I don't think you've thought this through. If MS Europe split from their parent company, they wouldn't have a product. It's only the fact that Microsoft is their parent company that gives them the legal right to produce copies of Microsoft software for sale.
The members of the EU have agreed to be bound by it's decisions, subject to certain restrictions. If the EU decided that a proper course of action was to seize all MS properties, funds, intellectual property as punishment for violation of the law (which has already been signed by the EU members) the individual police forces would be directed by their governments to enforce that decree. It's not like this would be some arbitrary judgment either. They have been found guilty of breaking the law.
I don't think you've thought this through. If MS Europe split from their parent company, they wouldn't have a product. It's only the fact that Microsoft is their parent company that gives them the legal right to produce copies of Microsoft software for sale.
You do realize who writes and enforces those laws right? The governments represented by the EU. The EU courts could easily declare the copyrights and patents of MS to be the property of MS Europe within the EU. For that matter they could just declare them null and void and let anyone who wanted to make copies and sell them. That, however, is very unlikely. The aforementioned scenario would be much more stable.
But this assumes that technology R&D is not driven by money....researchers (ie, developers) have the time to work pro-bono - when a lot of us do not.
No it doesn't. Many people get paid to write open source code. The money is there and being spent. Ever hear of IBM?
It also assumes that Open Source means someone else out there wants to develop exactly what you want, in the way you want it.
No it doesn't. If I write a movie player, someone can take that code and use it in a real-time video editor. I can take some of that code and make my movie player better. Lots of code is reusable and any overlap helps both parties.
finally, you assume that Open Source is an automobile to the Closed Source horse. I can't say I currently agree with that, unless you could perchance give me an example of a closed source app that is bested by an open source app?
Are you joking? Trolling? How about Apache vs. IIS? How about emacs vs. notepad? Examples of open source projects that are better than closed source ones are innumerable. As a customer Apache is so much better than IIS that there is no comparison. First it's free. Second it is more secure. Third bug fixes are more frequent. Fourth it is more stable. Fifth, it is more modifiable. Sixth, it is more portable. Seventh, it has more add-ons. Eighth, it's still free.
Open source is better for customers and smart customers are starting to realize that.
I don't see why Microsoft should have to turn over their source code without any kind of compensation. They did develop the product, and it seems to me that they should be able to profit from it. In my opinion the demands of the EU are in this case unreasonable.
It's because they broke the law. It's a punishment that attempts to correct some of the damage they did. It's like this a guy mugs and old lady takes the cash in her purse and bets it all on a number in roulette. He wins big then the cops nab him. The judge just said, "the money he won goes to charity as part of his punishment."
forcing MS to license any of their software under the GPL seems grossly anti-capitalistic.
No country in the world has a straight capitalism. The reason is that in an unmanaged capitalism, eventually all the money gravitates to one place. One monopoly is leveraged into another then another and eventually there is only one company. Monopolies break all the advantages offered by capitalism. They remove all incentive for innovation, supply an demand, and for making the customer happy.
Allowing MS to leverage one monopoly into multiple monopolies breaks capitalism, which is why monopolies have to follow special rules. Get it?
The other option is for Microsoft to just stop selling and supporting software in the EU. I honestly believe the EU would recant if MS pulled something like this.
I take it you failed both math and law classes in high school?
No one walks away from 25 billion in profit a year to avoid being fined 1.4 billion. No one with any brains creates a giant new market for their competition. No one in their right mind refuses to comply with the people who direct the army and police.
If Ballmer tried this he'd be fired by the end of the day. If the board of directors all went insane and did not fire him the EU would direct MS Europe to split from their parent company and comply with the orders. If they still refused they'd toss the European director in a prison and tell the next in command to comply.
I don't see an advantage here on -any- scale. Giving away intellectual property is giving someone else the opportunity to make money off of my hard work without any rewards to me.
Open Source licensing is not about adding more ways to make money for the developer. It is about making a superior product. 200 years ago horse stable owners might have said, "I don't see the advantage to selling automobiles. I mean if their are no horses that need grooming, feeding, or stabling I see no advantage to selling them over just selling wagons and horses like I do now."
They were right too. It's just that the customers wanted something better. Open source software is better for the customer. If customers are smart they will start moving towards and demanding open source. This might make it harder for you to make money. Deal with it.
Some of us, however, would prefer to move into and get a head start on this newfangled automobile thing. Largely because a lot of us are not just trying to make money, we're also software customers. The motivation for us is that we can develop something to do what we want, or what our company wants and then get free improvements to it for the open source community. Or if we need a solution, we can work with an already existing code base to get exactly what we need and save time and money.
it kills IP when my input into the project is not directly linked to any funding;
I agree that you should get paid for your input to a project you create or make a modification to. The trick here is that this funding has to come from one or more user's of the project. Ideally, funding would be along the lines of:
Kmart wants some software so they start an open source project and they hire someone to write it. They don't want to be locked into a vendor and they would like free random improvements, but they don't really need them. Piggly Wiggy likes the project and adopts it in their own stores. They hire a developer to modify it for them and make a few particular improvements. Kmart gets the improvements for free and they are happy. Piggly Wiggly gets to use the software for much less money than writing their own so they are happy. Both benefit from bug fixes contributed by the community or by developers hired by one another. Developers are paid by whoever wants a change, improvement, bug fix, or support.
This model for open source development is a little backwards from what we usually see. Usually the software comes before the demand. The other problem with this is that if you come up with a great idea for improving a project, you need to get one or more companies who use that project to pay you to develop the idea. That is the step many developers miss.
The main problem with this model is that innovation needs backing if it is to financially successful. Entrepreneurs need to do something novel and beat everyone else to market, or they need to sell people before they start coding. Three things help mitigate this. First many people just want to code for fun, or make something work for them. They don't care about making money. Second, government research grants and academic institutions will work on open source projects without requiring a pay off. Third, for projects vital to large enterprises they are often more than happy to pay one or more full time developers to "work on" a project even if their is nothing they really need changed. This is just so that they have a knowledgeable source should they need it. This funds innovation to everyone's benefit.
If I develop A, I still see there is no protection keeping company M from reselling A and making additional money selling add-ons; all for a product that I created. M owes me no money, nor do the add-ons garner me any royalties.
That is correct. Developers need to arrange to be paid for a project before they do it. They need to find something someone needs and fulfill that need. GNU licenses generally pay the developer back with more code, not with money. They are very beneficial to the users of software and not so much for the developer. That is why the developer needs a sponsor.
I know many developers do not like to hear that. In the U.S.A. their is an attitude where if you make something work very well, you should become rich and famous for it. Well, with GNU licensing you may become famous, but the riches will have to follow the fame. One great idea, coded and released as GNU open source will likely not make you rich.
I would say that RedHat is a perfect example of an open source initiative that is used as "strategic choice" and why would this business model not work with databases?
I disagree. Redhat relies upon revenue from services and support, to pay the bills. A more reliable model is to garner revenue from development as directed by your customers. That is not to say that you should not offer services and support, it is just that relying upon it is dangerous. Redhat has motivation right now to make their products rely upon the services and support they offer. This might mean tying into custom services they offer. It might mean making support necessary by keeping the the product hard to use. Neither is good for the customer. Now this might be corrected if another company were to come in, grab Redhat's code and start competing by making a more use friendly and cheaper version. The problem is, this disrupts the financial stability of the big developers. It could lead to Redhat laying off half their employees a few years after they grab a significant market. That is why I advocate making products easy, not tied to any vendor's services, and making money from the development first and foremost. This development may be customized code, code fixes, or new features. I really think Redhat needs to look to the sustainability of a model based upon support.
"closed source has no real advantage on open source." -->Except for that little thing called "Developers getting paid"
You're almost right here, but not quite. There are many business models that allow developers of open source software to be paid. The problem is, their is not a widespread and accepted method for funding open source technologies, that does not bring with it some disadvantages.
Redhat's model for example is to develop software that is open source and sell support and services for that software. It is a functional method and works for quite a few companies. The disadvantage that comes with it is that the business model encourages software that makes the user more reliant on services and support.
Other companies develop both open and closed source software, which they bundle together. This model works because they get paid directly for the closed source software, and still get the advantages of open source for some of their product. The disadvantage is that they are tied to closed source for part of their product, with the disadvantages of that development model.
Some companies use open source products and pay developers to modify it to their needs, fix bugs, and provide support. This works well for large companies because it gives them the advantages of open source, but for smaller companies, who cannot afford to hire a developer it requires either that they hire an outside firm (same problem as Redhat) or that they coordinate with other small companies to jointly pay developers. The problem with this model is that their is no easy way to organize it, and smaller companies rarely can be trusted to look at the long term benefits. They are also motivated to try to shift as much of the financial burden onto others as possible and "leech" software without contributing.
I think this last model is actually the most workable in the long term. Eventually I think all the major players will come around and realize that by sharing both software and development costs they win in the end and developers still get paid.
Many people think this will never happen and maybe they are right. I think the advantages of open source (trustable code, no vendor lock-in, code that will never go away, more stable and secure code, more flexible and customizable code, and much, much less expensive software solutions) are just too big of an advantage to be ignored. Big businesses do very stupid things and things that serve the executives more than the shareholders on a regular basis. They also seem to be morons when it comes to choosing which software to use. Perhaps most American businesses will ignore open source as they have in the past. I do not think, however, that all foreign markets will be so blind.
Well, only time will tell. In an infinite universe, that could happen. If it does, I'll be very, very surprised. My money's on Adobe.
Most smart money is. That is not because I am wrong. It is because GIMP will probably never reach photoshop's level of usability or the important 70% of the technical features. It could happen if a large company that does a lot of photo editing decided to champion it and devote some money and resources. It has already happened for the film industry where GIMP was modified and FilmGIMP is now important player in film editing.
What would be the measure of success?
For me that measure would simply being becoming a program I regularly use. On a more macroscopic scale, grabbing significant market share would be a good measure.
Forgive my skepticism.
Your skepticism is probably well founded. I give GIMP a one in ten chance of gaining that level of usability and features in the next three years.
Bad in what sense?...I imagine that you would find it difficult to back up that statement in any sort of objective sense.
Are you joking? I've done professional writing, development, and graphics work using a number of Adobe products over the years. Interface design is not their strong point. The only objective measure of usability are really the results of usability testing, but their are plenty of examples of Adobe products breaking the most basic of UI design guidelines.
We were using photoshop as an example so let's consider it. It relies heavily upon toolbars, with many tools invisible until right clicked upon. Also they have no labels unless moused over. This results in users hunting through dozens of unlabeled buttons trying to find a tool that is "behind" some other tool, that is in someone's mind loosely related to the first tool. and whose label cannot be seen even when the button itself is exposed. That is a serious no-no.
Here's another example. I have InDesign open in front of me right now. InDesign relies upon little floating windows of controls, most of which have a contextual menu tied to a triangle in the upper right of the window. About half of these windows allow you to use them while the window is minimized and half do not. I suspect it depends upon who coded that part of the UI. That is a serious failure of consistency.
Those are two examples I can see right now, open on my screen. There are hundreds more. Adobe does not make good user interfaces, and many of their products are of questionable quality. I have about four outstanding bugs with Adobe right now, serious ones that consistently crash their applications. Three of them crash that application on both Windows and Macs. Adobe may be the industry standard, but they certainly have plenty of room for improvement or for a competitor to come in and outdo them.
...so what does GIMP have to do to supplant Photoshop? It doesn't have to be "as good." Not at all. It has to be BETTER. And not just in the interface, either. It has to be functionally capable of something that designers want to do that Photoshop can't.
I strongly disagree. GIMP will destroy photoshop if it can be 70% as functional, as easy to use or easier, and easy to install on Mac, Windows, and Linux. If it ever reaches that state it will begin to absolutely crush Photoshop.
No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool. Photoshop didn't use to have those either, yet plenty of professionals, even of your ilk, used to use it.
This is a really weak argument. Most people got by just fine before tabbed browsing was introduced. No one actually needs tabbed browsing. That said, it does not mean many people are willing to jump back 5 years in technology and give up tabs. Layers make editing images easier, faster, and more flexible. Very few professionals who edit by hand are willing to go without them.
GIMP is good enough technologically, for most tasks. It is just not very usable or easy to learn. Photoshop has a crappy interface in a lot of ways, but it is still better than GIMP's interface. Features are not what keeps GIMP out of professional editing, nor is marketing. Accessibility, learnability, and usability are its weak spots.
Design rule #174: Don't put icons in menus. If you must use icons in your application, use then in a toolbar. Never in menus. Never. Its lame. It DOESN"T look cool and it DOESN"T make your application "user firendly".
Design Rule #1:
Test your design and do whatever users like, increases task success rate, increases task learnability, and increases task completion speed.
Wow, sounds like a good idea. I'm sure Steve Jobs and Apple would jump at the chance to undercut their own market by allowing Novell to make a low cost Mac alternative!
Actually, Apple has concentrated very little on the corporate markets and aimed instead at home users, scientific, education, and artistic markets. They have limited resources and are playing to their strengths.
If Novell were to run with GNUStep and license Apple and some some important third parties to develop for an alternative graphic layer or even license and implement their own version of Aqua it could go a long way towards building the credibility of both product lines.
This could happen, although Apple would probably make sure there were some real restrictions on how far their products propagated. All in all, this is pretty unlikely. It would also be a bad move in the long term for Novell to be dependent upon Apple. They would be better off promoting GNUStep and sticking with modified open source applications and with some home grown closed and open source projects.
I have a lot of respect for the GIMP project and developers and I have used GIMP in the past. It is useful and has a lot of very nice features. It also is a usability nightmare. A big part of the problem is that when people say "GIMP is not very usable" people hear "Gimp doesn't look like photoshop."
The truth of the matter is that photoshop is not great for usability either. Copying photoshop will help with learnability and ease of transition for photoshop users but what is really needed is some usability testing and UI redesign.
The Gimp rocks, be thankful for that. Yes it doesn't have some of photoshop's features, but most people don't need those features anyway... Would you rather spend 700 bucks, or an extra 5 minutes figuring soemthing out?
Yes, the GIMP rocks in a lot of ways. To answer your question, I'd rather not spend $700 or have to waste 5 minutes every time I want to do editing. Fewer features should make UI design easier. GIMP falls down because not all of the tasks can be accomplished from the main menus, it provides poor user feedback, and the most used tasks are not obvious. It could be greatly improved with some user-centered usability testing. Copying photoshop is helpful for some people, but really does not address many of the real problems.
Please note, I'm not trying to be negative here. As a usability expert I know says all the time, "user testing is really hard." It is very hard, but the basics can be done cheaply and can make a huge difference. The GIMP is a very well done and professional open source project. I have a lot of respect for the developers. I wish them the best and I hope that some day they sit down and rework the UI after doing some reading on UI design and testing.
Adding this kind of visual feedback to all of GIMP would go a long way towards making it more usable.
OS X in general is much better about providing good visual feedback than other platforms. I use Windows, OS X, and NetBSD on a daily basis. Running the same application on multiple systems, OS X is nicer simply because the default UI elements provide feedback. When a process makes an application think for 30 seconds, OS X indicates that by changing the state of the controls (pulsing buttons stay lit, etc.) On Windows or Gnome you have to guess if the computer is done thinking, if the click did not register, or if you should wait.
OS X users make up a good portion of the people doing serious graphic editing. Many are open to using alternative editors (believe it or not Graphic-Converter probably sees as much use as photoshop), but I have little or no faith in the usability of any Gimp interface that does not use the standard UI elements. I just don't believe they will ever do enough user testing to ever reach the usability level of the average OS X application. X11 is great on the mac for legacy applications, remotely controlling other Unix boxes, and really quick and dirty ports but I can't see using it for an application that I am going to live in day in and day out. To challenge photoshop on the mac an application really needs a native interface and needs to work with all the system services, scripting, and other OS UI features.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion. I think more UI feedback, including all options in the main menus (nothing only as a button or context menu), and some more user testing could make a dramatic improvement in the usability of gimp on all platforms.
I shudder that you sit here and argue the importance of the first amendment and then finish with "but I'd accept the invasion of freedom for mere safety."
I would except an invasion of privacy if it was necessary to the survival of our democracy, but for very few other reasons. Every rule has an exception. For me, I'd rather be alive and have the FBI know I posted to a political action site, than be dead. It's called pragmatism.
asically you have no clue because you have no idea why they need the logs.
Nor does anyone else because they issued a gag order to the political discussion site in question. So exactly how serious of a crime and how important of evidence would justify making people afraid to publicly express their political opinions in a democracy that relies entirely upon that aspect of free speech to operate? If this was the only way to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, well good job guys. I seriously doubt, however, it had anything to do with saving us from a disaster. At what point when we discover this was not really needed and the crime investigated was pretty much just harassing people for their political beliefs will all the agents and the judge involved be fired? Never.
Further, I know that in the US, I am in the legal right should any action actually be taken against me due to the speech.
Yeah because the government would never violate its own laws. If you hadn't noticed the government has thrown a bunch of people into a special prison in Cuba and claimed that they don't have any rights. The courts said they do, and ordered due process. None of them have been given a real trial yet. How many years have they been there now? Maybe you just haven't been paying attention. The government collecting names from a political discussion site is a classic case of a "chilling effect" on free speech. In five years we may both be in a special jail for dissidents because of what we have written here, or maybe the government won't become more totalitarian. You don't know and I don't know. In any case anyone, especially in the government, who is collecting this information is threatening the single most important aspect of free speech in a democracy. Their should be real and serious accountability. If this information does not stop a nuke from going off the judge and all the agents involved should be publicly fired for endangering our democracy in this way.
these people are not a threat to the Bush administration.
Everyone is a threat to the Bush administration. But that has nothing to do with this. We don't know why the seized the records or by whose order. It's not like Bush runs the government. It has a schizophrenic little mind of its own.
Making threats on the presidents life is enough to get the Anarchist site subpoena'd
By the secret service, not the FBI.
Subpoenaing a site for records is not illegal just because they're a political activism site.
No, but it should hold the highest levels of accountability. Political speech is the single most important part of free speech. Without it their can be no democracy. Gag orders regarding subpoenas of political sites damn well better be necessary to prevent a nuke from going off or everyone who pursued this investigation and the judge who authorized it should have to answer for their actions and explain why they felt it was so important to get these records that they were willing to risk demolishing a cornerstone of our democracy to get them.
the government already uses plenty of methods to detect who's expressing what opinions, and it hasn't stopped freedom of speech.
The supreme court has ruled multiple times that government surveillance of libraries and news agencies violates freedom of speech by producing a chilling effect. Unfortunately, their are no punishments for the executive branch when they violate our freedoms. The courts say "no" to any particular case and the feds say, "OK we'll stop" and then keep right on doing it. If you don't see how the government seizing the records of political discussion sites might cause people to fear speaking on those sites then I think you've been living in a police state too long. Just because they keep violating our rights does not mean we should ignore it when it happens again.
The man's an anarchist who ironically enjoys the freedoms granted in this country (granted by the government).
According to The declaration of independence (which predates our government) there are a number of rights that are unalienable and inherently belong to all men. The government does not grant us any rights. The government is supposed to be a organization by the people and for the people which the people use to help protect their rights from anyone who would take them. Of course that is in no way what the government is. It is a collection of bureaucracies with a huge stockpile of weapons that is not controlled by or representative of the people or any given group. It is probably controlled more by corporate interests and the power hungry ambition of various individual politicians than by anything else.
Maybe it's a vast conspiracy against everyone on the site! Put on your tinfoil hats, folks! I blame bush! Nothing like this ever happened under clinton!
Maybe people who are cowards and do not care about American ideals of freedom enjoy making light of our civil rights being routinely trampled.
What's the big deal here? The site is still up.
A political discussion site has their records taken by the state and issues a gag order to prevent them from saying what and why. I suppose the big deal is that some people don't have a problem with that.
So what? If I owned a little deli, and had a security camera, are those tapes safe from subpeona?
Freedom of speech. It is supposed to be a founding principal of our country. If the government subpoenas records from news agencies about who expressing what opinions then it will almost certainly have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. This directly contradicts the intentions of the authors of the bill of rights.
Gag orders on who you can tell about what the government has ordered you to do also directly contradict freedom of speech. Both are unconstitutional.
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I don't think you've thought this through. If MS Europe split from their parent company, they wouldn't have a product. It's only the fact that Microsoft is their parent company that gives them the legal right to produce copies of Microsoft software for sale.
The members of the EU have agreed to be bound by it's decisions, subject to certain restrictions. If the EU decided that a proper course of action was to seize all MS properties, funds, intellectual property as punishment for violation of the law (which has already been signed by the EU members) the individual police forces would be directed by their governments to enforce that decree. It's not like this would be some arbitrary judgment either. They have been found guilty of breaking the law.
I don't think you've thought this through. If MS Europe split from their parent company, they wouldn't have a product. It's only the fact that Microsoft is their parent company that gives them the legal right to produce copies of Microsoft software for sale.
You do realize who writes and enforces those laws right? The governments represented by the EU. The EU courts could easily declare the copyrights and patents of MS to be the property of MS Europe within the EU. For that matter they could just declare them null and void and let anyone who wanted to make copies and sell them. That, however, is very unlikely. The aforementioned scenario would be much more stable.
But this assumes that technology R&D is not driven by money. ...researchers (ie, developers) have the time to work pro-bono - when a lot of us do not.
No it doesn't. Many people get paid to write open source code. The money is there and being spent. Ever hear of IBM?
It also assumes that Open Source means someone else out there wants to develop exactly what you want, in the way you want it.
No it doesn't. If I write a movie player, someone can take that code and use it in a real-time video editor. I can take some of that code and make my movie player better. Lots of code is reusable and any overlap helps both parties.
finally, you assume that Open Source is an automobile to the Closed Source horse. I can't say I currently agree with that, unless you could perchance give me an example of a closed source app that is bested by an open source app?
Are you joking? Trolling? How about Apache vs. IIS? How about emacs vs. notepad? Examples of open source projects that are better than closed source ones are innumerable. As a customer Apache is so much better than IIS that there is no comparison. First it's free. Second it is more secure. Third bug fixes are more frequent. Fourth it is more stable. Fifth, it is more modifiable. Sixth, it is more portable. Seventh, it has more add-ons. Eighth, it's still free.
Open source is better for customers and smart customers are starting to realize that.
I don't see why Microsoft should have to turn over their source code without any kind of compensation. They did develop the product, and it seems to me that they should be able to profit from it. In my opinion the demands of the EU are in this case unreasonable.
It's because they broke the law. It's a punishment that attempts to correct some of the damage they did. It's like this a guy mugs and old lady takes the cash in her purse and bets it all on a number in roulette. He wins big then the cops nab him. The judge just said, "the money he won goes to charity as part of his punishment."
forcing MS to license any of their software under the GPL seems grossly anti-capitalistic.
No country in the world has a straight capitalism. The reason is that in an unmanaged capitalism, eventually all the money gravitates to one place. One monopoly is leveraged into another then another and eventually there is only one company. Monopolies break all the advantages offered by capitalism. They remove all incentive for innovation, supply an demand, and for making the customer happy.
Allowing MS to leverage one monopoly into multiple monopolies breaks capitalism, which is why monopolies have to follow special rules. Get it?
The other option is for Microsoft to just stop selling and supporting software in the EU. I honestly believe the EU would recant if MS pulled something like this.
I take it you failed both math and law classes in high school?
No one walks away from 25 billion in profit a year to avoid being fined 1.4 billion. No one with any brains creates a giant new market for their competition. No one in their right mind refuses to comply with the people who direct the army and police.
If Ballmer tried this he'd be fired by the end of the day. If the board of directors all went insane and did not fire him the EU would direct MS Europe to split from their parent company and comply with the orders. If they still refused they'd toss the European director in a prison and tell the next in command to comply.
MS may have some pull but get real.
I don't see an advantage here on -any- scale. Giving away intellectual property is giving someone else the opportunity to make money off of my hard work without any rewards to me.
Open Source licensing is not about adding more ways to make money for the developer. It is about making a superior product. 200 years ago horse stable owners might have said, "I don't see the advantage to selling automobiles. I mean if their are no horses that need grooming, feeding, or stabling I see no advantage to selling them over just selling wagons and horses like I do now."
They were right too. It's just that the customers wanted something better. Open source software is better for the customer. If customers are smart they will start moving towards and demanding open source. This might make it harder for you to make money. Deal with it.
Some of us, however, would prefer to move into and get a head start on this newfangled automobile thing. Largely because a lot of us are not just trying to make money, we're also software customers. The motivation for us is that we can develop something to do what we want, or what our company wants and then get free improvements to it for the open source community. Or if we need a solution, we can work with an already existing code base to get exactly what we need and save time and money.
it kills IP when my input into the project is not directly linked to any funding;
I agree that you should get paid for your input to a project you create or make a modification to. The trick here is that this funding has to come from one or more user's of the project. Ideally, funding would be along the lines of:
Kmart wants some software so they start an open source project and they hire someone to write it. They don't want to be locked into a vendor and they would like free random improvements, but they don't really need them. Piggly Wiggy likes the project and adopts it in their own stores. They hire a developer to modify it for them and make a few particular improvements. Kmart gets the improvements for free and they are happy. Piggly Wiggly gets to use the software for much less money than writing their own so they are happy. Both benefit from bug fixes contributed by the community or by developers hired by one another. Developers are paid by whoever wants a change, improvement, bug fix, or support.
This model for open source development is a little backwards from what we usually see. Usually the software comes before the demand. The other problem with this is that if you come up with a great idea for improving a project, you need to get one or more companies who use that project to pay you to develop the idea. That is the step many developers miss.
The main problem with this model is that innovation needs backing if it is to financially successful. Entrepreneurs need to do something novel and beat everyone else to market, or they need to sell people before they start coding. Three things help mitigate this. First many people just want to code for fun, or make something work for them. They don't care about making money. Second, government research grants and academic institutions will work on open source projects without requiring a pay off. Third, for projects vital to large enterprises they are often more than happy to pay one or more full time developers to "work on" a project even if their is nothing they really need changed. This is just so that they have a knowledgeable source should they need it. This funds innovation to everyone's benefit.
If I develop A, I still see there is no protection keeping company M from reselling A and making additional money selling add-ons; all for a product that I created. M owes me no money, nor do the add-ons garner me any royalties.
That is correct. Developers need to arrange to be paid for a project before they do it. They need to find something someone needs and fulfill that need. GNU licenses generally pay the developer back with more code, not with money. They are very beneficial to the users of software and not so much for the developer. That is why the developer needs a sponsor.
I know many developers do not like to hear that. In the U.S.A. their is an attitude where if you make something work very well, you should become rich and famous for it. Well, with GNU licensing you may become famous, but the riches will have to follow the fame. One great idea, coded and released as GNU open source will likely not make you rich.
I would say that RedHat is a perfect example of an open source initiative that is used as "strategic choice" and why would this business model not work with databases?
I disagree. Redhat relies upon revenue from services and support, to pay the bills. A more reliable model is to garner revenue from development as directed by your customers. That is not to say that you should not offer services and support, it is just that relying upon it is dangerous. Redhat has motivation right now to make their products rely upon the services and support they offer. This might mean tying into custom services they offer. It might mean making support necessary by keeping the the product hard to use. Neither is good for the customer. Now this might be corrected if another company were to come in, grab Redhat's code and start competing by making a more use friendly and cheaper version. The problem is, this disrupts the financial stability of the big developers. It could lead to Redhat laying off half their employees a few years after they grab a significant market. That is why I advocate making products easy, not tied to any vendor's services, and making money from the development first and foremost. This development may be customized code, code fixes, or new features. I really think Redhat needs to look to the sustainability of a model based upon support.
"closed source has no real advantage on open source." -->Except for that little thing called "Developers getting paid"
You're almost right here, but not quite. There are many business models that allow developers of open source software to be paid. The problem is, their is not a widespread and accepted method for funding open source technologies, that does not bring with it some disadvantages.
Redhat's model for example is to develop software that is open source and sell support and services for that software. It is a functional method and works for quite a few companies. The disadvantage that comes with it is that the business model encourages software that makes the user more reliant on services and support.
Other companies develop both open and closed source software, which they bundle together. This model works because they get paid directly for the closed source software, and still get the advantages of open source for some of their product. The disadvantage is that they are tied to closed source for part of their product, with the disadvantages of that development model.
Some companies use open source products and pay developers to modify it to their needs, fix bugs, and provide support. This works well for large companies because it gives them the advantages of open source, but for smaller companies, who cannot afford to hire a developer it requires either that they hire an outside firm (same problem as Redhat) or that they coordinate with other small companies to jointly pay developers. The problem with this model is that their is no easy way to organize it, and smaller companies rarely can be trusted to look at the long term benefits. They are also motivated to try to shift as much of the financial burden onto others as possible and "leech" software without contributing.
I think this last model is actually the most workable in the long term. Eventually I think all the major players will come around and realize that by sharing both software and development costs they win in the end and developers still get paid.
Many people think this will never happen and maybe they are right. I think the advantages of open source (trustable code, no vendor lock-in, code that will never go away, more stable and secure code, more flexible and customizable code, and much, much less expensive software solutions) are just too big of an advantage to be ignored. Big businesses do very stupid things and things that serve the executives more than the shareholders on a regular basis. They also seem to be morons when it comes to choosing which software to use. Perhaps most American businesses will ignore open source as they have in the past. I do not think, however, that all foreign markets will be so blind.
Well, only time will tell. In an infinite universe, that could happen. If it does, I'll be very, very surprised. My money's on Adobe.
Most smart money is. That is not because I am wrong. It is because GIMP will probably never reach photoshop's level of usability or the important 70% of the technical features. It could happen if a large company that does a lot of photo editing decided to champion it and devote some money and resources. It has already happened for the film industry where GIMP was modified and FilmGIMP is now important player in film editing.
What would be the measure of success?
For me that measure would simply being becoming a program I regularly use. On a more macroscopic scale, grabbing significant market share would be a good measure.
Forgive my skepticism.
Your skepticism is probably well founded. I give GIMP a one in ten chance of gaining that level of usability and features in the next three years.
Bad in what sense? ...I imagine that you would find it difficult to back up that statement in any sort of objective sense.
Are you joking? I've done professional writing, development, and graphics work using a number of Adobe products over the years. Interface design is not their strong point. The only objective measure of usability are really the results of usability testing, but their are plenty of examples of Adobe products breaking the most basic of UI design guidelines.
We were using photoshop as an example so let's consider it. It relies heavily upon toolbars, with many tools invisible until right clicked upon. Also they have no labels unless moused over. This results in users hunting through dozens of unlabeled buttons trying to find a tool that is "behind" some other tool, that is in someone's mind loosely related to the first tool. and whose label cannot be seen even when the button itself is exposed. That is a serious no-no.
Here's another example. I have InDesign open in front of me right now. InDesign relies upon little floating windows of controls, most of which have a contextual menu tied to a triangle in the upper right of the window. About half of these windows allow you to use them while the window is minimized and half do not. I suspect it depends upon who coded that part of the UI. That is a serious failure of consistency.
Those are two examples I can see right now, open on my screen. There are hundreds more. Adobe does not make good user interfaces, and many of their products are of questionable quality. I have about four outstanding bugs with Adobe right now, serious ones that consistently crash their applications. Three of them crash that application on both Windows and Macs. Adobe may be the industry standard, but they certainly have plenty of room for improvement or for a competitor to come in and outdo them.
I strongly disagree. GIMP will destroy photoshop if it can be 70% as functional, as easy to use or easier, and easy to install on Mac, Windows, and Linux. If it ever reaches that state it will begin to absolutely crush Photoshop.
No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool.
Photoshop didn't use to have those either, yet plenty of professionals, even of your ilk, used to use it.
This is a really weak argument. Most people got by just fine before tabbed browsing was introduced. No one actually needs tabbed browsing. That said, it does not mean many people are willing to jump back 5 years in technology and give up tabs. Layers make editing images easier, faster, and more flexible. Very few professionals who edit by hand are willing to go without them.
GIMP is good enough technologically, for most tasks. It is just not very usable or easy to learn. Photoshop has a crappy interface in a lot of ways, but it is still better than GIMP's interface. Features are not what keeps GIMP out of professional editing, nor is marketing. Accessibility, learnability, and usability are its weak spots.
Design rule #174:
Don't put icons in menus. If you must use icons in your application, use then in a toolbar. Never in menus. Never. Its lame. It DOESN"T look cool and it DOESN"T make your application "user firendly".
Design Rule #1:
Test your design and do whatever users like, increases task success rate, increases task learnability, and increases task completion speed.
Wow, sounds like a good idea. I'm sure Steve Jobs and Apple would jump at the chance to undercut their own market by allowing Novell to make a low cost Mac alternative!
Actually, Apple has concentrated very little on the corporate markets and aimed instead at home users, scientific, education, and artistic markets. They have limited resources and are playing to their strengths.
If Novell were to run with GNUStep and license Apple and some some important third parties to develop for an alternative graphic layer or even license and implement their own version of Aqua it could go a long way towards building the credibility of both product lines.
This could happen, although Apple would probably make sure there were some real restrictions on how far their products propagated. All in all, this is pretty unlikely. It would also be a bad move in the long term for Novell to be dependent upon Apple. They would be better off promoting GNUStep and sticking with modified open source applications and with some home grown closed and open source projects.
User: "Wah! Gimp doesn't look like photoshop!"
I have a lot of respect for the GIMP project and developers and I have used GIMP in the past. It is useful and has a lot of very nice features. It also is a usability nightmare. A big part of the problem is that when people say "GIMP is not very usable" people hear "Gimp doesn't look like photoshop."
The truth of the matter is that photoshop is not great for usability either. Copying photoshop will help with learnability and ease of transition for photoshop users but what is really needed is some usability testing and UI redesign.
The Gimp rocks, be thankful for that. Yes it doesn't have some of photoshop's features, but most people don't need those features anyway... Would you rather spend 700 bucks, or an extra 5 minutes figuring soemthing out?
Yes, the GIMP rocks in a lot of ways. To answer your question, I'd rather not spend $700 or have to waste 5 minutes every time I want to do editing. Fewer features should make UI design easier. GIMP falls down because not all of the tasks can be accomplished from the main menus, it provides poor user feedback, and the most used tasks are not obvious. It could be greatly improved with some user-centered usability testing. Copying photoshop is helpful for some people, but really does not address many of the real problems.
Please note, I'm not trying to be negative here. As a usability expert I know says all the time, "user testing is really hard." It is very hard, but the basics can be done cheaply and can make a huge difference. The GIMP is a very well done and professional open source project. I have a lot of respect for the developers. I wish them the best and I hope that some day they sit down and rework the UI after doing some reading on UI design and testing.
Adding this kind of visual feedback to all of GIMP would go a long way towards making it more usable.
OS X in general is much better about providing good visual feedback than other platforms. I use Windows, OS X, and NetBSD on a daily basis. Running the same application on multiple systems, OS X is nicer simply because the default UI elements provide feedback. When a process makes an application think for 30 seconds, OS X indicates that by changing the state of the controls (pulsing buttons stay lit, etc.) On Windows or Gnome you have to guess if the computer is done thinking, if the click did not register, or if you should wait.
OS X users make up a good portion of the people doing serious graphic editing. Many are open to using alternative editors (believe it or not Graphic-Converter probably sees as much use as photoshop), but I have little or no faith in the usability of any Gimp interface that does not use the standard UI elements. I just don't believe they will ever do enough user testing to ever reach the usability level of the average OS X application. X11 is great on the mac for legacy applications, remotely controlling other Unix boxes, and really quick and dirty ports but I can't see using it for an application that I am going to live in day in and day out. To challenge photoshop on the mac an application really needs a native interface and needs to work with all the system services, scripting, and other OS UI features.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion. I think more UI feedback, including all options in the main menus (nothing only as a button or context menu), and some more user testing could make a dramatic improvement in the usability of gimp on all platforms.
I shudder that you sit here and argue the importance of the first amendment and then finish with "but I'd accept the invasion of freedom for mere safety."
I would except an invasion of privacy if it was necessary to the survival of our democracy, but for very few other reasons. Every rule has an exception. For me, I'd rather be alive and have the FBI know I posted to a political action site, than be dead. It's called pragmatism.
asically you have no clue because you have no idea why they need the logs.
Nor does anyone else because they issued a gag order to the political discussion site in question. So exactly how serious of a crime and how important of evidence would justify making people afraid to publicly express their political opinions in a democracy that relies entirely upon that aspect of free speech to operate? If this was the only way to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, well good job guys. I seriously doubt, however, it had anything to do with saving us from a disaster. At what point when we discover this was not really needed and the crime investigated was pretty much just harassing people for their political beliefs will all the agents and the judge involved be fired? Never.
Further, I know that in the US, I am in the legal right should any action actually be taken against me due to the speech.
Yeah because the government would never violate its own laws. If you hadn't noticed the government has thrown a bunch of people into a special prison in Cuba and claimed that they don't have any rights. The courts said they do, and ordered due process. None of them have been given a real trial yet. How many years have they been there now? Maybe you just haven't been paying attention. The government collecting names from a political discussion site is a classic case of a "chilling effect" on free speech. In five years we may both be in a special jail for dissidents because of what we have written here, or maybe the government won't become more totalitarian. You don't know and I don't know. In any case anyone, especially in the government, who is collecting this information is threatening the single most important aspect of free speech in a democracy. Their should be real and serious accountability. If this information does not stop a nuke from going off the judge and all the agents involved should be publicly fired for endangering our democracy in this way.
these people are not a threat to the Bush administration.
Everyone is a threat to the Bush administration. But that has nothing to do with this. We don't know why the seized the records or by whose order. It's not like Bush runs the government. It has a schizophrenic little mind of its own.
Making threats on the presidents life is enough to get the Anarchist site subpoena'd
By the secret service, not the FBI.
Subpoenaing a site for records is not illegal just because they're a political activism site.
No, but it should hold the highest levels of accountability. Political speech is the single most important part of free speech. Without it their can be no democracy. Gag orders regarding subpoenas of political sites damn well better be necessary to prevent a nuke from going off or everyone who pursued this investigation and the judge who authorized it should have to answer for their actions and explain why they felt it was so important to get these records that they were willing to risk demolishing a cornerstone of our democracy to get them.
the government already uses plenty of methods to detect who's expressing what opinions, and it hasn't stopped freedom of speech.
The supreme court has ruled multiple times that government surveillance of libraries and news agencies violates freedom of speech by producing a chilling effect. Unfortunately, their are no punishments for the executive branch when they violate our freedoms. The courts say "no" to any particular case and the feds say, "OK we'll stop" and then keep right on doing it. If you don't see how the government seizing the records of political discussion sites might cause people to fear speaking on those sites then I think you've been living in a police state too long. Just because they keep violating our rights does not mean we should ignore it when it happens again.
The man's an anarchist who ironically enjoys the freedoms granted in this country (granted by the government).
According to The declaration of independence (which predates our government) there are a number of rights that are unalienable and inherently belong to all men. The government does not grant us any rights. The government is supposed to be a organization by the people and for the people which the people use to help protect their rights from anyone who would take them. Of course that is in no way what the government is. It is a collection of bureaucracies with a huge stockpile of weapons that is not controlled by or representative of the people or any given group. It is probably controlled more by corporate interests and the power hungry ambition of various individual politicians than by anything else.
Maybe it's a vast conspiracy against everyone on the site! Put on your tinfoil hats, folks! I blame bush! Nothing like this ever happened under clinton!
Maybe people who are cowards and do not care about American ideals of freedom enjoy making light of our civil rights being routinely trampled.
What's the big deal here? The site is still up.
A political discussion site has their records taken by the state and issues a gag order to prevent them from saying what and why. I suppose the big deal is that some people don't have a problem with that.
So what? If I owned a little deli, and had a security camera, are those tapes safe from subpeona?
Freedom of speech. It is supposed to be a founding principal of our country. If the government subpoenas records from news agencies about who expressing what opinions then it will almost certainly have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. This directly contradicts the intentions of the authors of the bill of rights.
Gag orders on who you can tell about what the government has ordered you to do also directly contradict freedom of speech. Both are unconstitutional.
One button mouse makes it easy to while in a figity car.
More importantly, an interface designed to work with a single button makes specialized interface devices much easier to implement.