Second, Not everyone wants to carry around a "desktop replacement" -- I don't burn (or even use) many CD's on the road; why should I be forced to carry an extra pound or two of unused harware with me?
There are already LOTS of tiny (~3 lb) notebooks available out there with no built-in cdrom drive. I suggest you check out Dell's (or any other major manufacturer's) website.
Sorry, you can't 'take out' of the BSD code base. It's still out there for everyone to use. You can't remove anything from it. You can refuse to contribute back if you like, but you can't take anything 'out' of it.
It's not dying. It can't shrink. It can only stay the same or grow.
People are free to contribute back everything, or just pieces/parts that won't take away from any special 'edge' they built on in propriatary code. Not being *forced* to contribute back, it can often make the non-coding bosses feel much more secure, and not worry about contributing back other parts that won't give your competition some competitive advantage.
Now all we need is to bioengineer some organism (start with some plant, since you've got the chlorophyll already) to turn sunlight into ethanol without messing around with separate fermentation steps. Set up a vat of it in your back yard, and presto, you've got your home of the future which produces it's own electricity. (and party supplies!)
This is true. Commercial software does have the possibility of the company going belly-up or abandoning the product when acquired.
However there is one big incentive that makes this more unusual than the rule. Money. As long as customers are buying a product, upgrades to it, or support contracts, the people making the product have a *big* incentive to continue work on it.
This is opposed to community open source projects where the incentive is just the satisfaction of making that piece of software. A product may be abandoned at any time if the guy working on it either becomes bored with it, or gets busy in 'real-life'.
As a general rule (and by looking at the amount of dead projects on sourceforge) IMHO the money is generally a better driving force at making sure the project continues.
Yes, you could pay some individual to do custom work on an abandoned OSS project to get it working to your satisfaction, but when you pay for commercial software, usually you are sharing the cost of the development with many many other companies who also want it developed. And I wasn't talking about tweaking an established working product for your internal user. But if that's what you want to talk about, many closed-source companies will (for a price, and under NDA) allow you access to their source code to modify your product for internal user, or even offer to do it for a fee.
As you say, it depends a lot on the situation, but I think there is a difference in the rate of companies with a commercial product dying vs folks walking away from projects where their only tie to it is personal satisfaction.
Agreed. I'm using a number of abandoned pieces of software myself. The problem is they are now getting long in the tooth and missing many features available in other commercial software. My users are noticing this and want the features. I have neither the time nor skill to implement them myself so we will not only incur the cost of the commercial software, but also the cost of retraining when we move from the abandoned software, and recoding of other interacting applications. If I had gone with commercial software from the start I could have avoided the transitional costs. Those costs are going to vary tremendously from business to business and case to case, but it is something to consider.
Well, maybe the support-contract geeks have special in-depth knowledge in the areas that your in-house geeks dont. A company building an OS, database, etc may have specialists at encryption etc, etc, that your in-house geeks only have a passing knowledge of. Your in-house geeks are specialists at everything? Impressive. Besides, it's always easier to patch the code if your the one who wrote it in the first place and know all the implications of any patch.
The other reason is you can distribute the cost of paying those 20-expert-geeks over 2,000 companies who pay you for the service. Othewise those companies would each have to hire the 20 themselves costing a colletive 40,000 geeks worth of salaries to the buisnesses involved.
Yes, some of those companies might release those patches back to the other users of the software, but think about it... amoung those others using the same software your company does are likely a good number of your competitors... Are you going to trust a patch your competitor released to you without haveing your own team of geeks check it out? It's still going to cost you. Distributing the cost of the support-contract-geeks is a good thing. You get a better return on invetment.
So you are going to release a patch to code that millions of people use, some in critical situations... in 6 minutes? How about a little testing first?
Wow, we can use all this great software we found on Sourceforge for our corporate enterprise. Then when it's abandoned like so many projects are on sourceforge... what? Oh great, we can 'read the code'. What do we do now? We can either wait for some bored group of kind souls to take it over, or we now have to hire ourselves a permanent staff of 50 code monkeys to keep the code patched and updated? Great. That's going to do wonders for the bottom line.
Having access to the "source" does you no good unless you are personally going to set up the staff up to make use of that fact. Ford motor company doesn't want to spend millions and millions of dollars maintaining their own operating system for use inhouse. They pay some company to provide the OS and share the costs involved with tens of thousands of other companies that also want to buy that software.
Seeing #includes is nice, but having a company standing behind and maintaining the software is what is needed.
Well, unlike the vast majority of the general population, I *can* read code... a little. I'm a biologist, not a CS trained person. I can do a little bit of coding, but not that much. An exploit others might see as obvious would slip right by me 99 out of 100 times. A subtle elegant exploit? I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of catching it. "You can just look at the source" is meaningless to the vast vast majority of the population. They could look, but it would do them zero good. That's why we buy programs from people paid to do that.
Yes, eventually people who can read code well might look at it (surely they will in a high-profile case like this, but what about some more obscure piece of code we found to work with?) but a lot of damage may be done if it's used before they have thoroughly investigated it.
If you look back at past slashdot stories, you'll find exactly that was done several months ago. An opensource patch was released for a windows exploid before MS could release one. Everyone raved about it that day.
The next day it was discovered the patch was very badly coded, and included a backdoor...
I think I'll stay away from 'opensource' MS patches, thank you very much.
or they spend it in creative ways to take an existing patent, add a chemical so it process but produces the same thing, and enjoy another 20 years
Even if they do this, the original process will still run out of it's patentable time period and be open for competitors to produce. The new process only makes a difference if it makes the product better (or cheaper for them to produce, giving them a competitive advantage).
It takes many millions of dollars to take a single drug through clinical trials and into production. Add in the numerous failures along the way of other drugs and you realize doing the research to get drugs to market is horrendously expensive.
Drug companies do need protection, in the form of limited patent time, to give them incentive to do the research. It may be too expensive for many people to by the drugs *today*, but the patents WILL expire, and from that point on, forever, the drugs become available to the masses relatively cheap.
It may seem terrible that people with a medical condition which needs treatment TODAY may have to pay a lot, but that price to society is more than offset by having the drug available for all future generations. Without the companies making money, the research may never be done (or at least might not be done till decades later).
Maybe you should learn to read better. That sentence means absolutely nothing in reguards to weather his clients and his clients alone would potentially be given access to the source. There's a difference between letting folks who PAY for the code see the source, and letting the world see the source.
They must not have taught reading comprehension in those crystal ball reading classes eh?
I wouldn't be overly proud of hiding your sourcecode improvements from your clients.
How do you know he doesn't or would never allow his clients to have access to the code? The beauty of the license is it allows him to hide the source code from his clients *competitors*! The clients are paying a premium for the code. Giving free access to it to his competitors makes it worthless as a competative advantage to the company.
If you're still in the embedded business in a few years, you'll be using Linux in some form.
I'd bow down to your obvious Nostradamus-like ability to see the future, but I just don't believe it.
No, DLP (Digital Light Processing) is used for BOTH rear and forward projection. The original poster is erroneously thinking it's for forward projection only, and you are mistaking it for rear projection only. The technology can be (and is) used for either.
Nope. First of all why tell them you have a faster mower, you most likely bought it so you could do more jobs in the same amount of time, not to tell folks it'll be faster so they will get charged less. You are charging for the amount of yard cut, not the time involved.
Following your rational,UPS would charge less for their overnight service than their ground service because it's faster. Doesn't make any sense once you think about the costs involved does it? UPS has to spend more $/pound to ship by air. You had to pay money for that faster mower.
If you were to brag about the faster mower, it would just be in the way of "We will only annoy your neighbors with loud noise for 30 minutes rather than 45 like our competitors", "The kids will be able to play on the lawn sooner", etc.
On the other hand, it could be introducing a foreign plant/animal into an ecosystem. We've seen plenty of cases where that leads to rapid growth of the new species in a land with no natural preditors/competitors, and the eventual destruction of native wildlife.
But I can tell you right now that my next one will be an Apple again, because "It just works" and I don't feel completly abandoned by Apple once I walk out of the door.
You mean like all those folks who bought older Macs because Apple said they would be able to run OSX on them when it came out? Then were told later that those machines wouldn't be able to run it after all?
We've got a few of those boxes. What a great feeling I get with support like that. Not.
2.6.0 has only been out for a week. I'm going to want to see someone stress test it for a hell of a lot longer than a week before I call it "enterprise ready".
Read the article. There is no iso image you can downlaod and use now. It's still in pieces parts until they get everything to beta stage. For now either use R5, or pay for yellow-tab.
How about it's API?
BeOS was described by most programmers as a 'joy' to program in, compared to other OS's, Linux included. The API made it fun and easy, like play.
Pretty sure this makes OpenSource advocates who posted it look really inept. I mean, if opensouce advocates can't read the source to the patch and tell it's full of exploits before posting it... seems to me that makes these OpenSouce advocates look like fools.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess soon we will all want to start using lead paint again on our houses.
There are already LOTS of tiny (~3 lb) notebooks available out there with no built-in cdrom drive. I suggest you check out Dell's (or any other major manufacturer's) website.
Then again, living in a dangerous neighborhood just got MUCH more dangerous...
It's not dying. It can't shrink. It can only stay the same or grow.
People are free to contribute back everything, or just pieces/parts that won't take away from any special 'edge' they built on in propriatary code. Not being *forced* to contribute back, it can often make the non-coding bosses feel much more secure, and not worry about contributing back other parts that won't give your competition some competitive advantage.
Now where's my jet-pack?
However there is one big incentive that makes this more unusual than the rule. Money. As long as customers are buying a product, upgrades to it, or support contracts, the people making the product have a *big* incentive to continue work on it.
This is opposed to community open source projects where the incentive is just the satisfaction of making that piece of software. A product may be abandoned at any time if the guy working on it either becomes bored with it, or gets busy in 'real-life'.
As a general rule (and by looking at the amount of dead projects on sourceforge) IMHO the money is generally a better driving force at making sure the project continues.
Yes, you could pay some individual to do custom work on an abandoned OSS project to get it working to your satisfaction, but when you pay for commercial software, usually you are sharing the cost of the development with many many other companies who also want it developed. And I wasn't talking about tweaking an established working product for your internal user. But if that's what you want to talk about, many closed-source companies will (for a price, and under NDA) allow you access to their source code to modify your product for internal user, or even offer to do it for a fee.
As you say, it depends a lot on the situation, but I think there is a difference in the rate of companies with a commercial product dying vs folks walking away from projects where their only tie to it is personal satisfaction.
Agreed. I'm using a number of abandoned pieces of software myself. The problem is they are now getting long in the tooth and missing many features available in other commercial software. My users are noticing this and want the features. I have neither the time nor skill to implement them myself so we will not only incur the cost of the commercial software, but also the cost of retraining when we move from the abandoned software, and recoding of other interacting applications. If I had gone with commercial software from the start I could have avoided the transitional costs. Those costs are going to vary tremendously from business to business and case to case, but it is something to consider.
The other reason is you can distribute the cost of paying those 20-expert-geeks over 2,000 companies who pay you for the service. Othewise those companies would each have to hire the 20 themselves costing a colletive 40,000 geeks worth of salaries to the buisnesses involved.
Yes, some of those companies might release those patches back to the other users of the software, but think about it... amoung those others using the same software your company does are likely a good number of your competitors... Are you going to trust a patch your competitor released to you without haveing your own team of geeks check it out? It's still going to cost you. Distributing the cost of the support-contract-geeks is a good thing. You get a better return on invetment.
So you are going to release a patch to code that millions of people use, some in critical situations... in 6 minutes? How about a little testing first?
Wow, we can use all this great software we found on Sourceforge for our corporate enterprise. Then when it's abandoned like so many projects are on sourceforge... what? Oh great, we can 'read the code'. What do we do now? We can either wait for some bored group of kind souls to take it over, or we now have to hire ourselves a permanent staff of 50 code monkeys to keep the code patched and updated? Great. That's going to do wonders for the bottom line.
Having access to the "source" does you no good unless you are personally going to set up the staff up to make use of that fact. Ford motor company doesn't want to spend millions and millions of dollars maintaining their own operating system for use inhouse. They pay some company to provide the OS and share the costs involved with tens of thousands of other companies that also want to buy that software.
Seeing #includes is nice, but having a company standing behind and maintaining the software is what is needed.
Yes, eventually people who can read code well might look at it (surely they will in a high-profile case like this, but what about some more obscure piece of code we found to work with?) but a lot of damage may be done if it's used before they have thoroughly investigated it.
The next day it was discovered the patch was very badly coded, and included a backdoor...
I think I'll stay away from 'opensource' MS patches, thank you very much.
Even if they do this, the original process will still run out of it's patentable time period and be open for competitors to produce. The new process only makes a difference if it makes the product better (or cheaper for them to produce, giving them a competitive advantage).
It takes many millions of dollars to take a single drug through clinical trials and into production. Add in the numerous failures along the way of other drugs and you realize doing the research to get drugs to market is horrendously expensive.
Drug companies do need protection, in the form of limited patent time, to give them incentive to do the research. It may be too expensive for many people to by the drugs *today*, but the patents WILL expire, and from that point on, forever, the drugs become available to the masses relatively cheap.
It may seem terrible that people with a medical condition which needs treatment TODAY may have to pay a lot, but that price to society is more than offset by having the drug available for all future generations. Without the companies making money, the research may never be done (or at least might not be done till decades later).
Psst, you can do this with IE too. It's not just a special Mozilla thing.
So is it ok if I hack a banking system and just steal 10 cents from a few million customers? I'm sure no one would throw me in jail for just 10 cents.
They must not have taught reading comprehension in those crystal ball reading classes eh?
How do you know he doesn't or would never allow his clients to have access to the code? The beauty of the license is it allows him to hide the source code from his clients *competitors*! The clients are paying a premium for the code. Giving free access to it to his competitors makes it worthless as a competative advantage to the company.
If you're still in the embedded business in a few years, you'll be using Linux in some form.
I'd bow down to your obvious Nostradamus-like ability to see the future, but I just don't believe it.
Http://www.dlp.com
Following your rational,UPS would charge less for their overnight service than their ground service because it's faster. Doesn't make any sense once you think about the costs involved does it? UPS has to spend more $/pound to ship by air. You had to pay money for that faster mower.
If you were to brag about the faster mower, it would just be in the way of "We will only annoy your neighbors with loud noise for 30 minutes rather than 45 like our competitors", "The kids will be able to play on the lawn sooner", etc.
On the other hand, it could be introducing a foreign plant/animal into an ecosystem. We've seen plenty of cases where that leads to rapid growth of the new species in a land with no natural preditors/competitors, and the eventual destruction of native wildlife.
You mean like all those folks who bought older Macs because Apple said they would be able to run OSX on them when it came out? Then were told later that those machines wouldn't be able to run it after all?
We've got a few of those boxes. What a great feeling I get with support like that. Not.
2.6.0 has only been out for a week. I'm going to want to see someone stress test it for a hell of a lot longer than a week before I call it "enterprise ready".
Read the article. There is no iso image you can downlaod and use now. It's still in pieces parts until they get everything to beta stage. For now either use R5, or pay for yellow-tab.
How about it's API? BeOS was described by most programmers as a 'joy' to program in, compared to other OS's, Linux included. The API made it fun and easy, like play.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34618.html