This project probably won't find its way directly into the kernel. From what I hear, the kernel developers want to redo the low level device driver stuff to better handle hot-swappable devices in general (PCMCIA, USB, FireWire, PPA, etc.) then add a cleaner USB implementation on top of that. In the meantime, this USB project is pretty heavily used, particularly in the LinuxPPC world (iMac requires USB support to do anything).
I'm curious to see this system in action. I see many problems with the system, but none of them are fatal flaws. The biggest for me is that the SPP avoids the whole issue of licensing by saying that the programmer is producing for the Public Domain. I'm not sure I'm all that interested in writing anything major for the public domain, since the GPL allows just as much use of the software, but also encourages other people to produce Free software. Of course, if enough developers like the PD idea, than the system could start to work.
Secondly, how would quality assurance be handled? The author implies that issues like that would be worked out by market pressures, but I think it's too grey an area to affect the market drastically. If you have one programmer (let's call him "Steve") who makes high quality work, but is slow to produce it and asks for a lot of money; and another programmer (let's call him "Bill") who makes very poor quality programs, but makes them quickly and doesn't ask much for them (but he's more prolific, so he gets a little bit much more often), the system is likely to encourage Bill more than Steve, while I'd prefer a system which works the other way around. Again, a concern, not a fatal flaw.
My third concern is that the SPP all but demands a Cathedral development style. The project is kept under wraps, worked on by an individual or small team, unless and until the donations reach their critical mass. While many good projects have used a Cathedral style, there is a lot to be said for the Bazaar style, and most of the SPP's likely developers seem to prefer Bazaar projects.
Another object, I'll use an example project for this one. Let's say someone offered to write a speech recognition library by December 31, 2001 if $100,000 in donations are gathered. Let's say everyone acts in good faith. The first scenario, the author estimates that the actual work will take 18 months, but at June 30, 2000 only $40,000 has been collected, how can the developer figure out whether it's worthwhile to start the project, maybe enough will be collected, maybe not.
The second scenario, everyone acts in good faith, lots of donations are collected, the devloper is a busy beaver; but something unexpected happens and the schedule slips by a month. According to the proposal, when the deadline is reached with no product, the "Publisher" refunds everyone's money. However, the programmer has just spent two years of his life expecting the big payoff to make it worthwhile, and is looking at a mostly finished project, a pile of bills and no cash. The donors have don't have the project they wanted, the Publisher not only loses his cut, but has to spend time and money refunding the donors. Everyone acted in good faith, and for want of a single month, nobody's happy.
A third scenario, still with the Speech Recognition project. It gets off to a good start, lots of donations come in quickly, the developer starts work. Three months later, IBM GPL's Via Voice. The developer is suddenly forced into choosing between going through the cost of bowing down from the project and refunding everyone, or doing a cleanroom version, and reinvent the wheel rather than going to the Wheel-O-Rama and playing with (and improving on) the great wheels they offer there. Again, everyone acted in good faith, but nobody's happy.
The name might imply it's the software AOL uses to serve its clients. The documentation seems to say it's a combination web server and HTTP application server. The site uses AOL trademarks without prominent attribution. It all looks fishy to me. Can someone please clue me in?
The big trouble with the Center for Disease Control analogy is that that CDC is a government agency with a public trust to uphold. Similarly, the AMA would like people to think they are a responsible, trustworthy and benign organization. In either case there would be a betrayal of trust.
The Cult of the Dead Cow has no such responsibilities, and no trust is betrayed. If you really want a tainted meat analogye, compare them with ecoterrorists, poisoning meat to prove that McDonalds doesn't follow proper hygiene procedures. Even that's not a great analogy, since the cDc's programs don't have the potential loss of life that a meat poisoning scheme would.
If windows 2000 doesn't cost $2000 and it were to sell for $50 and has all this and included MS Office, and Dev Studio, and IIS, and a built in scripting language, and all that Linux has and 200 days of uptime it may be worth buying.
I disagree, since Linux (or FreeBSD for that matter) would still have three big benefits over such a Windows system: It's better written, more stable, and Free.
Fact is the only reason anyone is tied to Microsoft is becuase we almost all use Office and Word.
Speak for yourself. The fact is that many of us don't use Word except for those times when we have to deal with some bozo who insists on sending everything in one of the many Microsoft.doc file formats. If you're lucky, you can sometimes even avoid Word then.
New Riders Publishing has become enlightened about the whole Free Documentation thing. They've already published two books under Free licenses, and they seem ready to do more. AFAIK, they are still giving the authors (or Debian in this case) royalties on the book sales.
good, concrete suggestions on what would make you want to contribute are always welcome.
I'm not likely to even attempt to become a core Netscape/Mozilla/Gecko developer, since I've got too many other things on my plate. However, I (and I assume there are many many others like me) would be eager to contribute little things here and there, assuming certain things are the case.
First, it would need to be at the point where I can use the program regularly. As the milestones go by, this is becoming true for more and more people. This also explains why the number of contributors is increasing. So far, so good.
Second, the program would have to be imperfect in my eyes. Any contributions I (and people like me) are likely to make are the itch scratching type. Since perfection is essentially impossible in a large project, that one should be easy to cover.
Third, the code would have to be fairly easy to grok. If I have to spend a week narrowing down the location of the feature I want to tweak to be spread amongst twenty files of spaghetti code, I'm going to do something else instead. I have not looked closely at the Mozilla code, but if, as you say, a significant portion of bug reports come with patches, this is not likely to be a problem.
Lastly, there has to be an easy way for me to get contributions to the project. As long as bugzilla stays up and used, that's covered quite well.
So basically, it looks like the Mozilla project is doing all the right stuff from my viewpoint. It's just a matter of time, time to get it closer to feature complete, and time spent using Mozilla by busy but well-wishing programmers like me. I think you will see the number of auxilliary developers grow very quickly over the rest of the year, and even faster next year.
As for getting more core developers, someone else would have to answer that.
At the time when Caldera bought DR-DOS, the only commercial value of the software was to bring this lawsuit. Novell didn't think it was worth it to go through the motions, so they sold the lawsuit to someone who wanted to. Caldera has a lot less to lose by baiting Microsoft than Novell does, so it was a good match. It's not sleazy, the lawsuit needed to be filed, Caldera wanted to be the one filing it.
In the meantime, they haven't been sitting on DR-DOS, waiting for the suit to save them. They've turned it into a viable and profitable embedded systems and thin client platform. Check out Caldera Thin Clients for more details. It's not sleazy at all to take a commercially dead product and find new markets for it.
Re:Informal Logical Fallacies
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 2
Look at the phrase replace copyright with copyleft. Your intended meaning, to replace copyright law with something that requires that software be Free, is certainly a possible interpretation, but not the only, or even the most common one. I generally hear that term used by the FSF's critics to mean "replace copyright law (in its entirety) with something that requires that all documents be Free." You don't have to write volumes on each point, but as you should be able to see, a little clarity is important to being understood, particularly since you are posting on the coattails of someone who has argued that RMS wants to force people to distribute software against their will.
That is a very interesting quote you give, and yes, it does indicate that he would replace, as you say, copyright with copyleft, but limited to software, not the whole of copyright law. I am sure he would make changes to the rest of copyright law as well, just not the same changes as he would make for software.
It sounds (to me) like we're pretty much on the same wavelength about what is going on, and we probably would be in agreement on many points as to what should go on. We're really just debating how to debate here, and if that's what you want, fine by me.
It looks like you've found a way to make sure Slashdot stays strong without sacrificing what makes it great. One important question, though. Now that you're part of Andover.net, do you have to wear pants?
Re:Informal Logical Fallacies
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 2
It's not clear to me if you are reading too much or too little into my posts, but you certainly aren't getting it.
I dismiss the notion that RMS is a Statist on the grounds that he has never said anything to indicate that he is. He never says that the Government should be paramount. He never pushes any agenda that would require the government to be paramount. I added the point about him actively critisizing the government as merely another example, yet you interpret it as my entire point. The original poster was making an accusation, and I was pointing out that he needs to back up such accusations with fact.
The original poster defined Collectivism and Statism to be the belief that the individual serves no purpose other than the will of the Government (or Church). I was arguing that, by that definition, RMS is not a Statist. You are making up your own definition of the term, and complaining that I am not arguing against it.
You seem to define Statism as the belief that the law is a tool to enforce sharing property. First of all, I have never heard such a definition of Statism proposed before, and you look like you are molding the definition to fit the target (RMS), which is a serious logical fallacy that I am surprised you don't recognize. Second of all, whether or not he fits this warped definition defends on what property you are talking about sharing. RMS believes that the law can and should be used to enforce that shared property will remain shared. He does not indicate in his writings that the law should be used to force people to share private property, in fact he says the opposite.
If the original poster's line about conscription was intended as an analogy, it failed. An analogy should connect the discussion at hand to something, the line was completely unconnected to the discussion at hand. It is possible to invent connections, as you did, that were not indicated by the original poster. I feel that doing so would be intellectually dishonest. I would rather argue what the poster meant, since it's unclear, I indicated that it was unclear rather than arguing against a fabrication. If you consider that a lack of imagination or dishonest, that is your opinion.
Regarding the replacing copyright with copyleft, you proposed it as if it were relevant to the discussion, so I assumed you thought it was relevant, and pointed out that it is impossible, and not proposed by any of the parties we are discussing. I am not deliberately trying to misunderstand you, I am desparately trying to understand you. If you toss out points along the lines of "If eggs start laying chickens, farmers would have problems", it doesn't help matters.
I agree with your assesment that RMS does not want to abolish copyright law, but he (and I) beleives that it requires some serious work. I strongly disagree that he considers the restrictions of the GPL to be the ideal state of law. He considers them the terms under which he wants to contribute software.
If RMS were made king for a day, and allowed to enact any laws he wants, I strongly doubt he would put in place a law saying that all software must be Free. On the other hand, he certainly would remove the penalties for copying. His ideal of law would be one that would allow and encourage Free Software to flourish, but from what I've read of his, he would not make Free Software manditory.
I am trying to understand the intent of your posts. I am also not trying to "attack the straw man", in case you hadn't noticed, you attacked my post first, I am merely responding.
Re:Informal Logical Fallacies
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 2
The Famous Brett Watson wrote: I've chosen to reply to this particular post because I've rarely seen so many informal logical errors in one place at one time
You don't read Slashdot very often, do you? I was basing my comment that RMS is not a Statist on SQL*Kitten's note that "Statism is the belief that the individual serves no purpose other than the will of the Government (or Church)." I discarded his use of the term Collectivism in favor of Statism because he appears to consider the terms interchangable, but I do not. Statism is a term that we both agree on definition, so it is easier to pick the term where there is no syntactic dispute. I am using his definition of the term Statist.
If a Statist considers the Will of the Government to supercede the Will of an individual, than a I would think a Statist would be unlikely to criticize a government.
When I critisize his bringing up of conscription, I am not dismissing an analogy. He makes no analogy, he is merely pointing out an example which I fail to see the relevance. In World War One, they used Mustard Gas. So there!
When I critisize his example of penalizing the non-productive, again, I cannot dispute the meat of his point, since he gave none. I am asking for some content that I can agree or disagree with.
Perhaps you might look into a course in logical argument yourself. I consider it useless to debate against my wild guess as to the person's argument. I would much rather encourage someone to supply me with a more complete argument, and dispute it on its merits. I know from experience that the original poster is quite capable of forming a complete, well formed argument.
As to the points you made on the subject:
Replacing copyright laws overnight with copyleft is nonsensical. Copyleft is the use of copyright laws to protect the freedom of the document. You cannot replace copyright with copyleft overnight, since copyleft implies copyright laws exist. If you suddenly remove copyright laws overnight, some people might suffer unnecessarily, but nobody (not even RMS) has suggested that we do this. You are guessing at arguments, and arguing against your guesses, not the reality.
Yes, his orignal post implies that intellectual property should be treated like all other property, which is a matter of opinion. Before you can have meaningful debate on matters of opinion, however, first you have to establish matters of fact. His orignal post states as a matter of fact that RMS wants to obligate everyone to give away their [intellectual] property. I ask for some evidence that this statement is factual, because all the evidence I see indicates that it is a false representation.
Do you understand where I'm coming from a bit better now?
The German computer mag C't decided to do their own, more detailed benchmarks. Their conclusion was that the PC Labs/Mindcraft results sound plausible, but under more realistic scenarios, Linux & NT are neck and neck, or Linux beats NT soundly. Find the English version of the article here
Sorry about the messed up html tags
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RMS Responds
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Collectivism means to me just the philosophy that a bunch of people working together is better than people working apart. It's a philosophy that most modern businesses seem to follow, and far from a bad thing.
The examples you give are not very illuminating of your ideas. You bring up the conscription of soldiers, in what way can anything RMS is doing be tied into the draft?!?! You say that a common policy is to penalize the productive so the non-productive may benifit. I can see how the non-productive benefit from what RMS is doing, but that is a costless side effect. How is anything he is doing penalizing the productive?
You write: My problem with RMS is that not only does he wish to give his property away (which, of course, is his right), he wishes to establish a system where everyone is obligated to give away their property. Without property, there can be no other rights.
Here's the rub, here's the only point where i've seen your views differ with RMS's. RMS feels that intellectual property law as it now stands is a crutch to support the non-productive publishing giants. You think that it actually helps productive people. Why bring all this name calling and false representation into it?
XML is better than HTML for a word processing format because it is much more flexible and extensible. On the other hand, XML is more a process than a standard. If MS Office writes its documents in XML, and my word processor writes its documents in XML, those documents can be completely incompatible. It should be easier to translate between XML documents than the current mess. On the other hand, I'm sure Microsoft, with their "embrace and extend" philosophy, can come up with an XML DTD so obscure and awkward, with non-standard constructs, that you might as well be looking at a proprietary binary format.
A very interesting piece, but there are some points I dispute.
It is not economic losses that the public has suffered, but loss of choice.
Later on in the article, Mr. Wu describes how, in addition to the two computers he uses to get his work done, he keeps a third machine with Windows and MS Office installed just because of Microsoft's monopolistic trade practices. I'd say this counts as an economic loss. Another economic loss is all the downtime and lost productivity due to Windows crashes.
Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats.
I agree that their dominance in the field of file formats is troubling, but in my experience their OS monopoly can't be discounted either. It's both.
With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant.
Nobody is accusing Microsoft of having a browser monopoly, much less abusing it. They are accused of using their OS Monopoly to get anti-competitive OEM bundling agreements, and using both of those to unfairly increase their browser's market share (among other things).
This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine.
See! Economic loss.
The major application of computers is word processing.
No, the major application of computers is database processing. The major application of desktop computers is word processing.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
There's a great quote, attributed to Brian Kernighan (of C fame), "The trouble with WYSIWYG is that what you see is all you get".
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document.... It would be ridiculous if you had to buy paper that required you to use a special pen to write on it, but that is exactly what happens today.
Agreed, while some offices have rejected the Office document as a standard, too many have not. As long as a significant portion of the people you deal with use a document format, you've got to have a way of using it.
The first step [the government should impose] requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly.
While I'd love to see such documentation, I disagree that the courts should require it. First off, I think the Justice department should be focusing on addressing Microsoft's direct restraint of trade and other anticompetitive business practices. It's hard to effectively do what you describe from the courts.
Secondly, it is easy for the government to achieve the same goal, without invoking the judiciary, and with a better (IMHO) result. The President should have his technology advisor draft an executive order specifying that by June, 2000, all electronic documents handled within government offices, and transmitted to and from government offices, must follow an attached standard. Then it should go ahead and specify the general standard (XML or whatever), and the specific formats for government word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, etc. The US Government is such a huge consumer of Microsoft products, MS would be foolish to not support such standards. All of us can then use such standards too, whether as a native file format, or merely a standard interchange format. Assuming the government makes their standard flexible and extensible (easy to do with things like XML) it should work well.
I think this is a better way to fix the document issue than to order Microsoft to do something that really can't be enforced.
Caldera also works with Novell for NDS services. The world is not just RedHat, we really have a "Big Four" situation, with RedHat, SuSE, Caldera and TurboLinux driving things on the distribution end.
Re: KDE release based on Qt2.0
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qt 2.0 released
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· Score: 2
Sounds great. What's the story with KDE's licensing?
I understand that the libraries are LGPL (which appears to me to work fine with the QPL). I have been told that some but not all of the programs are Artistic, and some programs are still GPLed . How do I find out which programs are which? The FAQ still says that everything is GPLed. I'm mostly interested in the licensing of the core apps: kwm, kpanel, kfm, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm not looking to flame anybody, or to get flamed, I just want to know which things are covered by which licenses.
Hmm. Suppose they never ship a binary. So when the customer recieves the box, you hit "install", and it says "Please wait", crunch, crunch "Done!". In the "crunch crunch" it compiled the modified GLP-ed components....
That's a tough one. If the place where the box gets the source is generally accessible, there's no problem at all, everyone's happy. If it is not, it violates the spirit of the GPL, but possibly does not violate the letter of the GPL.
The best argument against such a system is found in Section 3: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. Therefore, if the transmission is not in a form that anyone can modify, it is not source code.
Yes, but if you let anyone have the source code, can they not legally distribute it themselves for nothing? (ie. If the cow-orkers[moo-grunt!] got the source, then I'm sure one will run Linux and be smart enough to give it away...)
Of course they can. The sticking point was how far the distributor is required to go in distributing source; once it is distributed, it can be spread to the four winds.
It's moot anyway for the moment, since under the GPL they don't have to distribute a single line of source to anyone unless and until they distribute something with GPLed binary or object code.
On the other hand, there are examples of people buying "old unsupported software" Witness some people going back to older versions of Word Perfect, or buying classic video game compilations.
Older versions of WordPerfect are still supported. You can even get things like the HP LaserJet 5si printer drivers for WordPerfect 5.1. In fact a writer friend of mine has recently contacted Corel with a question about WP5.1+, and not only got a knowlegable response (consider that Corel had no part in developing WP until version 7), but found that program development is still very much active, particularly maintaining internationalization and driver support.
As his article pointed out, video games are a special market all their own, with different rules.
You've got a vlarge company with about 15 significant competitors. You have developed an in-house piece of software "Y" to run all aspects of a new (and highly competitve) line of business. The software has extreme use value, but no sale value.
What I don't see Eric's model capturing is the fact that you would want to keep "Y" closed-source to prevent competitors from gaining benefit from the technology, code fragments, business models, etc of "Y". You're not afraid of your competitor making and selling "Z" from it, but from using it to gain insight into your business or to enhance their business in a way that causes revenue loss not directly related to software.
You seem to be talking about trade secrets, specifically, where something about the software can reveal valuable secrets about how your company operates. In at least 95% of such cases, forget about Closed vs. Open, you shouldn't be distributing your software at all. It should be in-house only, with perhaps distribution with a few trusted consultants and partners under an NDA. Don't think that the competition can't reverse engineer the trade secrets out of your closed source distribution, it would just cost a little more for them to do it.
For those few companies who have to distribute software that they want to keep the mechanics secret (eg. hardware drivers), first they should review their secrecy motives. If there is something real there, it is both inexpensive and more effective to keep the secret parts in hardware (eg. a Flash ROM chip on your card), and publish the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
PikaPal asks:
Does anyone know what kind of support Linux has for USB and where one might find more information about it?
Linux currently does not have USB support in the kernel. There is a USB project, its homepage is at http://peloncho.fis.ucm.es/~inaky/uusb d-www. Make sure to read the FAQ.
This project probably won't find its way directly into the kernel. From what I hear, the kernel developers want to redo the low level device driver stuff to better handle hot-swappable devices in general (PCMCIA, USB, FireWire, PPA, etc.) then add a cleaner USB implementation on top of that. In the meantime, this USB project is pretty heavily used, particularly in the LinuxPPC world (iMac requires USB support to do anything).
Anonymous Coward asks:
;-p
ebay.com is another example. WTF does "ebay" mean?
It means "be" in pig latin
I'm curious to see this system in action. I see many problems with the system, but none of them are fatal flaws. The biggest for me is that the SPP avoids the whole issue of licensing by saying that the programmer is producing for the Public Domain. I'm not sure I'm all that interested in writing anything major for the public domain, since the GPL allows just as much use of the software, but also encourages other people to produce Free software. Of course, if enough developers like the PD idea, than the system could start to work.
Secondly, how would quality assurance be handled? The author implies that issues like that would be worked out by market pressures, but I think it's too grey an area to affect the market drastically. If you have one programmer (let's call him "Steve") who makes high quality work, but is slow to produce it and asks for a lot of money; and another programmer (let's call him "Bill") who makes very poor quality programs, but makes them quickly and doesn't ask much for them (but he's more prolific, so he gets a little bit much more often), the system is likely to encourage Bill more than Steve, while I'd prefer a system which works the other way around. Again, a concern, not a fatal flaw.
My third concern is that the SPP all but demands a Cathedral development style. The project is kept under wraps, worked on by an individual or small team, unless and until the donations reach their critical mass. While many good projects have used a Cathedral style, there is a lot to be said for the Bazaar style, and most of the SPP's likely developers seem to prefer Bazaar projects.
Another object, I'll use an example project for this one. Let's say someone offered to write a speech recognition library by December 31, 2001 if $100,000 in donations are gathered. Let's say everyone acts in good faith. The first scenario, the author estimates that the actual work will take 18 months, but at June 30, 2000 only $40,000 has been collected, how can the developer figure out whether it's worthwhile to start the project, maybe enough will be collected, maybe not.
The second scenario, everyone acts in good faith, lots of donations are collected, the devloper is a busy beaver; but something unexpected happens and the schedule slips by a month. According to the proposal, when the deadline is reached with no product, the "Publisher" refunds everyone's money. However, the programmer has just spent two years of his life expecting the big payoff to make it worthwhile, and is looking at a mostly finished project, a pile of bills and no cash. The donors have don't have the project they wanted, the Publisher not only loses his cut, but has to spend time and money refunding the donors. Everyone acted in good faith, and for want of a single month, nobody's happy.
A third scenario, still with the Speech Recognition project. It gets off to a good start, lots of donations come in quickly, the developer starts work. Three months later, IBM GPL's Via Voice. The developer is suddenly forced into choosing between going through the cost of bowing down from the project and refunding everyone, or doing a cleanroom version, and reinvent the wheel rather than going to the Wheel-O-Rama and playing with (and improving on) the great wheels they offer there. Again, everyone acted in good faith, but nobody's happy.
The name might imply it's the software AOL uses to serve its clients. The documentation seems to say it's a combination web server and HTTP application server. The site uses AOL trademarks without prominent attribution. It all looks fishy to me. Can someone please clue me in?
Both KDE and GNOME are important efforts at improving all Unix desktops, not just GNU/Linux. Have you ever tried to use CDE?
The big trouble with the Center for Disease Control analogy is that that CDC is a government agency with a public trust to uphold. Similarly, the AMA would like people to think they are a responsible, trustworthy and benign organization. In either case there would be a betrayal of trust.
The Cult of the Dead Cow has no such responsibilities, and no trust is betrayed. If you really want a tainted meat analogye, compare them with ecoterrorists, poisoning meat to prove that McDonalds doesn't follow proper hygiene procedures. Even that's not a great analogy, since the cDc's programs don't have the potential loss of life that a meat poisoning scheme would.
josepha48 wrote:
.doc file formats. If you're lucky, you can sometimes even avoid Word then.
If windows 2000 doesn't cost $2000 and it were to sell for $50 and has all this and included MS Office, and Dev Studio, and IIS, and a built in scripting language, and all that Linux has and 200 days of uptime it may be worth buying.
I disagree, since Linux (or FreeBSD for that matter) would still have three big benefits over such a Windows system: It's better written, more stable, and Free.
Fact is the only reason anyone is tied to Microsoft is becuase we almost all use Office and Word.
Speak for yourself. The fact is that many of us don't use Word except for those times when we have to deal with some bozo who insists on sending everything in one of the many Microsoft
New Riders Publishing has become enlightened about the whole Free Documentation thing. They've already published two books under Free licenses, and they seem ready to do more. AFAIK, they are still giving the authors (or Debian in this case) royalties on the book sales.
Shaver requested:
good, concrete suggestions on what would make you want to contribute are always welcome.
I'm not likely to even attempt to become a core Netscape/Mozilla/Gecko developer, since I've got too many other things on my plate. However, I (and I assume there are many many others like me) would be eager to contribute little things here and there, assuming certain things are the case.
First, it would need to be at the point where I can use the program regularly. As the milestones go by, this is becoming true for more and more people. This also explains why the number of contributors is increasing. So far, so good.
Second, the program would have to be imperfect in my eyes. Any contributions I (and people like me) are likely to make are the itch scratching type. Since perfection is essentially impossible in a large project, that one should be easy to cover.
Third, the code would have to be fairly easy to grok. If I have to spend a week narrowing down the location of the feature I want to tweak to be spread amongst twenty files of spaghetti code, I'm going to do something else instead. I have not looked closely at the Mozilla code, but if, as you say, a significant portion of bug reports come with patches, this is not likely to be a problem.
Lastly, there has to be an easy way for me to get contributions to the project. As long as bugzilla stays up and used, that's covered quite well.
So basically, it looks like the Mozilla project is doing all the right stuff from my viewpoint. It's just a matter of time, time to get it closer to feature complete, and time spent using Mozilla by busy but well-wishing programmers like me. I think you will see the number of auxilliary developers grow very quickly over the rest of the year, and even faster next year.
As for getting more core developers, someone else would have to answer that.
At the time when Caldera bought DR-DOS, the only commercial value of the software was to bring this lawsuit. Novell didn't think it was worth it to go through the motions, so they sold the lawsuit to someone who wanted to. Caldera has a lot less to lose by baiting Microsoft than Novell does, so it was a good match. It's not sleazy, the lawsuit needed to be filed, Caldera wanted to be the one filing it.
In the meantime, they haven't been sitting on DR-DOS, waiting for the suit to save them. They've turned it into a viable and profitable embedded systems and thin client platform. Check out Caldera Thin Clients for more details. It's not sleazy at all to take a commercially dead product and find new markets for it.
Look at the phrase replace copyright with copyleft. Your intended meaning, to replace copyright law with something that requires that software be Free, is certainly a possible interpretation, but not the only, or even the most common one. I generally hear that term used by the FSF's critics to mean "replace copyright law (in its entirety) with something that requires that all documents be Free." You don't have to write volumes on each point, but as you should be able to see, a little clarity is important to being understood, particularly since you are posting on the coattails of someone who has argued that RMS wants to force people to distribute software against their will.
That is a very interesting quote you give, and yes, it does indicate that he would replace, as you say, copyright with copyleft, but limited to software, not the whole of copyright law. I am sure he would make changes to the rest of copyright law as well, just not the same changes as he would make for software.
It sounds (to me) like we're pretty much on the same wavelength about what is going on, and we probably would be in agreement on many points as to what should go on. We're really just debating how to debate here, and if that's what you want, fine by me.
It looks like you've found a way to make sure Slashdot stays strong without sacrificing what makes it great. One important question, though. Now that you're part of Andover.net, do you have to wear pants?
It's not clear to me if you are reading too much or too little into my posts, but you certainly aren't getting it.
I dismiss the notion that RMS is a Statist on the grounds that he has never said anything to indicate that he is. He never says that the Government should be paramount. He never pushes any agenda that would require the government to be paramount. I added the point about him actively critisizing the government as merely another example, yet you interpret it as my entire point. The original poster was making an accusation, and I was pointing out that he needs to back up such accusations with fact.
The original poster defined Collectivism and Statism to be the belief that the individual serves no purpose other than the will of the Government (or Church). I was arguing that, by that definition, RMS is not a Statist. You are making up your own definition of the term, and complaining that I am not arguing against it.
You seem to define Statism as the belief that the law is a tool to enforce sharing property. First of all, I have never heard such a definition of Statism proposed before, and you look like you are molding the definition to fit the target (RMS), which is a serious logical fallacy that I am surprised you don't recognize. Second of all, whether or not he fits this warped definition defends on what property you are talking about sharing. RMS believes that the law can and should be used to enforce that shared property will remain shared. He does not indicate in his writings that the law should be used to force people to share private property, in fact he says the opposite.
If the original poster's line about conscription was intended as an analogy, it failed. An analogy should connect the discussion at hand to something, the line was completely unconnected to the discussion at hand. It is possible to invent connections, as you did, that were not indicated by the original poster. I feel that doing so would be intellectually dishonest. I would rather argue what the poster meant, since it's unclear, I indicated that it was unclear rather than arguing against a fabrication. If you consider that a lack of imagination or dishonest, that is your opinion.
Regarding the replacing copyright with copyleft, you proposed it as if it were relevant to the discussion, so I assumed you thought it was relevant, and pointed out that it is impossible, and not proposed by any of the parties we are discussing. I am not deliberately trying to misunderstand you, I am desparately trying to understand you. If you toss out points along the lines of "If eggs start laying chickens, farmers would have problems", it doesn't help matters.
I agree with your assesment that RMS does not want to abolish copyright law, but he (and I) beleives that it requires some serious work. I strongly disagree that he considers the restrictions of the GPL to be the ideal state of law. He considers them the terms under which he wants to contribute software.
If RMS were made king for a day, and allowed to enact any laws he wants, I strongly doubt he would put in place a law saying that all software must be Free. On the other hand, he certainly would remove the penalties for copying. His ideal of law would be one that would allow and encourage Free Software to flourish, but from what I've read of his, he would not make Free Software manditory.
I am trying to understand the intent of your posts. I am also not trying to "attack the straw man", in case you hadn't noticed, you attacked my post first, I am merely responding.
The Famous Brett Watson wrote:
I've chosen to reply to this particular post because I've rarely seen so many informal logical errors in one place at one time
You don't read Slashdot very often, do you? I was basing my comment that RMS is not a Statist on SQL*Kitten's note that "Statism is the belief that the individual serves no purpose other than the will of the Government (or Church)." I discarded his use of the term Collectivism in favor of Statism because he appears to consider the terms interchangable, but I do not. Statism is a term that we both agree on definition, so it is easier to pick the term where there is no syntactic dispute. I am using his definition of the term Statist.
If a Statist considers the Will of the Government to supercede the Will of an individual, than a I would think a Statist would be unlikely to criticize a government.
When I critisize his bringing up of conscription, I am not dismissing an analogy. He makes no analogy, he is merely pointing out an example which I fail to see the relevance. In World War One, they used Mustard Gas. So there!
When I critisize his example of penalizing the non-productive, again, I cannot dispute the meat of his point, since he gave none. I am asking for some content that I can agree or disagree with.
Perhaps you might look into a course in logical argument yourself. I consider it useless to debate against my wild guess as to the person's argument. I would much rather encourage someone to supply me with a more complete argument, and dispute it on its merits. I know from experience that the original poster is quite capable of forming a complete, well formed argument.
As to the points you made on the subject:
Replacing copyright laws overnight with copyleft is nonsensical. Copyleft is the use of copyright laws to protect the freedom of the document. You cannot replace copyright with copyleft overnight, since copyleft implies copyright laws exist. If you suddenly remove copyright laws overnight, some people might suffer unnecessarily, but nobody (not even RMS) has suggested that we do this. You are guessing at arguments, and arguing against your guesses, not the reality.
Yes, his orignal post implies that intellectual property should be treated like all other property, which is a matter of opinion. Before you can have meaningful debate on matters of opinion, however, first you have to establish matters of fact. His orignal post states as a matter of fact that RMS wants to obligate everyone to give away their [intellectual] property. I ask for some evidence that this statement is factual, because all the evidence I see indicates that it is a false representation.
Do you understand where I'm coming from a bit better now?
The German computer mag C't decided to do their own, more detailed benchmarks. Their conclusion was that the PC Labs/Mindcraft results sound plausible, but under more realistic scenarios, Linux & NT are neck and neck, or Linux beats NT soundly. Find the English version of the article here
Should've hit preview.
Collectivism means to me just the philosophy that a bunch of people working together is better than people working apart. It's a philosophy that most modern businesses seem to follow, and far from a bad thing.
I'll use your term Statism, since your definition of that agrees with mine. I agree that Statism is a bad thing. I disagree that RMS is a Statist. He rarely addresses the Government in his writings, much less the Will of the Government. Where he does address the Government, he is critical of them, particularly how they handle the topic of Intellectual Property. Would a Statist be so critical?
The examples you give are not very illuminating of your ideas. You bring up the conscription of soldiers, in what way can anything RMS is doing be tied into the draft?!?! You say that a common policy is to penalize the productive so the non-productive may benifit. I can see how the non-productive benefit from what RMS is doing, but that is a costless side effect. How is anything he is doing penalizing the productive?
You write:
My problem with RMS is that not only does he wish to give his property away (which, of course, is his right), he wishes to establish a system where everyone is obligated to give away their property. Without property, there can be no other rights.
Here's the rub, here's the only point where i've seen your views differ with RMS's. RMS feels that intellectual property law as it now stands is a crutch to support the non-productive publishing giants. You think that it actually helps productive people. Why bring all this name calling and false representation into it?
XML is better than HTML for a word processing format because it is much more flexible and extensible. On the other hand, XML is more a process than a standard. If MS Office writes its documents in XML, and my word processor writes its documents in XML, those documents can be completely incompatible. It should be easier to translate between XML documents than the current mess. On the other hand, I'm sure Microsoft, with their "embrace and extend" philosophy, can come up with an XML DTD so obscure and awkward, with non-standard constructs, that you might as well be looking at a proprietary binary format.
A very interesting piece, but there are some points I dispute.
... It would be ridiculous if you had to buy paper that required you to use a special pen to write on it, but that is exactly what happens today.
It is not economic losses that the public has suffered, but loss of choice.
Later on in the article, Mr. Wu describes how, in addition to the two computers he uses to get his work done, he keeps a third machine with Windows and MS Office installed just because of Microsoft's monopolistic trade practices. I'd say this counts as an economic loss. Another economic loss is all the downtime and lost productivity due to Windows crashes.
Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats.
I agree that their dominance in the field of file formats is troubling, but in my experience their OS monopoly can't be discounted either. It's both.
With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant.
Nobody is accusing Microsoft of having a browser monopoly, much less abusing it. They are accused of using their OS Monopoly to get anti-competitive OEM bundling agreements, and using both of those to unfairly increase their browser's market share (among other things).
This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine.
See! Economic loss.
The major application of computers is word processing.
No, the major application of computers is database processing. The major application of desktop computers is word processing.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen
was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
There's a great quote, attributed to Brian Kernighan (of C fame), "The trouble with WYSIWYG is that what you see is all you get".
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document.
Agreed, while some offices have rejected the Office document as a standard, too many have not. As long as a significant portion of the people you deal with use a document format, you've got to have a way of using it.
The first step [the government should impose] requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly.
While I'd love to see such documentation, I disagree that the courts should require it. First off, I think the Justice department should be focusing on addressing Microsoft's direct restraint of trade and other anticompetitive business practices. It's hard to effectively do what you describe from the courts.
Secondly, it is easy for the government to achieve the same goal, without invoking the judiciary, and with a better (IMHO) result. The President should have his technology advisor draft an executive order specifying that by June, 2000, all electronic documents handled within government offices, and transmitted to and from government offices, must follow an attached standard. Then it should go ahead and specify the general standard (XML or whatever), and the specific formats for government word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, etc. The US Government is such a huge consumer of Microsoft products, MS would be foolish to not support such standards. All of us can then use such standards too, whether as a native file format, or merely a standard interchange format. Assuming the government makes their standard flexible and extensible (easy to do with things like XML) it should work well.
I think this is a better way to fix the document issue than to order Microsoft to do something that really can't be enforced.
Caldera also works with Novell for NDS services. The world is not just RedHat, we really have a "Big Four" situation, with RedHat, SuSE, Caldera and TurboLinux driving things on the distribution end.
Sounds great. What's the story with KDE's licensing?
I understand that the libraries are LGPL (which appears to me to work fine with the QPL). I have been told that some but not all of the programs are Artistic, and some programs are still GPLed . How do I find out which programs are which? The FAQ still says that everything is GPLed. I'm mostly interested in the licensing of the core apps: kwm, kpanel, kfm, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm not looking to flame anybody, or to get flamed, I just want to know which things are covered by which licenses.
rew asks:
Hmm. Suppose they never ship a binary. So when the customer recieves the box, you hit "install", and it says "Please wait", crunch, crunch "Done!". In the "crunch crunch" it compiled the modified GLP-ed components....
That's a tough one. If the place where the box gets the source is generally accessible, there's no problem at all, everyone's happy. If it is not, it violates the spirit of the GPL, but possibly does not violate the letter of the GPL.
The best argument against such a system is found in Section 3: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. Therefore, if the transmission is not in a form that anyone can modify, it is not source code.
Anonymous Coward asks:
Yes, but if you let anyone have the source code, can they not legally distribute it themselves for nothing? (ie. If the cow-orkers[moo-grunt!] got the source, then I'm sure one will run Linux and be smart enough to give it away...)
Of course they can. The sticking point was how far the distributor is required to go in distributing source; once it is distributed, it can be spread to the four winds.
It's moot anyway for the moment, since under the GPL they don't have to distribute a single line of source to anyone unless and until they distribute something with GPLed binary or object code.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
On the other hand, there are examples of people buying "old unsupported software" Witness some people going back to older versions of Word Perfect, or buying classic video game compilations.
Older versions of WordPerfect are still supported. You can even get things like the HP LaserJet 5si printer drivers for WordPerfect 5.1. In fact a writer friend of mine has recently contacted Corel with a question about WP5.1+, and not only got a knowlegable response (consider that Corel had no part in developing WP until version 7), but found that program development is still very much active, particularly maintaining internationalization and driver support.
As his article pointed out, video games are a special market all their own, with different rules.
AtariDatacenter asks:
You've got a vlarge company with about 15 significant competitors. You have developed an in-house piece of software "Y" to run all aspects of a new (and highly competitve) line of business. The software has extreme use value, but no sale value.
What I don't see Eric's model capturing is the fact that you would want to keep "Y" closed-source to prevent competitors from gaining benefit from the technology, code fragments, business models, etc of "Y". You're not afraid of your competitor making and selling "Z" from it, but from using it to gain insight into your business or to enhance their business in a way that causes revenue loss not directly related to software.
You seem to be talking about trade secrets, specifically, where something about the software can reveal valuable secrets about how your company operates. In at least 95% of such cases, forget about Closed vs. Open, you shouldn't be distributing your software at all. It should be in-house only, with perhaps distribution with a few trusted consultants and partners under an NDA. Don't think that the competition can't reverse engineer the trade secrets out of your closed source distribution, it would just cost a little more for them to do it.
For those few companies who have to distribute software that they want to keep the mechanics secret (eg. hardware drivers), first they should review their secrecy motives. If there is something real there, it is both inexpensive and more effective to keep the secret parts in hardware (eg. a Flash ROM chip on your card), and publish the rest.