Look, the layoffs were of non-coders. After a merger you can downsize on lawyers, purchasing managers, marketing people, etc. It's not a sign of weakness.
Now, the loss of two people important to Mozilla is a blow. On the other hand, Mozilla is far healthier now than it was nine months ago, when it had three months of futile pounding on the old codebase while Netscape programmers were busy working on 4.5.
I mean, Mozilla is now to the point where bug hunting by non-coders is useful enough to recruit them. And when it eventually ships, even if it takes six months, it will take off.
Smart people can have stupid ideas. It is more politic to say "they aren't the best, or most efficient designs", but that's just politese for "they are stupid ideas."
Sure, I incidentally registered "my" domain name under the _international_.org with Internic, which incidentally is run by Network Solutions, Inc, the USA based company. But I can't really see how I, as a registrant of an international domain, can be expected to know and follow the USA's trademarking laws, nor to know which companies have registered which trademarks in the USA. And I don't have much of a choice when registering an international domain name, do I, if I intend for it to be useful?
A good argument from justice.
However, an absolutely worthless argument under the law. Network Solutions is a U.S. buisness whose physical activities are confined to the USA, and thus its dealings are subject to U.S. law, even if they people they are registering names for are Plutonians resident on Mercury and incorporated under the laws of Alpha Centauri. Whether you can get a international domain name elsewhere is irrelevant, legally. A challenge to the U.S. law is a matter for diplomacy, and perhaps the WTO or ITU.
The problem with nearly every debate on intellectual property rights is the same -- people are working from different basic assumptions. And, when boiled own to the essence, there is a grid of two sets of two basic assumptions -- the axis of property is theft vs. property is a natural right, and the axis of principle trumps practice and practice trumps principle.
RMS/FSF/GNU is a shining example of a group that, at the bottom (albeit maybe not conciously) holds both that property is theft and that practice thiumphs principle. If the only reason for the existence of physical property is only that multiple people cannot simultaneously have the same object, then you are denying that anyone has a *right* to property. Property is simply a social construct that assigns control to an individual enen though everyone has an equal _right_ to posession of the item.
Now, that means that RMS and ESR have the same basic view, as does a socialist who has decied that socialism is impractical and *supports* intellectual property on practical grounds. They all agree a *right* doesn't exist, and property is only a social construct for purely practical ends. Their fights are the same as fights between Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox -- of no real interest to outsiders, except as they may affect the outside world. This is essentially the mixed economy position of the American left.
A second position is that of the Lockeans (and their derivatives), who hold that property is the natural right of the person who applies labor to the unowned. This view naturally leads to the acceptance of intellectual property, since it is purely the product of [mental] labor. This position calls property a right and puts principle above practice -- property might lead to all sorts of undesireable consequences, but it's less important than protecting the principle. This is the unmixed capitalism of the American far right/libertarians.
The third position accepts the principle that property is theft, and puts principle above practicality. They are communists and socialists.
The fourth accepts the principle that property is a right, but puts practice over principle. These are the mixed economy advocates on the American Right.
Let me be blunt. I prefer the Communists to either variety of the mixed economy advocates, and the libertarians to the Communists. Give me an honest socialist who defends principle. At least they won't cheer a tyrant because he "gets things done."
I'd like to see Apple (and every other company out there writing their own "Open Source" licenses) explain why they didn't just use search-and-replace on the NPL anyway, or at least a moderately modified version thereof.
No, the NPL/MPL isn't perfect. But it's already been put through over a year of debate to find all the pitfalls. An amended NPL, therefore, would be far easier to analyze.
BTW, IMHO the problem with N/MPL-GPL compatibility is the GPL. All the GPL has to do is include a clause that allows FSF-certified free software the same privileges as the GPL extends to closed-source operating systems...
The Mac could have won -- if Apple had licensed the OS. Instead, it faced an insurmountable price disadvantage.
OS/2 could have won -- if it hadn't required 3 times the amount of RAM as Win 3 and hadn't supported Win3 so well that there was no point to writing OS/2 apps.
Java could have won -- if anybody could figure out how to write a commercial-grade app in it.
Unix unification was never a threat to anything but NT -- nobody was going to cut their prices enough to compete with Win9X.
Linux doesn't risk any of those pitfalls. It has others, but the GPL preserves it from institutional lapses and the Open Source development model will help it overcome technical threats.
"it's not law and it's not in stone. If LSB screws up then nobody uses it, we go back t othe drawing board and make it better."
And how long does it take to make the decisions, how long does it take to realize it was a mistake, and how long does it take LSB to correct it? And how much damage happens in the meantime?
Forget a standards committee. Let the rough, anarchic consensus of the Free Software movement and the marketplace solve it. It got us Linux, didn't it?
Simply enough, the "problem" is that Caldera's semi-proprietary offerings are being beat to a pulp in the marketplace by the 70% marketshare holder Red Hat, which is putting out essentially everything under GPL or other free licenses.
Look, it takes less effort to make your app run on all major distros than it does to get it to run on Win95 and NT, and your backward compatibility isn't much different than trying to write an app that runs on NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 (gods forbid NT 3.1).
No LSB? It means the other distro makers have to play catch-up with Red Hat's decisions, instead of getting to help make them.
It also means immunity from stupid mistakes -- if Red Hat screws up, another Linux distro will replace them as the leader. If a universal LSB screws up, however, a non-Linux (and not necessarily free) OS will win.
The perspective of the article is skewed. It's looking at the question as to whether OSS will cause the rise of new giants to kill the old ones. It won't -- but it will kill the old giants anyway.
Jon Katz was doing so well this time, and then he threw in a gratuitous repeat of his anti-corporation theme again. Numerous nonprofits, governments, and small buisnesses have the same flaws as Katz is attributing to large corporations -- and there are large corporations which have relatively few of the flaws.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, the layoffs were of non-coders. After a merger you can downsize on lawyers, purchasing managers, marketing people, etc. It's not a sign of weakness.
Now, the loss of two people important to Mozilla is a blow. On the other hand, Mozilla is far healthier now than it was nine months ago, when it had three months of futile pounding on the old codebase while Netscape programmers were busy working on 4.5.
I mean, Mozilla is now to the point where bug hunting by non-coders is useful enough to recruit them. And when it eventually ships, even if it takes six months, it will take off.
Smart people can have stupid ideas. It is more politic to say "they aren't the best, or most efficient designs", but that's just politese for "they are stupid ideas."
Sure, I incidentally registered "my" domain name under the _international_ .org with Internic, which incidentally is run by Network Solutions, Inc, the USA based company. But I can't really see how I, as a registrant of an international domain, can be expected to know and follow the USA's trademarking laws, nor to know which companies have registered which trademarks in the USA. And I don't have much of a choice when registering an international domain name, do I, if I intend for it to be useful?
A good argument from justice.
However, an absolutely worthless argument under the law. Network Solutions is a U.S. buisness whose physical activities are confined to the USA, and thus its dealings are subject to U.S. law, even if they people they are registering names for are Plutonians resident on Mercury and incorporated under the laws of Alpha Centauri. Whether you can get a international domain name elsewhere is irrelevant, legally. A challenge to the U.S. law is a matter for diplomacy, and perhaps the WTO or ITU.
But a good argument from justice.
The problem with nearly every debate on intellectual property rights is the same -- people are working from different basic assumptions. And, when boiled own to the essence, there is a grid of two sets of two basic assumptions -- the axis of property is theft vs. property is a natural right, and the axis of principle trumps practice and practice trumps principle.
RMS/FSF/GNU is a shining example of a group that, at the bottom (albeit maybe not conciously) holds both that property is theft and that practice thiumphs principle. If the only reason for the existence of physical property is only that multiple people cannot simultaneously have the same object, then you are denying that anyone has a *right* to property. Property is simply a social construct that assigns control to an individual enen though everyone has an equal _right_ to posession of the item.
Now, that means that RMS and ESR have the same basic view, as does a socialist who has decied that socialism is impractical and *supports* intellectual property on practical grounds. They all agree a *right* doesn't exist, and property is only a social construct for purely practical ends. Their fights are the same as fights between Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox -- of no real interest to outsiders, except as they may affect the outside world. This is essentially the mixed economy position of the American left.
A second position is that of the Lockeans (and their derivatives), who hold that property is the natural right of the person who applies labor to the unowned. This view naturally leads to the acceptance of intellectual property, since it is purely the product of [mental] labor. This position calls property a right and puts principle above practice -- property might lead to all sorts of undesireable consequences, but it's less important than protecting the principle. This is the unmixed capitalism of the American far right/libertarians.
The third position accepts the principle that property is theft, and puts principle above practicality. They are communists and socialists.
The fourth accepts the principle that property is a right, but puts practice over principle. These are the mixed economy advocates on the American Right.
Let me be blunt. I prefer the Communists to either variety of the mixed economy advocates, and the libertarians to the Communists. Give me an honest socialist who defends principle. At least they won't cheer a tyrant because he "gets things done."
I'd like to see Apple (and every other company out there writing their own "Open Source" licenses) explain why they didn't just use search-and-replace on the NPL anyway, or at least a moderately modified version thereof.
No, the NPL/MPL isn't perfect. But it's already been put through over a year of debate to find all the pitfalls. An amended NPL, therefore, would be far easier to analyze.
BTW, IMHO the problem with N/MPL-GPL compatibility is the GPL. All the GPL has to do is include a clause that allows FSF-certified free software the same privileges as the GPL extends to closed-source operating systems...
The Mac could have won -- if Apple had licensed the OS. Instead, it faced an insurmountable price disadvantage.
OS/2 could have won -- if it hadn't required 3 times the amount of RAM as Win 3 and hadn't supported Win3 so well that there was no point to writing OS/2 apps.
Java could have won -- if anybody could figure out how to write a commercial-grade app in it.
Unix unification was never a threat to anything but NT -- nobody was going to cut their prices enough to compete with Win9X.
Linux doesn't risk any of those pitfalls. It has others, but the GPL preserves it from institutional lapses and the Open Source development model will help it overcome technical threats.
Hey, as someone who tried to sodder a modem for a TI-85 calculator, how in the world can I criticize? This is great.
"it's not law and it's not in stone. If LSB screws up then nobody uses it, we go back t othe drawing board and make it better."
And how long does it take to make the decisions, how long does it take to realize it was a mistake, and how long does it take LSB to correct it? And how much damage happens in the meantime?
Forget a standards committee. Let the rough, anarchic consensus of the Free Software movement and the marketplace solve it. It got us Linux, didn't it?
Coverage in the mainstream press is nothing new anymore, and nothing mentioned in the story is new, either. Oh, well.
Simply enough, the "problem" is that Caldera's semi-proprietary offerings are being beat to a pulp in the marketplace by the 70% marketshare holder Red Hat, which is putting out essentially everything under GPL or other free licenses.
Look, it takes less effort to make your app run on all major distros than it does to get it to run on Win95 and NT, and your backward compatibility isn't much different than trying to write an app that runs on NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 (gods forbid NT 3.1).
No LSB? It means the other distro makers have to play catch-up with Red Hat's decisions, instead of getting to help make them.
It also means immunity from stupid mistakes -- if Red Hat screws up, another Linux distro will replace them as the leader. If a universal LSB screws up, however, a non-Linux (and not necessarily free) OS will win.
The perspective of the article is skewed. It's looking at the question as to whether OSS will cause the rise of new giants to kill the old ones. It won't -- but it will kill the old giants anyway.
Jon Katz was doing so well this time, and then he threw in a gratuitous repeat of his anti-corporation theme again. Numerous nonprofits, governments, and small buisnesses have the same flaws as Katz is attributing to large corporations -- and there are large corporations which have relatively few of the flaws.