Bonobos are _not_ chimpanzees. Bonobos are, well, bonobos. They are their own species. What you meant to say are one of the great apes: humans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Am I the only person here who thought Dogma sucked?
The only reason Dogma is getting any attention at all is because it attacked the Catholic Church. As if this is so shocking in 1999. And are they really such tough ideas that I had to endure hours of lectures from Chris Rock and Selma Hyak?
Let me look in my crystal ball and describe for you how this movie was written.
The writer is 18 years old. It is 4am, and he is talking with his buddies. They are all drunk. They are excited because, yesterday in their Religion 101 class, the professor described Catholicism in a different way than Father Ignatius back home in Church did! The writer is so charged, he just has to write this stuff down. He always thought there was something funny going on there.
Years later, after becoming the Big Director, he decides it's time to release these "revolutionary ideas" onto the world. So he takes a few minutes to write an incredibly weak plot, and shoots the film in three days. Every scene is shot in one take, with the actors reading from cue cards. And he got his six year old sister to write the score for the thing.
Every monologue was way too long. How many times did we need to listen to the same damn ideas? Have the Mouth of God guy explain this stuff in the first 20 minutes of the movie and get on with it. Oh, here's a new character -- let's have him say what everyone else has said for the next 20 minutes. The acting was wretched. Every scene change meant only that another monologue was coming. The only saving graces of the whole film were Silent Bob and his partner, and they do not make a movie.
Z3, ENIAC, Colossus, ABC, Mark I, fine. Does it really matter who's first with these things? These were all, indeed, programmable devices, but if you saw one today, it wouldn't resemble what we all call a computer. Indeed, they were only incrementally better than punched card tabulating machines, which by that time, could be configured to execute more than simple counting and additions.
These devices were not stored-program computers: you had to physically reconfigure them for each new program, instead of supplying your program along with your data.
ENIAC, schmENIAC. Remember Mauchly and Eckert, but remember them because they went on to found UNIVAC Corp., and to design and produce the UNIVAC, the first commercially available stored-program electronic computer, indeed, the first commercially available electronic computer of any kind. The UNIVAC had an immesurably bigger influence on the history of computing than any of these other devices. It was because of the UNIVAC that IBM, for instance (then a manufacturer of punched card tabulating machines), got into the business of making electronic computers, and set them on the path to become the company we all know and love.
I think you overestimate the importance of status within the big picture of free software, i.e. the status of a single developer across all free software packages. I have heard that something like 100,000 developers have worked on Linux in one way or another. This sounds high to me, so lets say that only 10,000 have contributed over the lifespan of free software. How many of these are known by name across the community? A dozen, two dozen, maybe? A very small percentage.
Community widw anonymity is already here, and yet this has not deterred developers from contributing.
This is because a developer is not anonymous within a project, not to other developers within the project or to the project maintainer, anyway, and this is the status that (most) developers aspire to. I think that, for most people, the idea behind of contributing is more like "Maybe my patch will be accepted into Project Foo," rather than "Maybe I will be the next Linus Torvalds, a household name."
You say that the push by the free software developer towards the end user is largely driven by the need to prove itself, and in regards to things like GNOME, KDE, the various end user tools like AbiWord and others, my gut tells me that I must agree with you. It seems like a lot of the impetus behind these projects is driven by the need to say, "See we have a GUI, etc., too.
However, I don't think this applies to things like the kernel, and the various servers and network related things, nor to things like embedded applications of Linux, RT-Linux and others. These seem like genuine responses to existing needs.
In light of this definition of the success of free software, then, I guess I don't see the basis for your saying that the impetus in free software will diminish after its success (an event which, much as I may desire it, has a low probability of occurring anytime soon).
As I understand what you are saying, you think that the motivation to write free software will dry up after Total World Domination because its motivating forces will disappear, perhaps the motivation that comes from fighting for a cause.
There are more motivations than this, though. The desire for respect will still exist. I do agree with you in that I believe that at our core we are all motivated by self interest. However, I believe that this is a purely academic point, since self interest can manifest itself in any number of direct and indirect ways.
For instance, I write free software because I am hoping that, in turn, others will free their software, and I can then examine their code for things I can use in my own work. More philosophically, I want to promote the free exchange of knowledge. But these are just two of the many motivations I have, some philosophical, some emotional and even some financial.
I cannot speak for other developers, but surely everyone has a similar mess of motivations for writing software.
And in the end, I think software will be written if there is a need or desire for the function it provides, and software is written for more reasons than simply to make money for the developer. And people themselves have more motivations than simply to make money.
As to your example of the sure-fire million dollar idea, sure, there are many people out there who would do as you describe (you can't throw a stick in San Jose without hitting one). But there are plenty of people out there that wouldn't.
I'm sorry I don't have time right now to be more than brief, but...
I am not clear on what you mean when you refer to OSS succeeding. Simply the fact that Linux and *BSD have made substanitial inroads into the server market (last poll I saw showed that 25% of webservers are run on Linux boxes) may be some indication of the success of free software. And I see no indication of a loss of interest.
In the most commonly implemented form of capitalism, you offer the best that you can in exchange for money, which is in limited supply: a scarce resource. And people have enacted many protections in this capitalism implementation to ensure that they maximise their share of this scarce resource.
Although people write free software for many reasons: respect and joy are two of them. Everyone has respect to offer, and joy is just out there for the taking: they are infinite resources.
This is a big difference between the two models.
It the (very) abstracted form of capitalism that is at issue; it is the prevailing implementation.
I think you bring up a some good points here, most especially this one:
Do you really believe that there are enough talented developers in every possible niche in all aspects of each software package to meet those various needs.
This is something I have thought about from time to time, although in a different context. Let's face it: there are a finite number of developers in the world (although I think that the Internet probably greatly boosts growth in the developer population), each with a finite amount of time and energy he/she can devote.
Whenever I hear about a new open source (or potentially open-source) project, I think, "That's nice. I hope there are still developers left to work on it".
With respect to your other points:
I think you misunderstand what is meant by a gift economy. I think that most developers are motivated by such things as the desire for respect or prestige, etc.. But your respect in this culture is proportional to the size and/or quality of your contribution to the culture. That's really all that's meant by a 'gift culture'. And the gift part must be important, because you can get prestige and the sense of working on something big on a closed-source project, as well.
And I don't think we need worry about running out of interesting things to work on; I think that the environment in which an OS lives changes quickly enough that there will always be interesting probelms to solve. An OS is an ever-evolving thing.
i think those whom view free software as a moral issue, feel that restricting information is wrong because it goes against the very nature of information (that it can be used in all places at all times) and because it hurts more people than it helps. imposing scarcity economics on an infinite resource is what they object to.
I think you have stated things very well and clearly here. I advocate free software because software is more than simply functional. There is more value in software than its utility: there is the Knowledge that is embodied in the source code.
That a community shares knowledge is a Good Thing, because knowledge begets more knowledge. If I have thought A and share that thought, and you have thought B and share it, a third person may see A and B, and build on them to achieve C. On the other hand, if you and I keep A and B to ourselves, the third person may never achieve C, or at least have a much harder time of it.
To withhold or release knowledge is a moral choice: do you choose to serve yourself in a (necessarily) short term goal, or to serve the community in the long term, by advancing the pool of common knowledge?
Disclaimer: we clearly don't know all the facts here; we have a 200 word article which tells us little more than what the headline states.
Now that that's over with...
The fact that some students found a class too difficult, and then complained about it is not surprising to me: I have heard of it and seen it happen many times throughout my life.
What _is_ disappointing to me that students would go to the (to me) extreme measure of bringing suit against a school over what (again, to me) is a misunderstanding or miscommunication. Surely there are more civil ways to handle these kinds of things, for instance (as one poster on this thread suggested) handle it through the student government -- this is one of the reasons student governments exist!
We can infer from what little information the article provides that the students at least talked with the administration about their complaints, and were told that they should take the class over again, for free, which seems fair.
I wonder what kind of damages they're suing for? In that you can divine their true motivations: is a suit their only honest recourse, or are they doing it because they think they'll get big money from the school if they win?
Whenever I hear the word 'lawsuit' these days, I immediately think the latter.
While true that the GPL has never been tested in court, thus far actually going to court has not been necessary.
There _have_ been cases in which someone has tried to include GPL'ed code in their closed source software, but a call from the FSF lawyers caused them to rectify the situation (I heard this in one of the panel discussions at LinuxWorld, but I don't remember who said it).
I find it humorous to observe how vehemently former MUD/Quake/UO/(fill-in-the-blank) addicts decry the thing they formerly loved. Like someone born-again or, perhaps more accurately, one who realizes that their significant other, while great in the sack, is not, perhaps, the one of their dreams, and that it's time to get back to looking for that one again.
So like the burning prophet on the mountain top, they say to themselves, "Get thee gone, MUD/Quake/UO! I renounce thee!", and to others, "Seek not the MUD/Quake/UO, for therein lies madness! I have seen the light!"
Gimme a break. What they all are angry at is not the game, but themselves, angry because they think they were weak, and now they have to act righteous to show that they're strong manly men now.
ObMUDAddictStory: I played JediMUD pretty much continuously for 6 months, back in '92 during grad school. Wrecked a year's worth of classes, or nearly so. Do I regret it? Nope. Sure was fun.
These long lasting games and activities tend to fulfill some need in a person's life at the time they're playing. When the need disappears, the desire to play disappears. Just like a girlfriend; she seemed right at the time, but after a while it was obvious she wasn't.
Certainly its no worse to play these kinds of games than many other activities are. You could, y'know, work for Microsoft, or something.
No, no, no. Linux is the Sushi of the OS menu. Loved by some, disliked by others, but mostly people are stunned that you would actually eat something of that nature.
You are intimidated, at first, by the otherness of it, but after your first bite, you are transported into delight, and wonder what you ever feared about it.
WordPerfect 8 reads _and_ writes Word format files for all versions of Word, as I heard the amplified voices from the Corel booth at LinuxWorld say (over and over...).
In addition, Quattro Pro at least reads (probably writes, too, but I wasn't paying much attention) Excel files, and will be available under Linux Real Soon Now (2nd or 3rd quarter this year, from what I heard in the Corel Keynote address).
No, I don't work for Corel. AFAIK, Applix's stuff probably can do all this, too.
Thing is, you would have to drag far fewer CDs (e.g. one), since a CD can hold hundreds of MP3s.
And then you could change which several hundred songs you wanted to listen to that day simply by switching CDs, instead of having to upload new ones vi serial port.
Slashdot Mirror
Bonobos are _not_ chimpanzees. Bonobos are, well, bonobos. They are their own species. What you meant to say are one of the great apes: humans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Am I the only person here who thought Dogma sucked?
The only reason Dogma is getting any attention at all is because it attacked the Catholic Church. As if this is so shocking in 1999. And are they really such tough ideas that I had to endure hours of lectures from Chris Rock and Selma Hyak?
Let me look in my crystal ball and describe for you how this movie was written.
The writer is 18 years old. It is 4am, and he is talking with his buddies. They are all drunk. They are excited because, yesterday in their Religion 101 class, the professor described Catholicism in a different way than Father Ignatius back home in Church did! The writer is so charged, he just has to write this stuff down. He always thought there was something funny going on there.
Years later, after becoming the Big Director, he decides it's time to release these "revolutionary ideas" onto the world. So he takes a few minutes to write an incredibly weak plot, and shoots the film in three days. Every scene is shot in one take, with the actors reading from cue cards. And he got his six year old sister to write the score for the thing.
Every monologue was way too long. How many times did we need to listen to the same damn ideas? Have the Mouth of God guy explain this stuff in the first 20 minutes of the movie and get on with it. Oh, here's a new character -- let's have him say what everyone else has said for the next 20 minutes. The acting was wretched. Every scene change meant only that another monologue was coming. The only saving graces of the whole film were Silent Bob and his partner, and they do not make a movie.
Easily the worst movie I have seen in five years.
Z3, ENIAC, Colossus, ABC, Mark I, fine. Does it really matter who's first with these things? These were all, indeed, programmable devices, but if you saw one today, it wouldn't resemble what we all call a computer. Indeed, they were only incrementally better than punched card tabulating machines, which by that time, could be configured to execute more than simple counting and additions.
These devices were not stored-program computers: you had to physically reconfigure them for each new program, instead of supplying your program along with your data.
ENIAC, schmENIAC. Remember Mauchly and Eckert, but remember them because they went on to found UNIVAC Corp., and to design and produce the UNIVAC, the first commercially available stored-program electronic computer, indeed, the first commercially available electronic computer of any kind. The UNIVAC had an immesurably bigger influence on the history of computing than any of these other devices. It was because of the UNIVAC that IBM, for instance (then a manufacturer of punched card tabulating machines), got into the business of making electronic computers, and set them on the path to become the company we all know and love.
I think you overestimate the importance of status within the big picture of free software, i.e. the status of a single developer across all free software packages. I have heard that something like 100,000 developers have worked on Linux in one way or another. This sounds high to me, so lets say that only 10,000 have contributed over the lifespan of free software. How many of these are known by name across the community? A dozen,
two dozen, maybe? A very small percentage.
Community widw anonymity is already here, and yet this has not deterred developers from contributing.
This is because a developer is not anonymous within a project, not to other developers within the project or to the project maintainer, anyway, and this is the status that (most) developers aspire to. I think that, for most people, the idea behind of contributing is more like "Maybe my patch will be accepted into Project Foo," rather than "Maybe I will be the next Linus Torvalds, a household name."
You say that the push by the free software developer towards the end user is largely driven by the need to prove itself, and in regards to things like GNOME, KDE, the various end user tools like AbiWord and others, my gut tells me that I must agree with you. It seems like a lot of the impetus behind these projects is driven by the need to say, "See we have a GUI, etc., too.
However, I don't think this applies to things like the kernel, and the various servers and network related things, nor to things like embedded applications of Linux, RT-Linux and others. These seem like genuine responses to existing needs.
In light of this definition of the success of free software, then, I guess I don't see the basis for your saying that the impetus in free software will diminish after its success (an event which, much as I may desire it, has a low probability of occurring anytime soon).
As I understand what you are saying, you think that the motivation to write free software will dry up after Total World Domination because its motivating forces will disappear, perhaps the motivation that comes from fighting for a cause.
There are more motivations than this, though. The desire for respect will still exist. I do agree with you in that I believe that at our core we are all motivated by self interest. However, I believe that this is a purely academic point, since self interest can manifest itself in any number of direct and indirect ways.
For instance, I write free software because I am hoping that, in turn, others will free their software, and I can then examine their code for things I can use in my own work. More philosophically, I want to promote the free exchange of knowledge. But these are just two of the many motivations I have, some philosophical, some emotional and even some financial.
I cannot speak for other developers, but surely everyone has a similar mess of motivations for writing software.
And in the end, I think software will be written if there is a need or desire for the function it provides, and software is written for more reasons than simply to make money for the developer. And people themselves have more motivations than simply to make money.
As to your example of the sure-fire million dollar idea, sure, there are many people out there who would do as you describe (you can't throw a stick in San Jose without hitting one). But there are plenty of people out there that wouldn't.
I'm sorry I don't have time right now to be more than brief, but ...
I am not clear on what you mean when you refer to OSS succeeding. Simply the fact that Linux and *BSD have made substanitial inroads into the server market (last poll I saw showed that 25% of webservers are run on Linux boxes) may be some indication of the success of free software. And I see no indication of a loss of interest.
Do you mean a different kind of success?
In the most commonly implemented form of capitalism, you offer the best that you can in exchange for money, which is in limited supply: a scarce resource. And people have enacted many protections in this capitalism implementation to ensure that they maximise their share of this scarce resource.
Although people write free software for many reasons: respect and joy are two of them. Everyone has respect to offer, and joy is just out there for the taking: they are infinite resources.
This is a big difference between the two models.
It the (very) abstracted form of capitalism that is at issue; it is the prevailing implementation.
I think you bring up a some good points here, most especially this one:
Do you really believe that there are enough talented developers in every possible niche in all aspects of each software package to meet those various needs.
This is something I have thought about from time to time, although in a different context. Let's face it: there are a finite number of developers in the world (although I think that the Internet probably greatly boosts growth in the developer population), each with a finite amount of time and energy he/she can devote.
Whenever I hear about a new open source (or potentially open-source) project, I think, "That's nice. I hope there are still developers left to work on it".
With respect to your other points:
I think you misunderstand what is meant by a gift economy. I think that most developers are motivated by such things as the desire for respect or prestige, etc.. But your respect in this culture is proportional to the size and/or quality of your contribution to the culture. That's really all that's meant by a 'gift culture'. And the gift part must be important, because you can get prestige and the sense of working on something big on a closed-source project, as well.
And I don't think we need worry about running out of interesting things to work on; I think that the environment in which an OS lives changes quickly enough that there will always be interesting probelms to solve. An OS is an ever-evolving thing.
Chris Malek
i think those whom view free software as a moral issue, feel that restricting information is wrong because it goes against the very nature of information (that it can be used in all places at all times) and because it hurts more people than it helps. imposing scarcity economics on an infinite resource is what they object to.
I think you have stated things very well and clearly here. I advocate free software because software is more than simply functional. There is more value in software than its utility: there is the Knowledge that is embodied in the source code.
That a community shares knowledge is a Good Thing, because knowledge begets more knowledge. If I have thought A and share that thought, and you have thought B and share it, a third person may see A and B, and build on them to achieve C. On the other hand, if you and I keep A and B to ourselves, the third person may never achieve C, or at least have a much harder time of it.
To withhold or release knowledge is a moral choice: do you choose to serve yourself in a (necessarily) short term goal, or to serve the community in the long term, by advancing the pool of common knowledge?
Disclaimer: we clearly don't know all the facts here; we have a 200 word article which tells us little more than what the headline states.
...
Now that that's over with
The fact that some students found a class too difficult, and then complained about it is not surprising to me: I have heard of it and seen it happen many times throughout my life.
What _is_ disappointing to me that students would go to the (to me) extreme measure of bringing suit against a school over what (again, to me) is a misunderstanding or miscommunication. Surely there are more civil ways to handle these kinds of things, for instance (as one poster on this thread suggested) handle it through the student government -- this is one of the reasons student governments exist!
We can infer from what little information the article provides that the students at least talked with the administration about their complaints, and were told that they should take the class over again, for free, which seems fair.
I wonder what kind of damages they're suing for? In that you can divine their true motivations: is a suit their only honest recourse, or are they doing it because they think they'll get big money from the school if they win?
Whenever I hear the word 'lawsuit' these days, I immediately think the latter.
ESR is indeed a developer: he is the maintainer of fetchmail.
While true that the GPL has never been tested in court, thus far actually going to court has not been necessary.
There _have_ been cases in which someone has tried to include GPL'ed code in their closed source software, but a call from the FSF lawyers caused them to rectify the situation (I heard this in one of the panel discussions at LinuxWorld, but I don't remember who said it).
I find it humorous to observe how vehemently former MUD/Quake/UO/(fill-in-the-blank) addicts decry the thing they formerly loved. Like someone born-again or, perhaps more accurately, one who realizes that their significant other, while great in the sack, is not, perhaps, the one of their dreams, and that it's time to get back to looking for that one again.
So like the burning prophet on the mountain top, they say to themselves, "Get thee gone, MUD/Quake/UO! I renounce thee!", and to others, "Seek not the MUD/Quake/UO, for therein lies madness! I have seen the light!"
Gimme a break. What they all are angry at is not the game, but themselves, angry because they think they were weak, and now they have to act righteous to show that they're strong manly men now.
ObMUDAddictStory: I played JediMUD pretty much continuously for 6 months, back in '92 during grad school. Wrecked a year's worth of classes, or nearly so. Do I regret it? Nope. Sure was fun.
These long lasting games and activities tend to fulfill some need in a person's life at the time they're playing. When the need disappears, the desire to play disappears. Just like a girlfriend; she seemed right at the time, but after a while it was obvious she wasn't.
Certainly its no worse to play these kinds of games than many other activities are. You could, y'know, work for Microsoft, or something.
No, no, no. Linux is the Sushi of the OS menu. Loved by some, disliked by others, but mostly people are stunned that you would actually eat something of that nature.
You are intimidated, at first, by the otherness of it, but after your first bite, you are transported into delight, and wonder what you ever feared about it.
WordPerfect 8 reads _and_ writes Word format ...).
files for all versions of Word, as I heard the amplified voices from the Corel booth at LinuxWorld say (over and over
In addition, Quattro Pro at least reads (probably writes, too, but I wasn't paying much attention) Excel files, and will be available under Linux Real Soon Now (2nd or 3rd quarter this year, from what I heard in the Corel Keynote address).
No, I don't work for Corel. AFAIK, Applix's stuff probably can do all this, too.
Thing is, you would have to drag far fewer
CDs (e.g. one), since a CD can hold hundreds
of MP3s.
And then you could change which several hundred
songs you wanted to listen to that day simply by switching CDs, instead of having to upload new ones vi serial port.
I liked the CD + 32 MB flash ram idea.
And if you switch to the Dvorak layout, all of the keys for vi get moved around. I guess I could adapt to all of them except ...
HJKL as arrow keys. I am a slave to these keys.