This has been the most compelling argument against my post. You say that you made the decision to break the law for your own career and monetary gain, and I understand why you made your decision though I don't necessarily respect it.
Personally, I'd rather not take that risk. Life's too short -- software authors have the right to demand whatever sum they want for their product, and capitalism should ensure that I can vote with my wallet. And I do exactly that: I get everything I need done with the free software I have.
On the other hand, I think the attitude that pirating software isn't stealing is a bit silly. It reminds me of Dr. Shipman, a UK serial killer who was recently imprisoned for dozens of life sentences. He killed only elderly people; does the fact that these elderly people were going to die in a few years anyway matter? No. He's still a murderer. And you're still a criminal.
Why are they better than me? I'm a student and because I can't afford proprietary software licensing schemes, I use Linux. There are other less costly yet equal or superior systems out there. Just because you can't afford to buy something doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You are deluding yourself if you think someone needs "a minimum of $12K" a month to "write and analyse the news in addition to providing links to other sites". These people are conmen, nothing more. If you have some spare cash, pass it on to the great guys at XFree86. The whole Linux desktop is based on their code, and yet it's really faded from the public eye in recent years, as people have instead concentrated on KDE and GNOME.
If people can spend hours a day for months on end, I'm sure there's someone out there who will be able to offer an LWN because they _love the software_, not because they want to make a bundle off the shoulders of helpful Linux users. Donating big money to a for-profit company which writes news is not the way to go!
These guys write about Linux and that's great and everthing, but do they really need to be a profit-making company to keep it up? And more to the point, does it make sense to donate money to a company? A friend of mine (who I'm not going to plug) set up a project to develop some low-level libraries for serial port communication, just to help other Linux projects (mainly to do with mobile phones / IrDA) and he's been hacking on it 2 hours a day for the last 6 months. Yet he reckons his job is thankless, and the only pro for him is to see his code used extensively by other projects. He would _love_ a small token of appreciation, even if it's just a postcard or a stuffed penguin or something, but he'd never go so far as to ask for it. It seems the only people who are ready to put aside their principles to ask for money are those who contribute less of the stuff that actually matters -- the code.
Do we really want a community where the merchandise / documentation industries get all the cash and limelight? Ximian makes more money selling stuffed monkeys than it does selling support services or software and these authors are getting more money writing _about_ the code than the actual coders are ever actually likely to see for their efforts. Sometimes it makes me wonder if there's something to the Microsoft way of doing things -- write code during the day, get a paycheck at the end of the month, end of story.
The Mono project hasn't started work on an Apache module yet. But Mono's ASP.NET support is designed such that an Apache 2 module shouldn't have to be longer than around 80 lines of code. It's trivial when you have the right framwork, but we are still a few weeks away from that.
If the guys who've done this have based their work on Mono, they certainly haven't informed the project. My educated guess is that this uses the.NET framework on Windows and Apache 2 for Windows. No great deal.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases. Just think of how much effort it took Cygwin to port the packages to Windows before packaging them, for example -- yet despite this their releases are far more timely. The Debian packagers claim that there is a lot of intricacy involved in the packaging, and i'm sure there is, but I don't buy that people should have to use older software with known bugs, several months after the upstream authors have released their software. Sadly, it seems that the maintainers of the most popular packages also seem to be the slowest to react to new releases.
If Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD, why can't Debian with its army of 2000 developers? It's so close to being the perfect distro, yet at the same time so far:-\
As someone has already pointed out, unlike the GNOME C# bindings which are hosted on a third-party site, go-mono.com, Qt# is already included in the main KDE distribution.
The screen is beatiful. But the keyboard is a nightmare, just for that reason I though of giving it back. Also, the BIOS doesn't support APM properly so you have to use the ACPI stuff if you need power management, and swsusp to suspend to RAM as it's no longer built in to the BIOS. It's also a nightmare to carry around, like the lunchbox computers of yesteryear -- this is kind of my first VAIO I've been disappointed in.
POV-RAY has an obnoxious licensing scheme that's in many ways worse than anything to come out of Microsoft. Not only is the program itself proprietary, but it even goes so far as to stipulate what you can and can't subsequently do with your own artwork. I'm surprised anyone in the geek community, open source enthusiast or otherwise, would want to be associated with POV-RAY. This is the software that gives 'freeware' a bad name.
I see this as an advantage. Ever noticed how the "Flash" sites are the very ones which tend to be filled to the brim with adverts and little else, or otherwise "arty" sites by self-important 'blogging nuts who think their combination of morphing pastel colours needs to be seen by the whole world? Sorry, but that's not what the Web is to me -- I use it for information, and that's why I use Mozilla.
You're not disappointed with his dismissal of OPN. You're disappointed with my dismissal which I posted to kerneltrap a good 24 hours ago. Nevertheless, I'm willing to let it slip by as a well-moderated post is more likely to get the message through. Still, sad that people have to copy-and-paste articles word-for-word:-(
I'm also disappointed to see people like you are still supporting Levin as I have seen him insult and hurt the feelings of innocent developers trying to use "OPN for what it is intended for" for no apparent reason. The abuse of power can't just be shrugged off; the issue must be addressed -- and the best way of doing so is by providing a community-driven alternative.
You still don't get it. There are already Vorbis players, GUI programs etc. for Mono. None of the programs you list have reached this level before dying.
Show me a single desktop GUI produced by one of these! Kaffe, GCJ and Wonka just aren't up to scratch. gcj can't even do runtime introspecting.
Proprietary solutions will always lose
on
Eclipse 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Why use the proprietary Java runtimes and Eclipse when Mono and gtk-sharp are prograssing so nicely?
IMO the worst thing that could happen to the Free Software community is the situation where the bulk of user-layer applications are dependent on a non-free platform. SharpDevelop is coming along very nicely too. Support.NET and the Mono project!
Worked at Eazel, and we certainly had a failed business plan or two. Only problem is, we used StarOffice and not PowerPoint so I guess that's a handfull of documents that won't go down in history. Mail me if you're interested anyway.
Isn't that the radio station company that was on Slashdot the other day for reinforcing the RIAA cartel? Sounds like a nice place to work! Maybe there was something to the "smear campaign" if this is what the company gets up to. Personally I've never heard of it before but it sounds like something people should beware of.
Oh, and realistically, of course they're not spending $75 million on a "web site". High bandwidth hosting is around £400 per annum, with unlimited colocation plans around £800 per annum. Top newspaper article writers are paid on the order of 3 figures and top glossy-zine writers 3 to 4 figures. Say there's a full-time web designer (there's lots of cgi on Salon that needs to be maintained), a bursar and a director, each getting £20,000-30,000 per annum and that leaves £74 million to spare. So obviously, the only possible way to account for this figure is that there's an opportunist at Salon who realisis that people have _absolutely_ no idea how much it costs to run a e-zine Web site. This is opportunism, plain and simple.
The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions. Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses. Of note is the Darwin Streaming Server from Apple which, while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software because it demands that you hand over all changes even if you don't distribute the software (you can see why this is a crazy notion).
Nevertheless, Macromedia has some cool technologies and I can see them being widely implemented if there are truly free and complete implementations.
This is just more encouragement for people to adopt strong crypto like GnuPG. Anyone who has the resources can read your internet traffic if they want to anyway, as you will know if you've worked at an ISP. Allowing more groups to legally do so will catch out the criminals who don't know what they're doing (and let's face it, a camel trader from Afghanistan, who whilst maybe being willing to give up his life for the cause, has no idea about crypto). The most dangerous people are the very people who are least likely to be able to protect there secrets.
So here's the deal: we let Consignia monitor the unprotected messages, and anyone who needs to keep secrets can use GnuPG. I don't know about you, but I think this is one case where we can afford to give up some temporary freedom for greater safety, particularly as it doesn't affect us as much as it affects the more clueless of the criminals.
Source code doesn't equal documentation. Just look at the recent Ogg Vorbis fiasco. Besides, due to the license of BitKeeper, it would be wise for developers not to even look at the code as it's no doubt encumbered with patents, trade secrets and who knows what else. Remember, Microsoft employees aren't even allowed to run GPL software because it might infect their code.
Despite staunch opposition from certain developers, Linus has recently started to maintain the kernel using the non-free BitKeeper SCM product, which is not only proprietary but also uses undocumented file formats, making interoperability difficult or impossible. Do you think it's fair to encourage developers who would otherwise keep to Free Software to turn to a proprietary solution and what is in effect, shareware?
the Hauppage 'PVR' is just a standard TV card bundled with additional encoding software for Windows. As long as you have a codec like DivX or VP3, 'vcr' for Linux can do the exact same thing with commodity hardware. I'm surprised noone has pointed this out yet.
This is misinformation. Far from being an alternative to proprietary products, the Apache foundation is pushing proprietary solutions.
The Apache foundation has been pushing Sun's proprietary Java technology for several years, with packages like Cocoon; indeed, most of their XML work is based on non-free Java components. Even though the code Apache produces is free, most of it (other than the Apache httpd) is based on proprietary foundations which compete directly with truly free alternatives like PHP and DotGNU/Mono's ASP.NET implementations.
Apache has served its purpose, but I just don't see why they're now trying to base their tools on closed source platforms. History has shown again and again that, even when the upper layers of software are proprietary and commercial, the platform itself must remain relatively free and open. That's why I've come to abhor the Apache Foundation.
I also don't agree with their willingness to give away so much code under a non-copylefted license, handing over their 'crown jewels' to companies who then proprietarise them. It sickens me to see companies package up Apache pre-releases and sell it on without source code as "Apache 2" months before the release date, damaging the reputation of the Apache httpd and Open Source in general. But that's another can of worms.
The EFF, a foundation created to defend the technological freedoms and rights of individuals around the world, is promoting the use of Macromedia Flash, the success of which will fill the coffers of a pro-DMCA company at the expense of open W3C standards. The irony is sweet and poignant.
I mean, they don't have to be Free Software fanatics or anything, but I do expect the EFF to at least make a token effort at not squandering money, and keeping true to their beliefs. Surely the $1000 licensing fee for Macromedia Flash plus time spend developing the animation could have been better employed to defend peoples' rights in the real world, rather than promoting a proprietary plugin that I can't even see. I mean, the total amount I have donated to the EFF in the past is probably less than $1000, and I'd consider myself one of their more pecunative sponsorors.
Self-declared "pragmatists" may claim that Flash is the most widespread, or that it is the 'best', but he is a fool who denies that freedom from vendor lock-in and the goals of the EFF do not go hand in hand. I'll be contacting them directly over the next few days; the only right thing for them to do is to remove the proprietary Flash animation from their site.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been the most compelling argument against my post. You say that you made the decision to break the law for your own career and monetary gain, and I understand why you made your decision though I don't necessarily respect it.
Personally, I'd rather not take that risk. Life's too short -- software authors have the right to demand whatever sum they want for their product, and capitalism should ensure that I can vote with my wallet. And I do exactly that: I get everything I need done with the free software I have.
On the other hand, I think the attitude that pirating software isn't stealing is a bit silly. It reminds me of Dr. Shipman, a UK serial killer who was recently imprisoned for dozens of life sentences. He killed only elderly people; does the fact that these elderly people were going to die in a few years anyway matter? No. He's still a murderer. And you're still a criminal.
Why are they better than me? I'm a student and because I can't afford proprietary software licensing schemes, I use Linux. There are other less costly yet equal or superior systems out there. Just because you can't afford to buy something doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You are deluding yourself if you think someone needs "a minimum of $12K" a month to "write and analyse the news in addition to providing links to other sites". These people are conmen, nothing more. If you have some spare cash, pass it on to the great guys at XFree86. The whole Linux desktop is based on their code, and yet it's really faded from the public eye in recent years, as people have instead concentrated on KDE and GNOME.
If people can spend hours a day for months on end, I'm sure there's someone out there who will be able to offer an LWN because they _love the software_, not because they want to make a bundle off the shoulders of helpful Linux users. Donating big money to a for-profit company which writes news is not the way to go!
These guys write about Linux and that's great and everthing, but do they really need to be a profit-making company to keep it up? And more to the point, does it make sense to donate money to a company? A friend of mine (who I'm not going to plug) set up a project to develop some low-level libraries for serial port communication, just to help other Linux projects (mainly to do with mobile phones / IrDA) and he's been hacking on it 2 hours a day for the last 6 months. Yet he reckons his job is thankless, and the only pro for him is to see his code used extensively by other projects. He would _love_ a small token of appreciation, even if it's just a postcard or a stuffed penguin or something, but he'd never go so far as to ask for it. It seems the only people who are ready to put aside their principles to ask for money are those who contribute less of the stuff that actually matters -- the code.
Do we really want a community where the merchandise / documentation industries get all the cash and limelight? Ximian makes more money selling stuffed monkeys than it does selling support services or software and these authors are getting more money writing _about_ the code than the actual coders are ever actually likely to see for their efforts. Sometimes it makes me wonder if there's something to the Microsoft way of doing things -- write code during the day, get a paycheck at the end of the month, end of story.
The Mono project hasn't started work on an Apache module yet. But Mono's ASP.NET support is designed such that an Apache 2 module shouldn't have to be longer than around 80 lines of code. It's trivial when you have the right framwork, but we are still a few weeks away from that.
.NET framework on Windows and Apache 2 for Windows. No great deal.
If the guys who've done this have based their work on Mono, they certainly haven't informed the project. My educated guess is that this uses the
If Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, Cygwin and FreeBSD, why can't Debian with its army of 2000 developers? It's so close to being the perfect distro, yet at the same time so far :-\
As someone has already pointed out, unlike the GNOME C# bindings which are hosted on a third-party site, go-mono.com, Qt# is already included in the main KDE distribution.
The screen is beatiful. But the keyboard is a nightmare, just for that reason I though of giving it back. Also, the BIOS doesn't support APM properly so you have to use the ACPI stuff if you need power management, and swsusp to suspend to RAM as it's no longer built in to the BIOS. It's also a nightmare to carry around, like the lunchbox computers of yesteryear -- this is kind of my first VAIO I've been disappointed in.
POV-RAY has an obnoxious licensing scheme that's in many ways worse than anything to come out of Microsoft. Not only is the program itself proprietary, but it even goes so far as to stipulate what you can and can't subsequently do with your own artwork. I'm surprised anyone in the geek community, open source enthusiast or otherwise, would want to be associated with POV-RAY. This is the software that gives 'freeware' a bad name.
I see this as an advantage. Ever noticed how the "Flash" sites are the very ones which tend to be filled to the brim with adverts and little else, or otherwise "arty" sites by self-important 'blogging nuts who think their combination of morphing pastel colours needs to be seen by the whole world? Sorry, but that's not what the Web is to me -- I use it for information, and that's why I use Mozilla.
-- for the English impaired this is irony --
You're not disappointed with his dismissal of OPN. You're disappointed with my dismissal which I posted to kerneltrap a good 24 hours ago. Nevertheless, I'm willing to let it slip by as a well-moderated post is more likely to get the message through. Still, sad that people have to copy-and-paste articles word-for-word :-(
I'm also disappointed to see people like you are still supporting Levin as I have seen him insult and hurt the feelings of innocent developers trying to use "OPN for what it is intended for" for no apparent reason. The abuse of power can't just be shrugged off; the issue must be addressed -- and the best way of doing so is by providing a community-driven alternative.
-- Richard Osborne
You still don't get it. There are already Vorbis players, GUI programs etc. for Mono. None of the programs you list have reached this level before dying.
Show me a single desktop GUI produced by one of these! Kaffe, GCJ and Wonka just aren't up to scratch. gcj can't even do runtime introspecting.
IMO the worst thing that could happen to the Free Software community is the situation where the bulk of user-layer applications are dependent on a non-free platform. SharpDevelop is coming along very nicely too. Support .NET and the Mono project!
Worked at Eazel, and we certainly had a failed business plan or two. Only problem is, we used StarOffice and not PowerPoint so I guess that's a handfull of documents that won't go down in history. Mail me if you're interested anyway.
Isn't that the radio station company that was on Slashdot the other day for reinforcing the RIAA cartel? Sounds like a nice place to work! Maybe there was something to the "smear campaign" if this is what the company gets up to. Personally I've never heard of it before but it sounds like something people should beware of.
Oh, and realistically, of course they're not spending $75 million on a "web site". High bandwidth hosting is around £400 per annum, with unlimited colocation plans around £800 per annum. Top newspaper article writers are paid on the order of 3 figures and top glossy-zine writers 3 to 4 figures. Say there's a full-time web designer (there's lots of cgi on Salon that needs to be maintained), a bursar and a director, each getting £20,000-30,000 per annum and that leaves £74 million to spare. So obviously, the only possible way to account for this figure is that there's an opportunist at Salon who realisis that people have _absolutely_ no idea how much it costs to run a e-zine Web site. This is opportunism, plain and simple.
The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions. Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses. Of note is the Darwin Streaming Server from Apple which, while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software because it demands that you hand over all changes even if you don't distribute the software (you can see why this is a crazy notion).
Nevertheless, Macromedia has some cool technologies and I can see them being widely implemented if there are truly free and complete implementations.
This is just more encouragement for people to adopt strong crypto like GnuPG. Anyone who has the resources can read your internet traffic if they want to anyway, as you will know if you've worked at an ISP. Allowing more groups to legally do so will catch out the criminals who don't know what they're doing (and let's face it, a camel trader from Afghanistan, who whilst maybe being willing to give up his life for the cause, has no idea about crypto). The most dangerous people are the very people who are least likely to be able to protect there secrets.
So here's the deal: we let Consignia monitor the unprotected messages, and anyone who needs to keep secrets can use GnuPG. I don't know about you, but I think this is one case where we can afford to give up some temporary freedom for greater safety, particularly as it doesn't affect us as much as it affects the more clueless of the criminals.
Source code doesn't equal documentation. Just look at the recent Ogg Vorbis fiasco. Besides, due to the license of BitKeeper, it would be wise for developers not to even look at the code as it's no doubt encumbered with patents, trade secrets and who knows what else. Remember, Microsoft employees aren't even allowed to run GPL software because it might infect their code.
Despite staunch opposition from certain developers, Linus has recently started to maintain the kernel using the non-free BitKeeper SCM product, which is not only proprietary but also uses undocumented file formats, making interoperability difficult or impossible. Do you think it's fair to encourage developers who would otherwise keep to Free Software to turn to a proprietary solution and what is in effect, shareware?
You forgot to mention one thing:
K-Meleon is dead. It's been unmaintained since 10-30-01 and doesn't support any of the more recent Gecko snapshots.
the Hauppage 'PVR' is just a standard TV card bundled with additional encoding software for Windows. As long as you have a codec like DivX or VP3, 'vcr' for Linux can do the exact same thing with commodity hardware. I'm surprised noone has pointed this out yet.
This is misinformation. Far from being an alternative to proprietary products, the Apache foundation is pushing proprietary solutions.
The Apache foundation has been pushing Sun's proprietary Java technology for several years, with packages like Cocoon; indeed, most of their XML work is based on non-free Java components. Even though the code Apache produces is free, most of it (other than the Apache httpd) is based on proprietary foundations which compete directly with truly free alternatives like PHP and DotGNU/Mono's ASP.NET implementations.
Apache has served its purpose, but I just don't see why they're now trying to base their tools on closed source platforms. History has shown again and again that, even when the upper layers of software are proprietary and commercial, the platform itself must remain relatively free and open. That's why I've come to abhor the Apache Foundation.
I also don't agree with their willingness to give away so much code under a non-copylefted license, handing over their 'crown jewels' to companies who then proprietarise them. It sickens me to see companies package up Apache pre-releases and sell it on without source code as "Apache 2" months before the release date, damaging the reputation of the Apache httpd and Open Source in general. But that's another can of worms.
I mean, they don't have to be Free Software fanatics or anything, but I do expect the EFF to at least make a token effort at not squandering money, and keeping true to their beliefs. Surely the $1000 licensing fee for Macromedia Flash plus time spend developing the animation could have been better employed to defend peoples' rights in the real world, rather than promoting a proprietary plugin that I can't even see. I mean, the total amount I have donated to the EFF in the past is probably less than $1000, and I'd consider myself one of their more pecunative sponsorors.
Self-declared "pragmatists" may claim that Flash is the most widespread, or that it is the 'best', but he is a fool who denies that freedom from vendor lock-in and the goals of the EFF do not go hand in hand. I'll be contacting them directly over the next few days; the only right thing for them to do is to remove the proprietary Flash animation from their site.