---
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.
What else do you call acquiring things of value that you didn't pay for?
Civil disobedience. The law is an ass and I have absolutely no problem ignoring it. If you think it's reasonable that M$ should be paid $35,000,000,000 per year for ten programs it mostly wrote more than a decade ago you need your head examined. Note that this payment is solely because of broken law and an opportunistic company. The "natural" state would be no law, no copyright and everybody copying as they please. See also this item.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
What a disingenuous pair of astroturfing M$ posts!
They are not trying to stop Linux booting. They are trying to break interoperability.
Once a large enough percentage of EFI PC's are installed M$ will bring out various "trusted computing" "patches" and gradually interoperability will stop working. Documents will become unreadable in Linux because they are encrypted, dual booting with Linux will stop working because the boot sector is checked by the "trusted" OS, file systems will become unreadable because they are encrypted (and patented) for "security", "improperly" signed documents (emails and wordprocessor) from the Linux world will have big error popups. The list goes on. And the DMCA will stop any attempts to bypass it. There strategy is clear enough, it's just difficult for a layman to understand which is why they're getting away with it. So far anyway.
And if they can break interoperability they can break Linux, because almost no Linux site will be able to interroperate with M$ sites; commercial partners, universities, you name it.
As usual, M$ will do it gradually, but there history is that they will do it. Intel is cooperating because it is they regard it as a compromise for the RIAA/MPAA "content" industries. Linux is small beer compared to M$ and the entertainment industries.
---
Astroturfers are scum.
Don't block ports unless you have a specific reason to. I'm continually irritated by control freak administrators who think they know better than me what I want to be use the network for. Do you know how many different network programs there are out there? You can't possibly know them all. eg. Traceroute uses a sequence of arbitrary ports and is a useful tool when you're having network problems to determine where the problem is.
More generally, denying services just because you can is the sign of an administrator who doesn't understand that the common case is normal operation, not breakin.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
I'd take it further.
The "free market" is a myth. Every market has rules, both written and unwritten, to encourage positive competitive behaviour (building your product up, e.g. copyrights, patents, contract law etc.) and discourage negative competitive behaviour (dragging your competitor's product down e.g. truth in advertising, shooting your competitor, banning protection rackets, fit for merchanteable purpose, anti-trust etc.)
The difficult bit is deciding what rules create a good market. At the moment intellectual property law is broken.
A true "free market" is simply warlordism ie. might makes right. Nobody except the warlord wants that.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
True. What's that got to do with whether software is commercial or not?
Also note that it must be real competition. I don't think "innovation" in marketing and underhanded tactics is what you had in mind.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an intellectual property 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$/RIAA rort.
The zealotry on the M$ side is the idea that it is okay that a company should be paid $35,000,000,000 per year for a few programs it largely wrote more than a decade ago. If you think that's reasonable you need your head examined.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an intellectual property creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA rort.
They may crash if you use them in an unexpected way (and since you are just randomly clicking around, it is hard to generate a bugreport).
I think test suites will help but not fix the "GUI reliability problem". The problem is that a large fraction of the programmer population have a poor or non-existent idea of what a race condition is and how to avoid it. Test suites usually don't test race conditions. Since GUI's are intrinsically one big mess of race conditions with essentially random timing injected by user events it's unsurprising that GUI's fail. There aren't many GUI programs out there that can't be crashed by moderately fast mouse or keyboard clicking. M$ windows GUI programs are particularly bad.
The fix? Better programmer training and better tools and techniques for controlling race conditions.
To those programmers of you who don't know what a race condition is, shame on you. It is core to any program with multi-processing or multiple threads, including non-preemptive threading and that's essentially all non-trivial programs these days.
I get a bit irritated by those whoe expound long and deeply about esoteric object programming philosophies while basic stuff like this still isn't being done right.
A race condition is a situation where changes in the relative timing between different threads in a program causes different behaviour (e.g. causing events to be delivered in a different order). That includes all "threads" such as the user, the network and the disk driver.
The fix is easy to understand but sometimes hard to do. For every line of code you write, ask yourself the question: What other actions could possibly happen while this line of code is executing and could they cause a problem? Simple, but not enough programmers do it.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an intellectual property 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$/RIAA rort.
Just admit it, X is slow compared to Windows on similar systems *every time*. It makes me think "Who the hell is developing these video drivers for X? Must be a guy in his basement, not the company who made the hardware."
Nonsense. I've used dozens, may be hundreds, of different M$ Windows and X windows machines. It varies depending on the amount of main memory, the amount of video memory, the quality of the video driver, the quality of the disk driver and the quality of the application.
In general M$ Windows applications have marginally faster window operations, not every time, probably due to, on average, better quality video drivers. On the other hand application quality and speed, particularly useless disk access, are generally worse on M$ Windows machines. It's getting worse too as M$ Windows applications feel the need to go to disk for every mouse click and the disk drivers still feel the need to lock up the machine for significant periods of time.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for a piece of work. It's equally wrong that an intellectual property creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the rort by M$.
In at least some cases the security clearance is tied to the job/contract. When you lose the job/contract you lose the security clearance and have to apply for it again when needed.
Also keep in mind that in addition to a good start, talent, luck, hard work etc. etc. all else being equal an unethical person will at least break even with an ethical person because an unethical person has the option of acting ethically. The ethical person does not have the option of acting unethically.
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"The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -- George Burns
Of course M$'s employees are treated well. The amount of money M$ receives per employee is extraordinary, probably the highest in the world. It is being paid $35,000,000,000+/year for a few programs it largely wrote more than a decade ago.
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It is wrong that an intellectual property (IP) creator should not be rewarded for their work. It is equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and curtail business excesses.
Very true. I've met very few business owners who weren't "going broke", in a "challenging market" or "taking years to establish" etc.
Easy fix. Put a large promininment "verify" button on the CD/DVD vending kiosk that checks the checksum of a patron's CD/DVD. Make sure the message it displays is informative:
Library staff would also need to be trained to point patrons at the kiosk verify button.
Spot the RIAA-BOT!
Seriously, while it's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be paid for their work, it's equally wrong that they should be paid too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Downloaders intuitively understand this.
While broken law continues to allow effectively infinite profit from one song by effectively creating infinite copyright I have no problem with people ignoring attempts by cartels to milk the system.
Copyright is a privilege granted by law, not a right, despite the name. I for one would like to see intellectual property law reformed. Till then, piracy is the way to go.
Check out the link. The above comment has nothing to do with open chip cores. While it may be a simple error by a non- hardware person the unnecessary mention of M$, which normally has little to do with PowerPC's, suggests an M$ astroturfer/troll in action.
The link shows nothing more than a high level chip diagram. This has nothing to do with open chip designs.
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Astroturfers are scum
You're a troll and probably an M$ astroturfer but I'll bite so those new here won't be fooled:
The source of the OS matters just as much as for application, but for reasons you haven't mentioned. These include:
Documentation - it is impossible for API documentation to be complete. Source is frequently needed to make clear what will happen under rare circumstances eg. virtual memory traps during a strcpy() in a device driver.
Back doors - without source it is impossible for the government to make sure that public data is not being used for private purposes. "Trust me" is not good enough for any non-trivial project. eg. voting
Unusual circumstances - Governments are large organisations with many specialised operations. To say one size fits all is simply wrong. Source is not a panacea but can help solve problems that closed source vendors won't even look at. eg. support for military spec hardware.
Forking - Closed source software forks every bit as much as open source source software and in addition will always eventually no longer be supported. With open source software an customer can make their own choices about when to drop support and not be beholden to a vendor trying to maximise profit.
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I sometimes think that closed source vendors are engaged in 1984 style double-think when it comes to closed source API's. By definition an open source API, assuming all else is equal, will allow a customer at least all the options of a closed source API.
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Astroturfers are scum
M$ is cross-subsidising from it's monopoly software and also trying to create technical dependencies. Enough said.
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Astroturfers are scum.
Political rah-rah-rah is entirely appropriate. You name an area of your life that is not affected by software and IP rights. Everything from supermarkets to credit cards to car engine computers depend totally on software.
No problem, until self-serving multi-nationals like M$ start using DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) to bypass the democratic legal system (eg. first sale doctrine) and control people's lives.
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The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
You're damn right Gnome would be reported differently.
Why is Longhorn being reported on slashdot at all?
- Longhorn is still vapourware.
- When it is finally realized it will be designed not to be hackable.
- M$ has more than enough front organisations to market its products without open source sites like slashdot supporting them.
Slashdot editors should try harder to avoid being suckered by the M$ marketing machine. It needs to cancel out the insane amount of M$ marketing drivel on the net and elsewhere to make the net as a whole more balanced.
The M$ people who say slashdot should give equal time to M$ are talking nonense. Such people should go back to microsoft.com where they belong.
Funny, didn't even reply to the parents main point ie. whether they are an astroturfer? I wonder why?