You're looking at this from the perspective of someone who understands and remembers the differences in a dozen config file formats. Most people don't.
With the average file it takes less than a second for a person to figure out how things are delimited.
Replacing that mess with a single standard format will make things *more* human readable IMHO
If Bob writes a program, releases it under the GPL, and incorporates contributed code into the project, that's another can of worms. I would think if he wanted to "go private" with the code base at that point he would need to get the permission of everyone who contributed any code, much like Mozilla did. If he couldn't get their permission he would have to rewrite those chunks of code.
If you can, you should have contributors confirm that they are assigning copyright to the owner of the project. Just via email is fine. That is pretty much what is necessary to make sure confusion doesn't occur down the road.
Another way to do it is for the author of the project, and all contributors, to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. This is one way of signifying to the contributors that you won't abscond with their work, and at the same time have a nice, consolidated ownership.
I imagine if you do that you're stuck with the GPL, though.
It wasn't on any debian.org main pages and chances are people were either going to that specific page to see if their mouths would help speed an X upgrade along or they probably already knew Branden's humour. I frankly found it quite amusing when I first saw it.
I did too, but that is because I prefer laughing at Debian users to being one.
They aren't there to represent "the Administration", they were being sent to represent the country. You know, the United States of America? The country's telecom industry, but still.
Another thing that really hurt borland was when the stock market crash happened and put an end to the merger between Borland and Corel.
Yeah. And in a larger sense, Borland pissed away a lot of good products because it didn't know what to do with them (not because they didn't have the engineering talent to maintain them). They would have had a heck of a time competing with Microsoft Office but they could have at least maintained a niche for technical people using office apps, technical writers and engineers. Ah well.
First, that quote: did I write that? I honestly don't remember writing that, although it might be the crack I'm smoking. "Personal issues" doesn't sound like something I would ordinarily say.
You still haven't told me why people should not sue them though? If I was a corrupt business person (like you say all business people are) then why shouldn't I keep filing suits against MS and collecting hundreds of millions of dollars? Seems like easy money to me.
Ah, I wasn't clear enough, I guess. The main problem in my view is that the legal system allows this. As you say, it's pretty rational behavior, and to be expected. Deplored, but expected.
I'm not sure I'd want to say that "all business people are corrupt", I would be more inclined to say business and the legal system are often corrupt. Which I admit is a bit of a cop-out, since our legal system is largely something we control (in theory), but still.
I guess that isn't totally fair, either. "Immature" might be a better way of describing our legal system's approach to dealing with IP issues or modern antitrust law. Although "corrupt" comes to mind a lot, too.
I know of ehtical business people.
Sure, I do too. Ask them how they feel about the system as a whole...
Wow, so they paid out two hundred million dollars even though they knew they were going to win huh?
Happens all the time. Removing the uncertainty of pending litigation would cause the stock price to boost pretty quickly, and sometimes it's just cheaper to settle. At the time their legal team had bigger worries to deal with, I would think.
Politically it was smart to give Borland a little boost, just as they gave Apple a little boost five or six years ago. They recognize that the next Apple or Borland might not be as incompetant as the ones we have now, and might be more of a threat.
MS plays by no rules, they have no ethics or morals.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the typical slashdotter is this: NOBODY in American business has much in the way of morals.
That said, I spend time occasionally reading about business and I wonder how anyone can attack Microsoft's morality with a straight face. Never mind the fact that there is real, live evil being done by global energy and mining concerns, stuff that, you know, actually kills people. Even by the tame standards of the software industry, Microsoft is basically okay. Compare them to somebody like CA, whose whole structure involves hoovering up other companies for their technology and firing everyone who works for them.
The "evil" thing about Microsoft is that they are a tough competitor and a dangerous partner. Wah.
And yet Borland sued MS for poaching their top talent and MS settled for a a couple of hundred million.
It made good economic sense for them to do that. I doubt they, or the people they hired, thought they did anything wrong. The whiners at Borland probably did, but the simple truth is that they couldn't keep their people because they were fuckups who were not exactly the greatest bunch in the world to work for. So some of them left, boo hoo.
You must admit that it's pretty damned hard to run a company when Bill Gates wants to put you out of business.
No shit? I guess that explains why everyone and their mother uses the legal system to stick knives in Microsoft. It beats having to compete with them in the marketplace. In Borland's case it wasn't really enough to help much, since at the end of the day you actually have to sell something worth buying.
It's amazing to me Bill failed with borland I guess we can thank the court system for that.
Borland is effectively dead. The courts had nothing to do with it. Borland's crappy management team and crappy products had a lot to do with it. At this point it is a minor miracle they have any revenue at all.
Incidentally, it's mostly management failures that are fucking them, they still have some great engineers. That just isn't enough. (and I'm sure pointing that out is just as heinous of me as violating the "Microsoft is the greatest evil in the world" ethic here)
At one time, Borland compilers were among the best in the world. Microsoft wanted to cripple them -- so they offered *all* of their top engineers double their salary at Borland to work for Microsoft. I think something like 40 engineers defected. Borland products have *sucked* since.
I know we are all supposed to hate Microsoft and believe them to be the cause of all that is wrong in the world, but Borland hosed themselves. Does the word "Inprise" mean anything to you?
Borland made some very, very bad decisions which made abandoning ship appealing to the top people. It's not as if Microsoft imposed an utterly retarded management on Borland during the mid-nineties.
It already sounds like a bloody helicopter and now you want me to spend 10cents making it even louder !
Wow !
Unless the fan you add to cool your harddrive is louder than your CPU fan, which is unlikely if you choose the right fan, the perceptible amount of noise outside the case will not increase. Try it.
If they look at the drivers, it's just as if I had looked at the Windows source code and wrote my own product with it. Not going to fly legally. They need a clean room implementation, just like we do.
No, there are no anti-reverse-engineering type clauses in the GPL.
You can complain all you want...but the chance that something will be done within a timeframe that's suitable to YOU is about, oh.....none. At least with OSS I have the *option* to do something about it if I so choose. With proprietary software I have to wait...and hope. There are no guarantees whatsoever that *my* particular problem will be addressed to my satisfaction.
Isn't this whole issue what expensive "Service Level Agreements" with software vendors are meant to address? I am pretty sure this is why IBM has become largely agnostic about whether it sells closed- or open-source software for a given project, or even whether it spends money developing one kind of software or the other. They will make money either way, selling expensive support.
There is the separate issue of liability, for example what happens if a software failure kills someone. I think it is telling that this hasn't been more an issue with the public. As shitty a state as software engineering is in, most of the software used in elevators or brakes (for example) cannot be THAT bad, or there would be more lawsuits.
I realize that since this is slashdot there's an implicit "har har Microsoft sucks lol" to everything that is said here. Even so... who else accepts any sort of "accountability" (or rather, liability) for software bugs, in the way you describe here?
Imagine the liability if they accepted responsibility for the work lost to a crash, or time spent finding a work-around for their bugs?
You aren't windows-bashing, so don't expect to get modded up. But yes, it's telling that binary compatibility sucks so hard on Linux. I sometimes wonder if it's just a cynical way of keeping anyone in their right mind from developing closed-source software on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
With the average file it takes less than a second for a person to figure out how things are delimited.
Not if that format is XML.
WTF?
Just when you thought Slashdot's editorial standards had pretty much bottomed out...
If you can, you should have contributors confirm that they are assigning copyright to the owner of the project. Just via email is fine. That is pretty much what is necessary to make sure confusion doesn't occur down the road.
Another way to do it is for the author of the project, and all contributors, to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. This is one way of signifying to the contributors that you won't abscond with their work, and at the same time have a nice, consolidated ownership.
I imagine if you do that you're stuck with the GPL, though.
I did too, but that is because I prefer laughing at Debian users to being one.
Where I come from we have a saying. Shut the @$@@ up is a dish best served cold.
It isn't as though those are the only two options...
They aren't there to represent "the Administration", they were being sent to represent the country. You know, the United States of America? The country's telecom industry, but still.
Yeah. And in a larger sense, Borland pissed away a lot of good products because it didn't know what to do with them (not because they didn't have the engineering talent to maintain them). They would have had a heck of a time competing with Microsoft Office but they could have at least maintained a niche for technical people using office apps, technical writers and engineers. Ah well.
Ah, I wasn't clear enough, I guess. The main problem in my view is that the legal system allows this. As you say, it's pretty rational behavior, and to be expected. Deplored, but expected.
I'm not sure I'd want to say that "all business people are corrupt", I would be more inclined to say business and the legal system are often corrupt. Which I admit is a bit of a cop-out, since our legal system is largely something we control (in theory), but still.
I guess that isn't totally fair, either. "Immature" might be a better way of describing our legal system's approach to dealing with IP issues or modern antitrust law. Although "corrupt" comes to mind a lot, too.
Sure, I do too. Ask them how they feel about the system as a whole...
Happens all the time. Removing the uncertainty of pending litigation would cause the stock price to boost pretty quickly, and sometimes it's just cheaper to settle. At the time their legal team had bigger worries to deal with, I would think.
Politically it was smart to give Borland a little boost, just as they gave Apple a little boost five or six years ago. They recognize that the next Apple or Borland might not be as incompetant as the ones we have now, and might be more of a threat.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the typical slashdotter is this: NOBODY in American business has much in the way of morals.
That said, I spend time occasionally reading about business and I wonder how anyone can attack Microsoft's morality with a straight face. Never mind the fact that there is real, live evil being done by global energy and mining concerns, stuff that, you know, actually kills people. Even by the tame standards of the software industry, Microsoft is basically okay. Compare them to somebody like CA, whose whole structure involves hoovering up other companies for their technology and firing everyone who works for them.
The "evil" thing about Microsoft is that they are a tough competitor and a dangerous partner. Wah.
It made good economic sense for them to do that. I doubt they, or the people they hired, thought they did anything wrong. The whiners at Borland probably did, but the simple truth is that they couldn't keep their people because they were fuckups who were not exactly the greatest bunch in the world to work for. So some of them left, boo hoo.
No shit? I guess that explains why everyone and their mother uses the legal system to stick knives in Microsoft. It beats having to compete with them in the marketplace. In Borland's case it wasn't really enough to help much, since at the end of the day you actually have to sell something worth buying.
Borland is effectively dead. The courts had nothing to do with it. Borland's crappy management team and crappy products had a lot to do with it. At this point it is a minor miracle they have any revenue at all.
Incidentally, it's mostly management failures that are fucking them, they still have some great engineers. That just isn't enough. (and I'm sure pointing that out is just as heinous of me as violating the "Microsoft is the greatest evil in the world" ethic here)
I know we are all supposed to hate Microsoft and believe them to be the cause of all that is wrong in the world, but Borland hosed themselves. Does the word "Inprise" mean anything to you?
Borland made some very, very bad decisions which made abandoning ship appealing to the top people. It's not as if Microsoft imposed an utterly retarded management on Borland during the mid-nineties.
Unless the fan you add to cool your harddrive is louder than your CPU fan, which is unlikely if you choose the right fan, the perceptible amount of noise outside the case will not increase. Try it.
No, there are no anti-reverse-engineering type clauses in the GPL.
They could not use those drivers regardless. Porting UNIX drivers to Linux and vice versa is a little bit more involved than porting a shell script.
They can look at the drivers to learn what they need to know, which might be a good start.
Not to mention the costs of trying someone in federal court.
With the wiki model, whoever has the most time to spend editing the work of others writes history.
Isn't this whole issue what expensive "Service Level Agreements" with software vendors are meant to address? I am pretty sure this is why IBM has become largely agnostic about whether it sells closed- or open-source software for a given project, or even whether it spends money developing one kind of software or the other. They will make money either way, selling expensive support.
There is the separate issue of liability, for example what happens if a software failure kills someone. I think it is telling that this hasn't been more an issue with the public. As shitty a state as software engineering is in, most of the software used in elevators or brakes (for example) cannot be THAT bad, or there would be more lawsuits.
Ten years ago. Didn't you get the memo?
You aren't windows-bashing, so don't expect to get modded up. But yes, it's telling that binary compatibility sucks so hard on Linux. I sometimes wonder if it's just a cynical way of keeping anyone in their right mind from developing closed-source software on Linux.
I bought a few copies of SuSE professional too. Unfortunately, we represent about 30% of their paid user base. :)
I've heard rumors about those internets.
Right. I'm sure that's exactly why Sun's license for OpenSolaris will require them to do neither.