The job of a linux distributor (such as Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu etc) is primarily that of assembling a large quantity of free and open source software into an easy to use and pre-configured package. While they may write and contribute some of their own software to the mix, and do some customisation and bug fixes of their own, 95%+ of the software you see in a linux distro will be common to other distrabutions.
I don't use Red Hat or Fedora myself, so could be wrong about the below, but... Fedora is developed by the community (Red Hat also helps to develop it) and is kept fairly up-to date with new software releases. Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses snapshot of Fedora as a core, keeps it stable (ie doesn't update it that often, just bug fixes) and adds a few bits of proprietary software and adds in the support contract (most people buy Red Hat for the support). If you want Red Hat without the support, and the RH branding, then maybe CentOS is what you are looking for.
I would personally suggest Ubuntu Linux, which is Debian based, its fairly well polished and most things will work straight out of the box, so you shouldn't need too much in the way of support to get it setup (Though I have had some difficulties with the 64 bit version). Even things like Java, ATI/nVidia drivers and multimedia codexs can be gotten via apt-get (you may need the extras repository for some of these). If you need paid support, Canonical will support Ubuntu for $100 USD per computer per year (I haven't used them myself, so can't say how good they are).
If you want free support, then goggle is your friend, as is reading the documentation, searching goggle groups, asking on mailing lists and visiting IRC channels. The only cost is the time and effort to find the answers for yourself (which doubles as a good education in Linux). You are not guaranteed an answer, but will usually find one, nor a time limit on how long it will take to find or receive an answer. This is the method that most individuals actually use, though it does require that you are willing to learn. In a business where time is money, it is possible that paid support may work out cheaper than your own time in searching google (it depends on how much your time is worth compared to the time saved via a support contract), but in comparison, I will ask you when was the last time you phoned up Microsoft and had them tell you how to fix your problem.
As for the Mozilla Corporation, they are very new and haven't done anything that I could comment on, but I see it as very, very unlikely that its formation will have a detrimental effect to the development of free and open source Firefox. We already have Netscape as a commercial company that takes Firefox, gives a customised setup, adds alot of their own branding to the package and throws in a few proprietary components and calls it Netscape 8. Firefox is not the poor "free starter edition" cousin to Netscape 8. As long as people are intrested in Firefox, then it will continue to be developed and it will always remain free.
For businesses specialising in free and open source software, the "switchero" is fairly uncommon. FLOSS licences actually prevent people from doing a "switchero" on existing software, if its been releases as FLOSS then that version will be free forever. With non copyleft (ie GPL) licences (or when exceptions are made in the licence), then someone can make a proprietary fork of the project and future versions of that fork may not be free, though others are still free to continue to work on the FLOSS version. This can also happen with copyleft or GPL software when only one person, or one group, owns ALL the copyright to the software and can thus change the licence for future versions (such as PHPedit). In many cases, where the software has been developed by the community, there are too many copyright holders for this
Apart from the fact that they already have a sizeable amount of translations already done.
The prime reason the CoS sells books, is not to make money from book sales, but as PR to get new members to join them. Most long term members will end up buying the majority of Hubbards works anyway (its an almost gaurenteed market).
The economics of translating the works is about gaining a wider audience of potentual members.
In one of their annual PR events, the CoS actually promoted the story of the Dianetics book, being translated into russian by a unknown person, and hand written copies being distrabuted samizat style. This supposedly led to a large underground movement, allowing the CoS to walk in, convert the the movement into an "offical" one and suposedly become very successful over there.
The two C's the CoS can't stand are Competition and Criticism. Copyright and Trademark law and associated lawsuits are a means to an end for them, its the key that enables them to keep an iron grip of control within their own organizational structure (which is a miriad of seperate legal entities). It is also a means of harrassing those who would dare to offer potentual Competition and/or Criticism and/or threaten their control.
How long till someone finds a security flaw in 3com's online payment system and assigns themselves a financial reward for discovering the security flaw.
The BBC doesn't need a computer tax, even if people only rarely watch TV, the majority of people will still own a TV set (and thus need a £120/year licence). The fear is that government will scrap the licence fee.
With the Iraq fiasco, and the BBC claims that the UK government "sexed up" the report with the 45 minute claim (they where wrong on a technicality, but correct in spirit), there has been alot of very close scrutiny on the BBC, its inner workings, what it is doing with taxpayer money and if it is still giving "value for money" etc, etc.
The difference is that with media conglomerates, TV shows are an investment which they then try to sell at retail to the public for profit. They have carefully worked out their business model, and its profitable. They are afraid of anything new that will upset that business model, and disrupt their profit flows. They only want to change when they have worked out that the new method will be more profitable, and that they can be in control of the change.
The BBC on the other hand gets its "investment" money direct from the public, and is now taking the view that as such, the public already owns everything it produces (its just a case of giving it to them). They are afraid of becoming obsolete and losing relevance to the public (at which point they will lose 99% of their funding). Thus the BBC is actually TRYING to embrace the revolution and work around the problems generated by those still kicking and screaming about the threat of losing control.
Its more a case that if you market for only beauty, then you can loose sight of other things such as functionaity and/or game-play.
Without beauty, you need to focus on the other aspects to become good. Though its sometimes hard to compete with beauty in the marketplace, when selling to the masses, even with lots of the other stuff.
The only other aspect is the learning-curve. Its one thing to figure it out for yourself, it another thing entirly to create a map of everywhere a user might get lost.
The real solution to global warming is Contraction and Convergence in which each global citizen would be given a a carbon emmissions allowance (similar to tradeable carbon credits under koyto). When you buy a tank of petrol, or a plane ticket, you would have to spend some of your "carbon credits" in addition to cash
The limits would initially be set by each countries current emmissions levels, but reduced yearly by a preset formula (some developing countries may actually get an per-capita increase).
The formula would be based on how much emmissions can be released while still keeping the CO2 concentration at the "safe" level of below 450ppm. You take this figure as the total global emmissions allowance and then divide it by the Earths population.
Individuals in countries like the USA that can't reduce their emmissions in line with the "contraction and convergence" reduction rate, would still have the option of buying carbon credits, on the world market, from those in the developing world who still have unused credits. However the laws of supply and demand show that the price of these credits will increase as the supply is reduced. Which leaves the market to work out the cheapest way for the economy to become carbon neutral
I agree with the philosphical dislike of the non-commercial restrictions, the purpose seems (in the case of music) to be insurance against a record company simply selling CDs in shops and not paying the artist any royalties.
In the software world, the notion of copyleft has achieved a similar goal in practice, without actually banning commercial distrabution.
The biggest differences with CC, seems to be first they trying to target an audience very used to the absolute monopoly of copyright, so have opted for the "open source" arguement of increased utility, rather than the "free software" argument of moral imperitive and freedom as a right.
Second, software is inherently useful, and most free software is written because the authour has a need for the software themselves or someone they are trying to help. With "art" (inc music and film), there is not this inherent utility, art is done because it is fun, or cool or in many cases (I assume) to try and become more well known, and then strike it big and become rich (well thats the dream put out in our mass media culture).
Money is always a problem when it gets involved in human endevors, but assuming we can't simply eliminate all money (which would eliminate this type of problem), the question may simply be one of finding a workable business model in the art world, that allows freedom, but also creates a money flow.
Maybe the answer lies in the idea that people are not paying an artist for what he has produced, but rather for what he has not yet produced and on live performance (the two things an artist has an natural monolopy on).
On the other issue while in small projects it is sometimes easier to simply bundle the source code in with the binary. There are many cases, especally when the source is large, to keep them seperate to save costs and save disk space (ie when bundling source would put you over the size limit for a single CD).
Think of a knoppix CD, most people don't need the source code to build it from scratch, except possibly developers, so forcing me to burn you a second source CD every time someone asks for a copy of knoppix would just be a waste of CDs.
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The job of a linux distributor (such as Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu etc) is primarily that of assembling a large quantity of free and open source software into an easy to use and pre-configured package. While they may write and contribute some of their own software to the mix, and do some customisation and bug fixes of their own, 95%+ of the software you see in a linux distro will be common to other distrabutions.
I don't use Red Hat or Fedora myself, so could be wrong about the below, but... Fedora is developed by the community (Red Hat also helps to develop it) and is kept fairly up-to date with new software releases. Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses snapshot of Fedora as a core, keeps it stable (ie doesn't update it that often, just bug fixes) and adds a few bits of proprietary software and adds in the support contract (most people buy Red Hat for the support). If you want Red Hat without the support, and the RH branding, then maybe CentOS is what you are looking for.
I would personally suggest Ubuntu Linux, which is Debian based, its fairly well polished and most things will work straight out of the box, so you shouldn't need too much in the way of support to get it setup (Though I have had some difficulties with the 64 bit version). Even things like Java, ATI/nVidia drivers and multimedia codexs can be gotten via apt-get (you may need the extras repository for some of these). If you need paid support, Canonical will support Ubuntu for $100 USD per computer per year (I haven't used them myself, so can't say how good they are).
If you want free support, then goggle is your friend, as is reading the documentation, searching goggle groups, asking on mailing lists and visiting IRC channels. The only cost is the time and effort to find the answers for yourself (which doubles as a good education in Linux). You are not guaranteed an answer, but will usually find one, nor a time limit on how long it will take to find or receive an answer. This is the method that most individuals actually use, though it does require that you are willing to learn. In a business where time is money, it is possible that paid support may work out cheaper than your own time in searching google (it depends on how much your time is worth compared to the time saved via a support contract), but in comparison, I will ask you when was the last time you phoned up Microsoft and had them tell you how to fix your problem.
As for the Mozilla Corporation, they are very new and haven't done anything that I could comment on, but I see it as very, very unlikely that its formation will have a detrimental effect to the development of free and open source Firefox. We already have Netscape as a commercial company that takes Firefox, gives a customised setup, adds alot of their own branding to the package and throws in a few proprietary components and calls it Netscape 8. Firefox is not the poor "free starter edition" cousin to Netscape 8. As long as people are intrested in Firefox, then it will continue to be developed and it will always remain free.
For businesses specialising in free and open source software, the "switchero" is fairly uncommon. FLOSS licences actually prevent people from doing a "switchero" on existing software, if its been releases as FLOSS then that version will be free forever. With non copyleft (ie GPL) licences (or when exceptions are made in the licence), then someone can make a proprietary fork of the project and future versions of that fork may not be free, though others are still free to continue to work on the FLOSS version. This can also happen with copyleft or GPL software when only one person, or one group, owns ALL the copyright to the software and can thus change the licence for future versions (such as PHPedit). In many cases, where the software has been developed by the community, there are too many copyright holders for this
Apart from the fact that they already have a sizeable amount of translations already done.
The prime reason the CoS sells books, is not to make money from book sales, but as PR to get new members to join them. Most long term members will end up buying the majority of Hubbards works anyway (its an almost gaurenteed market).
The economics of translating the works is about gaining a wider audience of potentual members.
In one of their annual PR events, the CoS actually promoted the story of the Dianetics book, being translated into russian by a unknown person, and hand written copies being distrabuted samizat style. This supposedly led to a large underground movement, allowing the CoS to walk in, convert the the movement into an "offical" one and suposedly become very successful over there.
The two C's the CoS can't stand are Competition and Criticism. Copyright and Trademark law and associated lawsuits are a means to an end for them, its the key that enables them to keep an iron grip of control within their own organizational structure (which is a miriad of seperate legal entities). It is also a means of harrassing those who would dare to offer potentual Competition and/or Criticism and/or threaten their control.
1. Deleberatly create security flaw in Windows
2. Notify 3com of security flaw
3. Wait 5 working days
4. Profit
How long till someone finds a security flaw in 3com's online payment system and assigns themselves a financial reward for discovering the security flaw.
His crime was to show up the US Military, somebodies head has to roll.
In other news: with recent staffing shortages, the US Military has started drafting accountants from the prestigious ranks of the RIAA and MPAA
The BBC doesn't need a computer tax, even if people only rarely watch TV, the majority of people will still own a TV set (and thus need a £120/year licence). The fear is that government will scrap the licence fee.
With the Iraq fiasco, and the BBC claims that the UK government "sexed up" the report with the 45 minute claim (they where wrong on a technicality, but correct in spirit), there has been alot of very close scrutiny on the BBC, its inner workings, what it is doing with taxpayer money and if it is still giving "value for money" etc, etc.
The difference is that with media conglomerates, TV shows are an investment which they then try to sell at retail to the public for profit. They have carefully worked out their business model, and its profitable. They are afraid of anything new that will upset that business model, and disrupt their profit flows. They only want to change when they have worked out that the new method will be more profitable, and that they can be in control of the change.
The BBC on the other hand gets its "investment" money direct from the public, and is now taking the view that as such, the public already owns everything it produces (its just a case of giving it to them). They are afraid of becoming obsolete and losing relevance to the public (at which point they will lose 99% of their funding). Thus the BBC is actually TRYING to embrace the revolution and work around the problems generated by those still kicking and screaming about the threat of losing control.
Its not a case of beautiful = unusable
Its more a case that if you market for only beauty, then you can loose sight of other things such as functionaity and/or game-play.
Without beauty, you need to focus on the other aspects to become good. Though its sometimes hard to compete with beauty in the marketplace, when selling to the masses, even with lots of the other stuff.
The only other aspect is the learning-curve. Its one thing to figure it out for yourself, it another thing entirly to create a map of everywhere a user might get lost.
The real solution to global warming is Contraction and Convergence in which each global citizen would be given a a carbon emmissions allowance (similar to tradeable carbon credits under koyto). When you buy a tank of petrol, or a plane ticket, you would have to spend some of your "carbon credits" in addition to cash
The limits would initially be set by each countries current emmissions levels, but reduced yearly by a preset formula (some developing countries may actually get an per-capita increase).
The formula would be based on how much emmissions can be released while still keeping the CO2 concentration at the "safe" level of below 450ppm. You take this figure as the total global emmissions allowance and then divide it by the Earths population.
Individuals in countries like the USA that can't reduce their emmissions in line with the "contraction and convergence" reduction rate, would still have the option of buying carbon credits, on the world market, from those in the developing world who still have unused credits. However the laws of supply and demand show that the price of these credits will increase as the supply is reduced. Which leaves the market to work out the cheapest way for the economy to become carbon neutral
Current studies show that the sustainable figure would be around 1-ton CO2 per person per year - Current per-capita usage in the USA is currently 20.6 tons per year, and 9.3 in the UK
No Broadcast flag but no white flag either
Well it took exactly 20 years for Wangari Maathai, after recieving the Alternitive Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award) in 1984 to be finally be awarded the "offical" Nobel Prizea i-nobel-prize.htm
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/recip/maathai.htm
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/news/wangari-maath
I agree with the philosphical dislike of the non-commercial restrictions, the purpose seems (in the case of music) to be insurance against a record company simply selling CDs in shops and not paying the artist any royalties.
In the software world, the notion of copyleft has achieved a similar goal in practice, without actually banning commercial distrabution.
The biggest differences with CC, seems to be first they trying to target an audience very used to the absolute monopoly of copyright, so have opted for the "open source" arguement of increased utility, rather than the "free software" argument of moral imperitive and freedom as a right.
Second, software is inherently useful, and most free software is written because the authour has a need for the software themselves or someone they are trying to help. With "art" (inc music and film), there is not this inherent utility, art is done because it is fun, or cool or in many cases (I assume) to try and become more well known, and then strike it big and become rich (well thats the dream put out in our mass media culture).
Money is always a problem when it gets involved in human endevors, but assuming we can't simply eliminate all money (which would eliminate this type of problem), the question may simply be one of finding a workable business model in the art world, that allows freedom, but also creates a money flow.
Maybe the answer lies in the idea that people are not paying an artist for what he has produced, but rather for what he has not yet produced and on live performance (the two things an artist has an natural monolopy on).
On the other issue while in small projects it is sometimes easier to simply bundle the source code in with the binary. There are many cases, especally when the source is large, to keep them seperate to save costs and save disk space (ie when bundling source would put you over the size limit for a single CD).
Think of a knoppix CD, most people don't need the source code to build it from scratch, except possibly developers, so forcing me to burn you a second source CD every time someone asks for a copy of knoppix would just be a waste of CDs.