You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.
Wait, wait... you don't see IBM giving away AIX despite the fact that it only runs on their hardware? And this means it, therefore, could legitimately be given away? Why? So someone can say "Boy, this disk sure is shiny. I bet it'll do amazing things when I put it in a machine that can actually run it. Screw it - I'm buying an IBM mainframe!".
Did this post make sense to anyone? Am I an idiot?
As someone who builds search engines for a living, I think I can tell you why this is a Very Hard Problem.
Do you know WHY Google is so effective as a search engine? 1. They have a massive index, replicated at least 3x. An unimaginable amount of data. 2. They have a huge, very tightly-integrated, highly-redundant and speed-optimised hardware platform tied to a very flexible software platform with constant monitoring, seamless failovers etc. 3. They have access to far more data than just the pages themselves. They also have email, chats, search logs, ad logs, click logs, etc. All indexed in one place, and all rich sources of data for spell-checking, re-ranking and so forth. They do extensive user-profiling using My Search History. Who would you trust more with you personal indexes - just Google or potentially everyone on earth? I know which is the lesser of two evils there.
Now, Google has struggled for YEARS just to get their search engine to work at all, in probably the most tightly controlled environment in the world. The problems Google is dealing with are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE higher for P2P systems, because you can't trust hosts, you can't monitor them closely, they all have different amounts of storage, possibly HUGE latencies, etc etc.
One of Google's great successes has been in making people TAKE FOR GRANTED the idea that if you put in a bunch of terms and click "search", the results come back almost instantly. Who wants to go back to the days of waiting seconds or minutes for a search to complete? Not me, that's for damn sure.
I think P2P search WILL happen, just not for general purpose searching over the web. I think it will happen over socially clustered indexes, e.g. of people's shared media files.
So you know your "ideal" has nothing to do with SUN, and I could not say too much about it, but only SUN needs practical reasons to open-source Java.
Wow, what a concept. That I could desire something for different reasons than Sun does. Of course they're not going to Open Source java for my reasons, but that's no reason for me not to hope they do anyway - whatever their reasons are.
I also hope that Microsoft opens the source to MS Office. Now, I'm not an idiot. I know they're not going to do it for some kind of free-software ideal. But they may do it if the market starts insisting on Open-Source software. Or they may do it because an open-source alternative is eating their lunch, just to compete. Microsoft released a free (as in beer) web browser because Netscape changed the rules of the marketplace. MS's move would normally have been commercial suicide, but they were forced to do it because of market conditions.
Sun won't open Java for altruistic reasons, but it doesn't mean they won't do it. We, as consumers, are the marketplace. If we want an open source Java, we just have to change our spending habits.
As for the whole thing about Linus' opinions on open source, I'm sure they're more nuanced than "RMS is a fool, every idea he ever had is unrealistic". It's possible for two people to disagree but still fundamentally be on the same side. I am sure Linus would rather live in a world of Open Source software than one in which the majority is closed, he's just not as extreme as RMS in that view.
Again, the disagreement between Eric Raymond and RMS is not one of absolute moral polarisation, but rather of degree and methodology. Both support the opening of source code, and their reasons may overlap. RMS is more idealistic, ESR more business-focused, but they're both in our camp. This kind of debate is healthy for the free software movement, and we are stronger for it, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to then say "this means that we shouldn't open source anything whose functionality is not going to be materially improved by it".
First, what you have stated is not everybody's ideal. Linus, for one things, would not agree here.
Uhh.. wouldn't he? Linus chose to use the GPL for Linux. Doesn't that endorsement (and huge personal sacrifice) say anything to you about his opinion of free software? Way to back up your argument, argu-man.
Second, what has this do with SUN?
Absolutely nothing. It is merely the opinion of many people calling for Sun to open-source Java. Sure, there are many business reasons why it would be a good idea for Sun to license the Java source under the GPL. One is securing the support of the vast army of open-source programmers to ensure that Java works on all of the (increasingly common) open-source platforms. Another is countering the encroachment of.NET. Having free source code available is a very good way to gain mindshare among the technical elite of the computer world, as these people enjoy being able to tear code apart and put it back together again, and many of them also have a say in the business decisions made by their employers.
But those are not my reasons. At least, not those alone. Let me draw an analogy: There is no pragmatic reason why I would call on the US government to try or release Australian Guantanemo detaineee David Hicks. I just call for that because it seems like the right thing to do. It's not pragmatic for the US government to do it, but it just seems like the right thing to do. No, I'm not equating closed-source to the failure of justice, but I am saying that sometimes people call for things despite the fact that it's not in their target's interests to comply. But in the commercial world, as in democracy, if enough voices start saying the same thing, the rules change.
At least, I still like to hope so.
Geez, where do you people get off anyway, dissing this particular point of view? There's a whole bunch of reasons why people are pro-Free-Software - most of them either because they like to get stuff for free or they like tweaking the code or they want to become the commodity implementation of Specification-X whatever. I'm not pretending my reasons should be Sun's reasons. But they're still my reasons, and they're still valid.
Okay, NOW you've given me a point we can argue about. How will having an Open Source Java make my life better?
By licensing Java's code with the GPL or similar, you essentially ensure that the code base will be free to look at, modify or do whatever you wish, provided you offer others the same rights on your derived code.
This means that if someone (say, Sun) decides that the next "official" version of Java will only run on Windows and OSX, but not Linux, I or someone else can still maintain the old Linux version, fixing bugs or enhancing it as necessary, perhaps keeping it up to date with the spec, and not be stuck in the past because we have no way to modify the software.
Another reason: say in the next version of Java Sun decides to include DRM software which restricts what I can do with my media files in order to comply with US laws. But I live in Australia! In your pragmatic world, maybe Sun would release a version for Australians which doesn't have the DRM restrictions, but in my pragmatic world this rarely happens, so let's assume in this case that it doesn't. So what do I do? I don't have the resources to re-implement the Java spec (as some others are doing, thank heavens), so I'm simply stuck - my Java-based media player software won't let me exercise my legal rights over the content, and there's simply nothing I can do about it.
In other words, maintaining your freedom to modify software that you use is not about what's happening right now. It's about maintaining the freedoms necessary to prevent these sorts of things happening in the future. My life is certainly happier knowing that, for example, my Linux system is produced by an ecosystem of vendors who all know that introducing artificial restrictions in their software will simply encourage their customers to go elsewhere for compatible systems without those restrictions.
What kind of a world would it be if Microsoft Office had always been licensed under the GPL? A much, much better one - Microsoft would never have had the opportunity to create a false economy, and an illegal monopoly. And please, don't argue that the industry would have been smaller, or jobs lost - people are certainly prepared to pay for something that's of value, delivered to them by a company that offers good support and user experience. And you can't argue that MS's countless billions in stockpiled cash is generating too many jobs right now.
Anyway, I certainly am not about to start letting other pieces of software teach me the same lesson as MS Office.
If you must argue that it's "pragmatic" to keep some software closed, I would argue "only in the case in which they could never, ever become an indispensible piece of the world's information infrastructure". Software that falls into that category is likely to be so marginal in functionality that it wouldn't be pragmatic to use it anyway.
No, this is not an argument of pragmatism verses idealism. This is an argument about you fundamentally misunderstanding why many people would want to open source Java. There is no war between pragmatism and idealism. I would hope that we can have both. It's just that given a choice, I would ask that Sun open source Java. That is all.
And the reason why I called you a dolt is because you are one. If your best argument against free software is that the arguments are "tired", then you're flat out intellectually lazy. There have been plenty of people here making valid points regarding forking, on both sides of the debate. Plenty of people talking about standardisation. Again, plenty of valid points on both sides. My point was that I enjoy the freedom that comes with open sourcing software. If you want to make the point that having that freedom is a bad thing, by all means take me on. But don't just call my point "tired" and treat it as case closed.
I'm so sorry that it's so annoying to you to hear the real reasons why many people want Java to be Open Source, in this discussion forum about whether Java should be Open Source. Oh, I apologise for taking up valuable brain space that could be consumed by admiring the sound of your own voice, mister "I live in the real world, with real problems, spare me your highly relevant point in what is, at least in part, an idealogical debate".
No. This is how it was in the Unix world before the Web. This was/is the spirit behind Unix and the BSD license.
Oh, spare me. How far back do you want to go? If you like, let's go on a merry treasure hunt for the man or woman who came up with the idea of sharing or altruism. Heck, let's talk about Jesus for a while, shall we? He certainly had some strong ideas about putting the collective interest before yourself, but I'm pretty sure he didn't put the bible out under the BSD license.
The success of GNU/Linux and, to a lesser extent, the BSD's, inspired the modern Open Source software movement. Yes, they had predecessors, both directly and in spirit. How is your argument any more than tangentially related to what I was trying to say, anyway? Why did you pick out such an irrelevant tidbit to nit-pick? My overarching point, in case you were too busy gazing at the patterns in the carpet, was that free software has ideals beyond the creation of better software in less time. Simple. And, I would think, rather hard to refute, since those ideals are enshrined in black and white.
No, sir, it is YOU who used the "strawman" argument, right here: "Why do people just assume that saying the magic words "open source" will automatically improve a particular piece of software". I'm a free software advocate, yet I certainly never claimed that the GPL license automatically improves a piece of software. On the contrary, it probably often makes it worse. Maybe it makes certain software commercially unviable, though I doubt that's as certain as many people seem to think it is.
Next time, put your brain in gear before you start spouting mindless slashisms in the hope that one of them will stick and make you look intelligent.
Incidentally, to respond to your completely shabby and infantile line of so-called "reasoning":
One thing is for sure, not all software is ever going to be free.
You know what else? Not every country is going to be a true democracy, not every person on earth is going to live in peace, not every child is going to be born free of the AIDS virus, and not everybody with a keyboard is going to have a brain wired to their fingers. Just because the world isn't perfect is no reason to let go of your ideals - on the contrary, it's all the more reason to have them.
Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. When you rent a house, if you don't like any aspect of the house, you have a wide variety of different houses to choose from and, yes, if you choose to, you can build your own. But imagine a world in which 95% of the population was periodically forced to move to a new house in order to continue to receive mail. Or, imagine a world in which you couldn't simply buy a bare-bones house and modify it as you wished, but had to buy ONLY off-the-shelf, unmodifiable houses which couldn't be changed in any way.
I for one am thankful to the free-software programmers (of which I am not one), who gladly provide the cement, bricks, lavatories, occasionally complete houses (see Debian) that force the renters to at least afford the rest of us some flexibility in what we have to choose from.
You may say it's pragmatic to settle for non-free software so you can use the web, or whatever. But imagine if, tomorrow, everyone insisted that they would only buy free software from now on. Just a simple choice. Do you think the world would be a better or worse place? Do you think that convenience and interoperability would improve or go down? Do you think the longevity of data, the ability to read files on multiple platforms, or any other aspect of what you call convenience and I call freedom, would be affected negatively? Do you REALLY THINK that the software industry would collapse?
Particularly now that there are VIABLE alternatives to the closed-source monopolists, now is the time for people to put their foot down and insist on free software. I HONESTLY don't believe it will happen, but to be honest I'd rather have principles and vision that blindly accept the (unsatisfactory) status quo.
We understand the rational [sic] behind open source software. We just realize that not all of the software world needs to be (or indeed should be) open sourced.
Absolutely. Nothing needs to be open-sourced, made free, at all, ever. There is no need for software freedom. It's just highly desirable, in much the same way as freedom of the press, the freedom to own property, the freedom to tear apart your car and turn it into a battlemech, the freedom to form a political party or the freedom to move about constant surveillance. Now, nobody is asking for legislation to require software freedom - despite attempts my major software and media players to legislate in the other direction. We are simply asking people to make a choice, instead of blindly accepting closed-source software as the most pragmatic solution.
as far as your nausea at us pragmatists, without us, nothing would ever get done. Tell me - how's HURD coming along?
Wow - zing. Ouch. You sure put me in my box. How's IIS coming along? How's Windows Vista coming along? How's IE coming along? To be honest, even if no free software project had ever been completed, ever, I would still be a free software advocate. People didn't found the free software movement because they'd discovered some kind of development-methodology magic bullet. They did it because they wanted to ensure that the users of software had more freedom, more choice, with the code that ran on their computers. And they decided to implement that vision whether or not it made software development any easier or more economically viable.
Did you use MSN circa 1995? Before Microsoft was forced to embrace the web because open protocols running largely on free-software platforms threatened their dominance? It was a dull, closed, unimaginative world where you had to pay to play and everything went through Microsoft as the gatekeeper. Whenever I try to imagine a world without free software, that's what I imagine. You're welcome to it.
Rarely do the most vocal proponents of "open sourcing" something actually get involved and start contributing to the codebase. It's all about religion for the most part, unfortunately.
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest, NOT to contribute to the code, NOT to get something for free, or even to become the "commodity" implementation of a specification.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded. This is the original philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU project, who were collectively the inspiration for the "open source" movement.
So if you're wondering why anything less than a GPL license is unsatisfactory to the hairy, unwashed free-software factinista, why don't YOU look up the facts and get a clue about the software freedoms that may, one day, mean that your descendants can read e-books, watch movies and examine the collected creative output of humanity unencumbered by the imposed obscurity of closed-source software, DRM and other impositions on our freedom.
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Oh yes. That must be because Linux is installed by OEMs so much, that the developers behind it don't think about making it easy for an enduser to install - silly me.:
Note that I didn't say install, I said reinstall - it's a big difference. I tried to reinstall RedHat Fedora Core 4 just four weeks ago and it decided it should trash my existing Linux partitions - by default. Had I chosen not to blow them away, I guarantee you it wouldn't have preserved my existing system settings the way Windows does. (And I HATE Windows. I'm a Mac and Linux user myself.)
So yes, I have installed (and reinstalled) Linux recently, using the most popular commercial distro, and it frickin' sucks ass.
When Microsoft created the MCE remote, they simply copied the style of VCR one-function-per-button remotes. This is stupid and short-sighted - the reason VCR remotes evolved that way is because for many years VCR's couldn't overlay fancy animated menus on the screen that give the user a sense of context.
When Apple designed Front Row, they realised that because they have visual cues all over the screen, each of the six buttons can have several functions depending on the context. They just need enough buttons to navigate a menu system, and everything else is done on the screen.
Leave it to Microsoft to cram in the technology. Leave it to Apple to see the possibilities afforded by that technology.
... and with Google Maps I finally found a use for that information. I now put a Google Map at the end of every post. Why not? It's trivially easy!
Also, I include nearby sites and photos to enable geographic browsing, as a complement to direct links (contextual browsing) and technorati tags (semantic browsing).
wtf?! Did anyone else balk at erikharrison's arrogance in the blurb? "Slashdot isn't the place"? Oh, Lord Erik Harrison, please deign to share with us your wisdom which is so far beyond our knat-like comprehension! I bow before your too-good-for-slashdotness, and offer this animal sacrifice in exchange for your mercy.
This article really annoyed me. It is simply small-minded fear-mongering. Firefox is just the first version of a browser which seems certain to achieve real longevity and have a profound impact on the way we use the web. It is up against against the enormous momentum of Internet Explorer, which after Windows itself is probably the most formidable monopoly in the client PC market.
It is natural for the first iteration of the Firefox browser to approach a limit for its market penetration, due to compromises made in order to get a v1.0 release out the door. The next iteration will build on this great beginning, and hopefully prove that the Open Source development (and marketing) model is a force to be reckoned with in the commodity software marketplace.
To me it seems that this situation is somewhat analogous to XFree86 vs. X.Org. Everyone was frustrated with the zealoutry and purism of the core XF86 team, and X.Org was forked from it.
Just look how quickly XF86 became irrelevant and distros migrated to X.Org. Similarly, with a certain amount of refocusing on the server side of things, Ubuntu could actually become the new Debian, or at least provide a model from which such an entity could be formed.
I hate to break it to you, but that's still reactive. ISS had to tell them there was a problem. Proactive would involve defensive programming which entirely avoids the logical constructs that _might_ lead to security issues.
What creative seem to miss that Apple gets is that the consumer market for high-tech products has changed.
While there are just as many, or more, geeks buying these things as ever, the real reason for Apple's success has been developing and marketing complex devices in a way that is not threatening or intimidating for Joe Schmoe. So as long as Creative makes players that look like a Klingon's wristband and Apple makes products that look like the finest polished ivory, I think I know who will have the greater market share.
I have spoken to an LSM/SELinux hacker who stated without a hint of doubt that Brad (the GRSecurity guy) is an obnoxious bonehead who will never get his patches accepted because:
(a) SELinux already does similar stuff in a far less intrusive way (performance-wise)
(b) He's a prat
Linus has decided on a secure linux architecture. It's called SELinux. It is evolving slowly but stands a real chance of achieving the holy grail of security, being thorough, efficient and easy enough to use.
Dan
Slashdot Mirror
You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.
Wait, wait... you don't see IBM giving away AIX despite the fact that it only runs on their hardware? And this means it, therefore, could legitimately be given away? Why? So someone can say "Boy, this disk sure is shiny. I bet it'll do amazing things when I put it in a machine that can actually run it. Screw it - I'm buying an IBM mainframe!".
Did this post make sense to anyone? Am I an idiot?
As someone who builds search engines for a living, I think I can tell you why this is a Very Hard Problem.
Do you know WHY Google is so effective as a search engine?
1. They have a massive index, replicated at least 3x. An unimaginable amount of data.
2. They have a huge, very tightly-integrated, highly-redundant and speed-optimised hardware platform tied to a very flexible software platform with constant monitoring, seamless failovers etc.
3. They have access to far more data than just the pages themselves. They also have email, chats, search logs, ad logs, click logs, etc. All indexed in one place, and all rich sources of data for spell-checking, re-ranking and so forth. They do extensive user-profiling using My Search History. Who would you trust more with you personal indexes - just Google or potentially everyone on earth? I know which is the lesser of two evils there.
Now, Google has struggled for YEARS just to get their search engine to work at all, in probably the most tightly controlled environment in the world. The problems Google is dealing with are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE higher for P2P systems, because you can't trust hosts, you can't monitor them closely, they all have different amounts of storage, possibly HUGE latencies, etc etc.
One of Google's great successes has been in making people TAKE FOR GRANTED the idea that if you put in a bunch of terms and click "search", the results come back almost instantly. Who wants to go back to the days of waiting seconds or minutes for a search to complete? Not me, that's for damn sure.
I think P2P search WILL happen, just not for general purpose searching over the web. I think it will happen over socially clustered indexes, e.g. of people's shared media files.
The time is most certainly NOT now.
Wow, what a concept. That I could desire something for different reasons than Sun does. Of course they're not going to Open Source java for my reasons, but that's no reason for me not to hope they do anyway - whatever their reasons are.
I also hope that Microsoft opens the source to MS Office. Now, I'm not an idiot. I know they're not going to do it for some kind of free-software ideal. But they may do it if the market starts insisting on Open-Source software. Or they may do it because an open-source alternative is eating their lunch, just to compete. Microsoft released a free (as in beer) web browser because Netscape changed the rules of the marketplace. MS's move would normally have been commercial suicide, but they were forced to do it because of market conditions.
Sun won't open Java for altruistic reasons, but it doesn't mean they won't do it. We, as consumers, are the marketplace. If we want an open source Java, we just have to change our spending habits.
As for the whole thing about Linus' opinions on open source, I'm sure they're more nuanced than "RMS is a fool, every idea he ever had is unrealistic". It's possible for two people to disagree but still fundamentally be on the same side. I am sure Linus would rather live in a world of Open Source software than one in which the majority is closed, he's just not as extreme as RMS in that view.
Again, the disagreement between Eric Raymond and RMS is not one of absolute moral polarisation, but rather of degree and methodology. Both support the opening of source code, and their reasons may overlap. RMS is more idealistic, ESR more business-focused, but they're both in our camp. This kind of debate is healthy for the free software movement, and we are stronger for it, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to then say "this means that we shouldn't open source anything whose functionality is not going to be materially improved by it".
Uhh.. wouldn't he? Linus chose to use the GPL for Linux. Doesn't that endorsement (and huge personal sacrifice) say anything to you about his opinion of free software? Way to back up your argument, argu-man.
Second, what has this do with SUN?Absolutely nothing. It is merely the opinion of many people calling for Sun to open-source Java. Sure, there are many business reasons why it would be a good idea for Sun to license the Java source under the GPL. One is securing the support of the vast army of open-source programmers to ensure that Java works on all of the (increasingly common) open-source platforms. Another is countering the encroachment of .NET. Having free source code available is a very good way to gain mindshare among the technical elite of the computer world, as these people enjoy being able to tear code apart and put it back together again, and many of them also have a say in the business decisions made by their employers.
But those are not my reasons. At least, not those alone. Let me draw an analogy: There is no pragmatic reason why I would call on the US government to try or release Australian Guantanemo detaineee David Hicks. I just call for that because it seems like the right thing to do. It's not pragmatic for the US government to do it, but it just seems like the right thing to do. No, I'm not equating closed-source to the failure of justice, but I am saying that sometimes people call for things despite the fact that it's not in their target's interests to comply. But in the commercial world, as in democracy, if enough voices start saying the same thing, the rules change.
At least, I still like to hope so.
Geez, where do you people get off anyway, dissing this particular point of view? There's a whole bunch of reasons why people are pro-Free-Software - most of them either because they like to get stuff for free or they like tweaking the code or they want to become the commodity implementation of Specification-X whatever. I'm not pretending my reasons should be Sun's reasons. But they're still my reasons, and they're still valid.
By licensing Java's code with the GPL or similar, you essentially ensure that the code base will be free to look at, modify or do whatever you wish, provided you offer others the same rights on your derived code.
This means that if someone (say, Sun) decides that the next "official" version of Java will only run on Windows and OSX, but not Linux, I or someone else can still maintain the old Linux version, fixing bugs or enhancing it as necessary, perhaps keeping it up to date with the spec, and not be stuck in the past because we have no way to modify the software.
Another reason: say in the next version of Java Sun decides to include DRM software which restricts what I can do with my media files in order to comply with US laws. But I live in Australia! In your pragmatic world, maybe Sun would release a version for Australians which doesn't have the DRM restrictions, but in my pragmatic world this rarely happens, so let's assume in this case that it doesn't. So what do I do? I don't have the resources to re-implement the Java spec (as some others are doing, thank heavens), so I'm simply stuck - my Java-based media player software won't let me exercise my legal rights over the content, and there's simply nothing I can do about it.
In other words, maintaining your freedom to modify software that you use is not about what's happening right now. It's about maintaining the freedoms necessary to prevent these sorts of things happening in the future. My life is certainly happier knowing that, for example, my Linux system is produced by an ecosystem of vendors who all know that introducing artificial restrictions in their software will simply encourage their customers to go elsewhere for compatible systems without those restrictions.
What kind of a world would it be if Microsoft Office had always been licensed under the GPL? A much, much better one - Microsoft would never have had the opportunity to create a false economy, and an illegal monopoly. And please, don't argue that the industry would have been smaller, or jobs lost - people are certainly prepared to pay for something that's of value, delivered to them by a company that offers good support and user experience. And you can't argue that MS's countless billions in stockpiled cash is generating too many jobs right now.
Anyway, I certainly am not about to start letting other pieces of software teach me the same lesson as MS Office.
If you must argue that it's "pragmatic" to keep some software closed, I would argue "only in the case in which they could never, ever become an indispensible piece of the world's information infrastructure". Software that falls into that category is likely to be so marginal in functionality that it wouldn't be pragmatic to use it anyway.
No, this is not an argument of pragmatism verses idealism. This is an argument about you fundamentally misunderstanding why many people would want to open source Java. There is no war between pragmatism and idealism. I would hope that we can have both. It's just that given a choice, I would ask that Sun open source Java. That is all.
And the reason why I called you a dolt is because you are one. If your best argument against free software is that the arguments are "tired", then you're flat out intellectually lazy. There have been plenty of people here making valid points regarding forking, on both sides of the debate. Plenty of people talking about standardisation. Again, plenty of valid points on both sides. My point was that I enjoy the freedom that comes with open sourcing software. If you want to make the point that having that freedom is a bad thing, by all means take me on. But don't just call my point "tired" and treat it as case closed.
I'm so sorry that it's so annoying to you to hear the real reasons why many people want Java to be Open Source, in this discussion forum about whether Java should be Open Source. Oh, I apologise for taking up valuable brain space that could be consumed by admiring the sound of your own voice, mister "I live in the real world, with real problems, spare me your highly relevant point in what is, at least in part, an idealogical debate".
Oh, spare me. How far back do you want to go? If you like, let's go on a merry treasure hunt for the man or woman who came up with the idea of sharing or altruism. Heck, let's talk about Jesus for a while, shall we? He certainly had some strong ideas about putting the collective interest before yourself, but I'm pretty sure he didn't put the bible out under the BSD license.
The success of GNU/Linux and, to a lesser extent, the BSD's, inspired the modern Open Source software movement. Yes, they had predecessors, both directly and in spirit. How is your argument any more than tangentially related to what I was trying to say, anyway? Why did you pick out such an irrelevant tidbit to nit-pick? My overarching point, in case you were too busy gazing at the patterns in the carpet, was that free software has ideals beyond the creation of better software in less time. Simple. And, I would think, rather hard to refute, since those ideals are enshrined in black and white.
No, sir, it is YOU who used the "strawman" argument, right here: "Why do people just assume that saying the magic words "open source" will automatically improve a particular piece of software". I'm a free software advocate, yet I certainly never claimed that the GPL license automatically improves a piece of software. On the contrary, it probably often makes it worse. Maybe it makes certain software commercially unviable, though I doubt that's as certain as many people seem to think it is.
Next time, put your brain in gear before you start spouting mindless slashisms in the hope that one of them will stick and make you look intelligent.
Incidentally, to respond to your completely shabby and infantile line of so-called "reasoning":
One thing is for sure, not all software is ever going to be free.
You know what else? Not every country is going to be a true democracy, not every person on earth is going to live in peace, not every child is going to be born free of the AIDS virus, and not everybody with a keyboard is going to have a brain wired to their fingers. Just because the world isn't perfect is no reason to let go of your ideals - on the contrary, it's all the more reason to have them.
Dolt.
Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. When you rent a house, if you don't like any aspect of the house, you have a wide variety of different houses to choose from and, yes, if you choose to, you can build your own. But imagine a world in which 95% of the population was periodically forced to move to a new house in order to continue to receive mail. Or, imagine a world in which you couldn't simply buy a bare-bones house and modify it as you wished, but had to buy ONLY off-the-shelf, unmodifiable houses which couldn't be changed in any way.
I for one am thankful to the free-software programmers (of which I am not one), who gladly provide the cement, bricks, lavatories, occasionally complete houses (see Debian) that force the renters to at least afford the rest of us some flexibility in what we have to choose from.
You may say it's pragmatic to settle for non-free software so you can use the web, or whatever. But imagine if, tomorrow, everyone insisted that they would only buy free software from now on. Just a simple choice. Do you think the world would be a better or worse place? Do you think that convenience and interoperability would improve or go down? Do you think the longevity of data, the ability to read files on multiple platforms, or any other aspect of what you call convenience and I call freedom, would be affected negatively? Do you REALLY THINK that the software industry would collapse?
Particularly now that there are VIABLE alternatives to the closed-source monopolists, now is the time for people to put their foot down and insist on free software. I HONESTLY don't believe it will happen, but to be honest I'd rather have principles and vision that blindly accept the (unsatisfactory) status quo.
Absolutely. Nothing needs to be open-sourced, made free, at all, ever. There is no need for software freedom. It's just highly desirable, in much the same way as freedom of the press, the freedom to own property, the freedom to tear apart your car and turn it into a battlemech, the freedom to form a political party or the freedom to move about constant surveillance. Now, nobody is asking for legislation to require software freedom - despite attempts my major software and media players to legislate in the other direction. We are simply asking people to make a choice, instead of blindly accepting closed-source software as the most pragmatic solution.
as far as your nausea at us pragmatists, without us, nothing would ever get done. Tell me - how's HURD coming along?Wow - zing. Ouch. You sure put me in my box. How's IIS coming along? How's Windows Vista coming along? How's IE coming along? To be honest, even if no free software project had ever been completed, ever, I would still be a free software advocate. People didn't found the free software movement because they'd discovered some kind of development-methodology magic bullet. They did it because they wanted to ensure that the users of software had more freedom, more choice, with the code that ran on their computers. And they decided to implement that vision whether or not it made software development any easier or more economically viable.
Did you use MSN circa 1995? Before Microsoft was forced to embrace the web because open protocols running largely on free-software platforms threatened their dominance? It was a dull, closed, unimaginative world where you had to pay to play and everything went through Microsoft as the gatekeeper. Whenever I try to imagine a world without free software, that's what I imagine. You're welcome to it.
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest, NOT to contribute to the code, NOT to get something for free, or even to become the "commodity" implementation of a specification.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded. This is the original philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU project, who were collectively the inspiration for the "open source" movement.
So if you're wondering why anything less than a GPL license is unsatisfactory to the hairy, unwashed free-software factinista, why don't YOU look up the facts and get a clue about the software freedoms that may, one day, mean that your descendants can read e-books, watch movies and examine the collected creative output of humanity unencumbered by the imposed obscurity of closed-source software, DRM and other impositions on our freedom.
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
"Every robot design expands until it can fetch beer. Those which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
Note that I didn't say install, I said reinstall - it's a big difference. I tried to reinstall RedHat Fedora Core 4 just four weeks ago and it decided it should trash my existing Linux partitions - by default. Had I chosen not to blow them away, I guarantee you it wouldn't have preserved my existing system settings the way Windows does. (And I HATE Windows. I'm a Mac and Linux user myself.)
So yes, I have installed (and reinstalled) Linux recently, using the most popular commercial distro, and it frickin' sucks ass.
To give the Microsoft engineers some credit, at least they anticipated that people would need to reinstall their OS.
When Apple designed Front Row, they realised that because they have visual cues all over the screen, each of the six buttons can have several functions depending on the context. They just need enough buttons to navigate a menu system, and everything else is done on the screen.
Leave it to Microsoft to cram in the technology. Leave it to Apple to see the possibilities afforded by that technology.
Dan
Also, I include nearby sites and photos to enable geographic browsing, as a complement to direct links (contextual browsing) and technorati tags (semantic browsing).
Neat!
Sheesh!
It is natural for the first iteration of the Firefox browser to approach a limit for its market penetration, due to compromises made in order to get a v1.0 release out the door. The next iteration will build on this great beginning, and hopefully prove that the Open Source development (and marketing) model is a force to be reckoned with in the commodity software marketplace.
Nothing to see here, please move on.
Now we know where all the swearing in the leaked Win2K source code came from.
Just look how quickly XF86 became irrelevant and distros migrated to X.Org. Similarly, with a certain amount of refocusing on the server side of things, Ubuntu could actually become the new Debian, or at least provide a model from which such an entity could be formed.
I think you mean "GNU" distribution then.
I hate to break it to you, but that's still reactive. ISS had to tell them there was a problem. Proactive would involve defensive programming which entirely avoids the logical constructs that _might_ lead to security issues.
While there are just as many, or more, geeks buying these things as ever, the real reason for Apple's success has been developing and marketing complex devices in a way that is not threatening or intimidating for Joe Schmoe. So as long as Creative makes players that look like a Klingon's wristband and Apple makes products that look like the finest polished ivory, I think I know who will have the greater market share.
Dan.
I have spoken to an LSM/SELinux hacker who stated without a hint of doubt that Brad (the GRSecurity guy) is an obnoxious bonehead who will never get his patches accepted because: (a) SELinux already does similar stuff in a far less intrusive way (performance-wise) (b) He's a prat Linus has decided on a secure linux architecture. It's called SELinux. It is evolving slowly but stands a real chance of achieving the holy grail of security, being thorough, efficient and easy enough to use. Dan
Posts that say that *BSD is dying... are dying.