Maybe this is partly because there needs to be a way to comply with the (silly?) requirements such as "don't sell OS along with a multimedia player" etc.?
Maybe a network like LinkedIn will be a future replacement for the pre web-2.0^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H classical style job list sites. It is not developed enough yet, but I somehow have a feeling it's incredibly powerful in its potential.
"Most of the ads were about gambling or adult content, which are banned categories in Google AdSense, clearly indicating a suspicious origin." It looks like it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure things out...
Personally I am far from defending the poor programming practices and irresponsible coding; in fact, when I actually worked as a programmer, way back in early 90ths (and there weren't many of us in post-Soviet Russia then), I used to be very keen on the code quality and beta-testing. In fact, the hardest thing I get to do in my projects is persuading people to actually use some beta-testing in them. (You don't really want to know how the money is earned in IT business here these days...)
The problem that I am referring to has nothing to do with defending the bad coders and incompetent designers. It is about the inertia that the first-to-market and vendor lock-in concepts developed in the IT world. You cannot just stop a car by pressing a button, no matter how good your brakes are. And with the whole sector's business models built around faulty in this way models, I'd say it's not going to happen.
The instant the law that makes corporations liable for damages caused by malfunctioning of their software, everybody just plain stops selling software -- or get sued to bankruptcy. And that means lots of people lose jobs, nasdaq crashes, economies get another kick in the head they need so much right now etc.. Nobody in their right mind would want to do that.
That's why I don't expect a revolution anytime soon, and there doesn't seem much to be done about it.
It has been noted more than once that should the software companies writing code become obliged to pay for the damages caused, the price of such software would sky rocket, as the development times will. And this won't be implemented in any one single country, since the developers there would be put at a great disadvantage. The chances of such idea becoming law universally, of course, are infinestimal.
On an somewhat unrelated note, free software seems to be naturally exempted from this, and is thus allowed to be all buggy and exploitably, thus losing somewhat of an edge against commercial software... so I'm not all that sure it's the direction where the wind blows right now:)
This is Russia, guys. They don't probably realize what that really means...
First of all, 'Russia' and 'property' are mutually exclusive. Russian society has always been based on the concept of common ownership of assets and the traditional 'obshchina' (~ commonship) values dating back to the pre-Viking times are still as strong here as ever. You don't own anything here, you work for the good of all and add whatever you produce to the common pool, from which you are entitled a share. When Forbes starts to count the money in the Russian richest guys' pockets, I can't help smirking. They don't understand that nobody really owns anything here. Tomorrow your friends may decide that you have too much and gone too far and they come along and say, hey, do you know that things are not done like that? To share is the law!
Yeah, to share is the law. If the concept of 'property' which has always been alien to Russians is somewhat unapplicable here, then the concept of 'intellectual property' is almost an oxymoron here. You don't even 'own' anything in the western meaning here, why would anyone respect rights to something intangible?
Now this might sound somewhat of an exaggeration, but, you have to live here to understand. (Although many of you would rather not live here, depending on how strong your feelings about being able to truly own anything and have certain rights are.)
Now you see where that brings us to. There is no respect for IP here and there won't be any at least for a couple of generations more. There is no moral objection against sharing software, songs or movies at all. There are pirated copies of pretty much everything sold openly in certain specialized markets, and they only way for the legal owners to compete is to ask for the same price as pirates do, which is 70-100 roubles (2.5 to 3.5 USD) for a CD.
And if anyone is going to try to change this... I'd just say, good luck, suckers. You will need a lot of it, and it wouldn't help you either.
I have a feeling that the idea is not really about promoting a product at all. It's about promoting the lifestyle and the mentality of a 'geek' as opposed to those of a 'norm', in a way, and the 'evil' corps against the 'good' free software developers stuff is secondary. Many geeks develop a sort of inferiority complex against norms and since firefox=feek, then actions life this one are acts of self-assertion of sorts.
and imagine what if they created such "stupid simple" tools to keep the journals everywhere in synch. That way, a blog can be seen in all communities no matter what its "home" provider is. It's a lot like open standards for office documents.
I'm absolutely positive this will happen one day, and LiveJournal's OpenID project is the first step towards it. It will probably take at least five years though.
Depends on the subject of the research, I'd say. When you look up something technical or scientific, Wikipedia is often an invaluable resource for a start, however articles on most political or cultural issues are often biased, despite what they claim. On the other hand, it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure that out on your own, so as long as you realize that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter and that articles praising some piece of art are usually written by those who admire it and can't thus be impartial, it's still a good place to start.
And that's where I believe what the Register article is missing: sure you shouldn't be blindly trusting anything written in Wikipedia, but it's still good for what it is: a collection of articles presenting views on most interesting topics. In other words, it's a tool that requires some understanding to use it.
That InformationWeek article mentioned in the post doesn't say anywhere that "the tabs will be very 'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users." What it says is that this was the reason they didn't implement the feature before, when they really should have, and that they now admitted their short-sightendness and amended etc etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, nowhere close. But I'm no fan of linking to a page and quoting what it doesn't say either.
ok the below is pretty much imho and going to be somewhat redundant but hey..
it is stupid to ignore the fact that this ideology is directed at a goal, more OSS and thus it is counterproductive to insist on this ideology when it discourages OSS.
This appears to be a does-the-end-justify-the-means sort of dispute. Advocating OSS just for the sake of the S being OS and skipping the important ideological part (not depending on proprietary products) to me pretty much means that OSS actually becomes something else than what it is "normally" supposed to be. Stallman does not appear to say OOo shouldn't be doing what they do; neither he is supposed to mean OOo are doing something "bad", or "evil". He is calling a spade a spade, in a way.
Yet this is exactly what Stallman's vociferous black and white view of the world does.
I disagree. OOo basically wanted the OSS label without having what it "really" takes; they have the full right to implement what they want however they want, but some things should be clear about it. Stallman pointed it out to them and they even appeared to have agreed on most points.
In fact choosing to contribute to OSS in certain ways can actually result in negative publicity since all the sudden Stallman is critisizing you for not going all the way and people start looking at you as an evil corporation.
That, if it is the case, is the problem of Stallman's PR skills, but not of the idea itself. Perhaps failure to find some more "smooth" words alienate a lot of people to Stallman, but it doesn't lower the value of the ideas and concepts that he bears and advocates.
If instead of postive PR for releasing the code to open office they are instead ripped for not fully open sourceing their java compilers/specs... they will be much less inclined to donate code in the future.
I am sorry if I misunderstand your logic, but you appear to be missing a significant part of the whole OSS concept. You're putting it this way like the OSS community depends on the large companies releasing large portions of their proprietary code into open source. It doesn't. The whole idea of OSS srives (ugh.. well is expected to) on that the corporations are supposed to be interested in OS-ing their product. If they can't understand what's it about, then they have no reason really to. No big deal, they will learn.. or lose. OS is even stronger than Marxism.
Sun however does appear to understand what OSS is about and why, and they do what they do, with all the related problems mentioned by other posters. Pointing out the problems is not discouraging them, it's revealing a possible hidden obstacle.
in the long term this sort of attitude [forking] actually harms the OSS movement by sending companies a message that it isn't worthwhile to open source some of their systems or fund the development of an open source framework they can augment with their proprietary technology.
Here I can't but absolutely agree. Forking a project should never be taken lightly. It is a kind of last resort and should only be done if educating and convincing the original developers fails and the project is important enough to influence the community.
nothing in this case prevents future improvements or modifications to GCJ which allow open office to be run in that manner.
And this is the only right way to go.
In short the open source community needs to get over this attitude that anyone who isn't totally comitted to OSS is evil.
I don't see that as a problem.. sure there are some hotshots who see Big Brother issues everywhere but in general the community is inclined the other way -- towards "less pure" OSS. Like someone else mentioned, in real projects people tend to be pragmatic and compromising. I believe that it is our duty to make sure every spade is called a spade and not a fork (ok bad pun) and let everybody decide for themselves. I repea
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this is partly because there needs to be a way to comply with the (silly?) requirements such as "don't sell OS along with a multimedia player" etc.?
Personally I'd pay for as a candidate. I wonder how many are there like me?
Maybe a network like LinkedIn will be a future replacement for the pre web-2.0^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H classical style job list sites. It is not developed enough yet, but I somehow have a feeling it's incredibly powerful in its potential.
now, that is revolting...
"Most of the ads were about gambling or adult content, which are banned categories in Google AdSense, clearly indicating a suspicious origin." It looks like it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure things out...
Personally I am far from defending the poor programming practices and irresponsible coding; in fact, when I actually worked as a programmer, way back in early 90ths (and there weren't many of us in post-Soviet Russia then), I used to be very keen on the code quality and beta-testing. In fact, the hardest thing I get to do in my projects is persuading people to actually use some beta-testing in them. (You don't really want to know how the money is earned in IT business here these days...)
The problem that I am referring to has nothing to do with defending the bad coders and incompetent designers. It is about the inertia that the first-to-market and vendor lock-in concepts developed in the IT world. You cannot just stop a car by pressing a button, no matter how good your brakes are. And with the whole sector's business models built around faulty in this way models, I'd say it's not going to happen.
The instant the law that makes corporations liable for damages caused by malfunctioning of their software, everybody just plain stops selling software -- or get sued to bankruptcy. And that means lots of people lose jobs, nasdaq crashes, economies get another kick in the head they need so much right now etc.. Nobody in their right mind would want to do that.
That's why I don't expect a revolution anytime soon, and there doesn't seem much to be done about it.
It has been noted more than once that should the software companies writing code become obliged to pay for the damages caused, the price of such software would sky rocket, as the development times will. And this won't be implemented in any one single country, since the developers there would be put at a great disadvantage. The chances of such idea becoming law universally, of course, are infinestimal.
:)
On an somewhat unrelated note, free software seems to be naturally exempted from this, and is thus allowed to be all buggy and exploitably, thus losing somewhat of an edge against commercial software... so I'm not all that sure it's the direction where the wind blows right now
Not quite true. It means just "your mother", implying the obvious though.
The expression you might be looking for is "Yob tvayu maht".
You must be not the gambling kind then. :) Risks are high, but so are rewards here, since working people are very underpaid here.
This is Russia, guys. They don't probably realize what that really means...
First of all, 'Russia' and 'property' are mutually exclusive. Russian society has always been based on the concept of common ownership of assets and the traditional 'obshchina' (~ commonship) values dating back to the pre-Viking times are still as strong here as ever. You don't own anything here, you work for the good of all and add whatever you produce to the common pool, from which you are entitled a share. When Forbes starts to count the money in the Russian richest guys' pockets, I can't help smirking. They don't understand that nobody really owns anything here. Tomorrow your friends may decide that you have too much and gone too far and they come along and say, hey, do you know that things are not done like that? To share is the law!
Yeah, to share is the law. If the concept of 'property' which has always been alien to Russians is somewhat unapplicable here, then the concept of 'intellectual property' is almost an oxymoron here. You don't even 'own' anything in the western meaning here, why would anyone respect rights to something intangible?
Now this might sound somewhat of an exaggeration, but, you have to live here to understand. (Although many of you would rather not live here, depending on how strong your feelings about being able to truly own anything and have certain rights are.)
Now you see where that brings us to. There is no respect for IP here and there won't be any at least for a couple of generations more. There is no moral objection against sharing software, songs or movies at all. There are pirated copies of pretty much everything sold openly in certain specialized markets, and they only way for the legal owners to compete is to ask for the same price as pirates do, which is 70-100 roubles (2.5 to 3.5 USD) for a CD.
And if anyone is going to try to change this... I'd just say, good luck, suckers. You will need a lot of it, and it wouldn't help you either.
I have a feeling that the idea is not really about promoting a product at all. It's about promoting the lifestyle and the mentality of a 'geek' as opposed to those of a 'norm', in a way, and the 'evil' corps against the 'good' free software developers stuff is secondary. Many geeks develop a sort of inferiority complex against norms and since firefox=feek, then actions life this one are acts of self-assertion of sorts.
and imagine what if they created such "stupid simple" tools to keep the journals everywhere in synch. That way, a blog can be seen in all communities no matter what its "home" provider is. It's a lot like open standards for office documents.
I'm absolutely positive this will happen one day, and LiveJournal's OpenID project is the first step towards it. It will probably take at least five years though.
Somehow I have a feeling Visto is just trying to "cash in" their patents by making out-of-court agreements to settle the deal.
Depends on the subject of the research, I'd say. When you look up something technical or scientific, Wikipedia is often an invaluable resource for a start, however articles on most political or cultural issues are often biased, despite what they claim. On the other hand, it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure that out on your own, so as long as you realize that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter and that articles praising some piece of art are usually written by those who admire it and can't thus be impartial, it's still a good place to start.
And that's where I believe what the Register article is missing: sure you shouldn't be blindly trusting anything written in Wikipedia, but it's still good for what it is: a collection of articles presenting views on most interesting topics. In other words, it's a tool that requires some understanding to use it.
That InformationWeek article mentioned in the post doesn't say anywhere that "the tabs will be very 'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users." What it says is that this was the reason they didn't implement the feature before, when they really should have, and that they now admitted their short-sightendness and amended etc etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, nowhere close. But I'm no fan of linking to a page and quoting what it doesn't say either.
ok the below is pretty much imho and going to be somewhat redundant but hey..
it is stupid to ignore the fact that this ideology is directed at a goal, more OSS and thus it is counterproductive to insist on this ideology when it discourages OSS.
This appears to be a does-the-end-justify-the-means sort of dispute. Advocating OSS just for the sake of the S being OS and skipping the important ideological part (not depending on proprietary products) to me pretty much means that OSS actually becomes something else than what it is "normally" supposed to be. Stallman does not appear to say OOo shouldn't be doing what they do; neither he is supposed to mean OOo are doing something "bad", or "evil". He is calling a spade a spade, in a way.
Yet this is exactly what Stallman's vociferous black and white view of the world does.
I disagree. OOo basically wanted the OSS label without having what it "really" takes; they have the full right to implement what they want however they want, but some things should be clear about it. Stallman pointed it out to them and they even appeared to have agreed on most points.
In fact choosing to contribute to OSS in certain ways can actually result in negative publicity since all the sudden Stallman is critisizing you for not going all the way and people start looking at you as an evil corporation.
That, if it is the case, is the problem of Stallman's PR skills, but not of the idea itself. Perhaps failure to find some more "smooth" words alienate a lot of people to Stallman, but it doesn't lower the value of the ideas and concepts that he bears and advocates.
If instead of postive PR for releasing the code to open office they are instead ripped for not fully open sourceing their java compilers/specs... they will be much less inclined to donate code in the future.
I am sorry if I misunderstand your logic, but you appear to be missing a significant part of the whole OSS concept. You're putting it this way like the OSS community depends on the large companies releasing large portions of their proprietary code into open source. It doesn't. The whole idea of OSS srives (ugh.. well is expected to) on that the corporations are supposed to be interested in OS-ing their product. If they can't understand what's it about, then they have no reason really to. No big deal, they will learn.. or lose. OS is even stronger than Marxism.
Sun however does appear to understand what OSS is about and why, and they do what they do, with all the related problems mentioned by other posters. Pointing out the problems is not discouraging them, it's revealing a possible hidden obstacle.
in the long term this sort of attitude [forking] actually harms the OSS movement by sending companies a message that it isn't worthwhile to open source some of their systems or fund the development of an open source framework they can augment with their proprietary technology.
Here I can't but absolutely agree. Forking a project should never be taken lightly. It is a kind of last resort and should only be done if educating and convincing the original developers fails and the project is important enough to influence the community.
nothing in this case prevents future improvements or modifications to GCJ which allow open office to be run in that manner.
And this is the only right way to go.
In short the open source community needs to get over this attitude that anyone who isn't totally comitted to OSS is evil.
I don't see that as a problem.. sure there are some hotshots who see Big Brother issues everywhere but in general the community is inclined the other way -- towards "less pure" OSS. Like someone else mentioned, in real projects people tend to be pragmatic and compromising. I believe that it is our duty to make sure every spade is called a spade and not a fork (ok bad pun) and let everybody decide for themselves. I repea