The GPL is interesting in that it has a built in profit motive, ie, I'll give you this to use as you will, and if you improve and distribute it, I get to see the changes, also under the GPL. Trading ideas for ideas. It's a license for people who want to be paid in kind for their work. It takes away people's incentive to take it, close the source, and go off in their own direction. It offers a center of gravity that keeps the whole project moving forward, while at the same time offering both ability and incentive towards interoperability.
How do you think the GPL should be changed? I think share and share a like works better than do whatever you want with my work, so long as you keep the copyright statements in it.
Brave enough to admit the GPL needs changing? I would be, if I agreed with you. More to the point, I'm not foolish enough to say it needs to be altered when it suits my purposes as a programmer. It's not like just because something was written under the GPL you couldn't write something else that did the same thing under another license. The fact that doesn't happen all that much should show that many, perhaps even most people find it quite workable.
for one thing, it would be difficult to run a 3 month stress test on 2.6.0 when 2.6.0 isn't 3 months old, and isn't part of a released enterprise product. If they stress tested one of the betas and it failed, Microsoft would use it for advertising.:)
"making it look better" is one of the things Linux sorely needs. Users don't like inconsistant interfaces. Users don't want things that work 13 different ways. It doesn't matter if something works if no one uses it, and giving an app a native interface does loads for making it more user friendly. All the heavy lifting has already been done, so why not throw on the paint job and make Open Office have a native KDE or Gnome interface. Seems the right way to head to me.
JS
SCO has very little real value. If IBM didn't buy them off when they were still under $2 a share, they're never going to. It's not just the cost of the shares, but also the cost of dismantling the company. It's not worth it. If SCO has anything they want, they'll wait until the case is over. I think the only thing of interest to them would be control over the AT&T sources, just so no one ever tries to go after AIX again. Other than that, SCO would be an expense. There is an upside to the case for IBM, and that is that it is making the idea of IBM as a defender of linux a meme. When this ends with a victory for IBM, it will do good things for them, whatever it's doing to them now. (They're still doing brisk business in linux servers, so they can't be doing too badly...)
Object Pascal is a beautiful language. It is rationally designed and easily readable without being overly wordy or obsenely terse. It works constistantly, it's a fast language to compile and it's a compiled language, no virtual machines. There are at least three free compilers for Pascal, in addition to the somewhat pricey Delphi. Why in pascal? Why in C? There's little enough you can do in one that you can't do in the other. It's personal preference. Of the fifteen or so languages I've written code in, Pascal remains my favorite. C may be an interesting place to visit, but Pascal is home.
if you had access to the program, and you fed it the songs that were your own personal hits, maybe rated them, it would be better than just about anything else at telling you what else you'd like. Finding you bands you'd never heard of that were actually pretty good. It could allow you to expand your musical horizons rather than forcing you into the narrow spam mold of the cold musical marketing machine. It could easily evolve into a simple web based tool to sell more and a broader variety of music, but they'd never even think of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL is interesting in that it has a built in profit motive, ie, I'll give you this to use as you will, and if you improve and distribute it, I get to see the changes, also under the GPL. Trading ideas for ideas. It's a license for people who want to be paid in kind for their work. It takes away people's incentive to take it, close the source, and go off in their own direction. It offers a center of gravity that keeps the whole project moving forward, while at the same time offering both ability and incentive towards interoperability.
How do you think the GPL should be changed? I think share and share a like works better than do whatever you want with my work, so long as you keep the copyright statements in it.
Brave enough to admit the GPL needs changing? I would be, if I agreed with you. More to the point, I'm not foolish enough to say it needs to be altered when it suits my purposes as a programmer. It's not like just because something was written under the GPL you couldn't write something else that did the same thing under another license. The fact that doesn't happen all that much should show that many, perhaps even most people find it quite workable.
for one thing, it would be difficult to run a 3 month stress test on 2.6.0 when 2.6.0 isn't 3 months old, and isn't part of a released enterprise product. If they stress tested one of the betas and it failed, Microsoft would use it for advertising. :)
unless you mean 4, somewhat crappy compression, compared to Quicktime or divx/xvid.. it all plays with the mplayerplug-in anyway.
"making it look better" is one of the things Linux sorely needs. Users don't like inconsistant interfaces. Users don't want things that work 13 different ways. It doesn't matter if something works if no one uses it, and giving an app a native interface does loads for making it more user friendly. All the heavy lifting has already been done, so why not throw on the paint job and make Open Office have a native KDE or Gnome interface. Seems the right way to head to me. JS
SCO has very little real value. If IBM didn't buy them off when they were still under $2 a share, they're never going to. It's not just the cost of the shares, but also the cost of dismantling the company. It's not worth it. If SCO has anything they want, they'll wait until the case is over. I think the only thing of interest to them would be control over the AT&T sources, just so no one ever tries to go after AIX again. Other than that, SCO would be an expense. There is an upside to the case for IBM, and that is that it is making the idea of IBM as a defender of linux a meme. When this ends with a victory for IBM, it will do good things for them, whatever it's doing to them now. (They're still doing brisk business in linux servers, so they can't be doing too badly...)
Object Pascal is a beautiful language. It is rationally designed and easily readable without being overly wordy or obsenely terse. It works constistantly, it's a fast language to compile and it's a compiled language, no virtual machines. There are at least three free compilers for Pascal, in addition to the somewhat pricey Delphi. Why in pascal? Why in C? There's little enough you can do in one that you can't do in the other. It's personal preference. Of the fifteen or so languages I've written code in, Pascal remains my favorite. C may be an interesting place to visit, but Pascal is home.
if you had access to the program, and you fed it the songs that were your own personal hits, maybe rated them, it would be better than just about anything else at telling you what else you'd like. Finding you bands you'd never heard of that were actually pretty good. It could allow you to expand your musical horizons rather than forcing you into the narrow spam mold of the cold musical marketing machine. It could easily evolve into a simple web based tool to sell more and a broader variety of music, but they'd never even think of it.