Actually, I'm pretty sure there exist both Ada and Modula-3 frontends for gcc as well.
Also, I'm not totally sure of this, but I think the frontend just translates the input language into an intermediate language. That's then optimized, and passed to the backend, which generates the object code. That's why gcc can compile to so many different architectures.
Also, saying Java is a "cut down C++" is somewhat misleading. Java does, as first glance, look like C++ with all of the bad stuff taken out. It does have some significant differences though. The semantics are different, and garbage collection leads to a diffrent style of programming. Being able to dynamically load classes is nice too...
GNU allows you to sell. You could sell a GPL program for $1 million if you wanted. I can not do this with many companies' licenses.
You could legally sell a GPL'ed program, but you cannot realistically expect to be able to do that. Because people can get the source code for free, they will get it from a free place, or at least a place that's a heck of a lot cheaper than $1000000. The problem with GPL is that it gives people so much "freedom", that GPLed code might as well be free beer.
How much money did the Linux kernel authors get for their efforts? How much money do distributors (Red Hat, etc.), support sellers (Linux Care), and book publishers (O'Reilly, etc.) make? GPL is biased against the developers. Those who write the code get almost nothing.
The only way a company could actually make money developing GPL'ed software is if they charged *one* person the entire R&D price to get the source. Once that one person gets it, the original developer has no hope of getting any real profits, since the source can (and will) be distributed for free.
A little about me... I'm not extremist. I like free software, and I use and contribute to it. I also believe that proprietary software has a place, until you show me otherwise. If you want all software to be free, explain how developers can make a living writing free software.
Neither RMS nor ESR does this adequately. RMS essentially requires that developers make only as much as sales clerks, and are funded with a software tax. RMS also thinks developers don't deserve recognition or reward for writing code, yet he paradoxically wants to be recognized for his contributions by having Linux renamed "GNU/Linux". (look for "artisan" on the GNU philosophy pages if you don't know what I'm talking about)
ESR has several business models on the opensource.org site, but very few of them make money for developers, only for tech-support, book and t-shirt sellers.
I'm still waiting for an example of a company that sells software, and only software, where all of the software is copyleft, and the company actually makes a profit. The FSF doesn't count, as it survives because of charitable donations, not sales.
They're big in the US, and elsewhere as well. In fact, according to their website, they're "the world's largest enterprise software company", whatever that means.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: just because they come from country X, doesn't mean they're only big in country X.
I find it strange that RMS keeps demanding that Linux be called "GNU/Linux". It seems he wants recognition. But that goes against the GNU philosophy:
Those who benefit from the current system where programs are property offer two arguments in support of their claims to own programs: the emotional argument and the economic argument.
The emotional argument goes like this: ``I put my sweat, my heart, my soul into this program. It comes from me, it's mine!''
This argument does not require serious refutation. The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. By contrast, consider the great artists and artisans of medieval times, who didn't even sign their names to their work. To them, the name of the artist was not important. What mattered was that the work was done--and the purpose it would serve. This view prevailed for hundreds of years.
Why can't RMS be like those great artists and atrisans? Why can't he merely be content with the fact that "the work was done--and the purpose it would serve"?
Actully, I agree that RMS should want recognition. But then that goes against some of his arguments in the GNU philosphy. If RMS wants recognition, then shouldn't all developers? And if that's the case, how does one reconcile this with the fact that GPL lets others take your code and then sell it?
Rather unfortunate (codecs)...
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RMS on APSL
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XAnim 2.80.0 apparently has support for dynamically loadable codecs. There are also several codecs for it that are available only in binary form, and you link them in when you build it. These codecs are available for Linux x86 (a.out and elf) and many other UNIXes as well.
You are stating opinion with neither evidence nor respect. I say there is, and I say companies like RedHat, Walnut Creek, Cygnus, VA Research and Cheapbytes prove it. They are all profitable. Whether or not they are sustainable has to pass the test of time, but I say they are.
They didn't write the code, yet they make the money. Give an example of where the people who actually write the free software make money off of it.
I don't know about in the US, but in Canada when Bell lost their monopoly on long distance, the prices fell a lot. Bell's own quality of service also increased.
Last I checked, Linus wasn't making money off of open source software. In fact, Transmeta is more closed than most companies -- they won't even reveal what it is they're doing.
JWZ works for Netscape. Netscape has one OSS "product", which is a "Loss Leader". Their business model requires that they sell closed software (or other things, now that they're part of AOL) to make money. They don't make much off of their one OSS product. You might want to look up what the term "loss leader" means.
Alan Cox is one of the "famous" that I mentioned before. He's hired to work on OSS because he's well known (and for good reason). We can't all be famous though. And if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that if you have two companies selling Linux supporti, say Red Hat and Linux Care, and one of them has developers, and the other one doesn't, then the one with developers has more operating costs, but no more income. That means it's in the best interest of companies that sell support to have no developers!
Does Linux Care have developers? If Linux Care has no developers they can probably offer support at a lower cost than RH. It'll be interesting to see if they start cutting into RH's revenues. I wouldn't be surprised if places start getting Linux distro's from Cheap Bytes or something, and their support from Linux Care.
I don't know anything about Rasterman, other than the fact that he makes a window manager. How is he making money? Certainly not off of E.
I contribute to OSS as well, BTW. But (like Linus, and many others who contribute to OSS) I also have a "real job".
I know there are some developers who can make money off of OSS. Most are doing small custom hacks though where 99% was pre-existing OSS code. essentially, we end up with a model where those who do 99% of the work get 0% of the money. Think about it. 99% of the code in Linux's kernel wasn't "paid for". I'm not saying there's anything *wrong * with ginving away code -- I do it myself. My point is that those people who contributed that code have to make a living doing something else.
I'm not trying to argue here. What I'm trying to do is find a way for us developers to make a living on OSS. I like OSS, and would rather write OSS for a living. I'd like to make more than a sales clerk while I'm at it though. I also don't like to write custom hacks. That's for plebes. I like to write real systems. Unfortunately, it's the people who write real systems that seem to get no income from OSS though. Then the custom hack leeches come along and make money off of it.
Uh, more like, the other company takes your base code, and builds their product on top of it. They *might* do some minor tweaks or bug fixes in your code. So you get back a couple of minor bugfixes in return for the base code (which would probably be more than 90% of your competitor's product, assuming your code is written well). Your competitor's product could be as good as or even slightly better than yours, so they can charge a similar or even higher price, yet you did most of the work. Is that fair?
People always bring up companies like Red Hat as examples of companies that make money off open source. Sure, RH is making money of OSS, but did they write that much code? No. Granted, they did write a little bit of code that has migrated to other distributions, but for the most part, the developers aren't making any money from the OSS they developed. The leeches are. The people selling support and books, who contribute very little to the code itself.
The only developers who seem to make any money at all from OSS are the famous ones, and they all do it indirectly. ie: Larry Wall has his job because of the fame he got from writing Perl. What about the other people that contributed to Perl? Linus got his current job probably in part because of his work on Linux. But what about the many other kernel developers?
People keep saying it's possible to make money on OSS. But every example I've seen has been of non-developers making money. What about the developers? I don't want to provide support or sell T-shirts. I want to write code, and I'd like to make a living at the same time.
Actually, the few times I watched his show ("Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" or something), he was exposing hoaxes, or at least finding scientific explanations for things that people figured had to involve tha paranormal. I seem to recall in one about the Bermuda triangle, they found a way that ships could sink in an area of sea more often than other areas. (bubbles rising from the ocean floor lower the average density of the water, hence making ships lose bouyancy)
I suppose you could say he sometimes seemed gullible, but I think he actually tended to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sort of like "okay, sure, you say that's what happened, now here's a possible scientific explanation for what you saw that doesn't involve the paranormal". That's the impression I got anyways.
Or to paraphrase, "Considering that cars have been built to make people's lives easier, why should people *have* to learn how to drive them?"
Almost all tools that increase one's ability to do something, or give one an entirely new ability, will require have some learning curve. "Universally intuitive user interfaces" are a myth.
I'm not saying that all UI's are equal. You're right that a bash prompt is likely to be considerably less usable to a newbie than Windows Explorer. But some amount of training or experimentation is required to use either. Even using a mouse has a learning curve.
I agree too that the typical Linux desktop is a bit too much for the typical user. Things are progressing rather nicely though. If/when we finally get a standard desktop environment with lots of nice apps, and no longer have to worry about a.out vs elf and libc5 vs glibc issues, then newbies might be able to start using Linux.
Not being a newbie myself, I use Linux when I want to do something productive. I switch to NT when I want to play StarCraft.
MUI had it - only what - 6? years ago ...
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GNOME 1.0 Released
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Yeah, the Amiga's message ports are incredibly efficient, but they rely on the fact that the Amiga has no virtual memory or memory protection. It was quite common to pass around pointers to your own internal data structures. All addresses were physical addresses, so other processes could look at your data. Efficient, yes. Safe, no. From a technical point of view, the Amiga was an amazing machine, but no memory protection was one of it's definite weaknesses.
Speaking of MUI, MUI was awful. The programmer's interface was badly designed (there are several things that would make any good programmer nausious). There were also many things about it's UI that were awful. The prefs program was unusable on a 640x200 screen (which was the standrad on NTSC Amigas). The only thing that made MUI efficient at all was that it ran on top of boopsi and the Amiga OS. Imagine how bloated and disgusting it would be if it was ported to X.
Of course, boopsi had its problems too. Having a single "dispatch" function is a pretty bad way to implement an object system. Imagine how many branches/calls are executed in a deep class hierarchy if you call a method that's never been overridden? Yikes...
SQL was not "originally going to be called SEQUEL". SEQUEL was another language that SQL was developed to replace. That's why you should pronounce SQL "S-Q-L", not "sequel", because the latter refers to the language SQL replaced.
I sometimes like to call SQL "squeal" though... It's non-ambiguous, and it gets on the nerves of people who write SQL.
I think you're thinking of "Guinea" or something. Guyana (only one 'n') is on the northern coast of South America. It's just to the west of the other two Guyanas (French and Dutch, aka "Suriname"), and to the east of Venezuela.
I think Guyana is the only South American country that has English as its official language.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm pretty sure there exist both Ada and Modula-3 frontends for gcc as well.
Also, I'm not totally sure of this, but I think the frontend just translates the input language into an intermediate language. That's then optimized, and passed to the backend, which generates the object code. That's why gcc can compile to so many different architectures.
Also, saying Java is a "cut down C++" is somewhat misleading. Java does, as first glance, look like C++ with all of the bad stuff taken out. It does have some significant differences though. The semantics are different, and garbage collection leads to a diffrent style of programming. Being able to dynamically load classes is nice too...
GNU allows you to sell. You could sell a GPL program for $1 million if you wanted. I can not do this with many companies' licenses.
You could legally sell a GPL'ed program, but you cannot realistically expect to be able to do that. Because people can get the source code for free, they will get it from a free place, or at least a place that's a heck of a lot cheaper than $1000000. The problem with GPL is that it gives people so much "freedom", that GPLed code might as well be free beer.
How much money did the Linux kernel authors get for their efforts? How much money do distributors (Red Hat, etc.), support sellers (Linux Care), and book publishers (O'Reilly, etc.) make? GPL is biased against the developers. Those who write the code get almost nothing.
The only way a company could actually make money developing GPL'ed software is if they charged *one* person the entire R&D price to get the source. Once that one person gets it, the original developer has no hope of getting any real profits, since the source can (and will) be distributed for free.
A little about me... I'm not extremist. I like free software, and I use and contribute to it. I also believe that proprietary software has a place, until you show me otherwise. If you want all software to be free, explain how developers can make a living writing free software.
Neither RMS nor ESR does this adequately. RMS essentially requires that developers make only as much as sales clerks, and are funded with a software tax. RMS also thinks developers don't deserve recognition or reward for writing code, yet he paradoxically wants to be recognized for his contributions by having Linux renamed "GNU/Linux". (look for "artisan" on the GNU philosophy pages if you don't know what I'm talking about)
ESR has several business models on the opensource.org site, but very few of them make money for developers, only for tech-support, book and t-shirt sellers.
I'm still waiting for an example of a company that sells software, and only software, where all of the software is copyleft, and the company actually makes a profit. The FSF doesn't count, as it survives because of charitable donations, not sales.
They're big in the US, and elsewhere as well. In fact, according to their website, they're "the world's largest enterprise software
company", whatever that means.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: just because they come from country X, doesn't mean they're only big in country X.
This is straight from Why Software Should Be Free, by RMS, under "How Owners Justify Their Power".
Why can't RMS be like those great artists and atrisans? Why can't he merely be content with the fact that "the work was done--and the purpose it would serve"?
Actully, I agree that RMS should want recognition. But then that goes against some of his arguments in the GNU philosphy. If RMS wants recognition, then shouldn't all developers? And if that's the case, how does one reconcile this with the fact that GPL lets others take your code and then sell it?
XAnim 2.80.0 apparently has support for dynamically loadable codecs. There are also several codecs for it that are available only in binary form, and you link them in when you build it. These codecs are available for Linux x86 (a.out and elf) and many other UNIXes as well.
You are stating opinion with neither evidence nor respect. I say there is, and I say companies like RedHat, Walnut Creek, Cygnus, VA Research and Cheapbytes prove it. They are all profitable. Whether or not they are sustainable has to pass the test of time, but I say they are.
They didn't write the code, yet they make the money. Give an example of where the people who actually write the free software make money off of it.
I don't know about in the US, but in Canada when Bell lost their monopoly on long distance, the prices fell a lot. Bell's own quality of service also increased.
Last I checked, Linus wasn't making money off of open source software. In fact, Transmeta is more closed than most companies -- they won't even reveal what it is they're doing.
JWZ works for Netscape. Netscape has one OSS "product", which is a "Loss Leader". Their business model requires that they sell closed software (or other things, now that they're part of AOL) to make money. They don't make much off of their one OSS product. You might want to look up what the term "loss leader" means.
Alan Cox is one of the "famous" that I mentioned before. He's hired to work on OSS because he's well known (and for good reason). We can't all be famous though. And if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that if you have two companies selling Linux supporti, say Red Hat and Linux Care, and one of them has developers, and the other one doesn't, then the one with developers has more operating costs, but no more income. That means it's in the best interest of companies that sell support to have no developers!
Does Linux Care have developers? If Linux Care has no developers they can probably offer support at a lower cost than RH. It'll be interesting to see if they start cutting into RH's revenues. I wouldn't be surprised if places start getting Linux distro's from Cheap Bytes or something, and their support from Linux Care.
I don't know anything about Rasterman, other than the fact that he makes a window manager. How is he making money? Certainly not off of E.
I contribute to OSS as well, BTW. But (like Linus, and many others who contribute to OSS) I also have a "real job".
I know there are some developers who can make money off of OSS. Most are doing small custom hacks though where 99% was pre-existing OSS code. essentially, we end up with a model where those who do 99% of the work get 0% of the money. Think about it. 99% of the code in Linux's kernel wasn't "paid for". I'm not saying there's anything *wrong * with ginving away code -- I do it myself. My point is that those people who contributed that code have to make a living doing something else.
I'm not trying to argue here. What I'm trying to do is find a way for us developers to make a living on OSS. I like OSS, and would rather write OSS for a living. I'd like to make more than a sales clerk while I'm at it though. I also don't like to write custom hacks. That's for plebes. I like to write real systems. Unfortunately, it's the people who write real systems that seem to get no income from OSS though. Then the custom hack leeches come along and make money off of it.
Yeah, how many times have you heard "Microsoft saved us from DOS!"?
cripes...
Uh, more like, the other company takes your base code, and builds their product on top of it. They *might* do some minor tweaks or bug fixes in your code. So you get back a couple of minor bugfixes in return for the base code (which would probably be more than 90% of your competitor's product, assuming your code is written well). Your competitor's product could be as good as or even slightly better than yours, so they can charge a similar or even higher price, yet you did most of the work. Is that fair?
People always bring up companies like Red Hat as examples of companies that make money off open source. Sure, RH is making money of OSS, but did they write that much code? No. Granted, they did write a little bit of code that has migrated to other distributions, but for the most part, the developers aren't making any money from the OSS they developed. The leeches are. The people selling support and books, who contribute very little to the code itself.
The only developers who seem to make any money at all from OSS are the famous ones, and they all do it indirectly. ie: Larry Wall has his job because of the fame he got from writing Perl. What about the other people that contributed to Perl? Linus got his current job probably in part because of his work on Linux. But what about the many other kernel developers?
People keep saying it's possible to make money on OSS. But every example I've seen has been of non-developers making money. What about the developers? I don't want to provide support or sell T-shirts. I want to write code, and I'd like to make a living at the same time.
Actually, the few times I watched his show ("Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" or something), he was exposing hoaxes, or at least finding scientific explanations for things that people figured had to involve tha paranormal. I seem to recall in one about the Bermuda triangle, they found a way that ships could sink in an area of sea more often than other areas. (bubbles rising from the ocean floor lower the average density of the water, hence making ships lose bouyancy)
I suppose you could say he sometimes seemed gullible, but I think he actually tended to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sort of like "okay, sure, you say that's what happened, now here's a possible scientific explanation for what you saw that doesn't involve the paranormal". That's the impression I got anyways.
Or to paraphrase, "Considering that cars have been built to make people's lives easier, why should people *have* to learn how to drive them?"
Almost all tools that increase one's ability to do something, or give one an entirely new ability, will require have some learning curve. "Universally intuitive user interfaces" are a myth.
I'm not saying that all UI's are equal. You're right that a bash prompt is likely to be considerably less usable to a newbie than Windows Explorer. But some amount of training or experimentation is required to use either. Even using a mouse has a learning curve.
I agree too that the typical Linux desktop is a bit too much for the typical user. Things are progressing rather nicely though. If/when we finally get a standard desktop environment with lots of nice apps, and no longer have to worry about a.out vs elf and libc5 vs glibc issues, then newbies might be able to start using Linux.
Not being a newbie myself, I use Linux when I want to do something productive. I switch to NT when I want to play StarCraft.
Yeah, the Amiga's message ports are incredibly efficient, but they rely on the fact that the Amiga has no virtual memory or memory protection. It was quite common to pass around pointers to your own internal data structures. All addresses were physical addresses, so other processes could look at your data. Efficient, yes. Safe, no. From a technical point of view, the Amiga was an amazing machine, but no memory protection was one of it's definite weaknesses.
Speaking of MUI, MUI was awful. The programmer's interface was badly designed (there are several things that would make any good programmer nausious). There were also many things about it's UI that were awful. The prefs program was unusable on a 640x200 screen (which was the standrad on NTSC Amigas). The only thing that made MUI efficient at all was that it ran on top of boopsi and the Amiga OS. Imagine how bloated and disgusting it would be if it was ported to X.
Of course, boopsi had its problems too. Having a single "dispatch" function is a pretty bad way to implement an object system. Imagine how many branches/calls are executed in a deep class hierarchy if you call a method that's never been overridden? Yikes...
SQL was not "originally going to be called SEQUEL". SEQUEL was another language that SQL was developed to replace. That's why you should pronounce SQL "S-Q-L", not "sequel", because the latter refers to the language SQL replaced.
I sometimes like to call SQL "squeal" though... It's non-ambiguous, and it gets on the nerves of people who write SQL.
www.BillWatch.net is also quite good. It's a somewhat /.-ish site. It covers other MS trials and issues as well.
I think you're thinking of "Guinea" or something. Guyana (only one 'n') is on the northern coast of South America. It's just to the west of the other two Guyanas (French and Dutch, aka "Suriname"), and to the east of Venezuela.
I think Guyana is the only South American country that has English as its official language.