I was in Portland last October. At the time there was a controversy about a proposal to allow self-service gasoline stations. For those that don't know, Oregon does not allow self-service gas stations. Every few years some Oregon politician tries to get rid of this ban, with all of the state but Portland agreeing that it's a fantastic idea. But Portland is different. Portlan hates the idea. Portland thinks that accidental immolations will be weekly occurances.
So anyway, I'm sitting in a McMennamins (an Oregon brewpub chain) when the bartender notices that I'm from California. He starts kidding me about Schwarzenegger.
"You guys must be stupid!" he says.
"Maybe we are, but at least we smart enough to use self-serve!"
If you attempt to restrict the manner in which groups can operate, you are limiting the freedoms of the individuals in said groups.
That is true. But corporporations are not normal groups of people. They can only be created by an act of government, and can only continue to exist through the special privileges that government provides. Corporations are artificial entities created by government, so it is not out of line for government to regulate them.
Unfortunately, most free marketers and libertarians view public "corporation" as synonymous with "business", and advocate policies accordingly.
There is. It is called not transfering all of our technical prowess overseas. Funny thing is, that's what we're doing. Some companies are going to implode because they don't understand this. They're creating, staffing and training their own competition.
But despite the rumours of the past four years, the US is most certainly not transfering all technical jobs overseas. We're transfering some, because that makes sense (we can't be the only nation that grows oranges either). But the situation is not quite as dark and dire as the doom and gloom pessimists would have you believe.
How prevalent is offshoring? To listen to the anecdotes, it much be the number one practice in the US. But I suspect the reality is different. We did have a huge downturn at the dot.bomb crash, and we did have a lot of companies look at drastic cost cutting measures. But is it still going on?
This study cites 3%. When you think about it in reference to the unemployment figures, that's a HUGE number. It isn't downplaying the impact of offshoring. But it's still rather small on the whole.
Have we become so addicted to bad news that we favor anecdotes over research? Do we hate Bush so much that we cannot accept that our lot is not so dismal as the media portrays it? I don't want to downplay the impact of offshoring, but the past four years were NOT a replay of the Great Depression.
I am looking forward to the day when I can email files or text without cutting it from my computer.
That day is today! Or rather, yesterday and the day before and the day before... If you're unable to do this, may I suggest using a better desktop and/or email client? This is something I routinely do in both Windows and KDE. I understand from good sources that it's routine in OSX and GNOME as well.
Cutting and pasting to attach files? How absurd! I simply drag and drop. Why the hell would anyone want to use cut and paste for this? With KMail I can even drag an image from an external webpage and onto the composer windows.
Take a look at the bug databases for any large Open Source project. Look at how many "bugs" are really feature requests. Quite a lot. I track one project's bug reports and probably half of all reports are feature requests, and not bugs.
But why private governance should be less intrusive than government regulation is something I have never quite understood. State censorship, while clearly problematic, is at least open to questioning and accountability. Notice and takedown is censorship without debate.
There are three differences:
1) Choice. Although you can question and debate state censorship, you have no options beyond that questioning and debate. If your government doesn't want you reading Mill's "On Liberty", your only real options are to defect or revolt. But for a private ISP, newspaper, radio station, etc, you have a choice. You have more than one ISP. You have more than one newspaper.
2) Guns. State censorship is backed up by guns, police, armies and navies. If they don't want you to publish a political screed, you're going to be in a world of hurt of you do. Private ISPs can't do anything but cancel your account. The MOST they can do is tell the state that you publishing a political screed, in which case this is an instance of state censorship anyway.
3) Ownership. Who owns the speech that should be free? In the case of state censorship, the state restricts your property of free speech. It has to leave its domain and intrude upon yours. But the situation is the opposite with private ISPs. The website is hosted on the ISPs property. It's their harddrive. They aren't intruding upon your property, but looking after their own. They never have to leave their private domain in order to restrict how their property is being used.
Compare and contrast the Linux desktop of today with the Windows desktop today. There's no comparision, Linux does more. For every major component, with one exception, the Open Source side does more than the Windows side.
The underlying operating system and environment on the Linux side does a heck of a lot more out of the box than Windows does. The typical distro comes with a complete build chain, half a dozen scripting languages, a couple of shells, text processing utilities, and industry standard servers for http, ftp, dns and mail. In every case the Linux equivalent beats out the Windows variety. Bash versus command.com? No comparison!
Then look at the desktop. A KDE default install kicks the Windows XP default desktop's butt! Ditto for GNOME! To get to the Windows XP level of functionality, you actually have to drop down to Blackbox, but even there Blackbox wins out in a number of areas (multiple desktops, smart window placement, etc).
Mozilla, Konqueror, Firefox, and all the other "standard" Open Source browsers kick Internet Explorer's ass.
I had to get my work computer upgraded from Win2K to WinXP today. At this moment I have just WinXP. There's not much I can do with just the default install (which is why I'm wasting my time posting to Slashdot from IE). I have to wait for IT to install MSOffice, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Visio, Rational Rose, Clearcase, Hummingbird, etc. But if I were to choose virtually any Linux distro, I could have been instantly productive the minute the default installation was complete.
Yes, Linux distros are getting bigger. We shouldn't sit back and let them bloat out of control. But much of that mass if muscle and not fat!
p.s. That one exception is OpenOffice. I'm willing to give it some slack for a while though, because it's still very new to the Open Source world.
p.p.s. I'm not even a Linux user, but a FreeBSD user. But since the "Linux desktop" is identical to the "FreeBSD desktop", I had to respond.
It's sarcasm. If a professional software programmer doesn't have a several layers of bosses over them telling them to follow the productivity destroying process, then it's akin to anarchy. At least from the Siemens perspective...
Whereas free software as a term is only ambiguous in languages where free as in freedom and free as in price are homonyms.
Sorry, doesn't wash. You don't even need to know any language but English to understand how flimsy this argument is.
Taking a look at www.m-w.com, I see that "free" has fifteen definitions, not counting the subdefinitions. You argument implies that the confusion of one word with fifteen meanings will be eliminated with languages that have two words for those same fifteen meanings. Balderdash! Eliminate the definition of "10: not costing or charging anything", and I still have fourteendefinitions!
In other words, I can still misinterpret "free software" to mean such varied things as: "software without obligations" (violates the GPL), "software that is not exact or literal" (sounds like a bug to me), or "software that is open to all comers" (Open Source). I'm ignoring such definitions as "free verse", "free electron" and "free end of a rope".
Let's get really weird, and use the synonyms Merriam Webster provides: "Independent Software", "Sovereign Software", and "Autonomous Software". Is this really what the FSF means?
When RMS says that they can't use a more accurate phrase because English has only one word for "free", what he is really saying is that he didn't pick the right phrase to begin with and is now too stubborn to admit it.
suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals
I work for Siemens. A rather huge multinational based in Germany. That's Germany as in "right there in the middle of Europe". Maybe the neo-anarchist software developers of Antwerp and Barcelona are a different story, but the software developers from Germany are the epitome of "screened, approved and trained" mobile resources.
Tell a German that product is more important than process, and they'll call the men in the white suits to haul you away! To them, process is the product, and what you sell to generate revenue is merely icing on the cake.
You're saying since FreeBSD doesn't have 2.5 million prepubescent screaming nerds running it, the media doesn't pay attention? That sounds like a good thing! In fact, it sounds like a new motto:
Nobody is this bad of a speller. The purpose is beyond my comprehension, but it can only be deliberate. I'm going to go through past stories and try to crack the code. There's got to be a secret buried in the mispellings...
Don't you mean "other 95%"? While I don't have any statistics, one out of four PCs being for serving or gaming sounds awfully high. That is unless you consider sharing folders to be serving, and fiddling with solitaire to be gaming. The vast majority of "PCs" are going to be workstations and desktops in business, which won't be servers and game boxes.
You have to administer Windows? Sheesh! I've only actually started using Windows in the last month. Stuff that is simple in KDE and GNOME elude me in Windows.
This isn't because Windows is different, it's because it was designed for people who don't ask questions and just follow the herd. It was designed to work just one way, and if that's not the way that's easiest for you, you're out of luck because you cannot customize it to your style.
less focused on merely maintaining the traditional, old, though highly flexible, X11 standard
And that's what has me worried. I would rather have the flexibility, power and elegance of X11, than the crufty functionally limited Win32. Win32 is successful not because it has a superior architecture or better API, but merely because it has the marketing might of Windows behind it.
p.s. Only bringing up Win32 because that's what everyone points to as the direction X11 must take in order to "survive".
I also suspect that available BSD licensed software will stagnate
You mean like the stagnating Apache the topic is about? The old Apache license was merely the BSD license with a trademark/advert clause.
Prepubescent Slashdot trolls like to joke about BSD dying, but the fact of the matter is that for the thirty year history of BSD licensed code, it has never once stagnated. FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, all under the BSD license, are growing at a tremendous rate.
For example, if you want to embed some GPL'd code into your existing code, why should that not mean you have to share back your private code?
No one has any problems with that. I am a huge fan of the BSD license, and *I* have no problem with that.
The problem is that the FSF considers dynamic linkage to be derivation. Thus you can "run afoul" of the GPL without embedding any GPL code into your own. You can fall under its restrictions by distribution completely original software. This is a restriction on use, not distribution, copying or modification.
Now do you see how restrictive BSD licenses are?
I'm imagining this petty dictator somewhere saying "now do you see how restrictive western style democracy is?"
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Portland last October. At the time there was a controversy about a proposal to allow self-service gasoline stations. For those that don't know, Oregon does not allow self-service gas stations. Every few years some Oregon politician tries to get rid of this ban, with all of the state but Portland agreeing that it's a fantastic idea. But Portland is different. Portlan hates the idea. Portland thinks that accidental immolations will be weekly occurances.
So anyway, I'm sitting in a McMennamins (an Oregon brewpub chain) when the bartender notices that I'm from California. He starts kidding me about Schwarzenegger.
"You guys must be stupid!" he says.
"Maybe we are, but at least we smart enough to use self-serve!"
If you attempt to restrict the manner in which groups can operate, you are limiting the freedoms of the individuals in said groups.
That is true. But corporporations are not normal groups of people. They can only be created by an act of government, and can only continue to exist through the special privileges that government provides. Corporations are artificial entities created by government, so it is not out of line for government to regulate them.
Unfortunately, most free marketers and libertarians view public "corporation" as synonymous with "business", and advocate policies accordingly.
There has to be a better way.
There is. It is called not transfering all of our technical prowess overseas. Funny thing is, that's what we're doing. Some companies are going to implode because they don't understand this. They're creating, staffing and training their own competition.
But despite the rumours of the past four years, the US is most certainly not transfering all technical jobs overseas. We're transfering some, because that makes sense (we can't be the only nation that grows oranges either). But the situation is not quite as dark and dire as the doom and gloom pessimists would have you believe.
Free Markets are like black holes, no one has ever seen one
Maybe not, but we have seen enough holes of varying shades of gray to get a general idea about what a true black hole would be like.
How prevalent is offshoring? To listen to the anecdotes, it much be the number one practice in the US. But I suspect the reality is different. We did have a huge downturn at the dot.bomb crash, and we did have a lot of companies look at drastic cost cutting measures. But is it still going on?
This study cites 3%. When you think about it in reference to the unemployment figures, that's a HUGE number. It isn't downplaying the impact of offshoring. But it's still rather small on the whole.
Have we become so addicted to bad news that we favor anecdotes over research? Do we hate Bush so much that we cannot accept that our lot is not so dismal as the media portrays it? I don't want to downplay the impact of offshoring, but the past four years were NOT a replay of the Great Depression.
I am looking forward to the day when I can email files or text without cutting it from my computer.
That day is today! Or rather, yesterday and the day before and the day before... If you're unable to do this, may I suggest using a better desktop and/or email client? This is something I routinely do in both Windows and KDE. I understand from good sources that it's routine in OSX and GNOME as well.
Cutting and pasting to attach files? How absurd! I simply drag and drop. Why the hell would anyone want to use cut and paste for this? With KMail I can even drag an image from an external webpage and onto the composer windows.
Take a look at the bug databases for any large Open Source project. Look at how many "bugs" are really feature requests. Quite a lot. I track one project's bug reports and probably half of all reports are feature requests, and not bugs.
But why private governance should be less intrusive than government regulation is something I have never quite understood. State censorship, while clearly problematic, is at least open to questioning and accountability. Notice and takedown is censorship without debate.
There are three differences:
1) Choice. Although you can question and debate state censorship, you have no options beyond that questioning and debate. If your government doesn't want you reading Mill's "On Liberty", your only real options are to defect or revolt. But for a private ISP, newspaper, radio station, etc, you have a choice. You have more than one ISP. You have more than one newspaper.
2) Guns. State censorship is backed up by guns, police, armies and navies. If they don't want you to publish a political screed, you're going to be in a world of hurt of you do. Private ISPs can't do anything but cancel your account. The MOST they can do is tell the state that you publishing a political screed, in which case this is an instance of state censorship anyway.
3) Ownership. Who owns the speech that should be free? In the case of state censorship, the state restricts your property of free speech. It has to leave its domain and intrude upon yours. But the situation is the opposite with private ISPs. The website is hosted on the ISPs property. It's their harddrive. They aren't intruding upon your property, but looking after their own. They never have to leave their private domain in order to restrict how their property is being used.
Compare and contrast the Linux desktop of today with the Windows desktop today. There's no comparision, Linux does more. For every major component, with one exception, the Open Source side does more than the Windows side.
The underlying operating system and environment on the Linux side does a heck of a lot more out of the box than Windows does. The typical distro comes with a complete build chain, half a dozen scripting languages, a couple of shells, text processing utilities, and industry standard servers for http, ftp, dns and mail. In every case the Linux equivalent beats out the Windows variety. Bash versus command.com? No comparison!
Then look at the desktop. A KDE default install kicks the Windows XP default desktop's butt! Ditto for GNOME! To get to the Windows XP level of functionality, you actually have to drop down to Blackbox, but even there Blackbox wins out in a number of areas (multiple desktops, smart window placement, etc).
Mozilla, Konqueror, Firefox, and all the other "standard" Open Source browsers kick Internet Explorer's ass.
I had to get my work computer upgraded from Win2K to WinXP today. At this moment I have just WinXP. There's not much I can do with just the default install (which is why I'm wasting my time posting to Slashdot from IE). I have to wait for IT to install MSOffice, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Visio, Rational Rose, Clearcase, Hummingbird, etc. But if I were to choose virtually any Linux distro, I could have been instantly productive the minute the default installation was complete.
Yes, Linux distros are getting bigger. We shouldn't sit back and let them bloat out of control. But much of that mass if muscle and not fat!
p.s. That one exception is OpenOffice. I'm willing to give it some slack for a while though, because it's still very new to the Open Source world.
p.p.s. I'm not even a Linux user, but a FreeBSD user. But since the "Linux desktop" is identical to the "FreeBSD desktop", I had to respond.
It's sarcasm. If a professional software programmer doesn't have a several layers of bosses over them telling them to follow the productivity destroying process, then it's akin to anarchy. At least from the Siemens perspective...
Whereas free software as a term is only ambiguous in languages where free as in freedom and free as in price are homonyms.
Sorry, doesn't wash. You don't even need to know any language but English to understand how flimsy this argument is.
Taking a look at www.m-w.com, I see that "free" has fifteen definitions, not counting the subdefinitions. You argument implies that the confusion of one word with fifteen meanings will be eliminated with languages that have two words for those same fifteen meanings. Balderdash! Eliminate the definition of "10: not costing or charging anything", and I still have fourteendefinitions!
In other words, I can still misinterpret "free software" to mean such varied things as: "software without obligations" (violates the GPL), "software that is not exact or literal" (sounds like a bug to me), or "software that is open to all comers" (Open Source). I'm ignoring such definitions as "free verse", "free electron" and "free end of a rope".
Let's get really weird, and use the synonyms Merriam Webster provides: "Independent Software", "Sovereign Software", and "Autonomous Software". Is this really what the FSF means?
When RMS says that they can't use a more accurate phrase because English has only one word for "free", what he is really saying is that he didn't pick the right phrase to begin with and is now too stubborn to admit it.
suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals
I work for Siemens. A rather huge multinational based in Germany. That's Germany as in "right there in the middle of Europe". Maybe the neo-anarchist software developers of Antwerp and Barcelona are a different story, but the software developers from Germany are the epitome of "screened, approved and trained" mobile resources.
Tell a German that product is more important than process, and they'll call the men in the white suits to haul you away! To them, process is the product, and what you sell to generate revenue is merely icing on the cake.
But it's still better than "free software", which implies that monetary-unencumbered software like Internet Explorer is RMS friendly.
It's a joke. Lighten up. Sheesh...
You're saying since FreeBSD doesn't have 2.5 million prepubescent screaming nerds running it, the media doesn't pay attention? That sounds like a good thing! In fact, it sounds like a new motto:
FreeBSD: Move out of your parent's basement!
Nobody is this bad of a speller. The purpose is beyond my comprehension, but it can only be deliberate. I'm going to go through past stories and try to crack the code. There's got to be a secret buried in the mispellings...
And then we'll see dupe stories on Slashdot about evil companies that don't recycle their hard drives.
Don't you mean "other 95%"? While I don't have any statistics, one out of four PCs being for serving or gaming sounds awfully high. That is unless you consider sharing folders to be serving, and fiddling with solitaire to be gaming. The vast majority of "PCs" are going to be workstations and desktops in business, which won't be servers and game boxes.
You have to administer Windows? Sheesh! I've only actually started using Windows in the last month. Stuff that is simple in KDE and GNOME elude me in Windows.
This isn't because Windows is different, it's because it was designed for people who don't ask questions and just follow the herd. It was designed to work just one way, and if that's not the way that's easiest for you, you're out of luck because you cannot customize it to your style.
less focused on merely maintaining the traditional, old, though highly flexible, X11 standard
And that's what has me worried. I would rather have the flexibility, power and elegance of X11, than the crufty functionally limited Win32. Win32 is successful not because it has a superior architecture or better API, but merely because it has the marketing might of Windows behind it.
p.s. Only bringing up Win32 because that's what everyone points to as the direction X11 must take in order to "survive".
Put brain in gear before pressing the "submit" button. The new XFree86 license sucks, but NOT because it's GPL-incompatible.
And that's how it ended up :)... rhymes with three, but is not free
Except that XFree86 is still free. That's "Free" as in "RMS". It might not be GPL compatible, but it certainly is still Free Software.
I also suspect that available BSD licensed software will stagnate
You mean like the stagnating Apache the topic is about? The old Apache license was merely the BSD license with a trademark/advert clause.
Prepubescent Slashdot trolls like to joke about BSD dying, but the fact of the matter is that for the thirty year history of BSD licensed code, it has never once stagnated. FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, all under the BSD license, are growing at a tremendous rate.
For example, if you want to embed some GPL'd code into your existing code, why should that not mean you have to share back your private code?
No one has any problems with that. I am a huge fan of the BSD license, and *I* have no problem with that.
The problem is that the FSF considers dynamic linkage to be derivation. Thus you can "run afoul" of the GPL without embedding any GPL code into your own. You can fall under its restrictions by distribution completely original software. This is a restriction on use, not distribution, copying or modification.
Now do you see how restrictive BSD licenses are?
I'm imagining this petty dictator somewhere saying "now do you see how restrictive western style democracy is?"