Didn't Caldera just get some money from some of these same companies? I thought I saw SCO on both lists. I wonder what the deal is. The bottom line is that Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, S.u.S.e., Madrakesoft and others are competitors. They are selling packing and support for Linux. Yes, they do cooperate on standardizing the important aspects so that various Linux systems are compatible, but there's a limit to that, and a sale for one is often a missed opportunity for the others.
So I can think of a couple possible reasons to invest is more than one. One is simply hedging bets. If one of them ends up the only real player, you want to own a piece of that company. Another would be a proxy war. Give them all money, keep them all playing and make sure none of them dominates the others. I have trouble believing that that is a viable strategy.
Some possible interesting takeover targets for RedHat
Buying Cygnus made sense. Some of the others you've listed also make sense. But the last thing I want to see is for Red Hat to overstretch itself. They aren't showing signs of it yet, and I don't want them to forget what they do and simply start growing through acquisitions.
That said, I could see them acquiring one or more of these. You've cited reasons for each of them, and good ones. We'll have to wait and see what they want to do with the money. I assume they aren't allowed to say much about it until the shares hit the market.
I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 and Emacspeak the Web was closed to her. While it is true that the blind are a niche market, there is an environment out there that does give them access to the Internet, and it is only available because of free software!
I read your comment with amusement how you measured competancy by compiling the kernel, and *whoa* configuring LILO by hand. No offense:) but a disabled banana could do them.
Actually, I was trying to emphasize that I am not afraid to tinker. I'm not worried about wrecking my system. But when I am doing this sort of thing, I have an occasional use for printed documentation. I was trying to point out exactly the sorts of things that should appear in print because of when they are needed.
As for your point, I'm rather thick-skinned, but a disabled banana could not recompile the kernel. You have to be able to guess what modules you want, and even type a little. I think it would require a trained cat at least.;-)
Seriously, what value is a shiney box and a manual going to have for a school? They should be downloading everything for free anyway.
I've been using Linux since the SLS distribution in the pre-1.0 kernel days. I'm not a kernel hacker, but I've recompiled it myself to add non-default drivers on a couple of occasions and I have configured LILO by hand once or twice... successfully. I'm not a newbie even if I don't build my own system from scratch.
And I like having a printed install manual and a CD ROM. There are a small number of documents that are useful in printed form. Installation documents, and the ones I need to recover when I screw up the boot process: LILO docs, Bootprompt HOWTO, that sort of stuff. The reason is blindingly obvious: I don't have a running system at the time I'm referring to them.
As for the CD ROM, I've done the floppy swap install too many times. I timed it once. Flat out, a full install on my trusty old generic 166 MHz Pentium took about 6 hours off of floppies and about half an hour off a CD ROM. And I didn't have to sit in front of the machine to install from the CD ROM. Getting that kind of speed doesn't require any hardware that isn't pretty common these days even in schools with a tight budget. No missing or damaged floppies either.
If Red Hat is supplying a boxed set to each school, I applaud them. Even if the schools don't install it, if they are willing to loan it out to the students through the library, then the students can try it out. Hmmm, maybe I'll donate a copy to the local library.
According to the INSTALL file there is a text based install:
----------------------------------------- Text Install ----------------------------------------- DrakX supports a text mode installation. To use it, type :
linux text
at prompt of syslinux. (it's on the boot just after the graphical logo). If you want to use the old text mode install use : txt_bootnet.img: install from FTP and HTTP txt_boot.img: install from CD-Rom or Hard Drive
And farther down:
================================================== =================== = TEXT INSTALL INSTRUCIONS
1 - insert your installation floppy disk and your Mandrake CD (if needed) in your drives and restart your machine.
2 - press 'enter' until the 'boot:' prompt appears and carefully follow the instructions which appear on the screen.
3 - after having chosen the installation language (such as French) and the keyboard (such as fr-latin1), chose " Disk Druid " in order to create/chose your Linux partitions. The minimum requirement is to create at least two distinct partitions:
* your main Linux partition, which will need to be loaded on " / " ("Mount point : / "). This will be the root directory (" root directory "). The size of this partition will need to be at least 300 Mb. More experienced users may load the/usr and/home directories on supplementary partitions.
* a swap Linux partition. This partition will need to be equal to approximately twice the size of the available RAM (Random Access Memory), or more for a server.
4 - after the installation of all the partitions, you may configure your machine. Carefully follow the instructions and don't forget to correctly install LILO (Linux Loader) on the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your hard disk.
5 - when the installation is complete take out the floppy disk and the CD-ROM and restart your machine.
6 - Linux should start. " Log in " as " root ". If X-Window is correctly installed, you should be able to start up KDE by typing "startx " on the command line.
Important note : the " root " account will give you unrestricted access to your Linux system. Do not use it except to configure or administer Linux. For every day use, use a normal user account with the " adduser USER " and " passwd USER " commands.
Okay, I'm not the first one to point out that UCITA certainly won't hurt open source. It doesn't effect, and can't effect our model of transactions where nothing is hidden. I would even argue that a shrink-wrapped packaging of open source software that tried to limit the rights of the purchaser in any of the ways that UCITA would allow would not be open source. It would undermine the reputation in the open source community of the company selling it.
This brings me to my first point, which is best summarized by the word reputation, although it is broader than that. There is an interesting book that explores the value of reputation in ongoing relationships, Order Without Law by Robert C. Ellickson. The author explored the interaction of farmers and ranchers in Shasta County in situations involving both open and closed range laws. He discovered that the law made no difference. They lived by an iron-clad rule: neighbors don't sue neighbors. These were people who expected to have ongoing relationships with each other for years to follow. They settled their disputes by other means.
David Friedman also explores this in his upcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account. He cites examples of communities that manage to achieve remarkable efficiencies through arbitration outside the courts and reputation. His commentary on the interaction of economics and law sheds a great deal of light on both subjects. For anyone interested in a thoroughly considered libertarian perspective on them that is not based on natural rights, I recommend his books. His web site has the complete contents of a couple of them along with selected chapters of others and many articles.
So what does this have to do with UCITA? Yes, it will be possible for companies to create draconian license agreements. But there are limits set on how bad these can get and which conditions they can enforce. Companies that have created de facto standards will have more control than small upstarts. With market share comes the power to marginalize small customers and market segments. But the contents of the license agreements will become widely known. And they are part of the purchase price. Software that I can't resell used costs me more than the same software that I can get $10 for in a couple of years when I'm done with it.
The little upstarts can undercut the market leaders even more effectively if they have the option of selling under a less restrictive license that doesn't hit them in the bottom line. They can sell at closer to the premium price and be more permissive in the use of their software. This already happens without the additional restrictions that UCITA makes possible.
As for open source software, we have the most open license conditions short of public domain. If you don't want to live with the restrictions of the licenses on commercial software, you turn to open source. If the commercial licenses get more restrictive, that will make them less appealing. One of the fundamental concepts of economics is that people enter into transactions voluntarily because they expect to gain from them. The bottom line is that both parties to the sale must expect to be better off because of it. That sets an upper limit on the price and other conditions that the seller can set. And it sets a lower limit that the buyer can expect.
Another fundamental concept of economics is that most of the interesting activity happens at the margin. Pretty much every value in the study of economics has a corresponding marginal value. It is essentially the slope of the curve for that value at the current point the economy is at. In the case of the relationship of supply and demand, I am talking about the marginal demand. It answers the question of how much the demand will rise or fall with a small change in the price. As I pointed out, the price isn't just the number that appears on your receipt. It is the aggregate of the value of all of the terms. How many customers an overly restrictive license will drive away depends on two things. The first is the customers' evaluation of the cost of the terms. The second is the customers' demand curve. The terms of the license are under the control of the supplier. Everything else is in the hands of the customers or the competition.
UCITA is not a good thing. In fact, it may set conditions that violate the traditional idea of the conditions required to establish a valid contract. That is a legal issue I can't answer. But as I have pointed out, I think it may lack the teeth that some suppliers want and most detractors fear.
There comes a point in sim city where you either quit or click on the disasters menu and select all of them. I'm glad bill decided to step back instead of building a flying robotic monster and having it lay waste to the campus -- that's what I would have done.
I agree. My computer has never run commercial software code. Its an all free system. It may be dysfunctional behavior in today's society, but I feel my rights include something that is not mandated by commercial interests.
Personally, I'm not even trying to make a political statement. I don't like to have my computer crash, and I need to be able to tailor my environment to unusual uses. I have seen that a good system administrator who knows what he's doing can reduce the number of Windows crashes significantly. I don't want to have to spend that kind of time on my home machine working around a poor default configuration.
But the issue of being able to tailor the system to something unusual is more important. First, I have to have support for the latin-3 character set. Oops, it isn't popular. Try finding fonts for it on the Web some time and you'll see what I mean. Second, as far as I'm concerned, any tool that doesn't let me automate the things I do repeatedly is wasting my time. I edit with Emacs, and there is no one else on the planet with anything close to my key bindings.
If they succeed in scuttling open source DVD playing software, I won't buy DVD movies. My own computer has never run anything but Linux. Someday, if I have the time, I'll probably give FreeBSD a try. If I can't play DVD movies on a real OS, then they don't want my money.
Knowing that Matrox is committed to having open source drivers for their stuff means that I can buy with confidence. I've been telling my parents (who've never touched Linux) for years that they should buy hardware that is supported by open source. It is the surest indicator that it will be widely supported regardless of which software they run.
They weren't ready for the Slashdot effect, were they?;-)
But seriously, I would like to suggest to anyone who is actually reading this, when you submit a story to Slashdot, submit the list of mirror sites if there are any. Only the biggest sites can handle the flash crowd that we generate on a hot story. As an example, my.sig is referring to the Linux Drivers Petition. It couldn't even get through to them the day the story was first posted.
I can think of two reasons that these companies are willing to do the port. Unlike ports to MacOS, no Windows user is going to have to buy new hardware to play games under Linux. They won't have to get new hardware for their developers either. A new hard drive maybe. For the world to switch won't cost $1-3000 per desktop and more for servers. It'll cost for some CD ROMs and some good books.
The other reason is that there are lots of people who want to be here first. If the stampeed of gamers starts happening, the company with the hot games on Linux at the time it starts stands to make a bundle.
Children who aren't trusted becomes adults you can't be trusted. You can't control your children forever, they become people someday, and if you don't prepare them to be decent people, you're out of luck.
They are people already. They are inexperienced, immature people with real feelings, needs, and dreams. Discipline, supervision, even punishment, have their place. But children more than anything else need to be nurtured. I see myself as a mentor to my children. Reminding myself of that reminds me to live up to the responsibilities I have to them. I don't own them, and I took on the obligation to guide them to adulthood. My single most important goal is to help them reach the point where they don't need my guidance and support anymore. I have to teach them to think for themselves.
Your proposal is far more likely to alienate them, since it tells them that they live in a loose association of independent individuals with "freely" chosen values, rather than in a family with an established identity and set of commitments.
I disagree. Certainly, if I gave my children no guidance or supervision, you would be right. But I have placed their computer in the same room with mine. I watch TV with them and help them select the shows or tapes to watch. I think that all parents owe that kind of involvement to their children, although the form it takes will differ. To have taught them the values that I want them to learn and then to turn around and indicate that I don't trust them to live up to my expectations would be to convey my distrust.
I have frequently set limits for my kids. All responsible parents do. My children have earned my trust. They know that they aren't allowed candy before dinner. They don't betray my trust. So the candy is within reach so that they can get some after dinner.
With your logic any time a child wants something you would have to say yes because they would just ask you if you didn't trust them, and you would cave.
Yes, from the way I stated this initially, I can see why you might take it that way. I certainly didn't intend to state that all children should be given complete trust. I was trying to make the opposite point and stated it too tersely. The same level of trust, or lack of it, should not be applied to all children. It is approriate to let a responsible 16 year old surf the net unrestricted looking for material for a school paper. That same liberty shouldn't be applied to a 5 year old. I'm stating extremes here because deciding where to draw the line is a very individual issue. People develop in different ways and at different speeds.
Censorware in a library applies the limited trust appropriate to the 5 year old to the 16 year old as well and to adults. Anyone who would not grant me the full exercise of my rights is unworthy of my respect and trust. They are liars and tyrants. Do I have a right to access any information on the Web from a library? That is hardly an obvious right. But if I have been taxed to pay for the public internet access from the library, I would say that the answer is yes.
Trust is a powerful thing. With the exception of true sociopaths, we all like it. And we all want to earn it and keep it. We want it most from people we respect. And such is our psychological make-up that we tend to reciprocate trust and respect, or their lack. Censorware, whether it is limiting access to the Web or blocking cable channels is showing the censored portion of the population that they aren't trusted or respected. They aren't likely to trust and respect the people doing it to them. This is part of the recipe for alienating our children.
CodeWarrior for both MacOS and Linux would aid portability in both directions. They do have to ask themselves a couple of questions though. In the end, code will get ported in both directions, but which way will dominate?
This will help them to go head-to-head with other processors to capture the hearts of Linux users. Can they use it to encourage us to buy their processors? They won't do it with bad optimization for other processors. That will just kill the Linux version of CodeWarrior. They'd have to find ways to make the switch appealing in a way that is cost-effective for them to implement and cost-effective for us to buy. Unfortunately, they would be jumping into a commoditized market, which generally cuts profit margins to the bone. Can anyone offer them suggestions?
Red Hat acquired two very important things with Cygnus. The first was an established, profitable customer base. The second was the talent that had produced the first. I don't mean to say that Red Hat doesn't have talent because they do. But this was an effective way to hire some of the best. It is good to see that they are taking steps to keep them. I would have been concerned if I didn't see anything like this.
Yes, geeks have feelings. Some of us are thicker-skinned than others. But personally, I think that as the open source community grows larger there is a place for mechanisms for drawing attention to the best that we have. There is no central guiding authority in open source. Our leaders and spokespeople have those roles by consensus.
Slashdot has already fulfilled the purpose of bringing our attention to various projects and people. And by allowing and encouraging us to post our thoughts, and through community moderation, it has facilitated people talking to each other. We have grown too big not to fragment without such a service. Yes, open source geeks will continue to do our own thing, vigorously. What this communication eliminates is the scattering into separate camps that don't talk for lack of a place to do it.
True, The Beanies are a popularity contest. True, many worthy people won't win, and many won't even be nominated. I took the trouble to nominate some people who I don't believe have much chance of winning, but are worthy of being noticed on the list of nominees. (Guys, there will be a complete list of nominees, won't there?) The money can do one very wonderful thing for an open source project. It could pay for a labor of love to live on a couple more years. It could pay to replace aging hardware or for a faster connection for somebody who could do more if he had more.
I wouldn't turn down the money, but I'm not likely to win in any category. I'd be honored to share the company of those nominated. Isaac Newton stated that he had seen farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants. In the case of open source, the giants designed a city full of wonders and we who have contributed have come to hoist the girders, and paint the walls. If a man truly can be known by the company he keeps, then I cannot fully state the pride I feel to be a part of this community.
Let's simply do what we do best
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 2
Let's call it the way it is. The news is supposed to be an honest, although not necessarily unbiased reporting of the important events of the day. If the footage has been manipulated, we can't trust it. The obvious answer is to build a mechanism for disseminating information about the media's reputation. A database containing information about the integrity of the news media (and possibly others) could be quite valuable.
Oh, and CBS, if you're reading this, I'll be getting my news somewhere else tonight.
I've been reading Under the Radar by Robert Young. A whole bunch of big players just had a chance to get in on Caldera. That would be the show of strength and backing that leads to the IPO announcement.
You were quoting me out of context on that. I wasn't saying that open source is going to take over the world this year. I was saying that if the premises of Extreme Programming and the analysis of what makes open source tick that Eric Raymond and Karl Fogel have done are correct, then open source will outstrip the competition in the long run. Something I didn't state, and I should rightly be criticized for, as you did, is that it will only happen in games where open source projects are actually playing. That said, I am not certain that all open source projects live up to the ideal Raymond and Fogel have described.
The CNet story starts off citing this as another example of the market's infatuation with anything with the Linux name on it. I wouldn't mind so much except that they didn't point out that Caldera is an existing player with a good track record, technically at least. The same is true of RedHat and VA Linux. Yes, there is significant money flowing into Linux, but much of it is flowing into companies that have developed a reputation and a customer base. The Motley Fool article a few days ago about Linux One did a good job of pointing out why that is important. This article gives more of the impression that anything with the current buzzword in it may be all hype. I don't think that is the impression that CNet intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Caldera just get some money from some of these same companies? I thought I saw SCO on both lists. I wonder what the deal is. The bottom line is that Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, S.u.S.e., Madrakesoft and others are competitors. They are selling packing and support for Linux. Yes, they do cooperate on standardizing the important aspects so that various Linux systems are compatible, but there's a limit to that, and a sale for one is often a missed opportunity for the others.
So I can think of a couple possible reasons to invest is more than one. One is simply hedging bets. If one of them ends up the only real player, you want to own a piece of that company. Another would be a proxy war. Give them all money, keep them all playing and make sure none of them dominates the others. I have trouble believing that that is a viable strategy.
Does anyone have any different ideas?
Some possible interesting takeover targets for RedHat
Buying Cygnus made sense. Some of the others you've listed also make sense. But the last thing I want to see is for Red Hat to overstretch itself. They aren't showing signs of it yet, and I don't want them to forget what they do and simply start growing through acquisitions.
That said, I could see them acquiring one or more of these. You've cited reasons for each of them, and good ones. We'll have to wait and see what they want to do with the money. I assume they aren't allowed to say much about it until the shares hit the market.
I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 and Emacspeak the Web was closed to her. While it is true that the blind are a niche market, there is an environment out there that does give them access to the Internet, and it is only available because of free software!
I read your comment with amusement how you measured competancy by compiling the kernel, and *whoa* configuring LILO by hand. No offense :) but a disabled banana could do them.
;-)
Actually, I was trying to emphasize that I am not afraid to tinker. I'm not worried about wrecking my system. But when I am doing this sort of thing, I have an occasional use for printed documentation. I was trying to point out exactly the sorts of things that should appear in print because of when they are needed.
As for your point, I'm rather thick-skinned, but a disabled banana could not recompile the kernel. You have to be able to guess what modules you want, and even type a little. I think it would require a trained cat at least.
I've been using Linux since the SLS distribution in the pre-1.0 kernel days. I'm not a kernel hacker, but I've recompiled it myself to add non-default drivers on a couple of occasions and I have configured LILO by hand once or twice
And I like having a printed install manual and a CD ROM. There are a small number of documents that are useful in printed form. Installation documents, and the ones I need to recover when I screw up the boot process: LILO docs, Bootprompt HOWTO, that sort of stuff. The reason is blindingly obvious: I don't have a running system at the time I'm referring to them.
As for the CD ROM, I've done the floppy swap install too many times. I timed it once. Flat out, a full install on my trusty old generic 166 MHz Pentium took about 6 hours off of floppies and about half an hour off a CD ROM. And I didn't have to sit in front of the machine to install from the CD ROM. Getting that kind of speed doesn't require any hardware that isn't pretty common these days even in schools with a tight budget. No missing or damaged floppies either.
If Red Hat is supplying a boxed set to each school, I applaud them. Even if the schools don't install it, if they are willing to loan it out to the students through the library, then the students can try it out. Hmmm, maybe I'll donate a copy to the local library.
According to the INSTALL file there is a text based install:
And farther down:
I haven't gotten through to any of those servers to find out if they have 7.0 on them yet, but I expect they will soon.
Okay, I'm not the first one to point out that UCITA certainly won't hurt open source. It doesn't effect, and can't effect our model of transactions where nothing is hidden. I would even argue that a shrink-wrapped packaging of open source software that tried to limit the rights of the purchaser in any of the ways that UCITA would allow would not be open source. It would undermine the reputation in the open source community of the company selling it.
This brings me to my first point, which is best summarized by the word reputation, although it is broader than that. There is an interesting book that explores the value of reputation in ongoing relationships, Order Without Law by Robert C. Ellickson. The author explored the interaction of farmers and ranchers in Shasta County in situations involving both open and closed range laws. He discovered that the law made no difference. They lived by an iron-clad rule: neighbors don't sue neighbors. These were people who expected to have ongoing relationships with each other for years to follow. They settled their disputes by other means.
David Friedman also explores this in his upcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account . He cites examples of communities that manage to achieve remarkable efficiencies through arbitration outside the courts and reputation. His commentary on the interaction of economics and law sheds a great deal of light on both subjects. For anyone interested in a thoroughly considered libertarian perspective on them that is not based on natural rights, I recommend his books. His web site has the complete contents of a couple of them along with selected chapters of others and many articles.
So what does this have to do with UCITA? Yes, it will be possible for companies to create draconian license agreements. But there are limits set on how bad these can get and which conditions they can enforce. Companies that have created de facto standards will have more control than small upstarts. With market share comes the power to marginalize small customers and market segments. But the contents of the license agreements will become widely known. And they are part of the purchase price. Software that I can't resell used costs me more than the same software that I can get $10 for in a couple of years when I'm done with it.
The little upstarts can undercut the market leaders even more effectively if they have the option of selling under a less restrictive license that doesn't hit them in the bottom line. They can sell at closer to the premium price and be more permissive in the use of their software. This already happens without the additional restrictions that UCITA makes possible.
As for open source software, we have the most open license conditions short of public domain. If you don't want to live with the restrictions of the licenses on commercial software, you turn to open source. If the commercial licenses get more restrictive, that will make them less appealing. One of the fundamental concepts of economics is that people enter into transactions voluntarily because they expect to gain from them. The bottom line is that both parties to the sale must expect to be better off because of it. That sets an upper limit on the price and other conditions that the seller can set. And it sets a lower limit that the buyer can expect.
Another fundamental concept of economics is that most of the interesting activity happens at the margin. Pretty much every value in the study of economics has a corresponding marginal value. It is essentially the slope of the curve for that value at the current point the economy is at. In the case of the relationship of supply and demand, I am talking about the marginal demand. It answers the question of how much the demand will rise or fall with a small change in the price. As I pointed out, the price isn't just the number that appears on your receipt. It is the aggregate of the value of all of the terms. How many customers an overly restrictive license will drive away depends on two things. The first is the customers' evaluation of the cost of the terms. The second is the customers' demand curve. The terms of the license are under the control of the supplier. Everything else is in the hands of the customers or the competition.
UCITA is not a good thing. In fact, it may set conditions that violate the traditional idea of the conditions required to establish a valid contract. That is a legal issue I can't answer. But as I have pointed out, I think it may lack the teeth that some suppliers want and most detractors fear.
What you are looking for is a flock of penguins!
Personally, I'm not even trying to make a political statement. I don't like to have my computer crash, and I need to be able to tailor my environment to unusual uses. I have seen that a good system administrator who knows what he's doing can reduce the number of Windows crashes significantly. I don't want to have to spend that kind of time on my home machine working around a poor default configuration.
But the issue of being able to tailor the system to something unusual is more important. First, I have to have support for the latin-3 character set. Oops, it isn't popular. Try finding fonts for it on the Web some time and you'll see what I mean. Second, as far as I'm concerned, any tool that doesn't let me automate the things I do repeatedly is wasting my time. I edit with Emacs, and there is no one else on the planet with anything close to my key bindings.
If they succeed in scuttling open source DVD playing software, I won't buy DVD movies. My own computer has never run anything but Linux. Someday, if I have the time, I'll probably give FreeBSD a try. If I can't play DVD movies on a real OS, then they don't want my money.
Knowing that Matrox is committed to having open source drivers for their stuff means that I can buy with confidence. I've been telling my parents (who've never touched Linux) for years that they should buy hardware that is supported by open source. It is the surest indicator that it will be widely supported regardless of which software they run.
They weren't ready for the Slashdot effect, were they? ;-)
.sig is referring to the Linux Drivers Petition. It couldn't even get through to them the day the story was first posted.
But seriously, I would like to suggest to anyone who is actually reading this, when you submit a story to Slashdot, submit the list of mirror sites if there are any. Only the biggest sites can handle the flash crowd that we generate on a hot story. As an example, my
I can think of two reasons that these companies are willing to do the port. Unlike ports to MacOS, no Windows user is going to have to buy new hardware to play games under Linux. They won't have to get new hardware for their developers either. A new hard drive maybe. For the world to switch won't cost $1-3000 per desktop and more for servers. It'll cost for some CD ROMs and some good books.
The other reason is that there are lots of people who want to be here first. If the stampeed of gamers starts happening, the company with the hot games on Linux at the time it starts stands to make a bundle.
They are people already. They are inexperienced, immature people with real feelings, needs, and dreams. Discipline, supervision, even punishment, have their place. But children more than anything else need to be nurtured. I see myself as a mentor to my children. Reminding myself of that reminds me to live up to the responsibilities I have to them. I don't own them, and I took on the obligation to guide them to adulthood. My single most important goal is to help them reach the point where they don't need my guidance and support anymore. I have to teach them to think for themselves.
I disagree. Certainly, if I gave my children no guidance or supervision, you would be right. But I have placed their computer in the same room with mine. I watch TV with them and help them select the shows or tapes to watch. I think that all parents owe that kind of involvement to their children, although the form it takes will differ. To have taught them the values that I want them to learn and then to turn around and indicate that I don't trust them to live up to my expectations would be to convey my distrust.
I have frequently set limits for my kids. All responsible parents do. My children have earned my trust. They know that they aren't allowed candy before dinner. They don't betray my trust. So the candy is within reach so that they can get some after dinner.
Yes, from the way I stated this initially, I can see why you might take it that way. I certainly didn't intend to state that all children should be given complete trust. I was trying to make the opposite point and stated it too tersely.
The same level of trust, or lack of it, should not be applied to all children. It is approriate to let a responsible 16 year old surf the net unrestricted looking for material for a school paper. That same liberty shouldn't be applied to a 5 year old. I'm stating extremes here because deciding where to draw the line is a very individual issue. People develop in different ways and at different speeds.
Censorware in a library applies the limited trust appropriate to the 5 year old to the 16 year old as well and to adults. Anyone who would not grant me the full exercise of my rights is unworthy of my respect and trust. They are liars and tyrants. Do I have a right to access any information on the Web from a library? That is hardly an obvious right. But if I have been taxed to pay for the public internet access from the library, I would say that the answer is yes.
Trust is a powerful thing. With the exception of true sociopaths, we all like it. And we all want to earn it and keep it. We want it most from people we respect. And such is our psychological make-up that we tend to reciprocate trust and respect, or their lack. Censorware, whether it is limiting access to the Web or blocking cable channels is showing the censored portion of the population that they aren't trusted or respected. They aren't likely to trust and respect the people doing it to them. This is part of the recipe for alienating our children.
CodeWarrior for both MacOS and Linux would aid portability in both directions. They do have to ask themselves a couple of questions though. In the end, code will get ported in both directions, but which way will dominate?
This will help them to go head-to-head with other processors to capture the hearts of Linux users. Can they use it to encourage us to buy their processors? They won't do it with bad optimization for other processors. That will just kill the Linux version of CodeWarrior. They'd have to find ways to make the switch appealing in a way that is cost-effective for them to implement and cost-effective for us to buy. Unfortunately, they would be jumping into a commoditized market, which generally cuts profit margins to the bone. Can anyone offer them suggestions?
Red Hat acquired two very important things with Cygnus. The first was an established, profitable customer base. The second was the talent that had produced the first. I don't mean to say that Red Hat doesn't have talent because they do. But this was an effective way to hire some of the best. It is good to see that they are taking steps to keep them. I would have been concerned if I didn't see anything like this.
Yes, geeks have feelings. Some of us are thicker-skinned than others. But personally, I think that as the open source community grows larger there is a place for mechanisms for drawing attention to the best that we have. There is no central guiding authority in open source. Our leaders and spokespeople have those roles by consensus.
Slashdot has already fulfilled the purpose of bringing our attention to various projects and people. And by allowing and encouraging us to post our thoughts, and through community moderation, it has facilitated people talking to each other. We have grown too big not to fragment without such a service. Yes, open source geeks will continue to do our own thing, vigorously. What this communication eliminates is the scattering into separate camps that don't talk for lack of a place to do it.
True, The Beanies are a popularity contest. True, many worthy people won't win, and many won't even be nominated. I took the trouble to nominate some people who I don't believe have much chance of winning, but are worthy of being noticed on the list of nominees. (Guys, there will be a complete list of nominees, won't there?) The money can do one very wonderful thing for an open source project. It could pay for a labor of love to live on a couple more years. It could pay to replace aging hardware or for a faster connection for somebody who could do more if he had more.
I wouldn't turn down the money, but I'm not likely to win in any category. I'd be honored to share the company of those nominated. Isaac Newton stated that he had seen farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants. In the case of open source, the giants designed a city full of wonders and we who have contributed have come to hoist the girders, and paint the walls. If a man truly can be known by the company he keeps, then I cannot fully state the pride I feel to be a part of this community.
Let's call it the way it is. The news is supposed to be an honest, although not necessarily unbiased reporting of the important events of the day. If the footage has been manipulated, we can't trust it. The obvious answer is to build a mechanism for disseminating information about the media's reputation. A database containing information about the integrity of the news media (and possibly others) could be quite valuable.
Oh, and CBS, if you're reading this, I'll be getting my news somewhere else tonight.
I've been reading Under the Radar by Robert Young. A whole bunch of big players just had a chance to get in on Caldera. That would be the show of strength and backing that leads to the IPO announcement.
You were quoting me out of context on that. I wasn't saying that open source is going to take over the world this year. I was saying that if the premises of Extreme Programming and the analysis of what makes open source tick that Eric Raymond and Karl Fogel have done are correct, then open source will outstrip the competition in the long run. Something I didn't state, and I should rightly be criticized for, as you did, is that it will only happen in games where open source projects are actually playing. That said, I am not certain that all open source projects live up to the ideal Raymond and Fogel have described.
The CNet story starts off citing this as another example of the market's infatuation with anything with the Linux name on it. I wouldn't mind so much except that they didn't point out that Caldera is an existing player with a good track record, technically at least. The same is true of RedHat and VA Linux. Yes, there is significant money flowing into Linux, but much of it is flowing into companies that have developed a reputation and a customer base. The Motley Fool article a few days ago about Linux One did a good job of pointing out why that is important. This article gives more of the impression that anything with the current buzzword in it may be all hype. I don't think that is the impression that CNet intended.