Lots of software companies have lots of patents. Sometimes they're silly, but it sets up sort of a Mutually Assured Destruction. Microsoft isn't going to try to bludgeon IBM with a patent suit, because they know IBM has just as many silly patents to bludgeon them back with.
And that's exactly why Perens says "We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software", and not "we're looking at a future where noone will be able to implement software."
If only companies large enough to posess huge patent portfolios could safely release software, then something like the Linux kernel never would have gotten off the ground.
Of course, how did it take them five years to figure this out? Doesn't the band even listen to their CD's?
Actually if I recall the story, this mistake was made in the original LP release; so it was more like 30 years.
Of course through its whole life "Kind of Blue" has been one of the most widely-admired recordings out there. I'm not sure why the OP seems to feel he got a raw deal because the speed was off on one song by a few percent.
I spent hours working with the 'Technics'(sp?) sets they used to sell. These differed from the regular legos in that they came with a bunch of various sized gears, universal joints, steering knuckles, etc. The normal solid bricks have holes through which shafts may be run. I spent many many hours learning about gears, mechanical advantage, backlash, torque (I often wished for some metal versions of the plastic gears and shafts for high-load areas) and many other concepts.
I loved those things. In high school at one point we had a clock-designing project that I prototyped with the lego technics stuff; no hands or anything, just weight-driven thing with a primitive escapement and a big bar that swung back and forth to do the same job as a pendulum, all made out of lego.
That's the sort of thing lego was great for--you could have a good time building the (very clever) models from the instructions, but then you could also go do crazy things of your own. I hope kids are still playing with those things for many years. Except for being a bit pointy, they were the perfect toy--fun in the best possible way, because you could always do more with them.
They need to continue to differentiate themselves from a sea of knockoff artists that can clone any simplistic kit Lego makes.
Hmm. Are there actually decent lego clones these days? When I was a kid there were a few, but a) they didn't interoperate with lego, and b) they didn't seem to be designed as carefully--they didn't hold together as firmly and just weren't as "useful".
What floors me......is the spin they manage to get from journalists.
This is the most disturbing aspect of the whole debacle to me. Capitalism and democracy both depend on individuals having access to the information they need to make good decisions. The only mainstream news I've seen on this has failed to convey any useful information on the SCO case. It seems like a total failure of the system.
Using the X505 in a public place such as a coffeehouse or on public transportation, you'll notice a lot of glances. Whether they are looking at the elegant little powerhouse in front of you or the big grin on your face while using it, you will be noticed - it's just that special.
Just reread that a couple times. It speaks for itself.
I think we need to face some facts.
Some people just will NOT vote correctly. They will NOT follow instructions. They just won't.
More importantly, I think we need to stop paying so much attention to such close votes. *No* voting system is ever going to be 100 percent accurate; with enough votes involved, there will always be errors somewhere along the way, and a vote that comes down a small fraction of a percentage point is always going to be won by chance.
Accuracy should still be improved, there should be paper trails, etc., but I don't think we can ever expect there to be any reason to who wins when the vote is that close.
But, unless you're a mathematician, an electrical engineer or scientist who writes modeling software, there are few occupations that require the level of math of college level classes.
This is a digression, but I want to make sure we're not underestimating the value of a college math class or two. As someone who's spent some time teaching college freshmen, I've noticed that most high-school graduates have only a very tenuous grasp of things like what a function really is, how sines, cosines, and logarithms really work, and a lot of other stuff that we tend to think of as high school mathematics these days but that (for whatever reason) most people don't really "get" till after they've had a calculus course or two.
I also tend to think that an "educated person" should have a basic idea of what it means to prove something mathematically. And that any responsible citizen in a democracy needs a basic grasp of statistics.
So while few people need a lot of differential equations and whatnot for their daily work, there's still a place for a certain amount of college mathematics.
Sure, to your average./ linux geek, not having the _choice_ of desktop environment is sacreligious
As a geek, I'm frankly pretty sick of going to the geek next door to help with some debugging only to discover that their desktop is configured so differently from mine that I have to ask their help to get a friggin' terminal window.
I'm thankful every day that the rest of the world isn't like this--I appreciate being able to use someone else's car, or stove, or whatever, without having to read the user's manual.
...we really need a distro that is consistent, and doesn't compromise on security
There is more than one way. Anyone that insists that there is only one way, and that is their way, is probably wrong.
Oh, yes, I do so enjoy the diversity of choices taken by application writers. It's wonderful, isn't it, that some may choose to allow me to exit their application with ctrl-Q, some with alt-Q, some with just q, some with:q, and some with Ctrl-X Ctrl-C?
And who couldn't appreciate the joy of searching for documentation in help menus, man pages, info pages, and in text, html, and xml files under/usr/share/doc/?
It's wonderful, isn't it, having the opportunity to learn a new scripting language and interface when it comes time to extend a new application? And who but the most small-minded panderer to the lowest common denominator could not appreciate the flowering in diversity of configuration methods? (How dull my life would be if I lacked the intellectual stimulation provided to me by the opportunity to puzzle through which of gconf,.Xresources,.cshrc, or.xsession is responsible for the fonts in my terminal windows!)
Ignore those so-called user-interface specialists and their petty concerns about "consistency" and "usability". It's All About Choice, after all!
not for nothing, I think having the CD is, to some degree, added value itself. There's the cover art and the insert booklet.
The typical DVD seems to have a zillion extra features on the DVD itself and then come with a plastic box with one little sheet of paper with a table of contents.
Seems like a terrible mistake on the part of the DVD merchants, doesn't it? You'd think it'd be to their advantage to make the consumers appreciate the package as a whole rather than only the bag of bits on the disk....
One of the main 'comments' I get when I recommend Debian GNU/Linux to people, is 'Debian is difficult to install' - a fair comment,
and this will be a move in the right direction.
And of course, the "standard answer" to this is "you only install Debian one time on any one machine".
I agree--I think that I spend less time on maintenance overall than I did when I used Redhat and reinstalled once or twice a year (but that was several years ago; maybe Redhat's updates have gotten better).
But I still have a hard time recommending Debian to new users unless they have someone experienced to help. For the last machine I installed Debian on, for example, I had to compile and insert a module by hand for the network card to get the install past a certain point. Fairly straightforward if you know what you're doing, but if I'd had to do that on my first GNU/Linux install I'd have been lost!
So you would rather have nvidia making no drivers at all for Linux?
That's not the choice we, as kernel users and developers, face. We can make it harder for binary module developers--by not buying their hardware, by not helping to support kernels with their code, etc. By doing these things we can decrease the chance that they'll distribute binary modules, but I'd argue that we also increase somewhat the chances that they'll distribute GPL'd code instead.
Q: What's purple, commutes, and is appreciated by only a select group?
A: A finitely-venerated abelian group
The pilot of a plane on its way out of Poland dies unexpectedly in flight. A passenger is asked to fill in. He looks at the controls and shakes his head. "What's wrong?" someone asks. The reply: "I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane".
"expocity is an effort to integrate an efficient means of switching between applications into the window manager metacity, similar to Expose on Apple's OS-X."
Good point, I forgot that, though note that this still falls a little short of a real attribution--something can be "similar to" something else but developed without knowledge of it.
What is the target audience supposed to do, go to their legal division and say, "No, there's no problem with Linux! See this explanatory document? All code is approved by a penguin...."
Well I suppose the hypothetical target audience has a legal department that takes a sheaf of press releases backed up by no evidence whatsoever as adequate support for a claim of copyright infringement. So maybe it's understandable if the OSDL comes across as a little condescending....
Good English skills - must understand and speak WELL
Most of the Indians I've met have had excellent English skills; English is in fact often their first language. What you're probably asking for isn't exactly good English skills, it is, more specifically, good skills at speaking the American dialect of English.
Personally, I've never thought it was that hard to understand Indian English, so I don't why it's such a big deal.
Redo your resume in plain ASCII. If the potential employers pay that much attention to poofy resume fonts then you don't want to work there anyway.
Actually I think more people should have plain text resumes. Of course it's probably best to honor a preference if a potential employer expresses one, but ascii is a good default, because a lot of people have to go through extra steps to deal with attachments, while noone is ever going to have trouble reading plain text included in the body of an email message.
Well, basically everybody copies features from everyone else. That's business.
Personally I see nothing wrong with copying features like this. What does bother me is copying without attribution--it would have been simple for them to add "inspired by OS X's expose feature" for those that didn't get the reference in the name.
what we need is a good 3rd party to anaylze this issue!
Disinterested third parties are hard to come by. And "bias" doesn't by a long shot imply untruth. In the end the way you determine truth is *not* by looking at who says something and analyzing their biases, though that can help; what you need to do primarily is weigh the arguments they make, and the evidence they provide.
So, look at the evidence provided by Moglen, and Perens, and others, and then look at the evidence SCO has provided us with so far.
in some markets, price is everything, like gasoline. but in some markets, there are other intangible factors. not the least of course is the fact that going into most laptop type environs (offices, coffee shops, college classrooms, etc.) there will be a stigma.
If you really hang out with people who would think less of you if you were seen with a possession that wasn't heavily advertised and expensive, then you need to find some new friends.
--Bruce Fields
Re:There's No Free Lunch -- Or Free Linux
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
In his address titled "There's No Free Lunch -- Or Free Linux," McBride will present his perspectives on the prospects of free industries, SCO's suit against IBM, and why intellectual property must be protected in a digital age.
What I find telling about all this is the intentional misdirection. He talks about these broad intellectual property issues because he knows they're interesting and engaging both to his friends and to his foes. If he's lucky he may even manage to bait his foes into responding to the attacks on free software instead of asking the hard questions.
For example, what intellectual property of SCO's is linux actually infringing on, and when may we see evidence of this infringement? Until they've answered that much more mundane question, there's no point to debating this other stuff.
I wonder if they plan on running some sort of web filter on their connections, it would be local government reflecting the will of the people.
Private entities censor too, all the time, and they don't have to worry about pesky things like voters or courts or bills or rights. Paid any attention to what companies are doing to their employees' internet connections?
If the censor is the company that owns the physical network, then the censorship is every bit as effective, too--unless you happen to have a few hundred million of your own lying around, or a lot of investors willing to make a very long-range gamble competing with an established monopoly, you can't very well decide to finance your own fiber rollout to compete with your cable company's just to get uncensored content.
Is the job of the government to provide high speed internet service to homes? As much as I like the sound of inexpensive bandwidth, if it's directly the government's service, there is a large potential for filtering or other restrictions on access, and a much greater threat for logging one's activities. I do not like this idea.
Doesn't the first amendment, for example, restrict a government provider more than it would a private one?
When public libraries censor internet content, there's a public debate and we can potentially do something about it. But Blockbuster's decision to censor content is entirely their own. You can go to a different video store, of course. But when your only internet connectivity is through one or two well-established monopolies that own the physical conduits, the IP service, and a good deal of "content" to boot, it gets scarier.
A lot of "government censorship" these days seem to be performed indirectly anyway. Look at the way something like the DMCA takedown stuff works, for example: it empowers private entities to perform certain kinds of censhorship much more effectively than government every could on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's exactly why Perens says "We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software", and not "we're looking at a future where noone will be able to implement software."
If only companies large enough to posess huge patent portfolios could safely release software, then something like the Linux kernel never would have gotten off the ground.
--Bruce Fields
Actually if I recall the story, this mistake was made in the original LP release; so it was more like 30 years.
Of course through its whole life "Kind of Blue" has been one of the most widely-admired recordings out there. I'm not sure why the OP seems to feel he got a raw deal because the speed was off on one song by a few percent.
--Bruce Fields
I loved those things. In high school at one point we had a clock-designing project that I prototyped with the lego technics stuff; no hands or anything, just weight-driven thing with a primitive escapement and a big bar that swung back and forth to do the same job as a pendulum, all made out of lego.
That's the sort of thing lego was great for--you could have a good time building the (very clever) models from the instructions, but then you could also go do crazy things of your own. I hope kids are still playing with those things for many years. Except for being a bit pointy, they were the perfect toy--fun in the best possible way, because you could always do more with them.
--Bruce Fields
Hmm. Are there actually decent lego clones these days? When I was a kid there were a few, but a) they didn't interoperate with lego, and b) they didn't seem to be designed as carefully--they didn't hold together as firmly and just weren't as "useful".
--Bruce Fields
This is the most disturbing aspect of the whole debacle to me. Capitalism and democracy both depend on individuals having access to the information they need to make good decisions. The only mainstream news I've seen on this has failed to convey any useful information on the SCO case. It seems like a total failure of the system.
Just reread that a couple times. It speaks for itself.
--Bruce Fields
More importantly, I think we need to stop paying so much attention to such close votes. *No* voting system is ever going to be 100 percent accurate; with enough votes involved, there will always be errors somewhere along the way, and a vote that comes down a small fraction of a percentage point is always going to be won by chance.
Accuracy should still be improved, there should be paper trails, etc., but I don't think we can ever expect there to be any reason to who wins when the vote is that close.
--Bruce Fields
This is a digression, but I want to make sure we're not underestimating the value of a college math class or two. As someone who's spent some time teaching college freshmen, I've noticed that most high-school graduates have only a very tenuous grasp of things like what a function really is, how sines, cosines, and logarithms really work, and a lot of other stuff that we tend to think of as high school mathematics these days but that (for whatever reason) most people don't really "get" till after they've had a calculus course or two.
I also tend to think that an "educated person" should have a basic idea of what it means to prove something mathematically. And that any responsible citizen in a democracy needs a basic grasp of statistics.
So while few people need a lot of differential equations and whatnot for their daily work, there's still a place for a certain amount of college mathematics.
--Bruce Fields
As a geek, I'm frankly pretty sick of going to the geek next door to help with some debugging only to discover that their desktop is configured so differently from mine that I have to ask their help to get a friggin' terminal window.
I'm thankful every day that the rest of the world isn't like this--I appreciate being able to use someone else's car, or stove, or whatever, without having to read the user's manual.
Yup.
--Bruce Fields
Oh, yes, I do so enjoy the diversity of choices taken by application writers. It's wonderful, isn't it, that some may choose to allow me to exit their application with ctrl-Q, some with alt-Q, some with just q, some with :q, and some with Ctrl-X Ctrl-C?
And who couldn't appreciate the joy of searching for documentation in help menus, man pages, info pages, and in text, html, and xml files under /usr/share/doc/?
It's wonderful, isn't it, having the opportunity to learn a new scripting language and interface when it comes time to extend a new application? And who but the most small-minded panderer to the lowest common denominator could not appreciate the flowering in diversity of configuration methods? (How dull my life would be if I lacked the intellectual stimulation provided to me by the opportunity to puzzle through which of gconf, .Xresources, .cshrc, or .xsession is responsible for the fonts in my terminal windows!)
Ignore those so-called user-interface specialists and their petty concerns about "consistency" and "usability". It's All About Choice, after all!
--Bruce Fields
The typical DVD seems to have a zillion extra features on the DVD itself and then come with a plastic box with one little sheet of paper with a table of contents.
Seems like a terrible mistake on the part of the DVD merchants, doesn't it? You'd think it'd be to their advantage to make the consumers appreciate the package as a whole rather than only the bag of bits on the disk....
--Bruce Fields
I agree--I think that I spend less time on maintenance overall than I did when I used Redhat and reinstalled once or twice a year (but that was several years ago; maybe Redhat's updates have gotten better).
But I still have a hard time recommending Debian to new users unless they have someone experienced to help. For the last machine I installed Debian on, for example, I had to compile and insert a module by hand for the network card to get the install past a certain point. Fairly straightforward if you know what you're doing, but if I'd had to do that on my first GNU/Linux install I'd have been lost!
--Bruce Fields
That's not the choice we, as kernel users and developers, face. We can make it harder for binary module developers--by not buying their hardware, by not helping to support kernels with their code, etc. By doing these things we can decrease the chance that they'll distribute binary modules, but I'd argue that we also increase somewhat the chances that they'll distribute GPL'd code instead.
--Bruce Fields
A: Two; one to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
(Now try to explain why I find this version funniner.)
Q: What's purple, commutes, and is appreciated by only a select group?
A: A finitely-venerated abelian group
The pilot of a plane on its way out of Poland dies unexpectedly in flight. A passenger is asked to fill in. He looks at the controls and shakes his head. "What's wrong?" someone asks. The reply: "I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane".
Good point, I forgot that, though note that this still falls a little short of a real attribution--something can be "similar to" something else but developed without knowledge of it.
--Bruce Fields
Well I suppose the hypothetical target audience has a legal department that takes a sheaf of press releases backed up by no evidence whatsoever as adequate support for a claim of copyright infringement. So maybe it's understandable if the OSDL comes across as a little condescending....
Most of the Indians I've met have had excellent English skills; English is in fact often their first language. What you're probably asking for isn't exactly good English skills, it is, more specifically, good skills at speaking the American dialect of English.
Personally, I've never thought it was that hard to understand Indian English, so I don't why it's such a big deal.
--Bruce Fields
Actually I think more people should have plain text resumes. Of course it's probably best to honor a preference if a potential employer expresses one, but ascii is a good default, because a lot of people have to go through extra steps to deal with attachments, while noone is ever going to have trouble reading plain text included in the body of an email message.
My solution: Bruce's resume-o-matic
--Bruce Fields
Personally I see nothing wrong with copying features like this. What does bother me is copying without attribution--it would have been simple for them to add "inspired by OS X's expose feature" for those that didn't get the reference in the name.
--Bruce Fields
Disinterested third parties are hard to come by. And "bias" doesn't by a long shot imply untruth. In the end the way you determine truth is *not* by looking at who says something and analyzing their biases, though that can help; what you need to do primarily is weigh the arguments they make, and the evidence they provide.
So, look at the evidence provided by Moglen, and Perens, and others, and then look at the evidence SCO has provided us with so far.
It looks pretty clear-cut to me....
--Bruce Fields
If you really hang out with people who would think less of you if you were seen with a possession that wasn't heavily advertised and expensive, then you need to find some new friends.
--Bruce Fields
What I find telling about all this is the intentional misdirection. He talks about these broad intellectual property issues because he knows they're interesting and engaging both to his friends and to his foes. If he's lucky he may even manage to bait his foes into responding to the attacks on free software instead of asking the hard questions.
For example, what intellectual property of SCO's is linux actually infringing on, and when may we see evidence of this infringement? Until they've answered that much more mundane question, there's no point to debating this other stuff.
--Bruce Fields
Private entities censor too, all the time, and they don't have to worry about pesky things like voters or courts or bills or rights. Paid any attention to what companies are doing to their employees' internet connections?
If the censor is the company that owns the physical network, then the censorship is every bit as effective, too--unless you happen to have a few hundred million of your own lying around, or a lot of investors willing to make a very long-range gamble competing with an established monopoly, you can't very well decide to finance your own fiber rollout to compete with your cable company's just to get uncensored content.
--Bruce Fields
Doesn't the first amendment, for example, restrict a government provider more than it would a private one?
When public libraries censor internet content, there's a public debate and we can potentially do something about it. But Blockbuster's decision to censor content is entirely their own. You can go to a different video store, of course. But when your only internet connectivity is through one or two well-established monopolies that own the physical conduits, the IP service, and a good deal of "content" to boot, it gets scarier.
A lot of "government censorship" these days seem to be performed indirectly anyway. Look at the way something like the DMCA takedown stuff works, for example: it empowers private entities to perform certain kinds of censhorship much more effectively than government every could on its own.
--Bruce Fields