Exactely, thanks free software and thanks mozilla for making this possible.
Mozilla is the root.
But we will use everything that stems from it.
Galeon is the best success story for mozilla at this point.
It prooves that the expensive modular architecture lots have so harshely criticized is starting to pay.
Good point. I found the previous message SEARCHING/. if somebody actually noted this. And it looks that nobody here is discussing how epidemics depend on population distribution. And market share is a BIG issue for MS now.
I thought everybody (on the media as well) would have discussed ages about how this splits the net in 2 (insecure and mostly safe) communities.
Perhaps IE has become the browser of choice for/.ers waiting for mozilla?
No wait. There is just one point here. I am stuck to open source.
This is getting too much similar to: Arms are just a tool, drugs instead are BAD.
For the great american people (and maybe some poor european) encription and technology is good and it must be widespread, so we can defend ourselves from the government. Chinese instead are to be considered unable to use the same tecnology for the same reasons... When I'll see (I won't: its a hoax) the chinese gov. make other osses illegal or using this os for bad things I will flame them. In the mean time they can do with linux anything as can everybody else. And I'm quite happy with it.
Just as long as the chinese people have free access to source code, all of this is good. Please just don't be afraid if someone who has done LOTS of bad mistakes gets one right. Paranoia must be a tool, not a master.
About free-is-everything argument: The fact that the chinese people (not some chinese, one billion chinese) are adopting any technology is just another naive illusion. You must have bucks to do choices in the technology arena. Or have institutions back choices for you instead.
Surely the first is better. In this case it simply isn't an option because software can be free as in speech, seldom as in beer (and seldom*1'000'000'000 is a BIG number) but knowledge of IT (even at consumer level) COSTS REAL BUCKS. (just imagine TCO*1'000'000'000).
Should any significant increase in tech knowledge occur for that 1'000'000'000 as a mass THIS WOULD BE GOOD no matter who does it. How it is done is an ethical problem not a tech or outcome problem.
Or do you think that backing a fascist coup as in Chile is ethical or acceptable? (but obviously you can discuss if it has been good) I guess (and hope) we have same ideas on the morality of bombing the Casa Rosada and desaparecidos.
98% with Amphigory's comment, but I would put this under a different perspective:
And I think the best thing for us to do is to totally ignore this. ... Don't you think there's a good reason why Linus tries to remain aloof from all this kind of stuff?
Sure Linux is about technology, and We don't need to get involved in the politics. But think about this.
Its them coming our way
We don't need to "try" to remain anything. Just continue going strait your way. Don't even turn back to look. Its just One billion people following us...
@#$%@#$% Who can say One billion people adopting (and extending in the future) a GPL OS isn't HISTORY??? Who cares about MS, DOJ, SUN whatever.
Still... Nothing changes in our minds. Its one billion people facing HUGE changes in their.
I hope in the future China will be rich, healthy and free enough to move to freedom in the OS choice; but for a start this is huge.
Linux development is communist, libertarian, and successful. It's rare enough that you see two of adjectives applied to the same concept, much less all three.
The [linux] development may be communist, but not Stalinist communist - the top developers like Linus and Alan are followed not because they wield any political or economic power to enforce what they say, but because they've proved themselves extraordinarily capable in the past, and so people voluntarily listen to them.
Keyword here is: The right to fork. I very much agree that marginal cost is a critical issue here. Both in production AND political choice. Flexibility does cost and you need lots of flexibility to achieve freedom and avoid stalinism. Its not a matter of social darwinism but of managing the costs of difference, choice and failure.
Russia during WWI was not really a good place to start anyway. Communism was not a russian invention at all. Historically they never even had an idea of what freedom meant. Let alone democracy. But that is a problem of the czars.
When we look at community economics under a rich and healthy perspective and not as a mean to get rid of some middle age culture this can radically change (good point on nanotech)!
But there is more, here. I am sorry I really disagree with HEMOS on his comment (I try not to flame here;)
I think having a state bird is silly enough.
Or with this very american-naive idea from Elfbabe from another post (#16)...
I don't think that having an official OS for a country made up largely of oppressed peasants makes very much sense.
If you think in american style you really have little clue as what needs to be done to get oppressed, poor and IGNORANT people to be free. Americans did this just by occupying new land (I won't discuss fundamental issues as "new"...;). In the real world (tm) there is no such thing. One billion people starving is something liberalism has historically never addressed. So please think of context before talking. Remember: anybody needs to eat more than being free. This is not nice nor right, but if you have SCARCITY of resources, in a "real world" (tm) way and not in a Mc Donald way, freedom gets to be so expensive that totalitarism is stronger that democratic forces. Sad but mostly true.
China has a dirigistic economy which tries to switch to market economy, more than a billion people with very little richness, problems in infrastructure we can't even imagine and very little culture on the value of freedom and diversity. This is a daunting task. Perhaps we should try to imagine ourselves as a chinese dirigent and ask ourselves:
How do I radically change this very poor country, using very little resources and without having violence spread around?
Not that this is necessarily what REAL chinese dirigents think, its what I guess WE would want them to think.
Well having an OS of choice gives them the opportunity to FOCUS all energies to get ONE BILLION PEOPLE to actually have some contact with IT and telecom.
Copying software has ->0 marginal costs. Duplicating and spreading knowledge on computers in "oppressed peasants" minds is a HUGE cost!!!
IMHO also doing this with GPL software gives them the opportunity not to get locked under some companies interest. I hope they fork their own innovations and return the source. (hope). You bet they need to have flexibility on the source code, they already have so little with what they have to deal in the real world....
Remarks on misused antibiotics with TB are totally on topic.
This kind of things gets every day nearer to debugging. In this sense we have had a buggy process in treating TB epidemics in the 40 and we are now facing some sort of "unintended use of our system"
Sounds familiar? TB has hacked our response and has a new threat for us. This is an escalation and some sort of Security Model will be needed when the complexity of our response will be simply not manageble without specialistic analisys. Doctors aren't analists.
When flesh and silicon (if moore's law lets silicon live) will merge the complexity of the response will boom.
Do we need new tools such as debuggers, profilers and such to manage the new risks in tinkering with our internal ecosystem??
Speak with confidence and cultivate phrases like "Without a doubt," "Yes, absolutely," and "Let's go for it." You'll soon find yourself among men with strong character who respect strength in others.
Imagine how uncomfortable this can get for some insecure girl who actually read this book and was influenced...;)
This post is from Italy, where lawsuits last longer than lives. We have a very reform-willing government and a very info-ignorant burocracy. (We actually have a law that defines a valid, legally-equivalent [possibly even more valued] electronic signing mechanism. And its 2 years already; obviously law is written but very little has happened) So copyright lawsuits on digital media can really be a NIGHTMARE here.
That said.
This situation has already happened us twice. Last december and last may.
Assibit (italian only) is an insurance broker and an Internet company.
One would imagine insurance companies actually would want to be on our site. Usually our intent is to sell THEIR product after all. So we setup pages on car insurance willing to get relations with various direct marketing and phone-maketing oriented companies.
We obviously had metatags on the subject including most companies names.
Not only we got request to cancel this stuff but in one case reaction was actually VERY aggressive. We haven't managed to get relations with these 2 companies. (but we have with many others) In our perspective this ends up in a loss of opportunity for them. But this is not how they percieve it. Management (and I think this behaviour occurs more or less in any trading sector) thinks they are actually defending their trademark. They do this on the (IMHO wrong) idea that, on the web, intermediaries are a useless cost. (from reselling to search engines we all are intermediaries some way... )
This ends up in weird behaviour like having only one site on the web with your trademark. They think they will get more hits from search engines like this. Which is true for people searching for their trademark, but not for people searching form their products... Evidence comes from the fact that we haven't lost a single user from removing the companies names, its just them loosing visibility on searches. In the one aggressive case, they were accusing us for being ahead of them in a couple of queries on altavista (besides they were spamming the engine), as if they owned some right on the position... Time will mend this, and some bad experiences will help....
What we actually did was drop the whole thing, if they WANTED to lose the customers we could bring them, there was no point in actually reviewing their service at all.
BTW. Has anyone ever got REALLY in a lawsuit on this? pointers?
Besides I wouldn't want to wait some more 2-4 years to have Loki or someone new start porting civ to solaris...
Its not about features. Its not a social-market matter, if you don't pay to get an OS. Its your personal choice.
Its about the development and growth model! OSS.
I'm not talking about kernel hacking (which is good.) and obviously not about the possibility my father finally has of reading the source code of his OS. (He usually dosn't do peer reviewing on the crypto code of his programs anyway...)
We have seen still very little about the REAL REVOLUTION (tm) which is not in technology, but in the IT growth model. "Open source"/"Free Software"/"whatever" leaves businesses more in control when developing their products. And quality of development a possibility to grow thanks to open standards (which give small investors and single developers a bigger chance on where they are putting their training money). Its not by chance that in the last years revenue for big IT firm has steadily moved prom products to consulting , services and support. Products are steadily becoming less the focus (and to do this you need scale economies at which OSS and open standards perform well). TCO and what I ACTUALLY get to using the box is the point.
Right now there are projects on what other OSes have already, just because thats what is still missing.
I don't think that when in a year or two this job is done, the community will just vanish. Au contraire, the investment put in all these years of development and even more in what is happening this year and in the next 2, will produce its most spectaculr results AFTER we have finished with word processing and desktop GUI.
When competition on R&D will re-start. (That's where MS stopped us all some 10 years ago...)
Slashdot Mirror
welll www.fastweb.it is doing it in Milan and many other major italian cities.
I am linked with a 10Mb ethernet since last august.....
is this news?
bindo
With your reasoning its just a matter of perspective.
Chinese perspective:
Linux has already been used for bad stuff: The Americans have built supercomputers with it!!!!!
I hope most chinese have more clue than you.
btw. I hope oil companies stop doing simulations. Thats BAD! I hope they just start drilling blindly they will certainly do less harm that way.
Whoa Taco managed to post a story without the word "porn" inside!!
Exactely, thanks free software and thanks mozilla for making this possible.
Mozilla is the root.
But we will use everything that stems from it.
Galeon is the best success story for mozilla at this point.
It prooves that the expensive modular architecture lots have so harshely criticized is starting to pay.
And it will pay LOADS.
using mozilla as my primary browser since may.
Good point. /. if somebody actually noted this.
/.ers waiting for mozilla?
I found the previous message SEARCHING
And it looks that nobody here is discussing how epidemics depend on population distribution.
And market share is a BIG issue for MS now.
I thought everybody (on the media as well) would have discussed ages about how this splits the net in 2 (insecure and mostly safe) communities.
Perhaps IE has become the browser of choice for
evolt.org looks /.ed but mozillaZine has a mirror of the article
I am stuck to open source.
This is getting too much similar to:
Arms are just a tool, drugs instead are BAD.
For the great american people (and maybe some poor european) encription and technology is good and it must be widespread, so we can defend ourselves from the government.
Chinese instead are to be considered unable to use the same tecnology for the same reasons...
When I'll see (I won't: its a hoax) the chinese gov. make other osses illegal or using this os for bad things I will flame them. In the mean time they can do with linux anything as can everybody else. And I'm quite happy with it.
Just as long as the chinese people have free access to source code, all of this is good.
Please just don't be afraid if someone who has done LOTS of bad mistakes gets one right.
Paranoia must be a tool, not a master.
About free-is-everything argument:
The fact that the chinese people (not some chinese, one billion chinese) are adopting any technology is just another naive illusion.
You must have bucks to do choices in the technology arena.
Or have institutions back choices for you instead.
Surely the first is better. In this case it simply isn't an option because software can be free as in speech, seldom as in beer (and seldom*1'000'000'000 is a BIG number) but knowledge of IT (even at consumer level) COSTS REAL BUCKS. (just imagine TCO*1'000'000'000).
Should any significant increase in tech knowledge occur for that 1'000'000'000 as a mass THIS WOULD BE GOOD no matter who does it.
How it is done is an ethical problem not a tech or outcome problem.
Or do you think that backing a fascist coup as in Chile is ethical or acceptable? (but obviously you can discuss if it has been good) I guess (and hope) we have same ideas on the morality of bombing the Casa Rosada and desaparecidos.
- And I think the best thing for us to do is to totally ignore this.
...
Sure Linux is about technology , and We don't need to get involved in the politics. But think about this.Don't you think there's a good reason why Linus tries to remain aloof from all this kind of stuff?
Its them coming our way
We don't need to "try" to remain anything. Just continue going strait your way.
Don't even turn back to look.
Its just One billion people following us...
@#$%@#$% Who can say One billion people adopting (and extending in the future) a GPL OS isn't HISTORY???
Who cares about MS, DOJ, SUN whatever.
Still...
Nothing changes in our minds.
Its one billion people facing HUGE changes in their.
I hope in the future China will be rich, healthy and free enough to move to freedom in the OS choice; but for a start this is huge.
- Linux development is communist, libertarian, and successful. It's rare enough that you see two of adjectives applied to the same concept, much less all three.
Keyword here is: The right to fork.The [linux] development may be communist, but not Stalinist communist - the top developers like Linus and Alan are followed not because they wield any political or economic power to enforce what they say, but because they've proved themselves extraordinarily capable in the past, and so people voluntarily listen to them.
I very much agree that marginal cost is a critical issue here. Both in production AND political choice.
Flexibility does cost and you need lots of flexibility to achieve freedom and avoid stalinism. Its not a matter of social darwinism but of managing the costs of difference, choice and failure.
Russia during WWI was not really a good place to start anyway. Communism was not a russian invention at all. Historically they never even had an idea of what freedom meant. Let alone democracy .
But that is a problem of the czars.
When we look at community economics under a rich and healthy perspective and not as a mean to get rid of some middle age culture this can radically change (good point on nanotech)!
But there is more, here. I am sorry I really disagree with HEMOS on his comment (I try not to flame here ;)
- I think having a state bird is silly enough.
Or with this very american-naive idea from Elfbabe from another post (#16)- I don't think that having an official OS for a country made up largely of oppressed peasants makes very much sense.
If you think in american style you really have little clue as what needs to be done to get oppressed, poor and IGNORANT people to be free. Americans did this just by occupying new land (I won't discuss fundamental issues as "new"In the real world (tm) there is no such thing. One billion people starving is something liberalism has historically never addressed. So please think of context before talking. Remember: anybody needs to eat more than being free. This is not nice nor right, but if you have SCARCITY of resources, in a "real world" (tm) way and not in a Mc Donald way, freedom gets to be so expensive that totalitarism is stronger that democratic forces. Sad but mostly true.
China has a dirigistic economy which tries to switch to market economy, more than a billion people with very little richness, problems in infrastructure we can't even imagine and very little culture on the value of freedom and diversity.
This is a daunting task.
Perhaps we should try to imagine ourselves as a chinese dirigent and ask ourselves:
- How do I radically change this very poor country, using very little resources and without having violence spread around?
Not that this is necessarily what REAL chinese dirigents think, its what I guess WE would want them to think.Well having an OS of choice gives them the opportunity to FOCUS all energies to get ONE BILLION PEOPLE to actually have some contact with IT and telecom.
Copying software has ->0 marginal costs. Duplicating and spreading knowledge on computers in "oppressed peasants" minds is a HUGE cost!!!
IMHO also doing this with GPL software gives them the opportunity not to get locked under some companies interest. I hope they fork their own innovations and return the source. (hope). ....
You bet they need to have flexibility on the source code, they already have so little with what they have to deal in the real world
- Remarks on misused antibiotics with TB are totally on topic.
This kind of things gets every day nearer to debugging.In this sense we have had a buggy process in treating TB epidemics in the 40 and we are now facing some sort of "unintended use of our system"
Sounds familiar? TB has hacked our response and has a new threat for us.
This is an escalation and some sort of Security Model will be needed when the complexity of our response will be simply not manageble without specialistic analisys.
Doctors aren't analists.
When flesh and silicon (if moore's law lets silicon live) will merge the complexity of the response will boom.
Do we need new tools such as debuggers, profilers and such to manage the new risks in tinkering with our internal ecosystem??
Imagine how uncomfortable this can get for some insecure girl who actually read this book and was influenced ... ;)
This post is from Italy, where lawsuits last longer than lives.
... ....
We have a very reform-willing government and a very info-ignorant burocracy.
(We actually have a law that defines a valid, legally-equivalent [possibly even more valued] electronic signing mechanism. And its 2 years already; obviously law is written but very little has happened)
So copyright lawsuits on digital media can really be a NIGHTMARE here.
That said.
This situation has already happened us twice. Last december and last may.
Assibit (italian only) is an insurance broker and an Internet company.
One would imagine insurance companies actually would want to be on our site. Usually our intent is to sell THEIR product after all. So we setup pages on car insurance willing to get relations with various direct marketing and phone-maketing oriented companies.
We obviously had metatags on the subject including most companies names.
Not only we got request to cancel this stuff but in one case reaction was actually VERY aggressive.
We haven't managed to get relations with these 2 companies. (but we have with many others)
In our perspective this ends up in a loss of opportunity for them.
But this is not how they percieve it. Management (and I think this behaviour occurs more or less in any trading sector) thinks they are actually defending their trademark. They do this on the (IMHO wrong) idea that, on the web, intermediaries are a useless cost. (from reselling to search engines we all are intermediaries some way... )
This ends up in weird behaviour like having only one site on the web with your trademark.
They think they will get more hits from search engines like this. Which is true for people searching for their trademark, but not for people searching form their products...
Evidence comes from the fact that we haven't lost a single user from removing the companies names, its just them loosing visibility on searches.
In the one aggressive case, they were accusing us for being ahead of them in a couple of queries on altavista (besides they were spamming the engine), as if they owned some right on the position
Time will mend this, and some bad experiences will help
What we actually did was drop the whole thing, if they WANTED to lose the customers we could bring them, there was no point in actually reviewing their service at all.
BTW. Has anyone ever got REALLY in a lawsuit on this? pointers?
Besides I wouldn't want to wait some more 2-4 years to have Loki or someone new start porting civ to solaris...
...)
Its not about features.
Its not a social-market matter, if you don't pay to get an OS. Its your personal choice.
Its about the development and growth model!
OSS.
I'm not talking about kernel hacking (which is good.) and obviously not about the possibility my father finally has of reading the source code of his OS. (He usually dosn't do peer reviewing on the crypto code of his programs anyway
We have seen still very little about the REAL REVOLUTION (tm) which is not in technology, but in the IT growth model.
"Open source"/"Free Software"/"whatever" leaves businesses more in control when developing their products. And quality of development a possibility to grow thanks to open standards (which give small investors and single developers a bigger chance on where they are putting their training money).
Its not by chance that in the last years revenue for big IT firm has steadily moved prom products to consulting , services and support. Products are steadily becoming less the focus (and to do this you need scale economies at which OSS and open standards perform well). TCO and what I ACTUALLY get to using the box is the point.
Right now there are projects on what other OSes have already, just because thats what is still missing.
I don't think that when in a year or two this job is done, the community will just vanish.
Au contraire, the investment put in all these years of development and even more in what is happening this year and in the next 2, will produce its most spectaculr results AFTER we have finished with word processing and desktop GUI.
When competition on R&D will re-start.
(That's where MS stopped us all some 10 years ago...)