And finally, of course, is stability, performance, etc. Be sure to mention it's ability to run on older hardware. A lot of schools, because of stupid regulations on state, federal and grant money, tend to have computers sitting collecting dust, or thrown in dumpsters. If they're NT/Netware shops stress stability and reliability. Particularly the "once you get it working, it doesn't break for no reason." (The netware admin at my school would love to hear this given the trouble he's been having with Netware 5.1 recently.) Also, compatability is a good touch to add in. Netware and NT both rely on proprietary technology and software for some of the things they do, particularly Netware.
Does anyone have good, solid evidence of the reasons for this stability? The obvious one would be the relative number of bugs, but that isn't provable. My own guess, and this is easier to demonstrate, is that applications don't step on each other or the OS via incompatible versions of DLLs under Linux. Yes, Linux uses shared libraries. Any modern Unix variant does, AFAIK. But the architecture is designed so that different versions are easily distinguished and can coexist on the same system. So installing new applications doesn't have nearly as many unexpected consequences.
Cyberspace has also highlighted the differences between intellectual property and other kinds. "If you 'take' my idea," writes Lawrence Lessig in his book Code, "I still have it. If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it. An unavoidable feature of intellectual property is that its consumption, as the economists like to put it, is 'non-rivalrous.' Your consumption does not lessen mine. Ideas, at their core, can be shared with no reduction in the amount the 'owner' can consume. This difference is fundamental, and it has been understood since the founding."
The whole concept of intellectual property law originates with a simple idea that Katz never expressed directly: Copyrights and patents are a legal monopoly on the use of an idea. David Friedman presents an analysis of the from an economic viewpoint in Chapter 11: Clouds and Barbed Wire: The Economics of Intellectual Property of his book Law's Order: An Economic Account. The purpose of this monopoly is to encourage production of intellectual property and sharing of it with a greater audience. That has been achieved by granting the creator of the intellectual property control over it's distribution and use. That is, the right to charge a fee for that distribution and use.
Intellectual property law has never been able to prevent illicit copying, or independant rediscovery. However, with books and other printed material, the price of a copy from the publisher is generally less than the pice of making a complete copy. That alone is sufficient to discourage most copying. Publishing a copy of the work without paying the copyright holder has been discouraged by the threat of legal action. What the Web has done has been to reduce the cost of duplication and the credibility of the lawsuit threat considerably. We can cut and paste from web pages or save them in their entirety with little effort. Furthermore, there are effectively no barriers between various jurisdictions. While printed copies of a book must physically reach the customer, that is not the case with electronic media. The bits I use have the same values as the bits on the web site I got them from. But there is no single physical link between the two that constituted the transfer of those bits. They travelled through a virtual link across a physical channel used by many. There is no agent here in my jurisdiction who can be held accountable for a copyright violation committed on a web site that I use, located elsewhere.
That leaves two targets for prosecution: the authors of the software that make this possible and the end consumers. Software again is just bits. It can escape unfriendly jurisdictions, and it will. Thus, we are left with the consumers. The problem with legal action against consumers is that they are hard to find, and rarely commit copyright violations in bulk. They download a song here, a movie clip there, etc. And worse still, even those of us who are scrupulous in our dealings because we respect the copyrights of the creators of the media we enjoy may commit accidental violations. They are no accident when a web site copies material, but we, as users of that material, may be entirely unaware of the violation.
I foresee that the fight to retain the old model of what a copyright means will be a long one. The publishers have much to lose. They are built around that model. In the end, it will collapse because enforcing it will be prohibitively expensive relative to other methods of distribution. Watch for legal costs of copyright enforcement to rise among traditional publishers. The ones that will survive the shift to the wired world will be the ones that can shift to a model that eliminates or greater curtails that cost. The window for profit exists during the time between the first publication of the information and the time when the cost of prohibiting illicit copying exceeds the profit from selling it. Perhaps the way to kick the copyright violators in the teeth is to kill their profits. Once the material is no longer profitable to sell, release it under an open source license that allows free duplication and use, but only with full credit to the author and publisher and requires payment to them if sold. If something is no longer of value to the author and publisher as intellectual property given their cost structure, they can reduce the price to nearly zero and eliminate the profit for dishonest competition.
I'd be very interested in hearing the experiences of both authors and publishers about how well open licenses work for books. There are now at least three publishers that I am aware of who have published books that are licensed in whole or in part under an open license: O'Reilly, Coriolis, and New Riders. I am not counting the various publishers who have printed the Linux HOWTOs, Guides, manpages, etc. because those were not new material at the time they were published in printed form. For the same reason, I have also omitted the Free Software Foundation, which has been publishing printed copies of its own manuals for years.
Obviously, from the point of view of the publishers, it works well enough to stick their financial necks out to print the copies. It would be interesting to hear the pros and cons from a financial viewpoint. But what I really want to know is whether anyone has found a way to blend an open license with a print book in such a way that the open source community feedback has continued to improve the text after print publication. There are a lot of worthwhile documentation projects that are too big for a single person working part time on them. A positive answer to this question could encourage them to happen.
This issue has been explored since, like forever, in science fiction. There is now even a name for it: "The Singularity", coined by writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. My gist of what it means is the point at which any and all "normal" humans will be unable to grasp, predict, or participate in, the further advancement of technology.
Vinge used the concept of a historical singularity in his novel Marooned in Real Time. It is thought provoking. But he explained the concept much more succinctly in this article. A discussion about it and comments from a number of people can be found here. The discussion lends more perspective to the context and scope of the idea than Vinge conveyed in the brief original article.
As we all know, at first Mandrake was little more than a repackaged version of Red Hat. That's changed a bit with the newer versions. My question is this: to what degree will Mandrake continue to differ from RedHat and will there ever be a "developer" version (i.e. one that is centered towards those who are a bit more technically competant)?
I was a bit disappointed that Jean-Loup didn't mention the inclusion of quite a number of localization packages into their release, and actively soliciting additional translations into any language they can find translators for. In the spirit of full disclosure, my name does appear there, and I did receive a copy in exchange for some late-night translation efforts.
Speaking of unsung heroes. I'd be interested in seeing an interview with one of the people who have kept the internationalization and localization of open source moving forward such as François Pinard of the Free Translation Project or Pablo Saratxaga of MandrakeSoft who is also running the Linux i18n Project.
Using 2 licenses is fine for a first edition, but the second edition should include corrections and additions submitted to the online documentation from third parties, that gets more complicated...
The Open Content web site contains an article discussing the differences between multiple developers contributing to a piece of software and multiple authors contributing to a document. They are soliciting additional contributions to the article. Your point illustrates the intersection of the problems they describe and the problems with dual licenses.
Perhaps one way to encourage participation would be to have the principal author retain all rights to negotiate the specific license for print publication. However, stipulate that other than recovery of his costs, not including payment for time put in on the document since other people aren't being reimbursed for that, the author's take of the income from publishing it would go to a not for profit open source project, preferrably the one the documentation is for.
But if you do the above, the online documentation gets maintained and the dead tree version does not. At some point you need to re-synch. But what pair of licenses allows that?
Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses. IOW O'Reilly or anyone else can come out with clearly differentiated books, but the information contained in such has to be available as free documentation.
I agree. The important thing to remember here is that granting the right to redistribute the document under the GNU Free Documentation License, or the Open Content License, or the Open Publication License is granting certain rights to anyone who wants them. It does not prohibit the author from making the text, or a derivative of it, available to a publisher under different terms. I see no reason why a publisher can't be offered special terms by the author that will make the document attractive enough to merit publishing it without giving up the open distribution of the document electronically. I suspect that we are going to find this to be a more contentious issue than free software licenses though.
Marc Steigler's book EarthWeb mentions this issue. He points out that free and easy access to information undermines governmental attempts to control public opinion. There are a couple of web sites related to the book. The first http://www.skyhunter.com/earthweb/ has information about the author's related activities and links to other sites. The other one belongs to the publisher, Baen Books and contains several sample chapters.
I took a user interface design class recently, which I thought was rather good. Some of us walked away from the class with an understanding of one simple principle that the instructor never stated explicitly as far as I can remember: No interface is perfect for every user.
He approached it from several different angles. He explained why the programmer, with his intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the software, the data formats, the interfaces, the controls, the options, is the last person in the world who should be defining the interface that a non-programmer user will use. He explained the importance of seeking out representative users and observing what they do rather than just asking them. And he said something that stuck, "The user is always right."
I used his own material to tear apart the all-GUI-all-the-time interface that has become the norm these days. I pointed out that the same things that make user interfaces approachable for the novice, and diminish the memory burden for the occasional user are often impediments for someone who executes the same task hundreds of times a day. If that person is also a programmer, with the skills to take a scripting language or a powerful set of configuration options and work some minor miracles, then the lack of those capabilities is keenly felt. For me, the joy and power of the Unix model of the world is that the interface I use daily can turn my repeated tasks into shell scripts that capture my knowledge of how to do it and relieve me of that burden.
A friend of mine commented in the late 80's that Unix had a lousy user interface. I replied that the shell lacks many of the things that people look for in a user interface, but as a programmer interface it is one of the best ever designed. I likened it to a readable JCL (he was a mainframe systems programmer). There is power, and an assumption that you can figure out what to do with it.
But there is no need for one interface, either a ubiquitous shell or a full-time GUI to be the single interface for an OS. Companies selling Linux to the desktop market can build powerful GUI installers and desktop environments on top of great open source tools. If the scriptability and the configurability is abandoned, Linux will lose the mindshare that moves it forward. It will lose the programmer-users who have come to it because it meets our needs. We can create the environment we want. We have shown the world that we don't have to settle for any software but our own. But giving Mom the GUI desktop that helps her find her e-mail twice a week, visit a couple of e-commerce sites, and do her taxes does not need to change the underlying engine.
Open source is already many things to many people. Everyone who has ever contributed a significant enhancement to an open source project has made his environment unique for a while developing it. The average user doesn't have the time to do that level of tweaking. But it has already been demonstrated that with the right set of usability features, you can sell it to many average users. Desktop open source can simply be open source with the GUI tools that casual users want.
Imagine that we create a database of information that direct marketters would drool over. I can certainly think of a few hundred things about myself that I don't mind telling them. Multiply that by thousands of people. But put a copyleft on it that states several things:
Anyone using it must notify whatever organization keeps the database. All the information necessary to contact them will become part of the database and must be kept up-to-date.
They will also agree to make all of the information they have about any individual covered in the database available upon request to that individual. This will include information not derived from the database.
They will accept corrections to the data they maintain.
There will be a list of exclusions that individuals in the database may specify concerning when their data will be divulged to third parties. For example, it will not be given out for unsolicited credit checks, or the e-mail address provided may not be used for unsolicited offers. Hey, let's blue-sky this one.
If the data is attractive enough, people may use it. The idea is that the license will apply certain terms to other data that they hold. Does anyone think it could work?
The media hype surrounding Linux and the run up of stock prices last year fueled mergers among companies visible as "Linux companies". But the BSD world seemed to be just quietly moving forward. Nothing in the article led me to believe that there is a downside to this. I wonder if it will draw more people to BSD now that it is looking more like a unified effort to the outside world.
This quote from the press release summarizes it nicely:
Mr. Coates says he will oppose the merger unless it results in substantially higher prices for Inprise shareholders and/or can be shown by Inprise's CEO to clearly benefit Inprise's customers. "Corel has a great Linux distribution, and I wish them the best in their battle against Microsoft. I would like to see the two companies form some type of alliance, perhaps like the one Inprise just announced with TurboLinux."
He is acting in the interests of the shareholders of Inprise to the best of his ability and knowledge. Clearly he wants to work with Corel. And the fact that he is resigning now rather than immediately after the mreger plans were announced says to me that this is over the details of the merger deal itself rather than the whole idea of merging. Let's see how Inprise and Corel react to the news.
If we are going to have a Slashdot Purity Test modelled after the Hacker Purity Test, then it is high time to create all of the other time-wasting inside jokes that are funny when you first see them and later become not just a familiar part of the lexicon and culture, but a useful way to spot the newbies who have just found them for the first time. Thus, in the spirit of the Geek Code, I offer The Slashdot Code, under the Open Content License, Version 1.0, July 14, 1998. Feel free to extend this, or change the letters used and incorporate it into the next version of the Geek Code.
The Slashdot Code is a measure of how much of a Slashdot Geek/Addict you really are. It should not be confused with the Slash Code which is the Perl code that runs the Slashdot web site.
Reading
To be considered a serious Slashdot Geek, there is no other requirement more important than actually reading the site. Okay, you don't have to read it but you should visit it often.
r++++ All of r+++ and more. I can give a good guess as to when the editors sleep and schedule my life so that I am never away from Slashdot at any other time. I have bookmarks to all of the static pages on the site. r+++ Slashdot is my home page. I never leave it except to follow links from stories there or to find material to post. I compulsively click the Reload button to see if there are new stories. r++ I visit Slashdot several times a day. I read the summary of every article. I have it bookmarked. r+ I visit Slashdot at least once a day. I don't want a single article to disappear off the main page before I've read it. r I visit Slashdot occasionally. It's one of a number of sources I use for my news. r- Been there. Wasn't impressed. r-- I read it once, but I didn't understand what everyone was talking about. r--- Slash what?
Posting comments
To be a member of the Slashdot community, you need to actually participate. One of the easiest ways to do that is to post comments about articles, since you don't even have to have an account.
c++++ I haven't missed a chance to post a comment on a single article since the last power outage. c+++ I post at least a few comment a day, certainly enough to keep my user page up to 50 comments in the past few weeks. c++ I comment on most articles. Any time something catches my interest or I know of a related web site. c+ I have a user account, mostly so that when I do occasionally comment I start at a score of 1 and I can find replies more easily. c I comment occasionally, but not enough that I have bothered to get an account. Anonymous Coward is good enough. c- I've commented a couple of times. c-- I have never commented. c--- I am a Troll.
Karma
Part of how Slashdot works is through Karma and scoring, which are intimately intertwined. Any Slashdotter should at least have an opinion about Karma.
K++++ I have read the Slash code looking for the things other than "mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments" that can raise my Karma. I believe I have the complete list. K+++ In addition to everything in K+++, I have found several ways to get my articles moderated up that weren't mentioned in 10 tips for improving your Karma. K++ I check my Karma daily and deliberately seek ways to improve it. I have read 10 tips for improving your Karma. K+ I have enough Karma to get the automatic +1 bonus to my score. K I have a user account. I have a single digit Karma because I don't post much. K- I don't know, or care what my Karma is. K-- I am an Anonymous Coward. K--- I am a Troll.
User account
Obviously, for posting and Karmic purposes, having a user account is essential. There are certain subtleties to that that should not be overlooked.
U++++ I tweak the customization of my user account roughly once a week. My PGP key is on my user page. I change my sig frequently. U+++ I have customized my whole Slashdot experience. U++ I use my user page as a convenient way to find all of my recent comments and check for replies to them. I go there once a day. U+ I have visited my user page and tweaked a couple of things. U I have a User account on Slashdot. I haven't done anything with it. U- I had a User account on Slashdot. I haven't logged in for so long that I have forgotten the password. U-- I am an Anonymous Coward
Submitting articles
Submitting articles is a part of the Slashdot experience as well.
S++++ I am a Slashdot editor. S+++ I submit often enough that I could be considered a regular columnist. At least at Jon Katz frequency. S++ I notice changes in the wording of the rejection notice. S+ I've submitted articles often enough that I know how to check the status of the ones I've submitted. S I've submitted an article or two. They were rejected. S- I have never submitted an article.
The Slashdot Purity Test suffers from some of the same minor flaws as the Hacker Purity Test from which it appears to draw its inspiration. Some of the questions that garner points should be turned around, such as:
123. Did you check your user info page to answer the above question?
I would have worded that, "Did you know your Karma without checking because you've looked at your User page in the past hour?"
Some of the other questions contradict each other. For example:
64. Do you ever forget to use the Preview button? 65....and later wish you remembered? 66. Have you ever previewed your post several times to get it ``just right''? 67. Do you think previewing is for weenies?
While it is a bit rough around the edges and should be labeled Version 0.1, it has potential, and it shows some understanding of the dynamics of Slashdot.
Oh, and it looks like it is being "used to gather demographic information".
I think they'll have a hard time convincing the judge that the Apps are part of the OS, yet it seems that Office is about to start integrating completely.
You aren't the only person thinking that. This article touches on it, but leaves a great deal open to speculation.
I like this idea. It isn't glamourous work, but certainly it needs doing.
What I had intended to suggest myself was getting a good server with lots of disk space and a fast internet connection. Register a domain name for it, and host a project, mailing lists, whatever. But go an extra step. Find a project or two that you consider worthwhile, no more than that, which need someone to coordinate them. Set up all the project communication and help keep them moving. The problem with some of the little projects is that they are being done by a handful of people in their spare time. Nobody has the time and energy to be the project leader.
The gain on the other hand is immense, the students gain an understanding of the real world. They have access to put forward their ideas. They have a feeling of empoewerment (icky Americanism but it fits perfectly here).
Just having the source, and having documentation of all the protocols and data formats, can foster an atmosphere that encourages experimentation. If you want to know why something is done a particular way and no another, change the code and watch them side by side. Measure the performance, sniff the packets on your net, etc.
I've learned more by experimentation and research to solve problems I've encountered than I ever learned from lectures, by orders of magnitude. I have no reason to believe that I am unique in that. Read what the section Mappers and Packers in the first chapter of The Programmers' Stone has to say about how children learn. Give them the source and watch where they go with it.
This is where all of you come in. You have a chance to influence the next generation of techies to use, support, and possibly even contribute code to the software you love. Volunteer your time at your local school. Help them setup and maintain their networks. Offer to speak on technology issues in classes and clubs. Make yourself available to mentor students with an interest in technology.
I whole-heartedly agree. Help them build their system. Take the Slash code and help them set up their own discussion of topics that are important to them. A few months later, they may be running a server for their city to discuss community issues. That would certainly be good PR, wouldn't it?
The original article did say:
It is a place where students are encouraged to work with computers and technology, not just to run educational software
It's great that they aren't just using their computers for educational software and word processing. However, there is a market for good educational software. Is anyone working on open source educational software? I've got two kids, so I'm interested in participating, but I don't have the background in education to create the content.
Here is another solution : don't commit illegal acts !
If you are an employee (I know...I know.... US employees would commit murder for a couple of extra bonus bucks;-) ) do not engage in illegal activities. The judge and the lawyers could then read all your mail and not find anything incriminating. If, like M$, you engage in potentially illegal activites, I am quite happy to see the lawyers go after you and find that incriminating evidence.
That will protect you from a jail sentence or monetary settlement for your activities. But it doesn't protect you from other damage that can be done by exposing your private data. Court transcripts are usually public information unless they are sealed. The purpose of that is to protect us from abuses of and by the courts by opening them to public scrutiny.
I can think of a significant number of things that I don't want made part of the public record. My financial records are a good place to start. That is simply going to invite more telemarketters who are going to have rather specific information about me. How about my medical history. Many doctors have e-mail accounts. While ordinarily medical information is considered private, by the time my hard disk has been unerased, that won't prevent the information from being leaked.
Robbing people of their privacy has a chilling effect on legal expressions of non-mainstream viewpoints, whether they are political, ethnic, religious, scientific or otherwise. If you can't discuss those views with people of like minds in harmless ways without having every word exposed to your neighbors and coworkers, won't you think twice about talking at all?
As several people have pointed out, this appears to be an automatic process rather than a user/programmer selected choice between cp and ln. This paragraph from the article makes that pretty clear:
"The Single Instance Store recognizes that there's duplication, coalesces the extra copies and stores the bits once instead of several times," Bolosky said. "So if you have 10 files with the same exact bits, instead of storing this data 10 times, it stores it once. It frees up a lot of space, and you realize performance improvements on the server."
If this is combined wit copy on write it is a good idea. If it isn't, it is obvious that it creates the possibility of things being changed identically when only a local copy should be changed.
Another obvious issue is that it clearly isn't as flexible as the Unix combination of copies, hard links and symbolic links. I can choose whether to make a copy which will thenceforth be a separate file, create a hard link which will be a separate name for the same data, or create a symbolic link which is a reference to another file which may or may not exist. This is typical of the differences between Windows and Unix. The Windows approach is powerful, but does not leave as much flexibility in the hands of the user or programmer. Unix assumes that if you know what you are doing, you can make the choice for yourself.
Okay, does everyone else remember the story on January 24th about the US Post Office handing out e-mail adresses? Many of the same things that we all said then about making spamming easier certainly apply here.
To the best of my knowledge the combination of my first name, middle initial and last name is unique. If I drop my middle initial, there's one other guy with the same name. There's only one other person who shares my middle name and last name. Do I want a way for spammers to attach a contact address to an indentifier that is unique and can also be used in the real world? Not a chance. I could certainly have used my name as my e-mail address. I didn't. For people who know me, through one online context or another, it is unique. But it doesn't cross over directly into the world of legal paperwork, financial records and medical data. I want some privacy.
Once this is stable, it could be the answer to secure open source e-commerce. Apache on the server and Mozilla on the client. Both open for peer review, which is the only thing in crypto that gives much assurance of security. To quote the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, September 15, 1999:
As a cryptography and computer security expert, I have never understood the current fuss about the open source software movement. In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we have for decades. Public security is always more secure than proprietary security. It's true for cryptographic algorithms, security protocols, and security source code. For us, open source isn't just a business model; it's smart engineering practice.
I still can't understand why these companies would be upset at getting MORE viewers. Surely server logs could be monitored, and doing such you could find out accurate numbers of what percentage of the population was watching your program, as opposed to those outdated neilsen ratings.
Also, whats the big deal if people rebroadcast your material? As long as it's live and not recorded, I don't understand what they're all up in arms about... all their gettig is more viewers = more advertising.
Advertising isn't their only source of revenue. They make money reselling the content into other markets that don't necessarily carry the same advertising as the original, if for no other reason, then simply because the advertisers may not be doing business in those markets. Those secondary broadcasts of the same material pay for content that they can sell, generally by selling advertising time themselves. Putting their content on the net undermines part of their market.
While I definitely don't like the bully-with-a-big-stick impression that they are making, they are right about what copyright law gives them control over. Copyright has always been a thorny issue because it is a government-sanctioned monopoly intended (at least originally) to encourage production of creative works. It is always legitimate to ask the question of whether a particular application of it achieves that goal.
CNBC just announced on the air that the AOL/Time-Warner announcement will be one of the topics of discussion on their show The Edge this evening at 6 pm EST. I didn't find a mailto: link to send them questions. Combining the Slashdot Effect with the CNBC Effect on this issue would be an interesting experiment.
My guess is that they want to do this because they believe they will make money at it. They believe that AOL can sell a more attractive ISP package for the average home user to the current Time-Warner cable modem customers than other ISPs can. They may be right. If they are, they make money, and they avoid having complex regulations shoved down their throat that will hamper them in future endeavors. Whatever criticisms we may have of AOL, it has attracted a huge customer base by offering them a service that appeals to them. The price and features are selling.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have good, solid evidence of the reasons for this stability? The obvious one would be the relative number of bugs, but that isn't provable. My own guess, and this is easier to demonstrate, is that applications don't step on each other or the OS via incompatible versions of DLLs under Linux. Yes, Linux uses shared libraries. Any modern Unix variant does, AFAIK. But the architecture is designed so that different versions are easily distinguished and can coexist on the same system. So installing new applications doesn't have nearly as many unexpected consequences.
The whole concept of intellectual property law originates with a simple idea that Katz never expressed directly: Copyrights and patents are a legal monopoly on the use of an idea. David Friedman presents an analysis of the from an economic viewpoint in Chapter 11: Clouds and Barbed Wire: The Economics of Intellectual Property of his book Law's Order: An Economic Account. The purpose of this monopoly is to encourage production of intellectual property and sharing of it with a greater audience. That has been achieved by granting the creator of the intellectual property control over it's distribution and use. That is, the right to charge a fee for that distribution and use.
Intellectual property law has never been able to prevent illicit copying, or independant rediscovery. However, with books and other printed material, the price of a copy from the publisher is generally less than the pice of making a complete copy. That alone is sufficient to discourage most copying. Publishing a copy of the work without paying the copyright holder has been discouraged by the threat of legal action.
What the Web has done has been to reduce the cost of duplication and the credibility of the lawsuit threat considerably. We can cut and paste from web pages or save them in their entirety with little effort. Furthermore, there are effectively no barriers between various jurisdictions. While printed copies of a book must physically reach the customer, that is not the case with electronic media. The bits I use have the same values as the bits on the web site I got them from. But there is no single physical link between the two that constituted the transfer of those bits. They travelled through a virtual link across a physical channel used by many. There is no agent here in my jurisdiction who can be held accountable for a copyright violation committed on a web site that I use, located elsewhere.
That leaves two targets for prosecution: the authors of the software that make this possible and the end consumers. Software again is just bits. It can escape unfriendly jurisdictions, and it will. Thus, we are left with the consumers. The problem with legal action against consumers is that they are hard to find, and rarely commit copyright violations in bulk. They download a song here, a movie clip there, etc. And worse still, even those of us who are scrupulous in our dealings because we respect the copyrights of the creators of the media we enjoy may commit accidental violations. They are no accident when a web site copies material, but we, as users of that material, may be entirely unaware of the violation.
I foresee that the fight to retain the old model of what a copyright means will be a long one. The publishers have much to lose. They are built around that model. In the end, it will collapse because enforcing it will be prohibitively expensive relative to other methods of distribution. Watch for legal costs of copyright enforcement to rise among traditional publishers. The ones that will survive the shift to the wired world will be the ones that can shift to a model that eliminates or greater curtails that cost.
The window for profit exists during the time between the first publication of the information and the time when the cost of prohibiting illicit copying exceeds the profit from selling it. Perhaps the way to kick the copyright violators in the teeth is to kill their profits. Once the material is no longer profitable to sell, release it under an open source license that allows free duplication and use, but only with full credit to the author and publisher and requires payment to them if sold. If something is no longer of value to the author and publisher as intellectual property given their cost structure, they can reduce the price to nearly zero and eliminate the profit for dishonest competition.
I'd be very interested in hearing the experiences of both authors and publishers about how well open licenses work for books. There are now at least three publishers that I am aware of who have published books that are licensed in whole or in part under an open license: O'Reilly, Coriolis, and New Riders. I am not counting the various publishers who have printed the Linux HOWTOs, Guides, manpages, etc. because those were not new material at the time they were published in printed form. For the same reason, I have also omitted the Free Software Foundation, which has been publishing printed copies of its own manuals for years.
Obviously, from the point of view of the publishers, it works well enough to stick their financial necks out to print the copies. It would be interesting to hear the pros and cons from a financial viewpoint. But what I really want to know is whether anyone has found a way to blend an open license with a print book in such a way that the open source community feedback has continued to improve the text after print publication. There are a lot of worthwhile documentation projects that are too big for a single person working part time on them. A positive answer to this question could encourage them to happen.
Vinge used the concept of a historical singularity in his novel Marooned in Real Time. It is thought provoking. But he explained the concept much more succinctly in this article. A discussion about it and comments from a number of people can be found here. The discussion lends more perspective to the context and scope of the idea than Vinge conveyed in the brief original article.
I was a bit disappointed that Jean-Loup didn't mention the inclusion of quite a number of localization packages into their release, and actively soliciting additional translations into any language they can find translators for. In the spirit of full disclosure, my name does appear there, and I did receive a copy in exchange for some late-night translation efforts.
Speaking of unsung heroes. I'd be interested in seeing an interview with one of the people who have kept the internationalization and localization of open source moving forward such as François Pinard of the Free Translation Project or Pablo Saratxaga of MandrakeSoft who is also running the Linux i18n Project.
The Open Content web site contains an article discussing the differences between multiple developers contributing to a piece of software and multiple authors contributing to a document. They are soliciting additional contributions to the article. Your point illustrates the intersection of the problems they describe and the problems with dual licenses.
Perhaps one way to encourage participation would be to have the principal author retain all rights to negotiate the specific license for print publication. However, stipulate that other than recovery of his costs, not including payment for time put in on the document since other people aren't being reimbursed for that, the author's take of the income from publishing it would go to a not for profit open source project, preferrably the one the documentation is for.
I agree. The important thing to remember here is that granting the right to redistribute the document under the GNU Free Documentation License, or the Open Content License, or the Open Publication License is granting certain rights to anyone who wants them. It does not prohibit the author from making the text, or a derivative of it, available to a publisher under different terms. I see no reason why a publisher can't be offered special terms by the author that will make the document attractive enough to merit publishing it without giving up the open distribution of the document electronically. I suspect that we are going to find this to be a more contentious issue than free software licenses though.
Marc Steigler's book EarthWeb mentions this issue. He points out that free and easy access to information undermines governmental attempts to control public opinion. There are a couple of web sites related to the book. The first http://www.skyhunter.com/earthweb/ has information about the author's related activities and links to other sites. The other one belongs to the publisher, Baen Books and contains several sample chapters.
I took a user interface design class recently, which I thought was rather good. Some of us walked away from the class with an understanding of one simple principle that the instructor never stated explicitly as far as I can remember: No interface is perfect for every user.
He approached it from several different angles. He explained why the programmer, with his intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the software, the data formats, the interfaces, the controls, the options, is the last person in the world who should be defining the interface that a non-programmer user will use. He explained the importance of seeking out representative users and observing what they do rather than just asking them. And he said something that stuck, "The user is always right."
I used his own material to tear apart the all-GUI-all-the-time interface that has become the norm these days. I pointed out that the same things that make user interfaces approachable for the novice, and diminish the memory burden for the occasional user are often impediments for someone who executes the same task hundreds of times a day. If that person is also a programmer, with the skills to take a scripting language or a powerful set of configuration options and work some minor miracles, then the lack of those capabilities is keenly felt. For me, the joy and power of the Unix model of the world is that the interface I use daily can turn my repeated tasks into shell scripts that capture my knowledge of how to do it and relieve me of that burden.
A friend of mine commented in the late 80's that Unix had a lousy user interface. I replied that the shell lacks many of the things that people look for in a user interface, but as a programmer interface it is one of the best ever designed. I likened it to a readable JCL (he was a mainframe systems programmer). There is power, and an assumption that you can figure out what to do with it.
But there is no need for one interface, either a ubiquitous shell or a full-time GUI to be the single interface for an OS. Companies selling Linux to the desktop market can build powerful GUI installers and desktop environments on top of great open source tools. If the scriptability and the configurability is abandoned, Linux will lose the mindshare that moves it forward. It will lose the programmer-users who have come to it because it meets our needs. We can create the environment we want. We have shown the world that we don't have to settle for any software but our own. But giving Mom the GUI desktop that helps her find her e-mail twice a week, visit a couple of e-commerce sites, and do her taxes does not need to change the underlying engine.
Open source is already many things to many people. Everyone who has ever contributed a significant enhancement to an open source project has made his environment unique for a while developing it. The average user doesn't have the time to do that level of tweaking. But it has already been demonstrated that with the right set of usability features, you can sell it to many average users. Desktop open source can simply be open source with the GUI tools that casual users want.
If the data is attractive enough, people may use it. The idea is that the license will apply certain terms to other data that they hold. Does anyone think it could work?
The media hype surrounding Linux and the run up of stock prices last year fueled mergers among companies visible as "Linux companies". But the BSD world seemed to be just quietly moving forward. Nothing in the article led me to believe that there is a downside to this. I wonder if it will draw more people to BSD now that it is looking more like a unified effort to the outside world.
He is acting in the interests of the shareholders of Inprise to the best of his ability and knowledge. Clearly he wants to work with Corel. And the fact that he is resigning now rather than immediately after the mreger plans were announced says to me that this is over the details of the merger deal itself rather than the whole idea of merging. Let's see how Inprise and Corel react to the news.
The Slashdot Code is a measure of how much of a Slashdot Geek/Addict you
really are. It should not be confused with the Slash Code which is the Perl code
that runs the Slashdot web site.
Reading
To be considered a serious Slashdot Geek, there is no other requirement
more important than actually reading the site. Okay, you don't have to read
it but you should visit it often.
r++++
All of r+++ and more. I can give a good guess as to when the editors
sleep and schedule my life so that I am never away from Slashdot at any
other time. I have bookmarks to all of the static pages on the site.
r+++
Slashdot is my home page. I never
leave it except to follow links from stories there or to find material to
post. I compulsively click the Reload button to see if there are
new stories.
r++
I visit Slashdot several times a day. I read the summary of every
article. I have it bookmarked.
r+
I visit Slashdot at least once a day. I don't want a single article to
disappear off the main page before I've read it.
r
I visit Slashdot occasionally. It's one of a number of sources I use
for my news.
r-
Been there. Wasn't impressed.
r--
I read it once, but I didn't understand what everyone was talking
about.
r---
Slash what?
Posting comments
To be a member of the Slashdot community, you need to actually
participate. One of the easiest ways to do that is to post comments about
articles, since you don't even have to have an account.
c++++
I haven't missed a chance to post a comment on a single article since
the last power outage.
c+++
I post at least a few comment a day, certainly enough to keep my user
page up to 50 comments in the past few weeks.
c++
I comment on most articles. Any time something catches my interest or I
know of a related web site.
c+
I have a user account, mostly so that when I do occasionally comment I
start at a score of 1 and I can find replies more easily.
c
I comment occasionally, but not enough that I have bothered to get an
account. Anonymous Coward is good enough.
c-
I've commented a couple of times.
c--
I have never commented.
c---
I am a Troll.
Karma
Part of how Slashdot works is through Karma and scoring, which are
intimately intertwined. Any Slashdotter should at least have an opinion about
Karma.
K++++
I have read the Slash code looking for the things other than "mostly
the sum of moderation done to users comments" that can raise my
Karma. I believe I have the complete list.
K+++
In addition to everything in K+++, I have found several ways to get my
articles moderated up that weren't mentioned in 10 tips for improving
your Karma.
K++
I check my Karma daily and deliberately seek ways to improve it. I have
read 10 tips for improving your Karma.
K+
I have enough Karma to get the automatic +1 bonus to my score.
K
I have a user account. I have a single digit Karma because I don't post
much.
K-
I don't know, or care what my Karma is.
K--
I am an Anonymous Coward.
K---
I am a Troll.
User account
Obviously, for posting and Karmic purposes, having a user account is
essential. There are certain subtleties to that that should not be
overlooked.
U++++
I tweak the customization of my user account roughly once a week. My
PGP key is on my user page. I change my sig frequently.
U+++
I have customized my whole Slashdot experience.
U++
I use my user page as a convenient way to find all of my recent comments
and check for replies to them. I go there once a day.
U+
I have visited my user page and tweaked a couple of things.
U
I have a User account on Slashdot. I haven't done anything with
it.
U-
I had a User account on Slashdot. I haven't logged in for so long that
I have forgotten the password.
U--
I am an Anonymous Coward
Submitting articles
Submitting articles is a part of the Slashdot experience as well.
S++++
I am a Slashdot editor.
S+++
I submit often enough that I could be considered a regular
columnist. At least at Jon Katz frequency.
S++
I notice changes in the wording of the rejection notice.
S+
I've submitted articles often enough that I know how to check the status
of the ones I've submitted.
S
I've submitted an article or two. They were rejected.
S-
I have never submitted an article.
The Slashdot Purity Test suffers from some of the same minor flaws as the Hacker Purity Test from which it appears to draw its inspiration. Some of the questions that garner points should be turned around, such as:
...and later wish you remembered?
123. Did you check your user info page to answer the above question?
I would have worded that, "Did you know your Karma without checking because you've looked at your User page in the past hour?"
Some of the other questions contradict each other. For example:
64. Do you ever forget to use the Preview button?
65.
66. Have you ever previewed your post several times to get it ``just right''?
67. Do you think previewing is for weenies?
While it is a bit rough around the edges and should be labeled Version 0.1, it has potential, and it shows some understanding of the dynamics of Slashdot.
Oh, and it looks like it is being "used to gather demographic information".
You aren't the only person thinking that. This article touches on it, but leaves a great deal open to speculation.
Why don't you finnance bug-fixing?
I like this idea. It isn't glamourous work, but certainly it needs doing.
What I had intended to suggest myself was getting a good server with lots of disk space and a fast internet connection. Register a domain name for it, and host a project, mailing lists, whatever. But go an extra step. Find a project or two that you consider worthwhile, no more than that, which need someone to coordinate them. Set up all the project communication and help keep them moving. The problem with some of the little projects is that they are being done by a handful of people in their spare time. Nobody has the time and energy to be the project leader.
Just having the source, and having documentation of all the protocols and data formats, can foster an atmosphere that encourages experimentation. If you want to know why something is done a particular way and no another, change the code and watch them side by side. Measure the performance, sniff the packets on your net, etc.
I've learned more by experimentation and research to solve problems I've encountered than I ever learned from lectures, by orders of magnitude. I have no reason to believe that I am unique in that. Read what the section Mappers and Packers in the first chapter of The Programmers' Stone has to say about how children learn. Give them the source and watch where they go with it.
I whole-heartedly agree. Help them build their system. Take the Slash code and help them set up their own discussion of topics that are important to them. A few months later, they may be running a server for their city to discuss community issues. That would certainly be good PR, wouldn't it?
The original article did say:
It's great that they aren't just using their computers for educational software and word processing. However, there is a market for good educational software. Is anyone working on open source educational software? I've got two kids, so I'm interested in participating, but I don't have the background in education to create the content.
That will protect you from a jail sentence or monetary settlement for your activities. But it doesn't protect you from other damage that can be done by exposing your private data. Court transcripts are usually public information unless they are sealed. The purpose of that is to protect us from abuses of and by the courts by opening them to public scrutiny.
I can think of a significant number of things that I don't want made part of the public record. My financial records are a good place to start. That is simply going to invite more telemarketters who are going to have rather specific information about me. How about my medical history. Many doctors have e-mail accounts. While ordinarily medical information is considered private, by the time my hard disk has been unerased, that won't prevent the information from being leaked.
Robbing people of their privacy has a chilling effect on legal expressions of non-mainstream viewpoints, whether they are political, ethnic, religious, scientific or otherwise. If you can't discuss those views with people of like minds in harmless ways without having every word exposed to your neighbors and coworkers, won't you think twice about talking at all?
If this is combined wit copy on write it is a good idea. If it isn't, it is obvious that it creates the possibility of things being changed identically when only a local copy should be changed.
Another obvious issue is that it clearly isn't as flexible as the Unix combination of copies, hard links and symbolic links. I can choose whether to make a copy which will thenceforth be a separate file, create a hard link which will be a separate name for the same data, or create a symbolic link which is a reference to another file which may or may not exist. This is typical of the differences between Windows and Unix. The Windows approach is powerful, but does not leave as much flexibility in the hands of the user or programmer. Unix assumes that if you know what you are doing, you can make the choice for yourself.
Okay, does everyone else remember the story on January 24th about the US Post Office handing out e-mail adresses? Many of the same things that we all said then about making spamming easier certainly apply here.
To the best of my knowledge the combination of my first name, middle initial and last name is unique. If I drop my middle initial, there's one other guy with the same name. There's only one other person who shares my middle name and last name. Do I want a way for spammers to attach a contact address to an indentifier that is unique and can also be used in the real world? Not a chance. I could certainly have used my name as my e-mail address. I didn't. For people who know me, through one online context or another, it is unique. But it doesn't cross over directly into the world of legal paperwork, financial records and medical data. I want some privacy.
Advertising isn't their only source of revenue. They make money reselling the content into other markets that don't necessarily carry the same advertising as the original, if for no other reason, then simply because the advertisers may not be doing business in those markets. Those secondary broadcasts of the same material pay for content that they can sell, generally by selling advertising time themselves. Putting their content on the net undermines part of their market.
While I definitely don't like the bully-with-a-big-stick impression that they are making, they are right about what copyright law gives them control over. Copyright has always been a thorny issue because it is a government-sanctioned monopoly intended (at least originally) to encourage production of creative works. It is always legitimate to ask the question of whether a particular application of it achieves that goal.
CNBC just announced on the air that the AOL/Time-Warner announcement will be one of the topics of discussion on their show The Edge this evening at 6 pm EST. I didn't find a mailto: link to send them questions. Combining the Slashdot Effect with the CNBC Effect on this issue would be an interesting experiment.
My guess is that they want to do this because they believe they will make money at it. They believe that AOL can sell a more attractive ISP package for the average home user to the current Time-Warner cable modem customers than other ISPs can. They may be right. If they are, they make money, and they avoid having complex regulations shoved down their throat that will hamper them in future endeavors. Whatever criticisms we may have of AOL, it has attracted a huge customer base by offering them a service that appeals to them. The price and features are selling.