Microsoft, Dell, and HP also have a lot of advertising (I'm assuming that's what you mean by "marketing", even though marketing and advertising are different), and spend a lot on it. You might think Apple's is better, but that doesn't necessarily mean they spent more.
Not really. Companies like Dell/HP sell high-margin expensive hardware and use that to subsidize their low-margin cheapo hardware in order to have a more complete product lineup. Apple sells high-margin expensive hardware and use that to subsidize development of software to run on that hardware.
Apple's prices aren't really out of line in comparison with Sony, for example. The difference is, you get to run OSX, Final Cut, iWork, etc. if you choose (legally) as well as Linux or Windows.
But I don't know why you think any of this has to do with "high marketing costs". Any backup for that?
If they sold it, it would be a conflict of interest.
I remember this was the complaint years ago when it was first announced that MS was working on an Antivirus (which I guess made it into Live OnceCare?). If you sell an OS and also sell the means to patch security holes, then there's no incentive to actually fix those security issues in the OS itself. Further, there's a conflict of interest in that, as the OS maker they should be open with security vendors servicing their OS, but those security vendors are suddenly competitors.
I think that by making it free, they're dodging some of those complaints. They still run the risk of damaging the business of some of those security vendors, but I find it hard to feel bad about that. Whenever Microsoft makes Windows better, they're removing potential avenues from businesses who would want to make money by fixing Windows. They should still do it.
And it is some level of financial recompense, but it doesn't address the question of whether it's fair recompense. The $129 number is a price subsidized by the purchase of a Mac. That's essentially the "upgrade" price. We don't know what the fully retail price of OSX would be if Apple were licensing it for use on non-Apple computers, because Apple doesn't offer those licensing terms to anyone.
It may be that, if Apple chose to license OSX for generic PCs, they would charge $500 or $1000 per copy. We don't know.
So in light of that, it's not clear that the $129 is sufficient for Psystar to say, "But we bought copies of OSX fair and square!"
Or if not "most tech companies", then every company that profits off of OSS is profiting from code that they didn't write. Even if they actually start the project, there will still be other code that they didn't write. Either that, or they're wildly unsuccessful at attracting developers to the project.
As to software to play it on, what's wrong with VLC? It's cross platform and plays Apple's h264 files perfectly.
There's nothing really to complain about. People use Apple's implementation of h264 because it's good. There isn't anything particularly better for this sort of thing out there.
I agree that AFP isn't a problem. You can run AFP on both Windows and Linux (via Netatalk, which AFAIK hasn't been updated but works fine). Even if AFP doesn't work well for you, OSX supports SMB, NFS, and pretty much anything else you want to use.
However, I do think Apple could work on optimizing file sharing. I have some network shares with thousands of files in the same directory, and it can take a couple minutes for OSX to return a directory listing through Finder. It's not a problem with the protocol. Linux can browse the same directories much faster, as can Windows. I can even drop into bash in OSX, "cd" to the directory, "ls", and get the listing pretty fast. Finder is trying to load some kind of other data (icons? thumbnails?) that's slowing it down a ton. IMO it's something that really ought to be fixed.
Maybe in Snow Leopard. Supposedly it'll be all about fixing technical things of that sort rather than adding features.
You know what's scary though? This $585M is such a drop in the bucket when it comes to the bailouts that it wouldn't be worth mentioning. This $585M would be less than.07% of the $850B bailout package.
What, you mean the imaging functionality? You can image Windows or Linux, but neither are as easy as OSX-- partially because Apple controls the hardware of their own machines, so OSX pretty much always has all the drivers you need.
In case you've never done imaging in OSX, it's absurdly easy. For one thing, OSX doesn't really discriminate what drive you install it onto, so it will run on a USB drive just as well as the internal hard drive without making any changes (not even reconfiguring a single file). So once you have that, the functionality to copy your complete OS onto another disk and immediately make it a functional, bootable version of source disk is built into the OS, as is the ability to dump it to a disk image.
So, for example, imagine I reformatted my laptop's hard drive. I can take my iMac, plug in a USB drive, and image the iMac's internal OS onto the USB drive. Then I can plug that USB drive onto my laptop, boot from it, and then copy the image onto the laptop's internal drive and everything will work. I don't have to change a single setting or install a single driver.
Plus, at this point, all the mainstream storage vendors have difficulty tapping the low end. They may be able to sell their expensive products to clients with deep pockets, but for small businesses it's a different story.
This doesn't seem like the "low end" for small business to me. Someone up the page quoted that their cheapest model is $11k for 2TB. You should be able to get >10TB of disk space for that price.
I'm not trying to say that Sun is a bad value. You might get some really great features for all that extra money. I wouldn't know because it's not worth investigating at those prices. There's no way I could justify spending $11k for 2TB.
Well also that 18.8% number doesn't tell you how many people specifically didn't want Obama, and how many of them just thought McCain was a better choice (for whatever reason).
Let me backtrack for a second and say that I'm not very liberal, at least not generally. I believe in small government, low taxes, personal responsibility, and free markets. However, I voted for Obama because I thought he was a better candidate.
I've always thought it was important to pay attention and make sure you're informed about politics, and because of this, I follow news from several different sources. I listen to NPR, watch PBS, check in with FOX News and CNN. I've followed this election from before the primaries started, and news coverage of Obama generally has been more positive than of the other candidates-- but I don't think it's because of a liberal bias of the media, but because in reality, Obama was a very good candidate.
What was really strange to me was to listen to McCain supporters on conservative-leaning shows talking about his strengths, and they boiled down to, "He's impulsive, doesn't think much about things, is a rebel, and lots of people hate him." That was from his *supporters*. And then Obama's detractors were often complaining that he was too elite, too professorial, too boring, and that he was just getting lots of support because people liked him so much. The rest of complaints against him were completely unfounded.
Now I really don't want to get into rehashing all the arguments and everything, but I'm just trying to stress I agree that the press was more positive about Obama, but I don't think it's their fault, and I don't think it was a result of anyone's bias. You can't blame the press because Obama ran a better campaign, handled himself better, made fewer political mistakes, and embodies more of the qualities that people are looking for in a President right now. I don't think "reality has a liberal bias," but I think that the current reality favors Obama specifically.
Yeah, it seems silly to use this as a measurement of productivity. Like you said, video encoding is a function of hardware and the encoder. All the OS has to do there is be as idle as possible, and not use up too much memory. Improving performance really means either improving the efficiency of the encoder or else finding and removing the hardware bottleneck that's slowing the operation most.
Better measures would be application startup, opening/closing documents, etc., and to a lesser extent things like OS startup and shutdown. Otherwise, real productivity is a result of a well-designed UI, and depends somewhat on the user. A change that improves my productivity may harm your productivity, or have no effect at all.
Where I would really like to see productivity improved on Windows is in improvements to the GUI, and it looks like they're trying, at least. Otherwise, I'd like to see them work on more technical improvements for setup, administration, security, compatibility/interoperability, etc.
Maybe that's just because I work in IT, but most of my complaints about Windows is that it's relatively annoying to set up (relative to Linux/OSX), it breaks in stupid ways, and lacks certain common-sense ways to fix it. If I could install a bootable copy of Windows on a USB drive and use it for imaging the way I can with OSX (as easily as I can with OSX), then that would be a great start. Also, remote administration and command-line improvements are a must, though I know MS is working on that. But now I'm really starting to stray off-topic, so I'll shut up.
That is time that has been taken from me. If I get those moments back, and the performance of the trivial CPU tasks involved in actually reading and writing files are kept the same, then yes, my productivity has improved.
I would go further and say that even if it's entirely cosmetic and improves the experience without speeding things up or improving productivity, that it's still a good thing for them to be working on.
Now that might seem silly to a lot of people, but sometimes UI design is about managing expectations and giving the user an idea of what's going on, how long something will take, etc. A good status bar doesn't increase the speed of file copying, but only lets the user know that the copying is continuing without errors, and gives an idea of how long the process will take to complete.
To get back to the point, even if it's true that the improvements in Windows 7 don't help productivity, but instead only make it less frustrating to use Windows, that still seems like progress to me.
Or it might be that people actually carry their iPhones around more places. Which would you take with you when you go out, your work e-mail or your iPod?
Or it could be that iPhones are more fragile, but that hasn't been my experience.
Right. Research suggests that the iPhone are reliable, so their methods must be wrong. Because I know a guy who's iPhone broke, and we all hate Apple anyway, so lets be as dismissive as we can.
It couldn't possibly be because the devices are durable and designed pretty well.
In the various Unixes, Linux, and Windows, many of the distinctions between server OS and desktop OS are to some extent artificial. I mean, you said it yourself: Ubuntu 8.04 server is a server OS and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop is a desktop OS, but they aren't different operating systems. Change the configuration and installed applications of either one, and you get the other.
So there generally is overlap between the server OS and desktop OS, and the overlap is the OS. Where they don't overlap is on things that aren't part of the OS, such as default configuration and pre-installed applications.
I agree that there have been many good and even a few great games in recent years, and I also think that a fair amount of time people over-idealize old games.
I think sometimes it's nostalgia, but there's something else too. To drag in a movie analog, I saw the Matrix again recently, and I realized that part of my attachment to it was that I remembered how revolutionary it was at the time. The actions scenes blew away everything that came before, and that fact is lodged in my brain to a degree that when I watch the Matrix, I still think it's cool in a way that someone coming to it new, having seen movies of recent years, might not really appreciate it. I think that's different from nostalgia, but I'm digressing a little here.
Over-idealization aside, I think there is another problem that people are seeing and expressing as "they don't make good games anymore", where the real problem isn't that they don't make good games anymore. It's that people don't make games of the sort that they like anymore.
My point is that, although the new games are good, money has had a normalizing effect on game development. There have been a couple genres that have continued to do well, like FPS, RTS, and MMORPG, and most of the good games that are released are just variations on the theme. Isometric RPGs, adventure games, and side-scrollers, for example, have become rare. The only puzzle games you find are usually little Flash games with practically no budget. "Arcade games" of the sort of Pacman or Space Invaders are pretty much dead.
So if you go looking for a great new arcade game or side-scroller, you aren't going to find much. Most of what you'll find are unimaginative Flash games that are very derivative of past games. There are a few gems out there, but what people may be missing is a sense of diversity over the spectrum of popular games.
No one said to lie to the programmers. There's no reason to lie. Obviously if you turn over the copyright of your work to your employer, you leave it open to that employer to decide how to license that copyrighted material. Your employer can license that material under any number of licenses, and even multiple license at the same time.
If you're a programmer and you want to retain control of how your code is licensed, then you don't hand over the copyright to anyone. The right to decide what license to release the code under is explicitly what the copyright is.
You could also justify "in house" IT by evaluating the costs of outsourcing all the work to contractors.
I think that's the real answer here. The work has to get done somehow, so if you want to justify the cost you're paying, compare it to the alternatives.
At the same time, there's another problem in that people might not understand that they work has to get done somehow. I've had jobs before where some people assumed I didn't do much, because most people generally don't think too much about it when things are working. I've seriously had someone say to me once, "Your job is easy. You don't do anything. All our IT stuff just works." I really had to explain, "No, our IT stuff doesn't just work. It works most of the time because I set it up properly and maintain it all. There are regular problems, but you don't pay much attention to that because I fix it."
I used to make the mistake of quietly fixing things and not drawing attention to how much I'd done. You don't have to be a drama queen or anything, but if you really want people to understand how valuable you are, sometimes you have to be open about all the things you deal with.
Cash helps. But without good management (on the client's part), it's going to lead to disappointment
Yes, to me this also raises some other questions. For one, I'm assuming that the guy asking the question has a reason for wanting specifically to open source it. He's probably hoping to get some amount of work put into the project that he's not paying for, or else why bother?
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that he's expecting completely free labor to be given selflessly for his own sake, but he might have the idea that other individuals or companies would have an interest once he got the project rolling.
So once he's heading down that road, it seems like his questions should turn to things like, "How do I attract a good community?" or "How do I manage different people with different business interests contributing to the same project?" So he might also want to ask, "Once I get these programmers writing things for me, how do I manage an open source project?"
Actually, if you read the summary instead of just the title (no, I'm not new here), you'll see that he has a number of fairly specific questions:
How do I find programmers?
How hard is it to find Cocoa programmers?
What sort of prices should I expect to pay?
Will there be a problem with the fact that I want to release it to open source?
So the GP post is answering these questions fairly well, actually. He's saying hire normal programmers like you'd hire any other programmers, with the employment deal including that you own the resulting copyright. If you own the copyright, you can release it under any license you choose.
I'm not such a big fan of Winamp. Like I said, you can dispute me as easily as saying, "that's just your opinion!" but yes, that's my opinion.
Firefox has themes and I like Firefox, but only because I know a good theme that's simple and integrates well with the OS. But the theme I'm referring to is the default theme, so the fact that there are other skins doesn't do much for me.
And I guess that's really my point. Pretty much every program that I've used when I could customize the GUI, I either liked the default well enough to use it, or else I couldn't find a skin that satisfied me.
What you're saying makes sense to me, but I've never seen it work out that an application being "themeable" was a particularly good thing. With a lot of programs, I feel like making the UI highly configurable really ends up being an excuse for the developer to not spend a lot of time making a good default UI. It's like, "Meh, I don't want to spend time making it usable or pretty, so I'll just make it so someone else can figure out how to make the UI good." And then no one else does.
Even if there's an active theming community, you usually end up with thousands of themes to sort through, 5 of which are moderately good, but none of them integrate well with the OS. And then, if you're slightly neurotic like I am, you end up constantly looking for a new, better theme, when all you really want is something that doesn't feel jarring when you switch to another application.
I admit that a lot of this is just my opinion, but all I'm trying to do here is voice my opinion. For me, the only time theming makes sense is when you can theme the entire OS thoroughly and consistently so that all applications match. I don't just want clean and simple, I also want consistent. The qualms I have had with the iTunes interface have been when they've chosen to give it nonstandard interface elements.
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Microsoft, Dell, and HP also have a lot of advertising (I'm assuming that's what you mean by "marketing", even though marketing and advertising are different), and spend a lot on it. You might think Apple's is better, but that doesn't necessarily mean they spent more.
Not really. Companies like Dell/HP sell high-margin expensive hardware and use that to subsidize their low-margin cheapo hardware in order to have a more complete product lineup. Apple sells high-margin expensive hardware and use that to subsidize development of software to run on that hardware.
Apple's prices aren't really out of line in comparison with Sony, for example. The difference is, you get to run OSX, Final Cut, iWork, etc. if you choose (legally) as well as Linux or Windows.
But I don't know why you think any of this has to do with "high marketing costs". Any backup for that?
If they sold it, it would be a conflict of interest.
I remember this was the complaint years ago when it was first announced that MS was working on an Antivirus (which I guess made it into Live OnceCare?). If you sell an OS and also sell the means to patch security holes, then there's no incentive to actually fix those security issues in the OS itself. Further, there's a conflict of interest in that, as the OS maker they should be open with security vendors servicing their OS, but those security vendors are suddenly competitors.
I think that by making it free, they're dodging some of those complaints. They still run the risk of damaging the business of some of those security vendors, but I find it hard to feel bad about that. Whenever Microsoft makes Windows better, they're removing potential avenues from businesses who would want to make money by fixing Windows. They should still do it.
On the plus side, they're probably making money until the court shuts them down, at which point they can declare bankruptcy and disappear.
And it is some level of financial recompense, but it doesn't address the question of whether it's fair recompense. The $129 number is a price subsidized by the purchase of a Mac. That's essentially the "upgrade" price. We don't know what the fully retail price of OSX would be if Apple were licensing it for use on non-Apple computers, because Apple doesn't offer those licensing terms to anyone.
It may be that, if Apple chose to license OSX for generic PCs, they would charge $500 or $1000 per copy. We don't know.
So in light of that, it's not clear that the $129 is sufficient for Psystar to say, "But we bought copies of OSX fair and square!"
Or if not "most tech companies", then every company that profits off of OSS is profiting from code that they didn't write. Even if they actually start the project, there will still be other code that they didn't write. Either that, or they're wildly unsuccessful at attracting developers to the project.
I'd rather have a larger filesize and get a standard-ish format like DivX than have to use this crap just to shave off some bits on the encode.
In what world is DivX considered "standard"?
Look, none of this stuff is hard. If you want to download the movie, they aren't obfuscating anything. Look in the HTML. It took me 2 seconds to find the small version of the trailer: http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/star_trek/startrek-tlr2_h.320.mov
As to software to play it on, what's wrong with VLC? It's cross platform and plays Apple's h264 files perfectly.
There's nothing really to complain about. People use Apple's implementation of h264 because it's good. There isn't anything particularly better for this sort of thing out there.
I agree that AFP isn't a problem. You can run AFP on both Windows and Linux (via Netatalk, which AFAIK hasn't been updated but works fine). Even if AFP doesn't work well for you, OSX supports SMB, NFS, and pretty much anything else you want to use.
However, I do think Apple could work on optimizing file sharing. I have some network shares with thousands of files in the same directory, and it can take a couple minutes for OSX to return a directory listing through Finder. It's not a problem with the protocol. Linux can browse the same directories much faster, as can Windows. I can even drop into bash in OSX, "cd" to the directory, "ls", and get the listing pretty fast. Finder is trying to load some kind of other data (icons? thumbnails?) that's slowing it down a ton. IMO it's something that really ought to be fixed.
Maybe in Snow Leopard. Supposedly it'll be all about fixing technical things of that sort rather than adding features.
You know what's scary though? This $585M is such a drop in the bucket when it comes to the bailouts that it wouldn't be worth mentioning. This $585M would be less than .07% of the $850B bailout package.
What, you mean the imaging functionality? You can image Windows or Linux, but neither are as easy as OSX-- partially because Apple controls the hardware of their own machines, so OSX pretty much always has all the drivers you need.
In case you've never done imaging in OSX, it's absurdly easy. For one thing, OSX doesn't really discriminate what drive you install it onto, so it will run on a USB drive just as well as the internal hard drive without making any changes (not even reconfiguring a single file). So once you have that, the functionality to copy your complete OS onto another disk and immediately make it a functional, bootable version of source disk is built into the OS, as is the ability to dump it to a disk image.
So, for example, imagine I reformatted my laptop's hard drive. I can take my iMac, plug in a USB drive, and image the iMac's internal OS onto the USB drive. Then I can plug that USB drive onto my laptop, boot from it, and then copy the image onto the laptop's internal drive and everything will work. I don't have to change a single setting or install a single driver.
Plus, at this point, all the mainstream storage vendors have difficulty tapping the low end. They may be able to sell their expensive products to clients with deep pockets, but for small businesses it's a different story.
This doesn't seem like the "low end" for small business to me. Someone up the page quoted that their cheapest model is $11k for 2TB. You should be able to get >10TB of disk space for that price.
I'm not trying to say that Sun is a bad value. You might get some really great features for all that extra money. I wouldn't know because it's not worth investigating at those prices. There's no way I could justify spending $11k for 2TB.
Well also that 18.8% number doesn't tell you how many people specifically didn't want Obama, and how many of them just thought McCain was a better choice (for whatever reason).
Reality has a well-known liberal bias!
I think that in this case, you may be right.
Let me backtrack for a second and say that I'm not very liberal, at least not generally. I believe in small government, low taxes, personal responsibility, and free markets. However, I voted for Obama because I thought he was a better candidate.
I've always thought it was important to pay attention and make sure you're informed about politics, and because of this, I follow news from several different sources. I listen to NPR, watch PBS, check in with FOX News and CNN. I've followed this election from before the primaries started, and news coverage of Obama generally has been more positive than of the other candidates-- but I don't think it's because of a liberal bias of the media, but because in reality, Obama was a very good candidate.
What was really strange to me was to listen to McCain supporters on conservative-leaning shows talking about his strengths, and they boiled down to, "He's impulsive, doesn't think much about things, is a rebel, and lots of people hate him." That was from his *supporters*. And then Obama's detractors were often complaining that he was too elite, too professorial, too boring, and that he was just getting lots of support because people liked him so much. The rest of complaints against him were completely unfounded.
Now I really don't want to get into rehashing all the arguments and everything, but I'm just trying to stress I agree that the press was more positive about Obama, but I don't think it's their fault, and I don't think it was a result of anyone's bias. You can't blame the press because Obama ran a better campaign, handled himself better, made fewer political mistakes, and embodies more of the qualities that people are looking for in a President right now. I don't think "reality has a liberal bias," but I think that the current reality favors Obama specifically.
It's pretty much CPU and memory bound.
Yeah, it seems silly to use this as a measurement of productivity. Like you said, video encoding is a function of hardware and the encoder. All the OS has to do there is be as idle as possible, and not use up too much memory. Improving performance really means either improving the efficiency of the encoder or else finding and removing the hardware bottleneck that's slowing the operation most.
Better measures would be application startup, opening/closing documents, etc., and to a lesser extent things like OS startup and shutdown. Otherwise, real productivity is a result of a well-designed UI, and depends somewhat on the user. A change that improves my productivity may harm your productivity, or have no effect at all.
Where I would really like to see productivity improved on Windows is in improvements to the GUI, and it looks like they're trying, at least. Otherwise, I'd like to see them work on more technical improvements for setup, administration, security, compatibility/interoperability, etc.
Maybe that's just because I work in IT, but most of my complaints about Windows is that it's relatively annoying to set up (relative to Linux/OSX), it breaks in stupid ways, and lacks certain common-sense ways to fix it. If I could install a bootable copy of Windows on a USB drive and use it for imaging the way I can with OSX (as easily as I can with OSX), then that would be a great start. Also, remote administration and command-line improvements are a must, though I know MS is working on that. But now I'm really starting to stray off-topic, so I'll shut up.
That is time that has been taken from me. If I get those moments back, and the performance of the trivial CPU tasks involved in actually reading and writing files are kept the same, then yes, my productivity has improved.
I would go further and say that even if it's entirely cosmetic and improves the experience without speeding things up or improving productivity, that it's still a good thing for them to be working on.
Now that might seem silly to a lot of people, but sometimes UI design is about managing expectations and giving the user an idea of what's going on, how long something will take, etc. A good status bar doesn't increase the speed of file copying, but only lets the user know that the copying is continuing without errors, and gives an idea of how long the process will take to complete.
To get back to the point, even if it's true that the improvements in Windows 7 don't help productivity, but instead only make it less frustrating to use Windows, that still seems like progress to me.
Or it might be that people actually carry their iPhones around more places. Which would you take with you when you go out, your work e-mail or your iPod?
Or it could be that iPhones are more fragile, but that hasn't been my experience.
Right. Research suggests that the iPhone are reliable, so their methods must be wrong. Because I know a guy who's iPhone broke, and we all hate Apple anyway, so lets be as dismissive as we can.
It couldn't possibly be because the devices are durable and designed pretty well.
In the various Unixes, Linux, and Windows, many of the distinctions between server OS and desktop OS are to some extent artificial. I mean, you said it yourself: Ubuntu 8.04 server is a server OS and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop is a desktop OS, but they aren't different operating systems. Change the configuration and installed applications of either one, and you get the other.
So there generally is overlap between the server OS and desktop OS, and the overlap is the OS. Where they don't overlap is on things that aren't part of the OS, such as default configuration and pre-installed applications.
I agree that there have been many good and even a few great games in recent years, and I also think that a fair amount of time people over-idealize old games.
I think sometimes it's nostalgia, but there's something else too. To drag in a movie analog, I saw the Matrix again recently, and I realized that part of my attachment to it was that I remembered how revolutionary it was at the time. The actions scenes blew away everything that came before, and that fact is lodged in my brain to a degree that when I watch the Matrix, I still think it's cool in a way that someone coming to it new, having seen movies of recent years, might not really appreciate it. I think that's different from nostalgia, but I'm digressing a little here.
Over-idealization aside, I think there is another problem that people are seeing and expressing as "they don't make good games anymore", where the real problem isn't that they don't make good games anymore. It's that people don't make games of the sort that they like anymore.
My point is that, although the new games are good, money has had a normalizing effect on game development. There have been a couple genres that have continued to do well, like FPS, RTS, and MMORPG, and most of the good games that are released are just variations on the theme. Isometric RPGs, adventure games, and side-scrollers, for example, have become rare. The only puzzle games you find are usually little Flash games with practically no budget. "Arcade games" of the sort of Pacman or Space Invaders are pretty much dead.
So if you go looking for a great new arcade game or side-scroller, you aren't going to find much. Most of what you'll find are unimaginative Flash games that are very derivative of past games. There are a few gems out there, but what people may be missing is a sense of diversity over the spectrum of popular games.
No one said to lie to the programmers. There's no reason to lie. Obviously if you turn over the copyright of your work to your employer, you leave it open to that employer to decide how to license that copyrighted material. Your employer can license that material under any number of licenses, and even multiple license at the same time.
If you're a programmer and you want to retain control of how your code is licensed, then you don't hand over the copyright to anyone. The right to decide what license to release the code under is explicitly what the copyright is.
You could also justify "in house" IT by evaluating the costs of outsourcing all the work to contractors.
I think that's the real answer here. The work has to get done somehow, so if you want to justify the cost you're paying, compare it to the alternatives.
At the same time, there's another problem in that people might not understand that they work has to get done somehow. I've had jobs before where some people assumed I didn't do much, because most people generally don't think too much about it when things are working. I've seriously had someone say to me once, "Your job is easy. You don't do anything. All our IT stuff just works." I really had to explain, "No, our IT stuff doesn't just work. It works most of the time because I set it up properly and maintain it all. There are regular problems, but you don't pay much attention to that because I fix it."
I used to make the mistake of quietly fixing things and not drawing attention to how much I'd done. You don't have to be a drama queen or anything, but if you really want people to understand how valuable you are, sometimes you have to be open about all the things you deal with.
Cash helps. But without good management (on the client's part), it's going to lead to disappointment
Yes, to me this also raises some other questions. For one, I'm assuming that the guy asking the question has a reason for wanting specifically to open source it. He's probably hoping to get some amount of work put into the project that he's not paying for, or else why bother?
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that he's expecting completely free labor to be given selflessly for his own sake, but he might have the idea that other individuals or companies would have an interest once he got the project rolling.
So once he's heading down that road, it seems like his questions should turn to things like, "How do I attract a good community?" or "How do I manage different people with different business interests contributing to the same project?" So he might also want to ask, "Once I get these programmers writing things for me, how do I manage an open source project?"
But then maybe he already has ideas about that.
Actually, if you read the summary instead of just the title (no, I'm not new here), you'll see that he has a number of fairly specific questions:
So the GP post is answering these questions fairly well, actually. He's saying hire normal programmers like you'd hire any other programmers, with the employment deal including that you own the resulting copyright. If you own the copyright, you can release it under any license you choose.
And make sure they document their code.
I'm not such a big fan of Winamp. Like I said, you can dispute me as easily as saying, "that's just your opinion!" but yes, that's my opinion.
Firefox has themes and I like Firefox, but only because I know a good theme that's simple and integrates well with the OS. But the theme I'm referring to is the default theme, so the fact that there are other skins doesn't do much for me.
And I guess that's really my point. Pretty much every program that I've used when I could customize the GUI, I either liked the default well enough to use it, or else I couldn't find a skin that satisfied me.
What you're saying makes sense to me, but I've never seen it work out that an application being "themeable" was a particularly good thing. With a lot of programs, I feel like making the UI highly configurable really ends up being an excuse for the developer to not spend a lot of time making a good default UI. It's like, "Meh, I don't want to spend time making it usable or pretty, so I'll just make it so someone else can figure out how to make the UI good." And then no one else does.
Even if there's an active theming community, you usually end up with thousands of themes to sort through, 5 of which are moderately good, but none of them integrate well with the OS. And then, if you're slightly neurotic like I am, you end up constantly looking for a new, better theme, when all you really want is something that doesn't feel jarring when you switch to another application.
I admit that a lot of this is just my opinion, but all I'm trying to do here is voice my opinion. For me, the only time theming makes sense is when you can theme the entire OS thoroughly and consistently so that all applications match. I don't just want clean and simple, I also want consistent. The qualms I have had with the iTunes interface have been when they've chosen to give it nonstandard interface elements.