You're right: it's not an either/or thing, it's only an "either" thing: colonization of space is simply not feasible in the foreseeable future.
And it's dangerous to assume it is feasible because it causes people to neglect addressing the serious issues that we really could address if we only tried.
Licensing something doesn't give you the moral right to claim credit for its invention. Do a Google search for "xerox parc" or "engelbart" or "xerox alto" on apple.com; the lack of attribution and credit given by Apple to these pioneers is embarrassing. Unfortunately, that kind of arrogance and lack of credit continues to this day; the claims accompanying Tiger are more of the same.
It is correct to say that Xerox did not invent the GUI. But the article seems to use that as some kind of exonoration of Apple, and that it isn't. The researchers at Xerox made enormous contributions, both to the user-visible aspects of GUIs, as well as to the underlying technologies (OOP, design patterns, etc.). In contrast, the developers at Apple made some moderate, practical improvements to the user-visible aspects of the GUI (although, ironically, in OS X, they are actually picking up more and more of the original Xerox UI design), and they made no contributions at all to the underlying technologies.
And little has changed. The poor foundations of the original MacOS haunted Apple until they finally had to throw out MacOS and start over again with OS X. And what do they do? They base it on NeXT and Objective-C, a system that was pretty nice in the 1980's, but that has never been technologically cutting edge and is pretty much obsolete today as far as software technologies go.
What then is the point in eating healthy, or even more so in having hospitals or anykind of healthcare?
Simple: better quality of life, not quantity at any cost.
Isn't spending all that money on healtcare a waste of money given that it only serves in delaying the inevitable? Imagine how much governments would save each year if people could just accept that simple fact. No need for medical insurance or anything.
Substantially, that is true: a large part of medical spending is on end-of-life care that does not extend life significantly and can be argued to prolong suffering.
True, but it is also our "duty" as living beings to delay the inevitable as much as possible.
Even if that were true, the prescription of space travel as a preventative for global disaster is snake oil: there is no conceivable way at this point in which the colonization of space would allow us to continue to exist as a species. We aren't self-reproducing, autonomous machines, we are part of an ecology and environment. We can leave that temporarily, but we don't even know how to begin to replace it.
Why all this lack of concern with survival of the race?
Well, that's the question you should ask of people who are claiming that space exploration will contribute anything to our survival: it won't. At this point, there is no conceivable way in which colonization will guard against the kinds of threats we face, even if we figure out manned interplanetary and interstellar space travel.
We can help our survival with the things we can control: birth rates, the environment, war. Beyond that, we simply have to accept the inevitable, unless there are radical and completely unforeseen discoveries.
Refusing to sit back and let the inevitable happen is what separates us from animals.
Quite right. And the best way of ensuring our survival is to take care of the things we can take care: the environment and curbing population growth.
Human colonies that would continue to function and grow even if earth was hit by a global disaster, on the other hand, are not feasible using current or foreseeable technology.
In the end, this kind of research will be vital to the survival of the race.
Why all this concern with "survival of the race"? You have to face the inevitable fact that all things come to an end, even entire species, even if they are dispersed across the galaxy. We will invariably go extinct sooner or later, one way or another.
Serious impacts are a low enough probability event not to worry about at this point; if our planet becomes uninhabitable for humans, it will be self-inflicted and there are far simpler ways of preventing that than space flight.
In any case,solar sailing is a great thing, not to ship a few carcasses to another planet, but because it lets us do great science.
Hmm. But we did in fact GET Java, right? It's a real product? It's not vaporware?
Sun misled people in order to get industry support behind Java, then kept it proprietary. This time, Sun may be misleading people about the release of Open Solaris in order to damage open source kernels.
Solaris worthless? You've got to be joking. Have you ever USED Solaris in an enterprise capacity? On a machine with > 8 CPU's?
Yes, and yes. I have lived with Sun workstations and servers since the 1980's. I used to push for the companies I was at to buy them by the boatload. We still have a few. I stopped doing that long before Sun lost my trust, simply because Sun had become technically irrelevant.
The part you have been missing is that in the last decade or so, the world has moved in a different direction. Linux runs the high-end compute clusters and servers of today just fine; Sun's approach to enterprise computing is a niche market (and one that is frankly better served by IBM anyway).
It amazes me how much value some people put on stuff that really has no bearing whatsoever on how good an OS/application/tool is for the job at hand.
Well, it's obvious that Sun just doesn't get a fundamental fact about customers and products: the quality of a piece of software is only one of many considerations. Trust is an important consideration in choosing who to do business with, and Sun has repeatedly violated my trust, both as a customer and as an open source developer. That's why I wouldn't do business with them anymore even if their products were still of interest.
Really? What did they promise and then come up with excuses on? Do you have facts to back up your statement? Or are you just parroting?
Sun committed to having Java standardized through an organization like ISO, ANSI, and/or ECMA. Then, after the industry put their support behind the language, they pulled out and gave us the JCP crap instead.
Having been an employee of Sun (I'm not anymore), I know that they are working intensely to get the code out, it's not bullshit.
I'm sure they'll release lots of source code; whether it amounts to an open source version of Solaris or comes with some hidden gotchas remains to be seen. In any case, it really doesn't matter anymore: Solaris is pretty much worthless at this point.
Slashdot as a community seems to have the opinion that if the announcement of something isnt accompanied by that something straight away, then its classed as vapourware,
You bet we have that opinion: this kind of long-term announcement is calculated to manipulate people. That's exactly what constitutes vaporware.
If Sun hadnt announced when they did, there would still be a lot of shouting down of Sun about an opensource solaris, even if Sun was doing this work in private.
I doubt anybody would give a second thought to an open source version of Solaris if Sun hadn't announced it: the open source community doesn't need an open source version of Solaris, and people don't expect this sort of thing from Sun.
At least this way people get to know whats happening.
You're a fool if you make any long-term plans based on Sun's announcements. Given their history, they are just as likely to put large chunks of Solaris under the "Sun Community License", set up a "Solaris Community Process" to manage it all, and require you to sign over your intellectual property to them for the privilege of fixing their bugs.
First, dot your legal i's and cross your political t's, then make the announcement that you are going to open source the stuff.
Sun has given us this bullshit before, where they first promised something and then came up with all sorts of excuses why they couldn't deliver. At this point, it is vaporware.
Despite having released some open source software, Sun also has renegged on promises in the past and misrepreseted proprietary software as "open source". Sun's management has also been publicly attacking open source and free software.
Of course, with that history, people aren't going to believe them until a complete Solaris source tree under a certified open source license sits on an external server somewhere and compiles into a working system.
(I still fail to see why anybody even cares about an open source version of Solaris--to me, it is a clear example of bloat and poor design--but that's a separate question.)
Not only do they refuse to publish papers opposing global warming, they also just rejected two papers of mine, one describing a perpetual motion machines and the other demonstrating conclusively that the universe is 6000 years old. Those pinko commie European bastards have been bought off by the oil lobby and the anti-Christ.
Yes, innovation strictly speaking, means the introduction of new ideas or technologies to a culture. Traditionally, that refers to when traders brought new technologies and ideas with them from another culture, in addition to invention.
But when a company takes a previously published idea, often with some small players in the market, builds a product around it, and markets the hell out of it without giving credit, that's not innovation; the idea was already in the culture.
Of course he put up Amazons patents up for prize money, and when people started to come in with information as prior art, he claimed that they were "too different" and shut down completely. The contact information and phone number has been obsolete/cut off for years.
Telling people who are filing bad patents about prior art only makes it easier for them to amend their patents in ways that makes it harder to fight them later.
Do not supply prior art information to people filing bad patents.
The fact that companies are forced to get patents in order to be able to negotiate doesn't mean that they have to get bad patents. There are plenty of things Amazon could get patents on that are innovative.
Amazon's and Bezos's patents seem to represent a particular low point among software patents. And that is a reason to boycott them.
There is nothing wrong with copying. Most of what Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Sun, and other companies are doing is copied from somewhere. In fact, most innovation doesn't come from companies, it comes from universities and a few private research labs. Even the technology that Google was founded on was developed while the founders were at Stanford. And among computer companies, Microsoft is one of the best companies in terms of spending on research and innovation.
Microsoft's problems have nothing to do with innovation (or lack thereof), they have to do with business practices.
But to stay within the law and avoid prosecution altogether, they must open their source. That's them being "forced". We're arguing semantics though, and I suspect we're talking about exactly the same thing.
No, we are talking about two different things. You are talking about what it takes to be compliant with the GPL. But that's not what we are discussing here. This is the context:
It's a widespread and unfortuate myth that your product automatically becomes subject to the GPL if you (accidentally or otherwise) violate the GPL by including GPL'ed code.
What we are discussing here is what happens after you have failed to comply with the GPL. After you have failed to comply with the GPL even just once, opening your source code simply will not help you anymore.
You don't see any difference between doing something and getting paid for it, and doing something and NOT getting paid for it.
They don't get "paid for it", they are getting unemployment benefits, same as in the US.
typical Microsoft
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This isn't really anything new. Gates embodies a blend of arrogance, ignorance, and intelligence fairly common in the tech community (and really no different from Jobs or McNealy): he thinks he can do everything better, he doesn't know or care what other people have done as long as they aren't on his radar screen as competitors, and he is smart enough to pull it off some time.
Of course, a great deal of luck and a huge war chest is also part of it: Microsoft got away with that sort of behavior for about a decade because they set the standards and because they could pump money into failing projects for as long as it took. It didn't matter whether Windows reinvented the wheel, because Microsoft made all the cars and because Microsoft could outspend everybody else until they got it right.
Will it work again? Perhaps, perhaps not. Microsoft can try to push their search product to market late in the game, with enormous effort and an enormous investment. But that alone isn't enough to unseat Google; they would have to leverage their Windows near-monopoly, but in a way that doesn't attract the attention of regulatory agencies around the world. Good luck.
Well when people say they're "forced" to open their source, I'd expect they're forced by their adherence to legal working practices, rather than the interpretation that leads to this argument
No, nobody is "forcing" them to open their source code. They can go to court. In that case, the consequences are likely that the court will order them to stop shipping the product until they have removed the code whose license they are violating and that they update all previous shipments. They would also likely have to pay a penalty. That would be the normal consequence for a wilfull copyright violation.
The argument that companies have isn't that they will need to open their source later when legislated, it's that they'd need to open their source now to avoid legislation altogether.
They may not even have that option. That option only exists if the copyright holder of the code whose copyright they violated gives them that option. That may not even be possible for large GPL'ed projects with many contributors.
So, my point is this: violating the GPL is a serious problem for a company, and the consequences may end up being far worse than merely having to open source their software.
If you're out of work, volunteering is one of the options for keeping your resume and skills up to date and staying involved in the workforce. Nobody is forcing you to do it, but it's the sensible thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right: it's not an either/or thing, it's only an "either" thing: colonization of space is simply not feasible in the foreseeable future.
And it's dangerous to assume it is feasible because it causes people to neglect addressing the serious issues that we really could address if we only tried.
Licensing something doesn't give you the moral right to claim credit for its invention. Do a Google search for "xerox parc" or "engelbart" or "xerox alto" on apple.com; the lack of attribution and credit given by Apple to these pioneers is embarrassing. Unfortunately, that kind of arrogance and lack of credit continues to this day; the claims accompanying Tiger are more of the same.
It is correct to say that Xerox did not invent the GUI. But the article seems to use that as some kind of exonoration of Apple, and that it isn't. The researchers at Xerox made enormous contributions, both to the user-visible aspects of GUIs, as well as to the underlying technologies (OOP, design patterns, etc.). In contrast, the developers at Apple made some moderate, practical improvements to the user-visible aspects of the GUI (although, ironically, in OS X, they are actually picking up more and more of the original Xerox UI design), and they made no contributions at all to the underlying technologies.
And little has changed. The poor foundations of the original MacOS haunted Apple until they finally had to throw out MacOS and start over again with OS X. And what do they do? They base it on NeXT and Objective-C, a system that was pretty nice in the 1980's, but that has never been technologically cutting edge and is pretty much obsolete today as far as software technologies go.
What then is the point in eating healthy, or even more so in having hospitals or anykind of healthcare?
Simple: better quality of life, not quantity at any cost.
Isn't spending all that money on healtcare a waste of money given that it only serves in delaying the inevitable? Imagine how much governments would save each year if people could just accept that simple fact. No need for medical insurance or anything.
Substantially, that is true: a large part of medical spending is on end-of-life care that does not extend life significantly and can be argued to prolong suffering.
True, but it is also our "duty" as living beings to delay the inevitable as much as possible.
Even if that were true, the prescription of space travel as a preventative for global disaster is snake oil: there is no conceivable way at this point in which the colonization of space would allow us to continue to exist as a species. We aren't self-reproducing, autonomous machines, we are part of an ecology and environment. We can leave that temporarily, but we don't even know how to begin to replace it.
Why all this lack of concern with survival of the race?
Well, that's the question you should ask of people who are claiming that space exploration will contribute anything to our survival: it won't. At this point, there is no conceivable way in which colonization will guard against the kinds of threats we face, even if we figure out manned interplanetary and interstellar space travel.
We can help our survival with the things we can control: birth rates, the environment, war. Beyond that, we simply have to accept the inevitable, unless there are radical and completely unforeseen discoveries.
Refusing to sit back and let the inevitable happen is what separates us from animals.
Quite right. And the best way of ensuring our survival is to take care of the things we can take care: the environment and curbing population growth.
Human colonies that would continue to function and grow even if earth was hit by a global disaster, on the other hand, are not feasible using current or foreseeable technology.
In the end, this kind of research will be vital to the survival of the race.
Why all this concern with "survival of the race"? You have to face the inevitable fact that all things come to an end, even entire species, even if they are dispersed across the galaxy. We will invariably go extinct sooner or later, one way or another.
Serious impacts are a low enough probability event not to worry about at this point; if our planet becomes uninhabitable for humans, it will be self-inflicted and there are far simpler ways of preventing that than space flight.
In any case,solar sailing is a great thing, not to ship a few carcasses to another planet, but because it lets us do great science.
The first solar sail spacecraft was launched by the Japanese last year. See here for more info.
Seriously! Minnesota's greatest invention prefigured email, hypertext, and the digital revolution.
No, it didn't. E-mail and hypertext preceded the PostIt note by a decade or two.
Hmm. But we did in fact GET Java, right? It's a real product? It's not vaporware?
Sun misled people in order to get industry support behind Java, then kept it proprietary. This time, Sun may be misleading people about the release of Open Solaris in order to damage open source kernels.
Solaris worthless? You've got to be joking. Have you ever USED Solaris in an enterprise capacity? On a machine with > 8 CPU's?
Yes, and yes. I have lived with Sun workstations and servers since the 1980's. I used to push for the companies I was at to buy them by the boatload. We still have a few. I stopped doing that long before Sun lost my trust, simply because Sun had become technically irrelevant.
The part you have been missing is that in the last decade or so, the world has moved in a different direction. Linux runs the high-end compute clusters and servers of today just fine; Sun's approach to enterprise computing is a niche market (and one that is frankly better served by IBM anyway).
It amazes me how much value some people put on stuff that really has no bearing whatsoever on how good an OS/application/tool is for the job at hand.
Well, it's obvious that Sun just doesn't get a fundamental fact about customers and products: the quality of a piece of software is only one of many considerations. Trust is an important consideration in choosing who to do business with, and Sun has repeatedly violated my trust, both as a customer and as an open source developer. That's why I wouldn't do business with them anymore even if their products were still of interest.
How soon does everyone think this system will be abused either by the government or by thieves ?
I dunno. But I do know that it will be harder to abuse than the current system, which is absolutely atrocious.
Really? What did they promise and then come up with excuses on? Do you have facts to back up your statement? Or are you just parroting?
Sun committed to having Java standardized through an organization like ISO, ANSI, and/or ECMA. Then, after the industry put their support behind the language, they pulled out and gave us the JCP crap instead.
Having been an employee of Sun (I'm not anymore), I know that they are working intensely to get the code out, it's not bullshit.
I'm sure they'll release lots of source code; whether it amounts to an open source version of Solaris or comes with some hidden gotchas remains to be seen. In any case, it really doesn't matter anymore: Solaris is pretty much worthless at this point.
Slashdot as a community seems to have the opinion that if the announcement of something isnt accompanied by that something straight away, then its classed as vapourware,
You bet we have that opinion: this kind of long-term announcement is calculated to manipulate people. That's exactly what constitutes vaporware.
If Sun hadnt announced when they did, there would still be a lot of shouting down of Sun about an opensource solaris, even if Sun was doing this work in private.
I doubt anybody would give a second thought to an open source version of Solaris if Sun hadn't announced it: the open source community doesn't need an open source version of Solaris, and people don't expect this sort of thing from Sun.
At least this way people get to know whats happening.
You're a fool if you make any long-term plans based on Sun's announcements. Given their history, they are just as likely to put large chunks of Solaris under the "Sun Community License", set up a "Solaris Community Process" to manage it all, and require you to sign over your intellectual property to them for the privilege of fixing their bugs.
First, dot your legal i's and cross your political t's, then make the announcement that you are going to open source the stuff.
Sun has given us this bullshit before, where they first promised something and then came up with all sorts of excuses why they couldn't deliver. At this point, it is vaporware.
Despite having released some open source software, Sun also has renegged on promises in the past and misrepreseted proprietary software as "open source". Sun's management has also been publicly attacking open source and free software.
Of course, with that history, people aren't going to believe them until a complete Solaris source tree under a certified open source license sits on an external server somewhere and compiles into a working system.
(I still fail to see why anybody even cares about an open source version of Solaris--to me, it is a clear example of bloat and poor design--but that's a separate question.)
Not only do they refuse to publish papers opposing global warming, they also just rejected two papers of mine, one describing a perpetual motion machines and the other demonstrating conclusively that the universe is 6000 years old. Those pinko commie European bastards have been bought off by the oil lobby and the anti-Christ.
Yes, innovation strictly speaking, means the introduction of new ideas or technologies to a culture. Traditionally, that refers to when traders brought new technologies and ideas with them from another culture, in addition to invention.
But when a company takes a previously published idea, often with some small players in the market, builds a product around it, and markets the hell out of it without giving credit, that's not innovation; the idea was already in the culture.
Of course he put up Amazons patents up for prize money, and when people started to come in with information as prior art, he claimed that they were "too different" and shut down completely. The contact information and phone number has been obsolete/cut off for years.
Telling people who are filing bad patents about prior art only makes it easier for them to amend their patents in ways that makes it harder to fight them later.
Do not supply prior art information to people filing bad patents.
The fact that companies are forced to get patents in order to be able to negotiate doesn't mean that they have to get bad patents. There are plenty of things Amazon could get patents on that are innovative.
Amazon's and Bezos's patents seem to represent a particular low point among software patents. And that is a reason to boycott them.
There is nothing wrong with copying. Most of what Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Sun, and other companies are doing is copied from somewhere. In fact, most innovation doesn't come from companies, it comes from universities and a few private research labs. Even the technology that Google was founded on was developed while the founders were at Stanford. And among computer companies, Microsoft is one of the best companies in terms of spending on research and innovation.
Microsoft's problems have nothing to do with innovation (or lack thereof), they have to do with business practices.
No, we are talking about two different things. You are talking about what it takes to be compliant with the GPL. But that's not what we are discussing here. This is the context:
What we are discussing here is what happens after you have failed to comply with the GPL. After you have failed to comply with the GPL even just once, opening your source code simply will not help you anymore.
You don't see any difference between doing something and getting paid for it, and doing something and NOT getting paid for it.
They don't get "paid for it", they are getting unemployment benefits, same as in the US.
This isn't really anything new. Gates embodies a blend of arrogance, ignorance, and intelligence fairly common in the tech community (and really no different from Jobs or McNealy): he thinks he can do everything better, he doesn't know or care what other people have done as long as they aren't on his radar screen as competitors, and he is smart enough to pull it off some time.
Of course, a great deal of luck and a huge war chest is also part of it: Microsoft got away with that sort of behavior for about a decade because they set the standards and because they could pump money into failing projects for as long as it took. It didn't matter whether Windows reinvented the wheel, because Microsoft made all the cars and because Microsoft could outspend everybody else until they got it right.
Will it work again? Perhaps, perhaps not. Microsoft can try to push their search product to market late in the game, with enormous effort and an enormous investment. But that alone isn't enough to unseat Google; they would have to leverage their Windows near-monopoly, but in a way that doesn't attract the attention of regulatory agencies around the world. Good luck.
Well when people say they're "forced" to open their source, I'd expect they're forced by their adherence to legal working practices, rather than the interpretation that leads to this argument
No, nobody is "forcing" them to open their source code. They can go to court. In that case, the consequences are likely that the court will order them to stop shipping the product until they have removed the code whose license they are violating and that they update all previous shipments. They would also likely have to pay a penalty. That would be the normal consequence for a wilfull copyright violation.
The argument that companies have isn't that they will need to open their source later when legislated, it's that they'd need to open their source now to avoid legislation altogether.
They may not even have that option. That option only exists if the copyright holder of the code whose copyright they violated gives them that option. That may not even be possible for large GPL'ed projects with many contributors.
So, my point is this: violating the GPL is a serious problem for a company, and the consequences may end up being far worse than merely having to open source their software.
If you're out of work, volunteering is one of the options for keeping your resume and skills up to date and staying involved in the workforce. Nobody is forcing you to do it, but it's the sensible thing to do.