"Free software" is a bad term because in English (The FSF's primary language) it usually means "no monetary cost"
Free Software advocates have spent an enormouse amount of time and energy explaining that when they say "free" they mean freedom, not "free of charge".
There are other words in the English language that have the same approximate meaning as free that could have been used, like "liberated software", that I wonder sometimes if the FSF is intentionally trying to cause confusion.
It's interesting, that when I see RMS interviewed by foreign journalists (specifically a certain Japanese interviewer) who speak langauges that have different terms for "no charge" and "freedom", they still make the mistake of translating "free" into "no charge".
I've always thought that "Open source" was a better term because of this.
Company X approaches me, asking if they could use such-and-so portion of the code (or even the whole thing) in a piece of proprietary software.
I say "yes", and negotiate some special licensing agreement with them that allows them to use the code. That's perfectly legal, because I hold the copyright to the code. With multiple copyright holders, you do need to reach a consensus first, oc.
Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. When I go the the fsf web-site, I see arguments against copyright, and IP, so I assume that the GPL gives the authors no more rights than others
When I go over the fsf or gnu websites, I see arguments against "Information ownership", and little propaganda bits like "control over your own ideas is really control over other people's lives." which leads me to the impression that the FSF believes that the author has no more rights than any other user of the code, and by extension, cannot re-license the code.
Of course it's possible that the GPL isn't as extreme as the other writings on the GNU sites.
You are charging exactly what you ought to be charging. Charging more would send you out of business because your competitor(s) would get more business. Charging less would lose you too much money, but you might get more customers.
Wrong, you misread what I said.
We are losing money on these service calls. We are trying to improve our product so that they will not be necessary. The only reason we get away with it now is because we are a well-funded startup
Open-sourcing our product will not help our company either.
That's fine for a big company like IBM, but my own company is having to do more "service" than we have the resources to do. We fly people all over the place to do installs, but we can't charge what we ought to for it, because if we did, our competitor would trounce us.
No, there really needs to be something in between GPL and BSD. Something that says that the code can be used in proprietary projects only if the authors of the code agree to such. This way companies could not leach the way they can with a BSD license, because they will probably be required to give programmers something, and it would be up to the programmers to decide what this would be (not necessarily money).
Not everybody is capable of fixing their own bugs, and you will probably end up paying more hiring your own program, because you will have to pay him to come up to speed on the code.
I've seen the software that support-oriented companies tend to produce... It's horrible, often full of bugs, and not intuitive to use. It's left this way for an obvious reason, to sell more support.
The real question is, what do we want? Do we want to have a popular platform that becomes as mainstream as Windows and Mac? Or do we want to forever be marginalized?
I know that there are some in the free software community that would be happy if the Oracles and IBMs of the world would pack up and leave us alone, but there are others who welcome things that commercial companies bring us.
The issue raised in this article is "The licenses that Troll, Apple et al bring us aren't free enough." We should be proud of the fact that we got companies to even start thinking in terms of Open Source.
At the end he says that ESR is leading us down a path of destruction. I don't see it as a path of destruction. I'd rather go down that path than end up in a world where I have to boot into Windows to get any work done.
One day I was trying to create a bootdisk, and I accidentally typed "dd if=image of=/dev/hda" instead of/dev/fd0. Ok, ok, I was root, so please thwack me for that.
Anyway/dev/hda1 contains Win95.
I was able to recreate the partition table, and the only thing I lost was the Windows installation! So this justifies its existance to me;^)
GNOME, I would imagine. That fvwm2/95/AnotherLevel/NextLevel crap deserved to die from day one. It's the first thing that I "undo" when installing a Red Hat system.
Another IIS system falls victim to the /. effect!
on
Slate Takes on Linux
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The command line in NT gives me a weird feeling, almost as if I should be shunned for using it. Like "Silly Unix person, don't you know you should be doing this by GUI?"
I don't know why this is, most of the serious NT admins that I have met swear by the command line.
GUIs are good at simplifying COMMON tasks, they cost you in terms of flexibility and productivity, but most people don't realize that because they've never experienced the power that you have without the GUI.
An example: At the company I used to work for, we did a lot of EDI, the EDI was processed by shell scripts on HP/UX boxes, and they ran, launched by cron, unattended, at all hours of the day.
This company was bought out by another company that also did EDI, but on NT. They actually had a small group of people that did nothing but drag and drop and process files by mouse all day! The little they did have automated (on NT) crashed constantly, either due to SQL server or something else. In short, they created a real mess.
What's worse was that some of them suggested replacing our "outmoded" Unix based method with their method!
I remember struggling with AT on NT as well. I was never able to make it schedule a job at specific intervals. IE, I wanted the job to run every five minutes. The best I could do was put another call to AT at the end of the batch file to make it run itself again in another five minutes.
The obvious problem here is if the batch file dies half way through, no more jobs get scheduled.
Is there a cleaner way to make the NT scheduler run a job at regular intervals?
AFAIK it's the patch issue. People complain that changes to QT must be distributed as patches.
In practice this is how open source works anyway. If somebody fixes a bug in the kernel, do the redistribute the whole kernel? NO! They send a patch to Linus and maybe others who need it right away.
I suspect the real reason is that there is still a lot of bitterness left over from the QT flamewars.
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"Free software" is a bad term because in English (The FSF's primary language) it usually means "no monetary cost"
Free Software advocates have spent an enormouse amount of time and energy explaining that when they say "free" they mean freedom, not "free of charge".
There are other words in the English language that have the same approximate meaning as free that could have been used, like "liberated software", that I wonder sometimes if the FSF is intentionally trying to cause confusion.
It's interesting, that when I see RMS interviewed by foreign journalists (specifically a certain Japanese interviewer) who speak langauges that have different terms for "no charge" and "freedom", they still make the mistake of translating "free" into "no charge".
I've always thought that "Open source" was a better term because of this.
Company X approaches me, asking if they could use such-and-so portion of the code (or even the
whole thing) in a piece of proprietary software.
I say "yes", and negotiate some special licensing agreement with them that allows them to use the code. That's perfectly legal, because I hold the copyright to the code. With multiple copyright holders, you do need to reach a consensus first, oc.
Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. When I go the the fsf web-site, I see arguments against copyright, and IP, so I assume that the GPL gives the authors no more rights than others
When I go over the fsf or gnu websites, I see arguments against "Information ownership", and little propaganda bits like "control over your own ideas is really control over other people's lives." which leads me to the impression that the FSF believes that the author has no more rights than any other user of the code, and by extension, cannot re-license the code.
Of course it's possible that the GPL isn't as extreme as the other writings on the GNU sites.
Wrong, you misread what I said.
We are losing money on these service calls. We are trying to improve our product so that they will not be necessary. The only reason we get away with it now is because we are a well-funded startup
Open-sourcing our product will not help our company either.
That's fine for a big company like IBM, but my own company is having to do more "service" than we have the resources to do. We fly people all over the place to do installs, but we can't charge what we ought to for it, because if we did, our competitor would trounce us.
This story has showed once a month for several months.
As far as I can tell, they will still be one company, they are not splitting up, AT&T style, into different companies.
The move may be designed to make it look as though MS is fixing its anti-trust problems, but I hope that the DOJ and the courts will not be confused
No, there really needs to be something in between GPL and BSD. Something that says that the code can be used in proprietary projects only if the authors of the code agree to such. This way companies could not leach the way they can with a BSD license, because they will probably be required to give programmers something, and it would be up to the programmers to decide what this would be (not necessarily money).
Not everybody is capable of fixing their own bugs, and you will probably end up paying more hiring your own program, because you will have to pay him to come up to speed on the code.
I've seen the software that support-oriented companies tend to produce... It's horrible, often full of bugs, and not intuitive to use. It's left this way for an obvious reason, to sell more support.
The real question is, what do we want? Do we want to have a popular platform that becomes as mainstream as Windows and Mac? Or do we want to forever be marginalized?
I know that there are some in the free software community that would be happy if the Oracles and IBMs of the world would pack up and leave us alone, but there are others who welcome things that commercial companies bring us.
The issue raised in this article is "The licenses that Troll, Apple et al bring us aren't free enough." We should be proud of the fact that we got companies to even start thinking in terms of Open Source.
At the end he says that ESR is leading us down a path of destruction. I don't see it as a path of destruction. I'd rather go down that path than end up in a world where I have to boot into Windows to get any work done.
Don't forget "Oog", the caveperson who invented cave-drawing.
How many years have you been running linux?
I propose this: Since RMS' ideology is so repugnant, use BSD.
Even Linus refuses to use the term GNU/Linux.
I propose this: if RMS is your god, then use Hurd or GNU/Hurd
Oh, BTW, I've been using Linux for 5 years (why that's relevant, I don't know)
I did see a story on slashdot about that last year, but nothing since.
One day I was trying to create a bootdisk, and I accidentally typed "dd if=image of=/dev/hda" /dev/fd0. Ok, ok, I was root, so please thwack me for that.
/dev/hda1 contains Win95.
;^)
instead of
Anyway
I was able to recreate the partition table, and the only thing I lost was the Windows installation! So this justifies its existance to me
GNOME, I would imagine. That fvwm2/95/AnotherLevel/NextLevel crap deserved to die from day one. It's the first thing that I "undo" when installing a Red Hat system.
What more needs to be said?
The command line in NT gives me a weird feeling, almost as if I should be shunned for using it. Like "Silly Unix person, don't you know you should be doing this by GUI?"
I don't know why this is, most of the serious NT admins that I have met swear by the command line.
GUIs are good at simplifying COMMON tasks, they cost you in terms of flexibility and productivity, but most people don't realize that because they've never experienced the power that you have without the GUI.
An example: At the company I used to work for, we did a lot of EDI, the EDI was processed by shell scripts on HP/UX boxes, and they ran, launched by cron, unattended, at all hours of the day.
This company was bought out by another company that also did EDI, but on NT. They actually had a small group of people that did nothing but drag and drop and process files by mouse all day! The little they did have automated (on NT) crashed constantly, either due to SQL server or something else. In short, they created a real mess.
What's worse was that some of them suggested replacing our "outmoded" Unix based method with their method!
I remember struggling with AT on NT as well. I was never able to make it schedule a job at specific intervals. IE, I wanted the job to run every five minutes. The best I could do was put another call to AT at the end of the batch file to make it run itself again in another five minutes.
The obvious problem here is if the batch file dies half way through, no more jobs get scheduled.
Is there a cleaner way to make the NT scheduler run a job at regular intervals?
I noticed that the Harmony page is being hosted by yggdrasil (Creators of the "Plug & Play Linux Distribution", which has faded away for you newbies)
I wonder if maybe yggdrasil is trying to make themselves relevant again by emulating what Red Hat did with GNOME?
What does Yggdrasil do these days anyway? From their web page, it doesn't appear they've produced a distribution since 1997.
People who create commercial software are accustomed to paying for development tools anyway, so the cost of QT isn't much of an issue.
Besides, isn't it proprietary code development what the anti-QT are trying to discourage anyway?
An LGPL'd QT clone would allow proprietary software writers to leach off of Free software efforts. QT doesn't, they want something in return.
AFAIK it's the patch issue. People complain that changes to QT must be distributed as patches.
In practice this is how open source works anyway. If somebody fixes a bug in the kernel, do the redistribute the whole kernel? NO! They send a patch to Linus and maybe others who need it right away.
I suspect the real reason is that there is still a lot of bitterness left over from the QT flamewars.
They were at 1.0 about two weeks ago, when did this happen?
Why is this a disadvantage? People pay significant amounts of money to MS and other providers of commercial development tools anyway.
Would you rather have large corporations just leach off free software