The reason FOSS is really starting to perform now is that it has acheived critical mass.
I jumped in to MS/DOS from CPM/80 because it was a better system on cheap hardware.
I jumped into Windows 3.0 because it finally had something I wanted.
Linux has come of age. It is a stable workable product and people are naturally migrating to it. The inovation will come more naturally now (TCP/IP was FOSS from the beginning) because there are more people using it.
Managing the complexity of so many projects will be the real problem FOSS has to solve. What projects are out there? What are truly viable? CPAN is a good model of this with voting on viability etc.
This is where middleware comes into play. Guess what there is a middle ware FOSS project out there.
FOSS will absorb ideas more easily because someone is interested in looking. They moved from Company A using commercial product X to Company B using FOSS product Y. They liked the old feature and cannot live without it so they implement it in FOSS project B.
You cannot reverse this logic. I find it nearly impossible to get my company to raise bug reports to their vendors, feature requests are a no-no because there is a cost involved.
Often security has to be designed into an application. Because large parts of firefox were re-engineered lately they are security because they have been considered and implemented from scratch.
Microsoft COULD use many developers to make IE more secure however it is unlikely that they will because there is no business plan for it. Also it is not about the code but the design and goals of the IE application that leads to some of the security problems.
Finally there are people that specifically target security issues in FireFox because it is a banner software for FOSS.
Your general comments on FOSS is correct a lot of software developed under FOSS do not have a lot of built in security or security concious programmers. There are simply too many to make this comment meaningful. Secure programming is hard and not that many people practice it. In a lot of ways I doubt that a significant percentage of IE programmers have specific security programming training which makes them no better than the rest of the world in this regard.
Finally let us discuss vunerabilities and reaction times. When vunerabilities are actually located they are removed faster from FOSS software than proprietary software. This is fact. So if there is an exploit I can expect that exploit to be closed faster on FireFox than IE as proven by historical data.
There is a difference of opinion. In both patches and directions. The trick here is to be the best person possible in these situations.
a) Post minor bug fixes between code to their bug notification system. Prove that you have good faith and are not sabotaging their ability to compete, you have a difference in opinion about methods but you are working on the same goal.
b) Post a request for developers to cross post any bug fixes into your system to the list. Request that the project sponsor post this on their page. (Sounds like they will decline but you should be polite and officially ask).
There is no real ethical debate here. The reason for the fork is apparent and ANY code changes that makes the project a better one is for the common good. Is is anoying when the competition "stands upon the shoulder of giants", hell yes.
Ego and programming do not mix and is the biggest problem with most developers.
eyeballs are not always the best approach. Those eyballs have predetermined ideas or thoughts.
For confirmation of this there was a discussion on the security of FOSS projects by a FOSS author. The security bug lasted years in Mailman because no one saw it.
Automated checking of code is not the be all and end all of code however it is better than a poor set of eyeballs anyday.
The gcc compiler has quite a number of checks built into it. For example uninitialised variables checks if you use -Wuninitialise. A good first pass on code is to compile -Wall and clean up the problems reported.
You might want to read Steve McConnell on writing solid code to see a full explanation as to why.
Funny thing I lost my working directory in University testing applications by my students. They recursed down the tree and deleted from there. A bug in their scripting.
I learnt, Linux scripts and ran them as a dummy user on my machine after that.
They can patent new ideas. They cannot patent blatantly obvious ones. The format of OOo was xml before Word released their layout.
Word may introduce 'new' technology in XML format an patent that however. This is how the market percieves control is gained. Corporate reponsability will eventually become important as well, the world of software development is changing.
Valgrind on X86 is a tool that will monitor access just as you described and provide this feedback. It simply hooks itself in at runtime so no compile needed (much more info if compiled -g of course)
Regarding testing, yes you cannot ever prove that a bug does not exist but we should always try.
What about blind users that would like to scroll exactly 6 elements and select option X.
What about the ability to see that there is another option if you do something else. Sometimes it is good to hide these for security reasons otherwise you have to indicate that 'yes we can do this but you have to do something first' be nice to figure out what though, which brins us back to the comment in the article.
My computer system runs a journalled file system (ext3) so that it recovers gracefully when the power is kicked out.
My core software writes working files that I can recover when I start the application again.
If I am playing a game I do not want this sort of overhead, I want the computer focussing on playing the game and it is not important if I loose a bit of play time.
Computers are 'general purpose', they need to cater for a range of different applications. The software application vendors have to build in this sort of journalling because it makes sense to thier particular application.
Frankly I do not worry about power outages. It is so infrequent that it is just not a concern to me. If you live somewhere that this is a problem then a hardware solution might just be the best alternative.
Using cygwin or LInux serving up you can simply create links like you describe. One for the legacy systems and one for the usable CLI compliant system.
There were two guys sitting side by side. One would arrive after 9 and leave at 5. A lot of the day he stared out the window. The guy next to him worked huge hours and was always busy.
Comes profit share time (bonuses) the guy staring out the window got at least 3 time the other guy. Why? When he was staring out the window he figured out how to save the company $1,000,000. Effectiveness is not equal to busy, thinking is always better than useless activity.
There is a project going somewhere to implement an exact match for the Word desktop. (Don't ask me where...) This can be done using the UNO interface (like the built in basic) and a little programming. It is definitely NOT a strategic direction of OpenOffice.org. If you wish this then please get involved and help, OOo will MS theme but it will never be installed by default, possibly not even in the official tarball for legal reasons. OOo will actively assist anyone who wants to get this working and OOo will publicise a MS theme should one become available.
OOo does not want to be hampered by the poor decisions that Microsoft has made in interface design over the years. We want to consider each change on it's merits not because 'we say so' corp does it that way.
OpenOffice.org is not trailing MS Word, it aim to be better. The leader and innovator, for example PDF export.
If OOo ever did implement MS Word's interface exactly I can imagine the advertising now. Open Source is just following the leader. We would play into their hands.
I think the classic explanation is more of you perform actions on objects not assign values. Therefore you would not be assigning a '5' to a value you would be performing an action like 'fill tank' on a car object with 5 (meaning litres).
Calling the routine literally get and set shows no 'object orientation'. Therefore you consider them bad because of stylistic ideals which is to think in actions rather than programatically.
Like all rules (like speeding when driving) it takes experience to know when to break the rules and by how much:-)
The reason that Novell bundled OpenOffice.org rather than StarOffice from Sun is that Novell has the highest number of non-Sun funded developers working activity on OpenOffice.org. Micheal Meeks (Ximian) leads a team of Novell people who work on it.
Novell has done a lot of work on making OpenOffice.org a more robust application.
If you come up with the same idea, sooner or afterwards, then we should compete in the marketplace, not the courtroom. Let the consumer decide.
The flaw to this argument is that if you come up with a sucessful product and SCO wants to take your business it can simply 're-invent' (not independantly) the process and then start completing it your market with your idea. The concept is for you to be able to build up your business and establish yourself in it without unfair competition from larger sharks.
I am not 100% in favour of patents but I am not against them either. I have heard some real problems with banks stealing business ideas and selling them to competitors with the person they stole it off left with nothing. I wonder how that sole person would have come up with $30K to register the patent. Patent system is flawed but there are good ideas behind it.
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The reason FOSS is really starting to perform now is that it has acheived critical mass.
I jumped in to MS/DOS from CPM/80 because it was a better system on cheap hardware.
I jumped into Windows 3.0 because it finally had something I wanted.
Linux has come of age. It is a stable workable product and people are naturally migrating to it. The inovation will come more naturally now (TCP/IP was FOSS from the beginning) because there are more people using it.
Managing the complexity of so many projects will be the real problem FOSS has to solve. What projects are out there? What are truly viable? CPAN is a good model of this with voting on viability etc.
"Thus FOSS does not need to be illegal. The proprietry houses will make money and move on. Always."
I think that the thrust of the argument is to:
a) develop a closed product and make money at a premimum rate of return.
b) Convert to an open source version and make money at a FOSS service oriented rate.
Most importantly is to pick the correct time and continue to make money as your investors want.
This is where middleware comes into play. Guess what there is a middle ware FOSS project out there.
FOSS will absorb ideas more easily because someone is interested in looking. They moved from Company A using commercial product X to Company B using FOSS product Y. They liked the old feature and cannot live without it so they implement it in FOSS project B.
You cannot reverse this logic. I find it nearly impossible to get my company to raise bug reports to their vendors, feature requests are a no-no because there is a cost involved.
Often security has to be designed into an application. Because large parts of firefox were re-engineered lately they are security because they have been considered and implemented from scratch.
Microsoft COULD use many developers to make IE more secure however it is unlikely that they will because there is no business plan for it. Also it is not about the code but the design and goals of the IE application that leads to some of the security problems.
Finally there are people that specifically target security issues in FireFox because it is a banner software for FOSS.
Your general comments on FOSS is correct a lot of software developed under FOSS do not have a lot of built in security or security concious programmers. There are simply too many to make this comment meaningful. Secure programming is hard and not that many people practice it. In a lot of ways I doubt that a significant percentage of IE programmers have specific security programming training which makes them no better than the rest of the world in this regard.
Finally let us discuss vunerabilities and reaction times. When vunerabilities are actually located they are removed faster from FOSS software than proprietary software. This is fact. So if there is an exploit I can expect that exploit to be closed faster on FireFox than IE as proven by historical data.
There is a difference of opinion. In both patches and directions. The trick here is to be the best person possible in these situations.
a) Post minor bug fixes between code to their bug notification system. Prove that you have good faith and are not sabotaging their ability to compete, you have a difference in opinion about methods but you are working on the same goal.
b) Post a request for developers to cross post any bug fixes into your system to the list. Request that the project sponsor post this on their page. (Sounds like they will decline but you should be polite and officially ask).
There is no real ethical debate here. The reason for the fork is apparent and ANY code changes that makes the project a better one is for the common good. Is is anoying when the competition "stands upon the shoulder of giants", hell yes.
Ego and programming do not mix and is the biggest problem with most developers.
eyeballs are not always the best approach. Those eyballs have predetermined ideas or thoughts.
For confirmation of this there was a discussion on the security of FOSS projects by a FOSS author. The security bug lasted years in Mailman because no one saw it.
Automated checking of code is not the be all and end all of code however it is better than a poor set of eyeballs anyday.
The gcc compiler has quite a number of checks built into it. For example uninitialised variables checks if you use -Wuninitialise. A good first pass on code is to compile -Wall and clean up the problems reported.
You might want to read Steve McConnell on writing solid code to see a full explanation as to why.
CPD from the same place provides some of the facilities for C code. I have used it on OpenOffice.org.
Funny thing I lost my working directory in University testing applications by my students. They recursed down the tree and deleted from there. A bug in their scripting.
I learnt, Linux scripts and ran them as a dummy user on my machine after that.
My company has a restrictive policy and I use FOSS exclusively at home.
Am I barred from using my favourite applications at work due to someones misunderstanding of the word 'free' as in freedom?
They can patent new ideas. They cannot patent blatantly obvious ones. The format of OOo was xml before Word released their layout.
Word may introduce 'new' technology in XML format an patent that however. This is how the market percieves control is gained. Corporate reponsability will eventually become important as well, the world of software development is changing.
Which version did you use? There has been a lot of work lately that invalidates your comments. 1.1.5 has just been released.
You web link also does not work!
Try http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/
Because pdf is great for presenting an image but not good for presenting an editable document that can be read anywhere.
Valgrind on X86 is a tool that will monitor access just as you described and provide this feedback. It simply hooks itself in at runtime so no compile needed (much more info if compiled -g of course)
Regarding testing, yes you cannot ever prove that a bug does not exist but we should always try.
What about blind users that would like to scroll exactly 6 elements and select option X.
What about the ability to see that there is another option if you do something else. Sometimes it is good to hide these for security reasons otherwise you have to indicate that 'yes we can do this but you have to do something first' be nice to figure out what though, which brins us back to the comment in the article.
My computer system runs a journalled file system (ext3) so that it recovers gracefully when the power is kicked out.
My core software writes working files that I can recover when I start the application again.
If I am playing a game I do not want this sort of overhead, I want the computer focussing on playing the game and it is not important if I loose a bit of play time.
Computers are 'general purpose', they need to cater for a range of different applications. The software application vendors have to build in this sort of journalling because it makes sense to thier particular application.
Frankly I do not worry about power outages. It is so infrequent that it is just not a concern to me. If you live somewhere that this is a problem then a hardware solution might just be the best alternative.
Using cygwin or LInux serving up you can simply create links like you describe. One for the legacy systems and one for the usable CLI compliant system.
There were two guys sitting side by side. One would arrive after 9 and leave at 5. A lot of the day he stared out the window. The guy next to him worked huge hours and was always busy.
Comes profit share time (bonuses) the guy staring out the window got at least 3 time the other guy. Why? When he was staring out the window he figured out how to save the company $1,000,000. Effectiveness is not equal to busy, thinking is always better than useless activity.
Assuming you are using OOo 1.1.3 (otherwise you are having problems already solved...)
There are very minor issues with tables that I know of but these are generally not show stoppers.
a) Please raise an issue and provide a sample document that will not convert. OOo is always interested in solving these problems.
b) Raise the prompt saving to word as a usability issue or find an issue that discussed it and vote for it.
We are working through all the issues but if nothing is reported then nothing will get fixed. More popular issues will be worked on first.
There is a project going somewhere to implement an exact match for the Word desktop. (Don't ask me where...) This can be done using the UNO interface (like the built in basic) and a little programming. It is definitely NOT a strategic direction of OpenOffice.org. If you wish this then please get involved and help, OOo will MS theme but it will never be installed by default, possibly not even in the official tarball for legal reasons. OOo will actively assist anyone who wants to get this working and OOo will publicise a MS theme should one become available.
OOo does not want to be hampered by the poor decisions that Microsoft has made in interface design over the years. We want to consider each change on it's merits not because 'we say so' corp does it that way.
OpenOffice.org is not trailing MS Word, it aim to be better. The leader and innovator, for example PDF export.
If OOo ever did implement MS Word's interface exactly I can imagine the advertising now. Open Source is just following the leader. We would play into their hands.
I think the classic explanation is more of you perform actions on objects not assign values. Therefore you would not be assigning a '5' to a value you would be performing an action like 'fill tank' on a car object with 5 (meaning litres).
:-)
Calling the routine literally get and set shows no 'object orientation'. Therefore you consider them bad because of stylistic ideals which is to think in actions rather than programatically.
Like all rules (like speeding when driving) it takes experience to know when to break the rules and by how much
OOo 1.9 (alpha not recommended... yet) has huge load time improvements.
The Ximian updates did not play well with other platforms. This is now addressed and the changes are in the 1.9 release.
I find it incredible the speed that the OpenSource movement updates this and makes things work better faster.
The reason that Novell bundled OpenOffice.org rather than StarOffice from Sun is that Novell has the highest number of non-Sun funded developers working activity on OpenOffice.org. Micheal Meeks (Ximian) leads a team of Novell people who work on it.
Novell has done a lot of work on making OpenOffice.org a more robust application.
If you come up with the same idea, sooner or afterwards, then we should compete in the marketplace, not the courtroom. Let the consumer decide.
The flaw to this argument is that if you come up with a sucessful product and SCO wants to take your business it can simply 're-invent' (not independantly) the process and then start completing it your market with your idea. The concept is for you to be able to build up your business and establish yourself in it without unfair competition from larger sharks.
I am not 100% in favour of patents but I am not against them either. I have heard some real problems with banks stealing business ideas and selling them to competitors with the person they stole it off left with nothing. I wonder how that sole person would have come up with $30K to register the patent. Patent system is flawed but there are good ideas behind it.