Re:Unfortunately that doesn't work all the time
on
Open Source Payday
·
· Score: 1
So I based my idea on a license that has been around for ages in the Windows world, the "Free for non commercial use" license. this lets individuals and charities, those that are making NO profits on the software, the right to use it. in my modified form you lose NO freedoms, you simply have one freedom modified and that is the right to distribute which says if you distribute then you MUST pay for a license that MUST be offered.
Right. That seems to be the same concept as Rails Wheels: don't stop people forking and re-distributing the software, but remove the GPL freedom of allowing the distributor to charge whatever they like (including nothing) for their version — ensure that money flows back to who did the work.
Ultimately as things become ever more complex and integrated i believe you will see the GPL model dying out, simply because good programmers don't have the spare time to futz with software they can't make a cent off of. if the numbers in an article.
I think GPL and BSD can work well, and will continue to be the best licence for very large foundation software projects that provide a common resource to many. But I agree that we need a licence that allows Independent Open Software Vendors (IOSVs) to make a living from their code without forcing them into a proprietary licence or into only using their code to get a job (that usually involves developing proprietary software!).
there has to be a way for someone to get paid to clean up the messes, to fix the drivers, do QA, write all the docs, all that boring thankless work that nobody wants to do HAS to get done. I would argue the current model is actually giving a HUGE advantage to companies like MSFT and Apple because by hiding the code THEY can pay someone to do those jobs, whereas FOSS can't so they don't get done. Sad really as the idea could do a lot of good, but nobody wants to deal with software that isn't even 80% done which is what the post I was responding to found out.
I think you're right. Many smaller FOSS projects are quite polished because the dev team takes pride in what they've made, even if they have day jobs at Microsoft an Apple. But there are many great diamonds in the rough that would benefit from a way to compensate people for the pleasant and not so pleasant dev and doc work on open projects.
Re:Unfortunately that doesn't work all the time
on
Open Source Payday
·
· Score: 3, Informative
1.-You are allowed to have the code, 2.-You are free to modify that code for personal use in any way you desire, 3.-If you distribute that code YOU MUST PAY for a license, which must be offered.
I'm not clear exactly how this would work. Is it similar to my Rails Wheels Licence?
Under a Rails Wheels licence, although a software package's source and build system must be made available, the software's owner has the option to only allow people who have paid for the software to run it in other than a test system.
Second, other developers can freely fork the software, but if they re-distribute it they must pay the original developer their normal asking price for each copy they distribute, meaning that they'll usually have to charge at least as much, keeping any premium their enhanced package can charge.
This makes the licence differ from a FOSS licence in two respects: The freedom to run (FSF Freedom 0) restricted to paying customers; and redistribution can require a per-copy fee to be paid to the original developer (though is otherwise unfettered).
Such a system can percolate money up fork trees so that each fork only gets paid for the value they add. All the FOSS benefits of being able to tinker with the software are unchanged.
I think an app marketplace centred around this licence would be a way to make commercial 100% open source software a reality, where by commercial I mean charging for the software itself rather than back door methods like product placement (Mozilla), support, donations, or proprietary extensions.
I greatly benefit from the NYT articles I read, but am not willing to pay given that it involves purchasing a subscription bundle rather than paying a per-article charge. Given the number of articles that interest me, a subscription would mean that I'd be paying between $1 and $3 each.
I'm prepared to pay for information services, but want to pick the eyes out of the entire Web, not just a single site. As one of the top sites, the NYT may be successful forcing its readers to make bundled purchases, but I don't think papers further down the chain will be able to do it.
The question is: is the NYT smart for implementing a slowly-tightening paywall because it's like boiling frogs, or dumb because it's like weaning babies?
Providing support isn't the only revenue option for software that's freely modifiable and re-distributable. Other than the most common revenue source, which is using an OSS project to attract an employer, there's:
Donations, which most OSS projects handle poorly by offering nothing in return. Kickstarter got this, or
Using a near-OSS licence that removes the freedom to run (freedom 0) but keeps the important freedoms to tinker and to break-away, which makes it feasible to charge for the software. This could work in an app store by forcing any forked app to be listed on the same store, with the original app author getting a cut equal to the price of his original app, and the authors of the new app keeping any premium.
For me, Firefox has always needed regular restarts to keep it acceptably fast. The recent memory work they've done has allowed me to run longer between restarts. But it looks like they've overdone the garbage collection so it freezes more often. Firefox desperately needs to be made more parallel so that rendering and UI don't block so much.
I can understand how such memory issues can make FF unusable on a memory-restricted portable. Good to know that Opera is OK. What about Chrome?
I run Linux, and have to use Chrome watch YouTube videos because Firefox (particularly recent versions) plays videos with short freezes every 10 seconds or so. Just like all the other constant freezes in the Firefox UI (typing, scrolling, clicking), particularly after it's been running for a while. Seems like it's regularly doing all this synchronous garbage collection.
I'm slowly migrating my browsing from Firefox to Chrome, so the loss of Flash on Firefox is not much of a concern.
I just checked the ads on Slashdot: animated ads (a squirrel on a trampoline), and large banners in bold colours. A long way from what Adblock Plus considers acceptable, and something that I'd find would distract from reading the content (which, I'm arguing, is what needs to happen if the content is in any way compelling).
Not only that but Slashdot content is mainly user-submitted and user-curated. Slashdot supports a handful of editors, coders, and salespeople — the latter only needed because they need to sell ads, mainly to companies that the stories are about (a conflict of interest). Sites with a lot more original content, like newspapers and magazines, are really struggling with funding their work solely from online advertising. So they're not only running more and more intrusive ads, and ads that look more and more like content, there's a big move to introduce paywalls. Unobtrusive ads aren't going to save them.
The problem is that one is less likely to notice unobtrusive ads on sites with interesting content. This means that such sites can't get good ad rates unless the ads blare somewhat.
Non-intrusive ads work better on search-engines, link-farms, content-farms, and sites like Facebook and Twitter that host small talk. The ads are sometimes the most interesting things on the page!
So I think an acceptance of non-intrusive ads does little to pay for quality content on the Web. Better would be to either punish only the worst sorts of advertising, or to pay directly for content and services through micro-payments, donations, and affiliate-like arrangements.
There have been occasions where advertisements have actually alerted me to products I wasn't aware of and had interest in.
I'd be interested in knowing approximately how often you get useful awareness from an ad compared to from content (editorial and comments). Do you think this amount of useful information is worth the distraction that advertising represents, or is your acceptance of advertising more about the moral issue of it being a quid pro quo for free content?
Most people don't want ads, eh? I disagree, and I believe that the proof is in the relatively low number of people willing to directly pay for media rather than allow media to be paid for by advertising. Simply put, less people are willing to pay for HBO than are willing to watch ads on network stations.
Unfortunately more and more are having their cake and eating it too by blocking, skipping, or ignoring advertising on free or advertising-subsidised media, which has led to an increase in the frequency and intrusiveness of advertising to compensate, which ultimately points to a collapse.
Personally, I don't mind ads all that much. Ad-supported media is an all-around winning proposition: producers are rewarded for creating content people want to watch, consumers are provided content at substantially lower direct cost, and advertisers get the opportunity to make their pitches to a strongly self-selected audience (which provides better demographic, economic and geographic targeting than more generalized advertising, such as billboards). For anyone mature enough to understand that creating good content is a labor and capital intensive process, it's hard to imagine a more equitable system for supporting "free" content.
Ads only work as a payment mechanism to the extent that people are willing to pay attention to them and be influenced by them. The audience for ads that force the target to process them at a time not of their choosing, which is unfortunately how a lot of content is funded (TV, radio, newspapers, websites), is shrinking. The revenue is instead going to forms of advertising that are less interruptive and more user-initiated, like search engines and direct mail. But these don't make any real content!
There are two other ways to fund media: up-front payments via subscriptions and micro-payments, and deferred-payments via donations, fees, and affiliate-like bonuses for material that a user found useful.
Google seems to have found the sweet spot in web advertising. Their text ads are unobtrusive, and in fact, can be quite useful. They mainly show up when I'm looking to buy something, and are profitable for both Google. What they don't do is try to manipulate my feelings - and that's the main reason I don't mind them. I guess Google's lucky to be in a business that lends itself to such a 'clean' ad-based revenue stream. I don't know if non-search websites can manage this.
Google's ads aren't intrusive, but they're still ads. What you see is who paid the most, rather than most useful information.
For most people, web-based services are a better medium for online discussions.
For people who are usually a long way from servers that host Web-based forums, USENET was so much faster to move from message to message because it accesses a copy at the local ISP. These days, with faster local and international connections, and AJAX UIs, the difference has lessened.
USNET's other advantages are a single UI rather than thousands of different Web-BBs, and a single searchable archive of all your posts.
It'd be nice if Open Source software could have good open documentation, which would allow the documentation to be rapidly and easily updated and improved by the community.
GPL shouldn't be used, because that would allow anyone to make available beer-wise-free copies, which would not reward the authors' work. Instead the book's copyright licence should allow anyone to fork it and sell it, as long as they paid the original authors the normal per-copy price, keeping for themselves any premium they could earn due to their improvements.
If you fling out billions of tiny (1 gram) ships made of diamond, there may be a good chance that one of them will make planetfall and survive, like a probe on Hoth.
Then we need the nanotech-AI that would allow such a probe to become an explorer, or to construct a relay station.
Once a consciousness can be stopped, travelling any distance is subjectively instantaneous, even the billions of light years to the edge of the universe. Of course there's no going back to the civilization you left, so you just take a copy with you.
When you think of free software, think of freedom of speech.
Yes, the most important aspect of open source is libre-freedom, not beer-freedom. But the GPL makes it very hard to charge for freely-forkable software. This pushes commercial open source companies to do things like requiring copyright assignment for community contributions, keeping part of the software proprietary, and keeping documentation closed.
There's no reason the licence for a piece of software can't make it freely-forkable while requiring payment for its use. I prefer a value-added model, where the vendor of a forked version must remit down the fork chain the prices that those developers have set, keeping for themselves any premium their version can achieve. This premium doesn't have to be in features or reliability — a forker may just be a better marketer.
Under Linux you can make each monitor a separate X-server, each having an independent set of workspaces (virtual desktops). This means that without moving windows you can easily switch between showing any combination of two sets of information: IDE and app, IDE and docs, terminal and browser, video and browser, etc.
Also seems like it's become impolite to disagree with people in your bubble. It's OK to agree, but if you disagree, you're supposed to remain silent.
You're quite right. Criticize something, no matter how constructively, and you're a "hater". Clicking the "Dislike" button on a YouTube video is regarded as a hostile act.
To reference a work you need to be aware of it first. Papers in top journals are the best ads.
But I think these journals will lose their power once you have a system where an a good paper uploaded to a general archive can build prominence by being mentioned in the feeds of people with an increasing number of followers. Sort of like an academic form of crowd-sourced newpapers like Flipboard.
I didn't realise that putting @username at the start of a Tweet sent the username user an explicit notification. What's the etiquette about ignoring these, or turning them off? And is there any easy way for someone (who may or may not follow one of the two people) to view both sides of the conversation?
Slashdot Mirror
So I based my idea on a license that has been around for ages in the Windows world, the "Free for non commercial use" license. this lets individuals and charities, those that are making NO profits on the software, the right to use it. in my modified form you lose NO freedoms, you simply have one freedom modified and that is the right to distribute which says if you distribute then you MUST pay for a license that MUST be offered.
Right. That seems to be the same concept as Rails Wheels: don't stop people forking and re-distributing the software, but remove the GPL freedom of allowing the distributor to charge whatever they like (including nothing) for their version — ensure that money flows back to who did the work.
Ultimately as things become ever more complex and integrated i believe you will see the GPL model dying out, simply because good programmers don't have the spare time to futz with software they can't make a cent off of. if the numbers in an article.
I think GPL and BSD can work well, and will continue to be the best licence for very large foundation software projects that provide a common resource to many. But I agree that we need a licence that allows Independent Open Software Vendors (IOSVs) to make a living from their code without forcing them into a proprietary licence or into only using their code to get a job (that usually involves developing proprietary software!).
there has to be a way for someone to get paid to clean up the messes, to fix the drivers, do QA, write all the docs, all that boring thankless work that nobody wants to do HAS to get done. I would argue the current model is actually giving a HUGE advantage to companies like MSFT and Apple because by hiding the code THEY can pay someone to do those jobs, whereas FOSS can't so they don't get done. Sad really as the idea could do a lot of good, but nobody wants to deal with software that isn't even 80% done which is what the post I was responding to found out.
I think you're right. Many smaller FOSS projects are quite polished because the dev team takes pride in what they've made, even if they have day jobs at Microsoft an Apple. But there are many great diamonds in the rough that would benefit from a way to compensate people for the pleasant and not so pleasant dev and doc work on open projects.
A relevant quote.
1.-You are allowed to have the code, 2.-You are free to modify that code for personal use in any way you desire, 3.-If you distribute that code YOU MUST PAY for a license, which must be offered.
I'm not clear exactly how this would work. Is it similar to my Rails Wheels Licence?
Under a Rails Wheels licence, although a software package's source and build system must be made available, the software's owner has the option to only allow people who have paid for the software to run it in other than a test system.
Second, other developers can freely fork the software, but if they re-distribute it they must pay the original developer their normal asking price for each copy they distribute, meaning that they'll usually have to charge at least as much, keeping any premium their enhanced package can charge.
This makes the licence differ from a FOSS licence in two respects: The freedom to run (FSF Freedom 0) restricted to paying customers; and redistribution can require a per-copy fee to be paid to the original developer (though is otherwise unfettered).
Such a system can percolate money up fork trees so that each fork only gets paid for the value they add. All the FOSS benefits of being able to tinker with the software are unchanged.
I think an app marketplace centred around this licence would be a way to make commercial 100% open source software a reality, where by commercial I mean charging for the software itself rather than back door methods like product placement (Mozilla), support, donations, or proprietary extensions.
I greatly benefit from the NYT articles I read, but am not willing to pay given that it involves purchasing a subscription bundle rather than paying a per-article charge. Given the number of articles that interest me, a subscription would mean that I'd be paying between $1 and $3 each.
I'm prepared to pay for information services, but want to pick the eyes out of the entire Web, not just a single site. As one of the top sites, the NYT may be successful forcing its readers to make bundled purchases, but I don't think papers further down the chain will be able to do it.
The question is: is the NYT smart for implementing a slowly-tightening paywall because it's like boiling frogs, or dumb because it's like weaning babies?
Providing support isn't the only revenue option for software that's freely modifiable and re-distributable. Other than the most common revenue source, which is using an OSS project to attract an employer, there's:
For me, Firefox has always needed regular restarts to keep it acceptably fast. The recent memory work they've done has allowed me to run longer between restarts. But it looks like they've overdone the garbage collection so it freezes more often. Firefox desperately needs to be made more parallel so that rendering and UI don't block so much.
I can understand how such memory issues can make FF unusable on a memory-restricted portable. Good to know that Opera is OK. What about Chrome?
I found the videos mildly humorous.
I look forward to the South Park boys taking on Google, as they did for Apple.
I run Linux, and have to use Chrome watch YouTube videos because Firefox (particularly recent versions) plays videos with short freezes every 10 seconds or so. Just like all the other constant freezes in the Firefox UI (typing, scrolling, clicking), particularly after it's been running for a while. Seems like it's regularly doing all this synchronous garbage collection.
I'm slowly migrating my browsing from Firefox to Chrome, so the loss of Flash on Firefox is not much of a concern.
I just checked the ads on Slashdot: animated ads (a squirrel on a trampoline), and large banners in bold colours. A long way from what Adblock Plus considers acceptable, and something that I'd find would distract from reading the content (which, I'm arguing, is what needs to happen if the content is in any way compelling).
Not only that but Slashdot content is mainly user-submitted and user-curated. Slashdot supports a handful of editors, coders, and salespeople — the latter only needed because they need to sell ads, mainly to companies that the stories are about (a conflict of interest). Sites with a lot more original content, like newspapers and magazines, are really struggling with funding their work solely from online advertising. So they're not only running more and more intrusive ads, and ads that look more and more like content, there's a big move to introduce paywalls. Unobtrusive ads aren't going to save them.
Flawed premise. Plenty of sites with good content have been operating successfully without intrusive ads.
Could you provide some examples of these sites and the types of ads they deliver.
I have no objection to non-intrusive ads.
The problem is that one is less likely to notice unobtrusive ads on sites with interesting content. This means that such sites can't get good ad rates unless the ads blare somewhat.
Non-intrusive ads work better on search-engines, link-farms, content-farms, and sites like Facebook and Twitter that host small talk. The ads are sometimes the most interesting things on the page!
So I think an acceptance of non-intrusive ads does little to pay for quality content on the Web. Better would be to either punish only the worst sorts of advertising, or to pay directly for content and services through micro-payments, donations, and affiliate-like arrangements.
There have been occasions where advertisements have actually alerted me to products I wasn't aware of and had interest in.
I'd be interested in knowing approximately how often you get useful awareness from an ad compared to from content (editorial and comments). Do you think this amount of useful information is worth the distraction that advertising represents, or is your acceptance of advertising more about the moral issue of it being a quid pro quo for free content?
Most people don't want ads, eh? I disagree, and I believe that the proof is in the relatively low number of people willing to directly pay for media rather than allow media to be paid for by advertising. Simply put, less people are willing to pay for HBO than are willing to watch ads on network stations.
Unfortunately more and more are having their cake and eating it too by blocking, skipping, or ignoring advertising on free or advertising-subsidised media, which has led to an increase in the frequency and intrusiveness of advertising to compensate, which ultimately points to a collapse.
Personally, I don't mind ads all that much. Ad-supported media is an all-around winning proposition: producers are rewarded for creating content people want to watch, consumers are provided content at substantially lower direct cost, and advertisers get the opportunity to make their pitches to a strongly self-selected audience (which provides better demographic, economic and geographic targeting than more generalized advertising, such as billboards). For anyone mature enough to understand that creating good content is a labor and capital intensive process, it's hard to imagine a more equitable system for supporting "free" content.
Ads only work as a payment mechanism to the extent that people are willing to pay attention to them and be influenced by them. The audience for ads that force the target to process them at a time not of their choosing, which is unfortunately how a lot of content is funded (TV, radio, newspapers, websites), is shrinking. The revenue is instead going to forms of advertising that are less interruptive and more user-initiated, like search engines and direct mail. But these don't make any real content!
There are two other ways to fund media: up-front payments via subscriptions and micro-payments, and deferred-payments via donations, fees, and affiliate-like bonuses for material that a user found useful.
Google seems to have found the sweet spot in web advertising. Their text ads are unobtrusive, and in fact, can be quite useful. They mainly show up when I'm looking to buy something, and are profitable for both Google. What they don't do is try to manipulate my feelings - and that's the main reason I don't mind them. I guess Google's lucky to be in a business that lends itself to such a 'clean' ad-based revenue stream. I don't know if non-search websites can manage this.
Google's ads aren't intrusive, but they're still ads. What you see is who paid the most, rather than most useful information.
For most people, web-based services are a better medium for online discussions.
For people who are usually a long way from servers that host Web-based forums, USENET was so much faster to move from message to message because it accesses a copy at the local ISP. These days, with faster local and international connections, and AJAX UIs, the difference has lessened.
USNET's other advantages are a single UI rather than thousands of different Web-BBs, and a single searchable archive of all your posts.
It'd be nice if Open Source software could have good open documentation, which would allow the documentation to be rapidly and easily updated and improved by the community.
GPL shouldn't be used, because that would allow anyone to make available beer-wise-free copies, which would not reward the authors' work. Instead the book's copyright licence should allow anyone to fork it and sell it, as long as they paid the original authors the normal per-copy price, keeping for themselves any premium they could earn due to their improvements.
If you fling out billions of tiny (1 gram) ships made of diamond, there may be a good chance that one of them will make planetfall and survive, like a probe on Hoth.
Then we need the nanotech-AI that would allow such a probe to become an explorer, or to construct a relay station.
Once a consciousness can be stopped, travelling any distance is subjectively instantaneous, even the billions of light years to the edge of the universe. Of course there's no going back to the civilization you left, so you just take a copy with you.
If you've got any ideas on how to structure a high quality forum that's easy for people to start using, I invite you to add them here.
I find it hard to sit through TED talks when ten times faster I could skim a transcript to focus on any information that's new to me.
When you think of free software, think of freedom of speech.
Yes, the most important aspect of open source is libre-freedom, not beer-freedom. But the GPL makes it very hard to charge for freely-forkable software. This pushes commercial open source companies to do things like requiring copyright assignment for community contributions, keeping part of the software proprietary, and keeping documentation closed.
There's no reason the licence for a piece of software can't make it freely-forkable while requiring payment for its use. I prefer a value-added model, where the vendor of a forked version must remit down the fork chain the prices that those developers have set, keeping for themselves any premium their version can achieve. This premium doesn't have to be in features or reliability — a forker may just be a better marketer.
My primary reason for using No Script is not security but to eliminate distracting content animations and auto-play videos.
Under Linux you can make each monitor a separate X-server, each having an independent set of workspaces (virtual desktops). This means that without moving windows you can easily switch between showing any combination of two sets of information: IDE and app, IDE and docs, terminal and browser, video and browser, etc.
Also seems like it's become impolite to disagree with people in your bubble. It's OK to agree, but if you disagree, you're supposed to remain silent.
You're quite right. Criticize something, no matter how constructively, and you're a "hater". Clicking the "Dislike" button on a YouTube video is regarded as a hostile act.
To reference a work you need to be aware of it first. Papers in top journals are the best ads.
But I think these journals will lose their power once you have a system where an a good paper uploaded to a general archive can build prominence by being mentioned in the feeds of people with an increasing number of followers. Sort of like an academic form of crowd-sourced newpapers like Flipboard.
Thanks for the explanation.
I didn't realise that putting @username at the start of a Tweet sent the username user an explicit notification. What's the etiquette about ignoring these, or turning them off? And is there any easy way for someone (who may or may not follow one of the two people) to view both sides of the conversation?