OSS hackers expect people to choose the first option.
No. At least some of us just want you to be aware that the second choice may have invisible strings attached. Our jumping up and down like monkeys is just part and parcel of trying to make such issues known. Our position is, once you are aware of those issues, choose what you will.
Bombarding people with information about how it's all free and it's LINUX and you can do all sorts of stuff like giving parts away that you can't with MS software and it's LINUX and blah blah blah and it's LINUX will get you nowhere. You'll just annoy the hell out of "Aunt Tillie" (to borrow a person).
Although the post is generally very good, the argument above could either be construed as a straw man or an illustration of some extreme hypothetical scenario. I've seen no evidence of anyone complaining about Linux distros "bombarding" them with "how it's all free", etc. and I certainly do not feel I've been bombarded by anything on my Fedora Core system.
If the second interpretation was the author's intention then the concerns raised are sound for purposes like arguing why we should not strengthen advertising clauses in the GPL.
The GPL is written to be practical (in contrast to inconvenient product activation schemes, etc), which is probably why it has a lax advertising clause. However, the expected protocol is to make reasonable effort to ensure the necessary information is available in non-intrusive and easy to find places.
It isn't too much to ask that the rights of the users with respect to the software are made known to them. Even if "Aunt Tillie" doesn't care if a piece of software is free or not, she probably doesn't care if the operating system says so in unintrusive places either.
are people bound by the legal requirements of the GPL or by the moral requirements of giving due credit.
Yes, they are only bound by legal requirements. Maybe that's all they care about.
But if they want to generate good will in the open source community they shouldn't play down the relevance of open source against open standards, hide the fact their products use open source components and label open source products as proprietrary.
Certainly as individuals with interest in open source we are as entitled to be vocally critical of Sun's decision to distance itself from open source philosophy as Sun is entitled act the way it has.
Remember the late eighties? You had Amigas, Macs, Atari STs, PC Clones with GEM, PC Clones with Windows, and those were just the "mainstream" platforms. You had choices. You could chose a computer that actually suited you. The different manufacturers did things in different ways to suit their audiences. There was more than a nod to the Mac in all of the above, but not so much you could safely argue most were clones of it. That was a good time to be in computing.
Those days are over. These days everything needs to be connected. When your DVD disc doesn't play on your operating system; when your bank doesn't support your browser; when your favourite games isn't compatible with your system, there is no choice. Was not GNU/Linux a clone of the same standards the proprietrary Unices were built around?
Read closely: There is no choice if there is no interoperability.
As much as you despise those in the FOSS community who clone software, they do it for a legitimate reason and so form a vital part of our strategy wresting control from Microsoft.
Get over it. Spend more time promoting projects you value than criticising projects you don't understand.
Ever hear of "Make" and "Makefiles"? You don't need to keep recompiling things than havn't changed.
I'm pretty sure every time I change my C++ files, it recompiles the STL headers I use even though they never change. *shudder*
That's just a fact of C++ programming. Compiled template libraries are impractical as demonstrated by the failed export keyword so ALMOST EVERYTHING has to be in the header files. *faint*
Something in C++ needs serious revision. But I have no idea what! *die*
Java has been successful because it has comprehensive well documented libraries that were written by developers with some design sense. For example, python is a nice language, but I have had an awful time working out how to do things I wanted to do because documentation is sparse and libraries cryptic and incomplete.
I would DIE to see C++ with a well documented cross platform library as comprehensive as Java's all in a single package. (Well not literally ofcourse!) But that is a long way off because library implementors are still exploring the language's expressive power.
I agree that garbage collection can be very efficient.
My complaint about garbage collection is that it only solves the memory problems. It doesn't solve deallocation problems with other resources, which are generally more expensive and more limited.
Wrap up a resource in an object and you don't know if the resource will be cleaned up in a timely manner. The object could be sitting in idle after I've severed all references to it and because of that, precious resources aren't being returned to the operating system.
In order to free system resources properly means I need to explicitly dispose of each resource wrapping object. (This is the design decision made in SWT.) But what's the point of a garbage collector then?
I like C++ because it's "Resource allocation is acquisition" strategy can be consistently used for memory allocations as well as system resource allocation.
My main gripe with C++ is its lack of reflection.
Other things I would like to see in C++ are:
Cleaner syntax for functional programming.
The virtual/overrides/new syntax from C#.
More memory management facilities in the STL.
Thread management and RPC facilities in the STL.
But one question: Couldn't an incremental collection also trigger a swap-in?
When I first read "Los Angeles police arrested Ruben Centero Moreno, 34, after the projectionist used night vision goggles to spot his video camera in a showing of The Alamo.", I thought:
Ruben Centero Moreno was the projectionist who was using night vision goggles to search for his own video camera and got arrested for it.
Of course such cosmic coindicences do happen, such as the moon's angular diameter being almost equal to the sun's when viewed from the earth, but far more often, it indicates a gap either in our observations or our theories.
Maybe it's not such a coincidence. If the moon played a critical role in the evolution of complex life for instance, the observation of this supposed coincidence would be a case of an observer relative observation.
Under this hypothesis, if the moon wasn't so, we wouldn't be here to observe it and likewise for any other alien lifeforms. It follows then that although such a probably for any arbitrary planet is very low, there is a high probability that such a moon orbits a planet that has evolved complex life capable of observing it.
Doubtless, with me rambling on about aliens, I'm now sounding like an incomprehensible crackpot.
The atmosphere of Mercury is almost nonexistent, it contains light metals which are stripped from the planet's surface by the sun's radiation. Due to the short orbital period, Mercury's solar day is 176 days, even though the planet rotates once every 59 days.
While a habitat and test mining station have been established on the surface, enormous problems are faced trying to colonise Mercury. Radiation from the sun is so intense that the surface is constantly being stripped by the solar winds. The most successful approach so far has been a moving base, which can stay on the far side of the planet near the pole. Due to the extremely long solar day, such a base only has to move an average of 10 to 20 kilometres per day to stay in the shade.
I like the idea of building a base on ceramic train tracks that keep the base in the shade by pushing the base solely on the power of expansion of the ceramic material due to the Sun's heat.
You are right, in the sense that genetic engineering is just a high tech equivalent of cross breeding. It's just that genetic engineering can be faster and make modifications that are normally not possible with other means. On the other hand, they are more expensive, less understood and takes away control of genetic stock away from farmers and into the hands of scientists and engineers that are often far removed from the realities of farm life.
Personally, I don't believe there is anything wrong with genetic engineering per se.
What is more disturbing is the pattern of behaviour by genetic engineering firms.
Genetic engineering for the purpose of encouraging the use of pesticides, is not my idea of being environmentally responsible.
Patenting genes and "genetic trash" that have already existed before humanity isn't scientifically responsible.
Genetically engineering strains of grain, patenting it and then blaming farmers for taking advantage of their intellectual property when all that happened is the natural process of crop contamination would be totally unacceptable.
Having a monoculture crops all over the world because plants were designed with terminator genes is even worse. Such crops produce sterile seed which cannot be sowed in the next season and therefore farmers need to purchase seeds from a genetic engineering firm each and every season - encouraging the development of monopoly control over agriculture. Furthermore, a single disease could spread through monoculture cropse like wildfire and cause all sorts of hardship.
No. My problem with genetic engineering is not the genetic engineering at all. It is the broken system of governance that we have and the profit bent people who control the technology. Until these problems are fixed genetic engineering will get no support from me.
The only reason that the US dollar has any value overseas is that it can eventually be redeemed in the US. Someone has to eventually spend it here (although not necessarily the someone that you initially gave the dollars to).
Emphasis mine. You can redeem it in the US and that gives it its value. But you don't have to.
It is not unusual for a nation to hoard the currency of another nation to achieve an exchange rate that serves the former's economic policy.
However the point is that even at our current usage we could eventually burn through any reasonable supply of oil you care to propose.
Oil will progressively become more difficult to obtain and because of that, our usage of oil necessarily decreases as the oil becomes more costly. Therefore we will never run out of oil and your statement is false, but only on the technicality that we wouldn't want to use the rest for economic reasons.
This is a good thing because it means we won't be able dump all that carbon into the atmosphere. Oil will become too difficult to extract and process to be worth using it long before it can make a drastic contribution to global warming.
Coal however is a different matter and I shudder at the possibility of all the carbon in the world's coal reserves being unlocked and released into the atmosphere.
What's more, single developers can develop against the GPL version without releasing any software. Once the software is at the stage where it is fully functional, and good enough to rake in money, the developer can purchase a license, build against that version of QT and sell the closed source software there and then.
It's still very good for proprietary developers because it delays expenses until there is potential to earn money. If by the time you want to sell your software, you don't have the confidence that it will earn you many times the license fee - you really should reconsider if selling your product is a good idea after all.
I really don't see the complaint of the original poster. Trolltech is giving closed source developers a very good deal.
Let me give you an example, quality multi-lingual terminological databases and glossaries are multi-year projects that demand a great deal of capital and human labor.
Thanks. Your post provoked me to search for a free multi-lingual dictionary database project and it looks like there is one in the works.
In spite of clueless politicians, the future looks bright (for now).
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No. At least some of us just want you to be aware that the second choice may have invisible strings attached. Our jumping up and down like monkeys is just part and parcel of trying to make such issues known. Our position is, once you are aware of those issues, choose what you will.
Although the post is generally very good, the argument above could either be construed as a straw man or an illustration of some extreme hypothetical scenario. I've seen no evidence of anyone complaining about Linux distros "bombarding" them with "how it's all free", etc. and I certainly do not feel I've been bombarded by anything on my Fedora Core system.
If the second interpretation was the author's intention then the concerns raised are sound for purposes like arguing why we should not strengthen advertising clauses in the GPL.
The GPL is written to be practical (in contrast to inconvenient product activation schemes, etc), which is probably why it has a lax advertising clause. However, the expected protocol is to make reasonable effort to ensure the necessary information is available in non-intrusive and easy to find places.
It isn't too much to ask that the rights of the users with respect to the software are made known to them. Even if "Aunt Tillie" doesn't care if a piece of software is free or not, she probably doesn't care if the operating system says so in unintrusive places either.
What's wrong with complaining?
The GPL is a legal document and if its terms are not met, we respond by taking legal action.
It's not like complaining is a legal action of any description.
Yes, they are only bound by legal requirements. Maybe that's all they care about.
But if they want to generate good will in the open source community they shouldn't play down the relevance of open source against open standards, hide the fact their products use open source components and label open source products as proprietrary.
Certainly as individuals with interest in open source we are as entitled to be vocally critical of Sun's decision to distance itself from open source philosophy as Sun is entitled act the way it has.
Those days are over. These days everything needs to be connected. When your DVD disc doesn't play on your operating system; when your bank doesn't support your browser; when your favourite games isn't compatible with your system, there is no choice. Was not GNU/Linux a clone of the same standards the proprietrary Unices were built around?
Read closely: There is no choice if there is no interoperability.
As much as you despise those in the FOSS community who clone software, they do it for a legitimate reason and so form a vital part of our strategy wresting control from Microsoft.
Get over it. Spend more time promoting projects you value than criticising projects you don't understand.
What if I was a savant and by listening to a piece of music once, I remember it for life. Have I made a copy?
This site:
says that:
Is it possible to use gravity to communicate information faster than the speed of light?I'm pretty sure every time I change my C++ files, it recompiles the STL headers I use even though they never change. *shudder*
That's just a fact of C++ programming. Compiled template libraries are impractical as demonstrated by the failed export keyword so ALMOST EVERYTHING has to be in the header files. *faint*
Something in C++ needs serious revision. But I have no idea what! *die*
I would DIE to see C++ with a well documented cross platform library as comprehensive as Java's all in a single package. (Well not literally ofcourse!) But that is a long way off because library implementors are still exploring the language's expressive power.
My complaint about garbage collection is that it only solves the memory problems. It doesn't solve deallocation problems with other resources, which are generally more expensive and more limited.
Wrap up a resource in an object and you don't know if the resource will be cleaned up in a timely manner. The object could be sitting in idle after I've severed all references to it and because of that, precious resources aren't being returned to the operating system.
In order to free system resources properly means I need to explicitly dispose of each resource wrapping object. (This is the design decision made in SWT.) But what's the point of a garbage collector then?
I like C++ because it's "Resource allocation is acquisition" strategy can be consistently used for memory allocations as well as system resource allocation.
My main gripe with C++ is its lack of reflection.
Other things I would like to see in C++ are:
- Cleaner syntax for functional programming.
- The virtual/overrides/new syntax from C#.
- More memory management facilities in the STL.
- Thread management and RPC facilities in the STL.
But one question: Couldn't an incremental collection also trigger a swap-in?I would also like an operating system that could do things like plug the computer it is installed on into the telephone socket.
Ruben Centero Moreno was the projectionist who was using night vision goggles to search for his own video camera and got arrested for it.
Needless to say, I was utterly befuddled.
Hey, I found it! I'll name it "Earth" in honour of my birthplace.
Maybe it's not such a coincidence. If the moon played a critical role in the evolution of complex life for instance, the observation of this supposed coincidence would be a case of an observer relative observation.
Under this hypothesis, if the moon wasn't so, we wouldn't be here to observe it and likewise for any other alien lifeforms. It follows then that although such a probably for any arbitrary planet is very low, there is a high probability that such a moon orbits a planet that has evolved complex life capable of observing it.
Doubtless, with me rambling on about aliens, I'm now sounding like an incomprehensible crackpot.
I like the idea of building a base on ceramic train tracks that keep the base in the shade by pushing the base solely on the power of expansion of the ceramic material due to the Sun's heat.
Yes, but how will we find the ingredients to make BBQ source? BBQ beef is inedible unless it's drenched in rich BBQ source.
Or we could make it more efficient by genetically engineer people to eat grass.
Personally, I don't believe there is anything wrong with genetic engineering per se. What is more disturbing is the pattern of behaviour by genetic engineering firms.
No. My problem with genetic engineering is not the genetic engineering at all. It is the broken system of governance that we have and the profit bent people who control the technology. Until these problems are fixed genetic engineering will get no support from me.
Emphasis mine. You can redeem it in the US and that gives it its value. But you don't have to.
It is not unusual for a nation to hoard the currency of another nation to achieve an exchange rate that serves the former's economic policy.
Instead we should teach this kid the difference between stealing, copyright infringement and fair use.
We just need to find more creative ways to generate electricity.
Oil will progressively become more difficult to obtain and because of that, our usage of oil necessarily decreases as the oil becomes more costly. Therefore we will never run out of oil and your statement is false, but only on the technicality that we wouldn't want to use the rest for economic reasons.
This is a good thing because it means we won't be able dump all that carbon into the atmosphere. Oil will become too difficult to extract and process to be worth using it long before it can make a drastic contribution to global warming.
Coal however is a different matter and I shudder at the possibility of all the carbon in the world's coal reserves being unlocked and released into the atmosphere.
It's still very good for proprietary developers because it delays expenses until there is potential to earn money. If by the time you want to sell your software, you don't have the confidence that it will earn you many times the license fee - you really should reconsider if selling your product is a good idea after all.
I really don't see the complaint of the original poster. Trolltech is giving closed source developers a very good deal.
I suppose it is just trading one politically explosive issue for another.
Thanks. Your post provoked me to search for a free multi-lingual dictionary database project and it looks like there is one in the works.
In spite of clueless politicians, the future looks bright (for now).