"the defendant was charged with kicking the victim's head and body and trying to strangle him" and "The lawsuit only dealt with the theft of the goods - a virtual amulet and a virtual mask in RuneScape"
This case is only news- (or rather, Slashdot-) worthy because of the latter crime, but two took place - assault and virtual theft.
Considering the investment of time many people put into virtual activities (including writing comments on/.), I think it's an excellent idea for a judge to set this kind of precedent, especially for a crime committed by, and on, a child.
It's not clear from the original post if this person has been doing only manual QA tasks or has also been writing automated tests.
I agree with the parent that there's no substantive difference between a QA engineer who's coding tests and a Dev engineer who's coding functionality - both are needed to deliver a product, and both need to create quality complete code.
A good QA engineer who wants to move into development should try to build good relationships with developers and the development manager, try to take on the QA tasks that would benefit from more complex automation, and if possible try to add value to the unit tests. That's a great way to show your interest and build towards an effective demonstration of what you can do.
Once you've got some development experience, make it known that you want to move into full-time development, and if you don't get what you want, take that experience and sell it on, being honest but focussing on the capability and complexity of and technologies in what you've done. Unless you get lucky at interview, the job market will probably favour employers for a while, so play it safe and do a year of hands-on coding before you try to move.
So you're saying it's wrong for a closed source project to replicate an open source one? (note replicate in this case doesn't mean fork, or even port, it means re-implement from scratch)
From your chosen example, you appear to have no problem with the reverse scenario, since OpenOffice.org certainly does borrow some ideas from (and implements the document formats of) the (presently) dominant office suite which is decidedly closed source.
Oh please. Open source isn't better than closed source, it's just (somewhat) free. Internet distribution just means that the ways of making money from software (and for that matter, music, movies and that often overlooked engine of Windows popularity, computer games) are changing.
The internet is amazing and no one would ever want to go back... but hasn't anyone noticed that the Sophie project was about creating "books" from existing material? If the mechanisms of "re-distribution" (i.e. P2P, social upload sites, blogs and videos that endlessly recycle and "add value" to original content) continue to out-strip the means of making money from software and media, we're going to see more creative ways of making money (invasive DRM on media, games created for the purposes of legal entrapment) and less creative content.
I think the best way to view this is as evidence that some kind of equilibrium may establish itself between closed/proprietary/licensed and open/free. It reminds me of an old science fiction story where an alien race decide to destroy mankind by giving them a machine that can duplicate anything; mankind survives by reorienting its value system around uniqueness rather than mass production. Man I wish I knew the name of that story and the author, but I read it before I was able to fully appreciate how smart it was, and before any of us could have known how relevant it might be.
It will be interesting to see how all this good work will be funded, or rather, by whom. Google is a no-brainer, but who else?
The Web for Society program sounds like something that should be a target for funding from technology-supporting charities like Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation.
Most people don't and won't use Linux because it's a bunch of random software. Open-source is great for producing libraries and software to an existing spec, but most o-s developers hate to ape a UI too closely, with the result that most o-s GUIs are appalling.
Commercial desktops are: - designed = usability and consistency, actually considering the use cases that regular people carry out every day - principled = they don't contain every random feature that some hacker thinks would be cool
Linux has a few key apps (browser and an office suite), but if it weren't for Java, it would be very limited. O-s hackers create tools, not apps.
There is a huge chicken-and-egg problem - a platform doesn't get apps until it has volume, and vice-versa.
If there was a coherent Linux desktop movement that created a common framework independent of any graphical toolkit (Gtk or Qt), and that focussed on users rather than on features, it might just gain users. The current situation with Vista was the perfect opportunity to promote Linux, but the big L wasn't ready.
If your MP3 player is wireless, you don't need a Surface to recognise it or drag to it - you just need a automatically registered representation of the player in a virtual environment, like on a computer desktop.
If the artwork is physical rather than virtual, the resolution of the image isn't going to be great from a camera - a scanner is an optimised graphical input device.
I'm not ruling out Surface and multi-touch as useful innovations, far from it - I just think that the "cool" demos we've seen so far are just scratching at the... surface.
To suggest that online shows wouldn't exist without TV is short-sighted.
Do you think that the music industry should have died when gramophones started becoming popular, offering a viable alternative to radio? How about LP's? Cassettes? Did MTV kill the industry? CD's? Maybe DVDs? No.
Cinema reinvented itself by focussing on what it does well - big screen, big sound and someone else to clean up the popcorn.
It's simple - the medium moves on and media producers take advantage of the new features.
The drive for the in-progress media upgrade is that Internet is replacing TV by offering more choice from small providers, more interactivity for "viewers" and more effective advertising through *targetting* with *global* reach. This pull/push will cause more well-resourced shows to be released on the internet.
Also, TVs/monitors are now big enough and integrated media center/console/computers smart enough that you can use them in the living room, so you can read books, play games and experience local and broadcast media and content from your sofa. It's the (current) best of all worlds. Enjoy it!
Yes, but actually the US collaborated in the plausible fiction of the Cold War so as to maintain power. Gorbachev broke silence when the military cost of maintaining that fiction was too great for his country to bear.
The current "cold war", the War against Terrorism, also uses real elements (like militant Islam and 9/11), but in the scope of its abuse of the rights of US citizens and foreign soldiers, it's also a plausible fiction.
As for the original post, it's relatively easy to stop a pheromone fear weapon - just wear nose plugs. As usual, psychological means (such as propaganda) to create fear or to project power are far more plausible and effective.
When considering fear, it's not soldiers on a battlefield you should be concerned about - it's voters on election day.
I haven't yet seen the details of the policy, but if it allows the US government access to any message transferred or stored on a US-based computing device, I think it's time for the rest of the world to abandon GMail, Yahoo mail etc. in droves.
Every US citizen needs to read Deterring Democracy (Noam Chomsky) or failing that, try The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein); your government is out of control.
Once upon a time, some people imagined that the internet would be the ultimate platform for free speech. Terrorists will simply get more creative in their communication technology (e.g. steganography on Flickr or other image-sharing web-sites) - it's the regular folk who are losing privacy, not by inches but by miles.
The reasons why are almost entirely covered in the other replies, but I would add the following:
America's interference in matters of copyright and DRM is *never* welcomed , it is simply tolerated because: 1. the US is a significant market for all kinds of good and the world's leading producer of media, and therefore it's trade agreements are a serious bargaining chip 2. the US is also the world's leading military power, which gives it power in other domains (e.g. invading Iraq to control oil resources)
But things change - patents lapse or are denied force, military assets become obsolete, other economies and markets and producers develop. And when governments consistently fail the people they represent, they are replaced or toppled, by vote or revolution. The ecology of power in a state and between states enforces limits, and there will always be enough little people to pull down greedy Gulliver.
Right, and open-source and open standards are a desperate attempt to get ancillary or support revenue a) from a product that is either a commodity (e.g. JBoss) or is under serious threat in its market (e.g. OOo, Adobe), or b) for a company that hasn't the momentum to achieve volume by other means. Occasionally an open-source project is simply an ego extension of it's original or primary developer/author (Linux being the archetypal example in more than one respect). Some successful open-source projects attract enough parasites or symbionts (e.g. Red Hat)
Or more bluntly, most open-source is cheap, a knock-off or both.
Today through methods such as patents, financial leverage (as supplier and as a consumer of other suppliers), political leverage, marketing/PR, as an issuer of shares owned by citizens, and as an employer of staff who are directly dependent, corporations exert *massive* control. But the signs have been there for years...
1) Science-fiction has long predicted the rise of mega-corporations that are essentially beyond the control of governments, eventually capable of implementing their own security force, legislation and potentially even taxes (especially if a corporation invests in developing infrastructure), although the funding and tax breaks that large corporations receive are already a form of indirect taxation 2) Naomi Klein's "No Logo" described the mechanics and effects of globalisation 3) Companies funded by VCs and shareholders are naturally driven by short-term needs in their operation; we want companies to be successful and we don't need to know how they actually achieve success
Even ignoring corporate "visionaries" like Tom Peters (especially in "Reimagine!") who foresee most of us being effectively employed in PSFs (Professional Service Firms, either as teams within a corporation or as out-sourced resources), most of us will effectively work for an increasingly small number of ever larger corporations. A company that de-merges is in a temporary state before it either dies or is re-absorbed.
The US is the most advanced state in terms of empowering corporations in these ways (using the term "advanced" in the way it's used in medicine for, say, cancer). By virtue of these methods of control, the trend is inevitably towards ever-larger and more global companies (where "larger" includes both in-sourced and out-sourced employees, even if the latter are nominally employed within a small private company).
The only hope of delaying or reversing these trends is to enact legislation that reins in one of the above methods of control. However this would require an overwhelming display of "democracy" or exertions of individual "freedom" that I find hard to believe in; most of us are just too focussed on the short-term and our immediate circle of concern to actually do anything other than rant here on/.
There's clearly little benefit for countries with small patent portfolios to agree to enforce US patents, but the US simply has to link patents to trade agreements to make this work anyway, similar to what has been done with DRM - see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/13 57232 for a recent relevant example of this.
I guess we all know that this has nothing to do with child porn, but let's try to figure out an alternative that would allow the politicians to achieve their stated goal without violating the rights of internet users in the process.
Like everything, child porn follows a production chain before it reaches its consumers. Someone has to: - take the photos (which is the step that directly harms the children) - publish them to a site (which makes them available, indirectly harming the children) - point to the site so that paedophiles can find it - forward the site link or the photos themselves
Gonzales is going after the end of the chain (the consumers) and is doing so in an unlimited way that invades every internet users's basic rights to privacy.
There are more direct tactics that could be applied: - increase the penalties and the policing against the creators of the photos - go after the sites, forcing them to reveal their usage records and (where necessary) continuing to allow the site to operate for a time so that records can be obtained
To preserve the rights of internet users, records should only be retained and available where there is a likelihood that there is a connection to child porn: - oblige ISP providers to:
* preserve mail messages *** containing a limited set of keywords ***
* track DNS queries for *** specifically identified child porn sites or (mail-based) distributors ** - require communication services (mail, IM) to track the lists of addresses that are sent to (not received)
And here's the crucial part: any of the above data may only be requested for specific users that have been identified as potential child porn distributors.
Despite the revisionism in the phrase "Cray co-founder", he is an acknowledged HPC expert. See Burton Smith's bio at the Computing History museum. However see also the rather self-serving Seymour Cray Award he received during his tenure at Cray.
Now what's a hot iron hardware guy doing joining Microsoft you might be thinking? Well take a look at his articles.
I don't think being "technical" is what prevents users clicking. I suspect many Firefox users are simply more active in trying to control their desktop environment, and perhaps also are more averse to advertising in the first place (they may have chosen Firefox because of it's built-in option to stop popup advertising). In the end, I don't think Firefox is responsible for any decline in ad clicks.
I expect we will see more advertising using Flash; I don't think MacroMedia are going to let you tweak what you see and what you don't since advertising content is a key use of their technology.
The battle for our eyeballs will continue. I think the real question is - how much are online users willing to endure advertising to get reasonable content for free or cheap? Either way we pay, in either time or money. I for one am grateful for those folks who click on adverts because they in effect help to subsidise the internet, but advertisers are under pressure to convert page hits to ad clicks to sales so who knows how long the current model will last?
You're right about *exclusively*, however final decision authority does rest in an individual. That is far more closed compared to Mozila.org, GNOME.org or Java.
You can also obtain and modify Java's code as you wish (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp) but you can only *distribute* your modifications for the purpose of "research" (so not as part of a commercial product for example).
Java is "bazaar"-like because the JCP provides a mechanism for groups and individuals to create proposals to evolve or extend Java which are ratified by a committe (again of groups and individuals, essentially chosen in a meritocratic manner). This could be compared with Mozilla's team of super-reviewers.
Jonathan's point is that Linux (the kernel) is cathedral-like because decisions about changes to the kernel are made exclusively by Linus Torvalds.
I really find Eric Raymond's seminal CATB article (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html) to be an essential read, but it's terminology is IMHO too obscure to be used effectively in discussions like this; I find well-known terms like "dictatorship" (Linux kernel), "meritocracy" (Mozilla.org, "Individual Expert"s on the Java JCP Committee) and "feudal" (GNOME.org) are clearer.
The couched assertion in this post that "most **experts** view Linux as the most serious threat to Microsoft" represents a rather narrow view of operating systems and the entire open-source model of software development. At best, it is grossly simplistic. But I can't address this here in this thread - take a look at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ColmSmyth/2004111 6#linux_is_an_open_source for an evaluation of what really threatens Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
For those others who only skimmed the headlines:
"the defendant was charged with kicking the victim's head and body and trying to strangle him"
and
"The lawsuit only dealt with the theft of the goods - a virtual amulet and a virtual mask in RuneScape"
This case is only news- (or rather, Slashdot-) worthy because of the latter crime, but two took place - assault and virtual theft.
Considering the investment of time many people put into virtual activities (including writing comments on /.), I think it's an excellent idea for a judge to set this kind of precedent, especially for a crime committed by, and on, a child.
It's not clear from the original post if this person has been doing only manual QA tasks or has also been writing automated tests.
I agree with the parent that there's no substantive difference between a QA engineer who's coding tests and a Dev engineer who's coding functionality - both are needed to deliver a product, and both need to create quality complete code.
A good QA engineer who wants to move into development should try to build good relationships with developers and the development manager, try to take on the QA tasks that would benefit from more complex automation, and if possible try to add value to the unit tests. That's a great way to show your interest and build towards an effective demonstration of what you can do.
Once you've got some development experience, make it known that you want to move into full-time development, and if you don't get what you want, take that experience and sell it on, being honest but focussing on the capability and complexity of and technologies in what you've done. Unless you get lucky at interview, the job market will probably favour employers for a while, so play it safe and do a year of hands-on coding before you try to move.
So you're saying it's wrong for a closed source project to replicate an open source one? (note replicate in this case doesn't mean fork, or even port, it means re-implement from scratch)
From your chosen example, you appear to have no problem with the reverse scenario, since OpenOffice.org certainly does borrow some ideas from (and implements the document formats of) the (presently) dominant office suite which is decidedly closed source.
Oh please. Open source isn't better than closed source, it's just (somewhat) free. Internet distribution just means that the ways of making money from software (and for that matter, music, movies and that often overlooked engine of Windows popularity, computer games) are changing.
The internet is amazing and no one would ever want to go back... but hasn't anyone noticed that the Sophie project was about creating "books" from existing material? If the mechanisms of "re-distribution" (i.e. P2P, social upload sites, blogs and videos that endlessly recycle and "add value" to original content) continue to out-strip the means of making money from software and media, we're going to see more creative ways of making money (invasive DRM on media, games created for the purposes of legal entrapment) and less creative content.
I think the best way to view this is as evidence that some kind of equilibrium may establish itself between closed/proprietary/licensed and open/free. It reminds me of an old science fiction story where an alien race decide to destroy mankind by giving them a machine that can duplicate anything; mankind survives by reorienting its value system around uniqueness rather than mass production. Man I wish I knew the name of that story and the author, but I read it before I was able to fully appreciate how smart it was, and before any of us could have known how relevant it might be.
It will be interesting to see how all this good work will be funded, or rather, by whom. Google is a no-brainer, but who else? The Web for Society program sounds like something that should be a target for funding from technology-supporting charities like Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation.
Amazing. You claim he can't know about America, but you claim to know the ways he knows about it. You are the +5 generalisation about America.
Most people don't and won't use Linux because it's a bunch of random software. Open-source is great for producing libraries and software to an existing spec, but most o-s developers hate to ape a UI too closely, with the result that most o-s GUIs are appalling.
Commercial desktops are:
- designed = usability and consistency, actually considering the use cases that regular people carry out every day
- principled = they don't contain every random feature that some hacker thinks would be cool
Linux has a few key apps (browser and an office suite), but if it weren't for Java, it would be very limited. O-s hackers create tools, not apps.
There is a huge chicken-and-egg problem - a platform doesn't get apps until it has volume, and vice-versa.
If there was a coherent Linux desktop movement that created a common framework independent of any graphical toolkit (Gtk or Qt), and that focussed on users rather than on features, it might just gain users. The current situation with Vista was the perfect opportunity to promote Linux, but the big L wasn't ready.
If your MP3 player is wireless, you don't need a Surface to recognise it or drag to it - you just need a automatically registered representation of the player in a virtual environment, like on a computer desktop.
If the artwork is physical rather than virtual, the resolution of the image isn't going to be great from a camera - a scanner is an optimised graphical input device.
I'm not ruling out Surface and multi-touch as useful innovations, far from it - I just think that the "cool" demos we've seen so far are just scratching at the... surface.
To suggest that online shows wouldn't exist without TV is short-sighted.
Do you think that the music industry should have died when gramophones started becoming popular, offering a viable alternative to radio? How about LP's? Cassettes? Did MTV kill the industry? CD's? Maybe DVDs? No.
Cinema reinvented itself by focussing on what it does well - big screen, big sound and someone else to clean up the popcorn.
It's simple - the medium moves on and media producers take advantage of the new features.
The drive for the in-progress media upgrade is that Internet is replacing TV by offering more choice from small providers, more interactivity for "viewers" and more effective advertising through *targetting* with *global* reach. This pull/push will cause more well-resourced shows to be released on the internet.
Also, TVs/monitors are now big enough and integrated media center/console/computers smart enough that you can use them in the living room, so you can read books, play games and experience local and broadcast media and content from your sofa. It's the (current) best of all worlds. Enjoy it!
Yes, but actually the US collaborated in the plausible fiction of the Cold War so as to maintain power. Gorbachev broke silence when the military cost of maintaining that fiction was too great for his country to bear.
The current "cold war", the War against Terrorism, also uses real elements (like militant Islam and 9/11), but in the scope of its abuse of the rights of US citizens and foreign soldiers, it's also a plausible fiction.
As for the original post, it's relatively easy to stop a pheromone fear weapon - just wear nose plugs. As usual, psychological means (such as propaganda) to create fear or to project power are far more plausible and effective.
When considering fear, it's not soldiers on a battlefield you should be concerned about - it's voters on election day.
I haven't yet seen the details of the policy, but if it allows the US government access to any message transferred or stored on a US-based computing device, I think it's time for the rest of the world to abandon GMail, Yahoo mail etc. in droves.
Every US citizen needs to read Deterring Democracy (Noam Chomsky) or failing that, try The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein); your government is out of control.
Once upon a time, some people imagined that the internet would be the ultimate platform for free speech. Terrorists will simply get more creative in their communication technology (e.g. steganography on Flickr or other image-sharing web-sites) - it's the regular folk who are losing privacy, not by inches but by miles.
Mod parent down; certainly not "Insightful".
The reasons why are almost entirely covered in the other replies, but I would add the following:
America's interference in matters of copyright and DRM is *never* welcomed , it is simply tolerated because:
1. the US is a significant market for all kinds of good and the world's leading producer of media, and therefore it's trade agreements are a serious bargaining chip
2. the US is also the world's leading military power, which gives it power in other domains (e.g. invading Iraq to control oil resources)
But things change - patents lapse or are denied force, military assets become obsolete, other economies and markets and producers develop. And when governments consistently fail the people they represent, they are replaced or toppled, by vote or revolution. The ecology of power in a state and between states enforces limits, and there will always be enough little people to pull down greedy Gulliver.
Right, and open-source and open standards are a desperate attempt to get ancillary or support revenue a) from a product that is either a commodity (e.g. JBoss) or is under serious threat in its market (e.g. OOo, Adobe), or b) for a company that hasn't the momentum to achieve volume by other means. Occasionally an open-source project is simply an ego extension of it's original or primary developer/author (Linux being the archetypal example in more than one respect). Some successful open-source projects attract enough parasites or symbionts (e.g. Red Hat)
Or more bluntly, most open-source is cheap, a knock-off or both.
This realisation has been a long time coming.
/.
Today through methods such as patents, financial leverage (as supplier and as a consumer of other suppliers), political leverage, marketing/PR, as an issuer of shares owned by citizens, and as an employer of staff who are directly dependent, corporations exert *massive* control. But the signs have been there for years...
1) Science-fiction has long predicted the rise of mega-corporations that are essentially beyond the control of governments, eventually capable of implementing their own security force, legislation and potentially even taxes (especially if a corporation invests in developing infrastructure), although the funding and tax breaks that large corporations receive are already a form of indirect taxation
2) Naomi Klein's "No Logo" described the mechanics and effects of globalisation
3) Companies funded by VCs and shareholders are naturally driven by short-term needs in their operation; we want companies to be successful and we don't need to know how they actually achieve success
Even ignoring corporate "visionaries" like Tom Peters (especially in "Reimagine!") who foresee most of us being effectively employed in PSFs (Professional Service Firms, either as teams within a corporation or as out-sourced resources), most of us will effectively work for an increasingly small number of ever larger corporations. A company that de-merges is in a temporary state before it either dies or is re-absorbed.
The US is the most advanced state in terms of empowering corporations in these ways (using the term "advanced" in the way it's used in medicine for, say, cancer). By virtue of these methods of control, the trend is inevitably towards ever-larger and more global companies (where "larger" includes both in-sourced and out-sourced employees, even if the latter are nominally employed within a small private company).
The only hope of delaying or reversing these trends is to enact legislation that reins in one of the above methods of control. However this would require an overwhelming display of "democracy" or exertions of individual "freedom" that I find hard to believe in; most of us are just too focussed on the short-term and our immediate circle of concern to actually do anything other than rant here on
But please, prove me wrong!
There's clearly little benefit for countries with small patent portfolios to agree to enforce US patents, but the US simply has to link patents to trade agreements to make this work anyway, similar to what has been done with DRM - see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/13 57232 for a recent relevant example of this.
I guess we all know that this has nothing to do with child porn, but let's try to figure out an alternative that would allow the politicians to achieve their stated goal without violating the rights of internet users in the process.
Like everything, child porn follows a production chain before it reaches its consumers. Someone has to:
- take the photos (which is the step that directly harms the children)
- publish them to a site (which makes them available, indirectly harming the children)
- point to the site so that paedophiles can find it
- forward the site link or the photos themselves
Gonzales is going after the end of the chain (the consumers) and is doing so in an unlimited way that invades every internet users's basic rights to privacy.
There are more direct tactics that could be applied:
- increase the penalties and the policing against the creators of the photos
- go after the sites, forcing them to reveal their usage records and (where necessary) continuing to allow the site to operate for a time so that records can be obtained
To preserve the rights of internet users, records should only be retained and available where there is a likelihood that there is a connection to child porn:
- oblige ISP providers to:
* preserve mail messages *** containing a limited set of keywords ***
* track DNS queries for *** specifically identified child porn sites or (mail-based) distributors **
- require communication services (mail, IM) to track the lists of addresses that are sent to (not received)
And here's the crucial part: any of the above data may only be requested for specific users that have been identified as potential child porn distributors.
There are a number of tools and browser extensions that can help your privacy - the mos radical is an anonymising proxy such as Tor - see http://colm-smyth.blogspot.com/2006/09/web-privacy -how-to-get-it-how-it-can-be.html for a summary of techniques.
I've used this technique too to maintain multiple Google identities, among others. See http://colm-smyth.blogspot.com/2006/09/web-privacy -how-to-get-it-how-it-can-be.html for a summary of the best ideas (and Firefox extensions) I've found for enhancing web privacy.
Despite the revisionism in the phrase "Cray co-founder", he is an acknowledged HPC expert. See Burton Smith's bio at the Computing History museum. However see also the rather self-serving Seymour Cray Award he received during his tenure at Cray. Now what's a hot iron hardware guy doing joining Microsoft you might be thinking? Well take a look at his articles.
I don't think being "technical" is what prevents users clicking. I suspect many Firefox users are simply more active in trying to control their desktop environment, and perhaps also are more averse to advertising in the first place (they may have chosen Firefox because of it's built-in option to stop popup advertising). In the end, I don't think Firefox is responsible for any decline in ad clicks.
I expect we will see more advertising using Flash; I don't think MacroMedia are going to let you tweak what you see and what you don't since advertising content is a key use of their technology.
The battle for our eyeballs will continue. I think the real question is - how much are online users willing to endure advertising to get reasonable content for free or cheap? Either way we pay, in either time or money. I for one am grateful for those folks who click on adverts because they in effect help to subsidise the internet, but advertisers are under pressure to convert page hits to ad clicks to sales so who knows how long the current model will last?
http://blogs.sun.com/ColmSmyth/You're right about *exclusively*, however final decision authority does rest in an individual. That is far more closed compared to Mozila.org, GNOME.org or Java.
You can also obtain and modify Java's code as you wish (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp) but you can only *distribute* your modifications for the purpose of "research" (so not as part of a commercial product for example).
1 6#linux_is_an_open_source) has aspects of both the cathedral and the bazaar.
r /cathedral-bazaar/index.html) to be an essential read, but it's terminology is IMHO too obscure to be used effectively in discussions like this; I find well-known terms like "dictatorship" (Linux kernel), "meritocracy" (Mozilla.org, "Individual Expert"s on the Java JCP Committee) and "feudal" (GNOME.org) are clearer.
Java is "bazaar"-like because the JCP provides a mechanism for groups and individuals to create proposals to evolve or extend Java which are ratified by a committe (again of groups and individuals, essentially chosen in a meritocratic manner). This could be compared with Mozilla's team of super-reviewers.
Jonathan's point is that Linux (the kernel) is cathedral-like because decisions about changes to the kernel are made exclusively by Linus Torvalds.
Java has open processes for becoming a member of the change committee (see http://www.jcp.org/en/participation/membership) and for submitting proposals (see http://www.jcp.org/en/procedures/jcp2#1).
"Linux" in the broadest sense (see http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ColmSmyth/200411
I really find Eric Raymond's seminal CATB article (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaa
http://blogs.sun.com/ColmSmyth/
The couched assertion in this post that "most **experts** view Linux as the most serious threat to Microsoft" represents a rather narrow view of operating systems and the entire open-source model of software development. At best, it is grossly simplistic. But I can't address this here in this thread - take a look at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ColmSmyth/2004111 6#linux_is_an_open_source for an evaluation of what really threatens Microsoft.