If you're the creator of a copyrighted work you can license it under any license you see fit and keep relicensing it under whatever suits you. If somebody happens to have a copy under the older license this license still remains valid off course.
The main difference between software and hardware is that the 'manufacturing' cost of software (with which I mean the cost to reproduce a one unit of it) is essentially zero. This is not true for hardware. Therefore software could kick of a new economic field that is not (as) scarcity based as all the other products. Which is why FOSS is interesting and IMHO also why it is successful at the moment.
Apply that to your question and I don't see how you could apply free software ideas to hardware. And for really setting up shop from scratch I would add a couple of zero's to that 500 million of yours, if you really want to know.
The problem is not that the ISP's don't block their customers from doing it (I wouldn't want that), it is that some ISP's/organisations have publicly available SMTP servers that run unchecked of who or what uses them to send mail. This fact alone is one of the main causes of internet spam.
I don't know about you but I found my version of kmail's gpg support lacking (no adding the signature as multipart) and it's imap interface quite confusing. Plus, I found a bug that deleted all files in my mbox. Yay for backups.
I totally agree with parent. The grandparent poster probably has got us confused with south america or something. Left wing usually means socialist or progressive here (depending on who you ask and what the topic is). The 'hawks' (eg. big on military spending etc) are usually rightwing, typically the nationalist or extreme-right parties (the two can be one and the same of course).
How about: Roughly what percent of your music collection would you have bought if you weren't able to download it?
This is the one that interests me since the supposed "billions of losses" that the music industry makes seem to be calculated in rather strange way. Such as for instance every download is supposedly a sale lost. Or otherwise seeing their numbers falling a bit and immediately blame it on "music pirating". How about everybody now has elvis on 8-tracks, cassette and cd and they're not going to buy every new version you feed them over and over again? (unless they come up with yet another medium off course, which they will)
Are you building your own binaries? You need to have libgnutls?-dev installed for msn while building (for the encryption stuff when logging in). If you're using rpms, don't force them or anything and make sure they depend on a TLS library such as libgnutls.
The point as I understand it is not that the government actually use PDF internally (although it would be nice if they used open formats there) but that the file format of documents they put out for the public is something readable by all, eg. pdf. Most editors these days can export to pdf or you can just convert to it from another format with the right app.
Actually I wasn't talking about America, but your comment does show a problem with public education. The select few that actually come out on top think everything is not that bad since, hey, they made it so why wouldn't somebody else be able to make it?
A better education for every child might be a possibility if people would start caring about their children's education and less about the president who cuts the most taxes IMHO. When it comes to banning violent games, everybody is up in arms. But when the president diverts money from schools to war funds nobody says a thing. Off course most low-income families (those that are most likely to end up in bad schools) probably don't even vote, and they don't vote because they think it doesn't matter, and they think it doesn't matter because nobody ever taught them it did, and nobody ever taught them it did because, basically schools suck. Classic.
Actually in my country this seems to work surprisingly well. (it's not perfect but nothing is) So your theorem that the system is proven not to work is wrong. Or at least partly so, because the system seems to work very well here.
In any case, I'm sure other countries would want to follow suit if it turns out US education actually gets better by privatizing it, so by all means go ahead.;-)
Regardless, you're assuming the general public is much more sheepish than they actually are. Do you really believe that average joe user is going to put up with this? It's not like this is going to just happen unnoticed. It'll happen, and the public will through a huge shit fit.
Many companies are really fed up with the way microsoft tries to squeeze every last buck out of them. The problem is, what is the alternative? Microsoft has been smart about using propietary formats for just about anything, so you're stuck with a whole lot of legacy data that will cost endless manhours to convert. If you do decide to switch you need not only replace all of your servers, get new support contracts, retrain your staff, etc.
Point being, many people will put up with this shit because it's just too much effort to choose another way. In fact, there are only 2 defences: people stop buying microsoft or somebody stops microsoft. The latter can only happen at the government/judicial level and we've seen that doesn't do much of anything. The former, well, see above...
It must be good if they do. IMHO the only good courses is the ones that only a few can finish. People learn more if it's hard, or they give up entirely. Since this guy's company will be funding him I don't think he'll just give up on it.
For this particular situation, it is probably the simplest approach. PHP works nicely with mySQL, you don't have to put too much work in the interface, there's tons of stylesheets out there that you can maybe edit a bit and then integrate with your app so everything looks nice. I think when it comes to rapid application development in FOSS, people will most generally use something web-based.
Off course there are other concerns such as compatibility, which is another advantage of FOSS. If you have macs and windows computers to deal with, they both have a working web browser (firefox) which you can develop for. Writing a C app that does the same will require some porting, which will be more work. (but this was already mentioned above).
You want HTML-only? What in the world is wrong with multipart text+html messages? The fact that they allow people to read your mail with a real mail client maybe?
Sadly, the grandparent is right in this aspect. What you wrote applies to GPL programs shipped with the distro only. Commercial software (Acrobat Reader, Mathematica) installs into/usr/local/$somedir and that's it. The most you can expect is some links created in/usr/local/bin. I'd like to see a Mathematic.rpm package conforming to FHS, but that's just a dream.
Some people conform to it, others don't. The point being that there is a standard on this stuff. That some people aren't keeping to it is their customers' problem, not those who developed this standard. What's important is that these noncompliant packages at least don't easily break the system like all those windows legacy apps do.
In any case we're going to see a lot more discussion in the future between the people that say "you should be able to configure everything with graphical apps". And those (and I'm leaning towards it) who say "learn to use a damn text editor (really when you've edited a couple of config files you quickly get the hang of it). In any case, standardizing at such a high level als the end user interface requires throwing out a whole lot of perfectly good alternatives and I don't think people would stand for it.
In essence what the OP is saying doesn't really apply. I don't think it is exactly important that there is one "configuration panel to end them all" or something like that. That is still thinking coming from a very limited, windows-centric world. What is important is that if you should want to use graphical configuration apps in whatever is your desktop environment, they should work for your particular situation in your particular distro. I don't think the average user will keep switching from gnome to kde or something and actually notice that. Not if we're just talking about system configuration.
couriel is actually a perfectly acceptable word for e-mail as far as I'm concerned (I'm not french though). I kinda like it actually. There are other words they come up with which are much more interesting (like the word for internet startup, but can't remember it).
Java 3D performance is pretty good but it seems to me it's the same thing like the java BigInteger support, eg they just wrote the library in C to make it go faster. Swing is fucking slow and anybody who has ever used a desktop app like say xnap knows that.
I've written a lot of stuff in java (not as much as a professional mind you) and I have seen how fast and how slow swing apps can be. If you have the time and dedication and the right libs for it, user apps are still better written in C for speed. I'd personally write them in C++ actually because of the OO design.
Off course I picked up somewhere someone is working on a java native compiler so that would probably balance it all a bit out.
The sales from software firms might go down, but the costs for other companies might go down as well, freeing money for other projects and possibly creating more jobs in those companies that way.
Now if this will cost programming jobs, I don't know. Suddenly a company might not have to buy 1000$ a piece licenses and could hire a full-time programmer. Maybe it won't. Maybe a lot of work will flow to consulting companies to create the right solutions for those companies.
In any way, we don't really know that and we actually can't know because economy can be quite unpredictable like that though some people try to take other examples to it. In that sense trying to stop changes because you think they will make people loose jobs is only the way to go if you're a luddite. In the long term we'll be better off, just as now we are better off than we were at the end of say the 16th century. Let's just hope it doesn't happen in quite the same painful way as the industrial revolution happened. (yes I know that didn't begin in the 17th century)
I agree partly with you, but if you call another man bitch that has an entirely different meaning attached to it than calling a woman bitch. Like you have never been joking around with your friends and calling them names?
And meaning differs between places. For instance, the word nigger (at least its translation) in dutch doesn't have the same negative meaning as it has in english (at least not in my little geographical space in the world).
So in short, saying bitch is not allways anti-woman because it can have different meanings depending on the situation. It's basically just a bad word taken out of context and given a new meaning, where it is no longer decidedly anti-woman.
If you're talking about the shell: thingie, that was actually a windows problem, not a mozilla one.
I do agree though that bugs in mozilla sometimes seem to take awfully long to fix. No use in finding the bugs and then letting them hang for a while...
Slashdot Mirror
If you're the creator of a copyrighted work you can license it under any license you see fit and keep relicensing it under whatever suits you. If somebody happens to have a copy under the older license this license still remains valid off course.
The main difference between software and hardware is that the 'manufacturing' cost of software (with which I mean the cost to reproduce a one unit of it) is essentially zero. This is not true for hardware. Therefore software could kick of a new economic field that is not (as) scarcity based as all the other products. Which is why FOSS is interesting and IMHO also why it is successful at the moment.
Apply that to your question and I don't see how you could apply free software ideas to hardware. And for really setting up shop from scratch I would add a couple of zero's to that 500 million of yours, if you really want to know.
The problem is not that the ISP's don't block their customers from doing it (I wouldn't want that), it is that some ISP's/organisations have publicly available SMTP servers that run unchecked of who or what uses them to send mail. This fact alone is one of the main causes of internet spam.
I don't know about you but I found my version of kmail's gpg support lacking (no adding the signature as multipart) and it's imap interface quite confusing. Plus, I found a bug that deleted all files in my mbox. Yay for backups.
I totally agree with parent. The grandparent poster probably has got us confused with south america or something. Left wing usually means socialist or progressive here (depending on who you ask and what the topic is). The 'hawks' (eg. big on military spending etc) are usually rightwing, typically the nationalist or extreme-right parties (the two can be one and the same of course).
How about:
Roughly what percent of your music collection would you have bought if you weren't able to download it?
This is the one that interests me since the supposed "billions of losses" that the music industry makes seem to be calculated in rather strange way. Such as for instance every download is supposedly a sale lost. Or otherwise seeing their numbers falling a bit and immediately blame it on "music pirating". How about everybody now has elvis on 8-tracks, cassette and cd and they're not going to buy every new version you feed them over and over again? (unless they come up with yet another medium off course, which they will)
Are you building your own binaries? You need to have libgnutls?-dev installed for msn while building (for the encryption stuff when logging in). If you're using rpms, don't force them or anything and make sure they depend on a TLS library such as libgnutls.
You're using a proxy probably? Yeah that doesn't work. :-)
The point as I understand it is not that the government actually use PDF internally (although it would be nice if they used open formats there) but that the file format of documents they put out for the public is something readable by all, eg. pdf. Most editors these days can export to pdf or you can just convert to it from another format with the right app.
Actually I wasn't talking about America, but your comment does show a problem with public education. The select few that actually come out on top think everything is not that bad since, hey, they made it so why wouldn't somebody else be able to make it?
A better education for every child might be a possibility if people would start caring about their children's education and less about the president who cuts the most taxes IMHO. When it comes to banning violent games, everybody is up in arms. But when the president diverts money from schools to war funds nobody says a thing. Off course most low-income families (those that are most likely to end up in bad schools) probably don't even vote, and they don't vote because they think it doesn't matter, and they think it doesn't matter because nobody ever taught them it did, and nobody ever taught them it did because, basically schools suck. Classic.
Actually in my country this seems to work surprisingly well. (it's not perfect but nothing is) So your theorem that the system is proven not to work is wrong. Or at least partly so, because the system seems to work very well here.
;-)
In any case, I'm sure other countries would want to follow suit if it turns out US education actually gets better by privatizing it, so by all means go ahead.
It is true, the proxy code needs work and the developers are looking for somebody to take a look at it. But nobody has stepped forward as of yet...
Many companies are really fed up with the way microsoft tries to squeeze every last buck out of them. The problem is, what is the alternative? Microsoft has been smart about using propietary formats for just about anything, so you're stuck with a whole lot of legacy data that will cost endless manhours to convert. If you do decide to switch you need not only replace all of your servers, get new support contracts, retrain your staff, etc.
Point being, many people will put up with this shit because it's just too much effort to choose another way. In fact, there are only 2 defences: people stop buying microsoft or somebody stops microsoft. The latter can only happen at the government/judicial level and we've seen that doesn't do much of anything. The former, well, see above...
Copyright is automatic whenever you write something down. You probably mean trademarking.
It must be good if they do. IMHO the only good courses is the ones that only a few can finish. People learn more if it's hard, or they give up entirely. Since this guy's company will be funding him I don't think he'll just give up on it.
For this particular situation, it is probably the simplest approach. PHP works nicely with mySQL, you don't have to put too much work in the interface, there's tons of stylesheets out there that you can maybe edit a bit and then integrate with your app so everything looks nice. I think when it comes to rapid application development in FOSS, people will most generally use something web-based.
Off course there are other concerns such as compatibility, which is another advantage of FOSS. If you have macs and windows computers to deal with, they both have a working web browser (firefox) which you can develop for. Writing a C app that does the same will require some porting, which will be more work. (but this was already mentioned above).
You want HTML-only? What in the world is wrong with multipart text+html messages? The fact that they allow people to read your mail with a real mail client maybe?
Some people conform to it, others don't. The point being that there is a standard on this stuff. That some people aren't keeping to it is their customers' problem, not those who developed this standard. What's important is that these noncompliant packages at least don't easily break the system like all those windows legacy apps do.
In any case we're going to see a lot more discussion in the future between the people that say "you should be able to configure everything with graphical apps". And those (and I'm leaning towards it) who say "learn to use a damn text editor (really when you've edited a couple of config files you quickly get the hang of it). In any case, standardizing at such a high level als the end user interface requires throwing out a whole lot of perfectly good alternatives and I don't think people would stand for it.
In essence what the OP is saying doesn't really apply. I don't think it is exactly important that there is one "configuration panel to end them all" or something like that. That is still thinking coming from a very limited, windows-centric world. What is important is that if you should want to use graphical configuration apps in whatever is your desktop environment, they should work for your particular situation in your particular distro. I don't think the average user will keep switching from gnome to kde or something and actually notice that. Not if we're just talking about system configuration.
Actually he was speaking specifically about knowledge of transfer, e.g., "it's called knowledge of transfer"
Do you even read comments before posting?
couriel is actually a perfectly acceptable word for e-mail as far as I'm concerned (I'm not french though). I kinda like it actually. There are other words they come up with which are much more interesting (like the word for internet startup, but can't remember it).
I think I speak for all of us when I say: If you don't know what it's about, just shut the fuck up.
Java 3D performance is pretty good but it seems to me it's the same thing like the java BigInteger support, eg they just wrote the library in C to make it go faster. Swing is fucking slow and anybody who has ever used a desktop app like say xnap knows that.
I've written a lot of stuff in java (not as much as a professional mind you) and I have seen how fast and how slow swing apps can be. If you have the time and dedication and the right libs for it, user apps are still better written in C for speed. I'd personally write them in C++ actually because of the OO design.
Off course I picked up somewhere someone is working on a java native compiler so that would probably balance it all a bit out.
The sales from software firms might go down, but the costs for other companies might go down as well, freeing money for other projects and possibly creating more jobs in those companies that way.
Now if this will cost programming jobs, I don't know. Suddenly a company might not have to buy 1000$ a piece licenses and could hire a full-time programmer. Maybe it won't. Maybe a lot of work will flow to consulting companies to create the right solutions for those companies.
In any way, we don't really know that and we actually can't know because economy can be quite unpredictable like that though some people try to take other examples to it. In that sense trying to stop changes because you think they will make people loose jobs is only the way to go if you're a luddite. In the long term we'll be better off, just as now we are better off than we were at the end of say the 16th century. Let's just hope it doesn't happen in quite the same painful way as the industrial revolution happened. (yes I know that didn't begin in the 17th century)
I agree partly with you, but if you call another man bitch that has an entirely different meaning attached to it than calling a woman bitch. Like you have never been joking around with your friends and calling them names?
And meaning differs between places. For instance, the word nigger (at least its translation) in dutch doesn't have the same negative meaning as it has in english (at least not in my little geographical space in the world).
So in short, saying bitch is not allways anti-woman because it can have different meanings depending on the situation. It's basically just a bad word taken out of context and given a new meaning, where it is no longer decidedly anti-woman.
If you're talking about the shell: thingie, that was actually a windows problem, not a mozilla one.
I do agree though that bugs in mozilla sometimes seem to take awfully long to fix. No use in finding the bugs and then letting them hang for a while...