You can have some marketing guys deal with finding the work, and billing the customer, and you hack the code the way they tell you to.
Or else you go work on custom business applications, and use open source as a foundation. Since the company has no intention of ever selling the software, they don't care if it's under the GNU license. And you can make software better / faster / easier by using the off-the-shelf free libraries than you can by writing everything from scratch.
In the end, open source just makes everything that is a commodity (filesystems, kernels, TCP/IP stacks) "free", and requires software engineers to work on non-commodity products.
Besides, how many times should the TCP/IP stack be re-implemented from scratch? That's not a good use of the limited developer resources in the world.
Much more likely is that 4900 of the 5000 are from people in other districts who are emailing either every person in Congress or are emailing them because of their position on some committee.
Also, it is very possible that 4000 of those 4900 are generated by a small group of people, since we all know how easy it is to spam.
I won't even get into the inaccuracies of your post regarding our form of government. We're a Constitutional Republic, not a representative democracy.
And it's their job to do the right thing for their district and the country based on their opinion, not the opinions of the residents of their district. If the residents don't like their votes, they can elect someone new next election.
While you're certainly correct in terms of physics, the courts have ruled as the original poster indicated. RAM is a copy.
They have not ruled that photons are a copy.
Sorry, but that's the current legal system in the US of A. God Bless America.
It's absurd. It also means that using software in excess of the license makes you a felon. (Making copies of software worth more than $5000 is a felony. Each copy into RAM in excess of your license is a copy for purposes of the statute.)
This means that using Frontpage (see recent Slashdot story) in excess of the license more than 10 or 20 times is a felony. e.g. Criticizing Microsoft with their own software is a felony.
It's WAAAYYYY past time to get the laws about computer programs changed. My first suggestion is that to register the copyright on a computer program, the entire source must be provided to the library of congress.
The article quotes that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the least productive developers. The correct figure, if I remember correctly, is that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the AVERAGE developer, and the average developer is ten times as productive as the worst.
That means there's a 100:1 ratio between the most productive developer and the least.
Some of this productivity difference is attributable to experience. Again, IIRC, the difference between developers with similar amounts of experience is about 10:1 again. This implies that a bottom 1% programmer with a great deal of experience is about as good as a top fresh-out-of-college programmer.
But I don't think you ever get bottom 1% programmers with a great deal of experience. No one would keep them around in their organization very long, and they would never get the experience. They go off into other careers both in and out of IT.
And contrary to the article, the top developers get paid a lot more than 10% more than the average developers. The thing is, the only ones that keep advancing in their careers, and get the 6 figure salaries, are the top developers. I'd hazard to guess that of the 19% of the developers that are still in the industry 20 years after graduation (from the article), almost all are from the top 25%.
Those people who are only average developers don't produce enough to justify the salary of a Sr. developer even with the benefits of 20 years of experience. (And the productivity of an average developer does not significantly increase after 10 years in the industry, in my experience.)
In my experience, however, everyone expects to continue getting promotions (and significant raises) throughout their career. But if you can't produce in the development business, you won't get that promotion. And then you have to decide, once you're getting paid the most your productivity will justify, if you're happy with that, or if you want to change careers.
And I think most people will get out of the business before they are "stuck" at a relatively low level on the corporate ladder for their entire career.
Meritocracies are really rough if you're not on top.
As someone who has actually pored through the resumes in question in previous jobs, let me throw in my two bits:
1) Somewhere between 20-35% of the resumes had no experience even vaguely related to the position at hand. Say we're looking for a C developer, we would get resumes from people who want to design web sites or be an administrative assistant. (Really!)
2) 10-20% of the resumes failed the "If you can't form complete English sentences on your Resume, you obviously can't even write email" test. If you can't write well enough to get one or two pages of the most important document in your career right (and don't have the brains to have someone else review it for you), we didn't want to hire you.
3) About half of the remaining resumes were rejected because technicians, fresh-outs, etc. were applying for positions with 2+ years of development experience. (We had positions periodically for fresh-outs, but then we'd be rejecting the resumes for Sr. guys.)
4) We're down to about 10-20% of the resumes at this point, and those guys got a phone call. We'd ask them some dirt simple C questions like "What does "static" mean?" We'd ask them what they thought about software engineering and software process. About half failed here, but if you have a really strong resume you probably got a face-to-face interview anyway.
Of those that got a face-to-face interview, about half had obviously exaggerated on their resume to the point that they weren't trustworthy candidates. They couldn't answer trivial questions about C while claiming 5 years of development in the language. I can't recommend hiring someone who lies on their resume.
Of the remaining candidates, many got an offer. But in the end, it was well under 5% of the resumes reviewed. And I think that's totally appropriate.
First, you can't simply "Write your own", because you have to be compatible with Microsoft's latest and greatest. Otherwise, you can't read the attachments your customers and vendors send to you. This is one of the causes of "Network Effects" that economists talk about.
Second, for Microsoft selling what are essentially commodity products (OS, Office Suite), they have an awfully high profit margin. Most people (who have actually paid the Microsoft Tax on all of their servers and machines) DON'T think Microsoft is fine. They think they are immensely expensive, but they don't have any viable alternatives.
And once Microsoft persuades governments and others to use Microsoft Services via.NET, and block access from unlicensed clients via strong crypto, you won't have a choice. Use Microsoft, and pay the MS tax on every client, machine, and transaction, or you can't talk to anyone using Microsoft. That is the future.
1) With a publically traded company, you can exercise and sell at the same time, and the net proceeds are given to you. Or you can exercise some of them, and use the proceeds to purchase the rest of your shares. No problem.
2) The tax treatment depends on the type of option (Qualified vs. Nonqualified), tax bracket, etc. I strongly suggest people consult a tax professional when receiving options and again when you are planning on selling them.
3) Read your option agreement carefully. It usually specifies what happens. In any case, if the company is "forced" to sell or liquidate, it indicates the company failed, and the shareholders should not expect much compensation. But if the company is sold on favorable terms, the ISO holders may even be in a better position, as some ISO agreements cause all shares to vest when the company is sold.
No. It makes it more difficult to sell shrink-wrapped style software for money, especially commodity goods.
I own none of the rights to any of the software I have ever written. But I've been able to make plenty of money writing software. My current company usually does not hold the rights to the software it develops.
Most of the companies I've written code for do not sell software. They sell hardware, provide consulting services, or use the applications internally.
Most of the code written by all developers is not for shrink-wrapped products. Most of the code written is for business specific applications, frequently by a team of in-house developers who get paid quite handsomely. And if the company does not re-sell that software, the issue of the GPL is moot to them.
But yes, commodity software, such as the Unix OS and supporting utilities, CD rip and burn software, web browsers, etc. will eventually have very low profit margins (regardless of the GPL.) It's too easy for someone to reimplement and undercut your prices if you have significant margins. Because distribution costs are so low for software, once someone has developed the product, there is little incentive to not compete on price.
But again, contrary to the impression you get by walking through the software aisle of your favorite computer store, that isn't what most software engineers are doing for a living. And for many of categories of developers, the GPL does not significantly limit their freedoms.
Re:Things RMS didn't forsee in 1984
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GPL FAQ
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Actually, you can't ship the library, or use the header files for the library, or anything else without making copies on your own system.
Copying these files without a license from the author is a violation of the copyright on these files.
To use these files, you must have a license, which in this case is the GPL. If the GPL puts certain restrictions on your own code as terms of that use, you must agree to it, or refrain from using the library.
It is not that hard to save 6 months worth of salary. When you get your next annual raise, just put all of the difference in the bank. (Give yourself a cost of living raise, if you feel like it.) If you're a hot-shot computer jock, you'll be getting 10% a year in the early part of your career.
Do this for three years. You won't be impacting your standard of living at all, but you'll be putting over 20% of your salary into savings. (And you'll have accumulated almost 6 months salary already.)
Then go ahead and let your raises increase your standard of living, but keep saving 20%. Your live will be much less stressful.
Also, the "credit protection plan" is still a rip-off. All they do is pay the minimum payment on your cards. Even with $5000 charged, your minimum payment is going to be on the order of $150, depending on your card. And then you have to pay back the $5000 at whatever absurd rate of interest you've signed up for. Heck, leaving money on a credit card is a rip-off.
And if you only have a month worth of savings, you'll be in a bind when the first round of interviews don't work out; the job from the second round falls through on the Intellectual property agreement; and your pick of jobs from the third round takes 2 weeks to finalize the offer.
Let me suggest the motley fool books on personal finance someday.
Except that courts have ruled that copying from the CD-ROM to your hard-disk (or hard-disk to RAM) is making a copy. This requires the copyright holder's permission and is not part of your rights gained when buying the CD.
Therefore, unless you agree to the license, you don't have any legal right to copy the software to your hard disk.
Further, copying the software (to RAM or Hard Disk) in excess of the license IS a copyright violation.
You, and the company, also don't pay federal, state or FICA taxes on perks, depending on how they are provided. Given 15% FICA, 28% federal, 6% state (for my state), that's about a 50% discount.
So if they pay for a car, you can drive a $40k car instead of a $20k car for the same cost to your take home pay.
I'd love to move even my monthly cell-phone and internet access bill to pre-tax money. That would save me close to $500 a year.
Just as a reminder, unless you pay for software, you won't get any kind of warranty. (Even if you do pay for software, you probably won't get one either. Checked your shrinkwrap agreement lately?)
There is absolutely no way that any OSS developer is going to risk being sued becaused they "signed" some "testing standards" statement and a jury might rule that they didn't meet all of the requirements. Lawyers, Doctors, and other professionals get paid, and buy insurance to protect them in the event they get sued. An unpaid OSS developer will never be able to afford that insurance.
A much simpler solution is to just publish the test plan for the package. Then the user of the software can decide if it has been adequately tested. Just because the author (or a third party) claims that it has been tested to a certain level doesn't mean anything, especially if the certification is accompanied by a disclaimer of liability.
I work for a software consulting company and one of the deliverables on every project is the test plan. But every customer is not willing to pay for exaustive testing (and in some cases really don't have any need for that level of QA.) On some projects, the test plan might be "we ran through the changes and it appears to work". In other cases, it would be thousands of test cases, with both automated regression tests and manually executed cases. For a program that prints labels for a CD, you don't really need extensive QA. For a compiler, you do.
It certainly wouldn't HURT for some person or group to publish different levels of certification, along with suggested test plans, tools for managing test cases and plans, and automated test tools (perhaps based on DejaGNU, etc.) Sounds like an excellent Open Source project in fact. Providing tools to actually help authors and development teams would be much more useful (and much more work) than creating a committee to write up some bogus standards that aren't really appropriate for any specific project.
If the author of this question is really serious about the quality of OSS, then I'd suggest that they just go test something. If you're concerned about the quality standards for a specific piece of software, contact the author and volunteer to set up an automated regression test system and generate sufficient test cases to prove it works. I'm sure that the developer would welcome the assistance. Open Source works much better when led by example, rather than by creating some arbitrary standards.
Actually, in the States AT&T Wireless's web enabled phones are all based on a CDPD network, which is packet switched.
Note that you may not be able to use the voice network while connected to the CDPD network, but that's a different issue.
WAP includes the ability to run on everything from connection based systems, SMS messaging, to CDPD or other packet based networks.
But content is much more relevant than connection mechanism. After all, most people on the Internet today use a circuit switched system (analog phone line and modem) rather than a direct packet based system.
I knew some of the folks in the 'cruz Geek Houses and visited on several occasions. But I suspect that they are not ever going to happen, at least quite like that, elsewhere.
Why?
Geek houses started because it was a good idea to actually buy a house in California, but they were immensely expensive for 20-somethings to afford. So several geeks got together and bought a big house. That won't happen in Atlanta, for example, where any geek barely out of school can afford a decent place to live.
Second, Geek Houses existed to provide network access (at all) and later high speed (T1) access before cable-modem and DSL become popular. Today, to be a "True" Geek House, you'd need to be talking about a DS-3/T-3 into your house. People with a real need for speed. But I haven't heard anyone who really thinks they need 25% of a T3 on a regular basis. And since anyone can get DSL or Cable Modem, and set up a $150 firewall box, it is not very geeky to have a house connected to the Internet these days.
I suspect that the Geek House phenomenon was limited to places like California where real estate was absurdly expensive, and to a time when network access was difficult and expensive. Atlanta is not the place, now is not that time.
An Atlanta Resident, with a suburban house wired with 3 cat-5 and RG-6 to every room.
A bigger problem with the current system is that in many places, such as Metro Atlanta, there are huge numbers of political entities. Between a dozen counties, twice that number of cities and towns, and several unincorporated areas (including the nationally known Buckhead), no one in the metro area would know where to find a given site.
In the last 16 years, I've lived in 8 different political jurisdictions right here in Metro Atlanta. Do you think I want to change my email address every time I move? Do you think a business wants anything other than www.<company>.atl.ga.us?
Last I checked, there was generally nothing to stop you from giving out your license key to everyone in the world. When searching for comments about software packages (that we were about to buy), I've turned up quite a few license keys on "warez" groups.
It is trivial to copy executables, CD Images, and 16 character license keys. That's why copyright law makes it illegal.
Making the source available doesn't make that kind of copying one bit more difficult. And just me, but I generally find, for using the software, a copy of the redhat install disk to be much more useful than a copy of the redhat source RPM disk.
Source is really only useful when you need to find out what something is doing, or need to add a feature. The rest of the time, it's just insurance.
A much better solution would be to require ALL software to have the source-code published to receive copyright protection. It would go on file with the Library of Congress, just like any other copyrighted work.
First, this would fix the problem of a competitor stealing your code in a "closed source" project, because there would be no closed source. I'm sure a market would come into existance for a program to search a competitor's software for bits of yours.
It would make it possible for people to make "after-market" versions, much like customized cars. The original manufacturer would still sell copies, but people should have the right to purchase a modified version of a peice of software if they require it. Patches could be distributed by any third party that you want to contract to do the work.
It might make it somewhat easier for people to copy an algorithm, but that's ok, IMO. There's always patents to protect algorithms.
Actually, I don't think that the Web Surfing Cell Phones are the answer. Nor is turning the PDA into a Cell Phone. As you point out, the Qualcomm thing just doesn't cut it. But any integration of a phone and PDA has to make compromises.
A better solution is to use Bluetooth. Bluetooth can be used as a "Person Area Network". If your cellphone has Bluetooth and your PDA has Bluetooth, then you can surf from your PDA with no problems. And you can dial a number on your PDA. But you don't have to worry about not being able to access your PDA if your phone's battery dies. And if you change cell phone providers, No Problem, as long as your new phone is Bluetooth enabled as well.
I want a bigger screen, and different input, than you can possibly fit on a cell-phone. And in the end, I just want about 14 buttons on my cell phone so I can dial a phone number.
Don't try to force things together that just don't fit.
It's my understanding, based on the published details about the CSS algorithm, that it wouldn't be hard to reverse engineer it again.
A simple brute-force search can be used to decode the keys, and a known plain text attack can break the algorithm used to decode the data.
The judge makes it very clear that if the reverse engineering was done legally, there would be no case. So someone should just do it. (And not use the Xing player at all.)
Just get a couple of college grad students in math to work a couple of weekends, and we're done. Can someone provide some "known plain-text" and the matching encrypted data? (This would presumably be fair use, if it's not enough to play even a frame of a movie.) Multiple samples, at several K each, are probably useful for decryption but not sufficient to actually generate a useful MPEG stream.
Just document the steps used to break it, and the issue becomes terribly moot.
Slashdot Mirror
So go work for a company that does consultancy.
You can have some marketing guys deal with finding the work, and billing the customer, and you hack the code the way they tell you to.
Or else you go work on custom business applications, and use open source as a foundation. Since the company has no intention of ever selling the software, they don't care if it's under the GNU license. And you can make software better / faster / easier by using the off-the-shelf free libraries than you can by writing everything from scratch.
In the end, open source just makes everything that is a commodity (filesystems, kernels, TCP/IP stacks) "free", and requires software engineers to work on non-commodity products.
Besides, how many times should the TCP/IP stack be re-implemented from scratch? That's not a good use of the limited developer resources in the world.
Much more likely is that 4900 of the 5000 are from people in other districts who are emailing either every person in Congress or are emailing them because of their position on some committee.
Also, it is very possible that 4000 of those 4900 are generated by a small group of people, since we all know how easy it is to spam.
I won't even get into the inaccuracies of your post regarding our form of government. We're a Constitutional Republic, not a representative democracy.
And it's their job to do the right thing for their district and the country based on their opinion, not the opinions of the residents of their district. If the residents don't like their votes, they can elect someone new next election.
While you're certainly correct in terms of physics, the courts have ruled as the original poster indicated. RAM is a copy.
They have not ruled that photons are a copy.
Sorry, but that's the current legal system in the US of A. God Bless America.
It's absurd. It also means that using software in excess of the license makes you a felon. (Making copies of software worth more than $5000 is a felony. Each copy into RAM in excess of your license is a copy for purposes of the statute.)
This means that using Frontpage (see recent Slashdot story) in excess of the license more than 10 or 20 times is a felony. e.g. Criticizing Microsoft with their own software is a felony.
It's WAAAYYYY past time to get the laws about computer programs changed. My first suggestion is that to register the copyright on a computer program, the entire source must be provided to the library of congress.
The article quotes that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the least productive developers. The correct figure, if I remember correctly, is that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the AVERAGE developer, and the average developer is ten times as productive as the worst.
That means there's a 100:1 ratio between the most productive developer and the least.
Some of this productivity difference is attributable to experience. Again, IIRC, the difference between developers with similar amounts of experience is about 10:1 again. This implies that a bottom 1% programmer with a great deal of experience is about as good as a top fresh-out-of-college programmer.
But I don't think you ever get bottom 1% programmers with a great deal of experience. No one would keep them around in their organization very long, and they would never get the experience. They go off into other careers both in and out of IT.
And contrary to the article, the top developers get paid a lot more than 10% more than the average developers. The thing is, the only ones that keep advancing in their careers, and get the 6 figure salaries, are the top developers. I'd hazard to guess that of the 19% of the developers that are still in the industry 20 years after graduation (from the article), almost all are from the top 25%.
Those people who are only average developers don't produce enough to justify the salary of a Sr. developer even with the benefits of 20 years of experience. (And the productivity of an average developer does not significantly increase after 10 years in the industry, in my experience.)
In my experience, however, everyone expects to continue getting promotions (and significant raises) throughout their career. But if you can't produce in the development business, you won't get that promotion. And then you have to decide, once you're getting paid the most your productivity will justify, if you're happy with that, or if you want to change careers.
And I think most people will get out of the business before they are "stuck" at a relatively low level on the corporate ladder for their entire career.
Meritocracies are really rough if you're not on top.
As someone who has actually pored through the resumes in question in previous jobs, let me throw in my two bits:
1) Somewhere between 20-35% of the resumes had no experience even vaguely related to the position at hand. Say we're looking for a C developer, we would get resumes from people who want to design web sites or be an administrative assistant. (Really!)
2) 10-20% of the resumes failed the "If you can't form complete English sentences on your Resume, you obviously can't even write email" test. If you can't write well enough to get one or two pages of the most important document in your career right (and don't have the brains to have someone else review it for you), we didn't want to hire you.
3) About half of the remaining resumes were rejected because technicians, fresh-outs, etc. were applying for positions with 2+ years of development experience. (We had positions periodically for fresh-outs, but then we'd be rejecting the resumes for Sr. guys.)
4) We're down to about 10-20% of the resumes at this point, and those guys got a phone call. We'd ask them some dirt simple C questions like "What does "static" mean?" We'd ask them what they thought about software engineering and software process. About half failed here, but if you have a really strong resume you probably got a face-to-face interview anyway.
Of those that got a face-to-face interview, about half had obviously exaggerated on their resume to the point that they weren't trustworthy candidates. They couldn't answer trivial questions about C while claiming 5 years of development in the language. I can't recommend hiring someone who lies on their resume.
Of the remaining candidates, many got an offer. But in the end, it was well under 5% of the resumes reviewed. And I think that's totally appropriate.
First, you can't simply "Write your own", because you have to be compatible with Microsoft's latest and greatest. Otherwise, you can't read the attachments your customers and vendors send to you. This is one of the causes of "Network Effects" that economists talk about.
.NET, and block access from unlicensed clients via strong crypto, you won't have a choice. Use Microsoft, and pay the MS tax on every client, machine, and transaction, or you can't talk to anyone using Microsoft. That is the future.
Second, for Microsoft selling what are essentially commodity products (OS, Office Suite), they have an awfully high profit margin. Most people (who have actually paid the Microsoft Tax on all of their servers and machines) DON'T think Microsoft is fine. They think they are immensely expensive, but they don't have any viable alternatives.
And once Microsoft persuades governments and others to use Microsoft Services via
This comment is about 90% wrong.
1) With a publically traded company, you can exercise and sell at the same time, and the net proceeds are given to you. Or you can exercise some of them, and use the proceeds to purchase the rest of your shares. No problem.
2) The tax treatment depends on the type of option (Qualified vs. Nonqualified), tax bracket, etc. I strongly suggest people consult a tax professional when receiving options and again when you are planning on selling them.
3) Read your option agreement carefully. It usually specifies what happens. In any case, if the company is "forced" to sell or liquidate, it indicates the company failed, and the shareholders should not expect much compensation. But if the company is sold on favorable terms, the ISO holders may even be in a better position, as some ISO agreements cause all shares to vest when the company is sold.
No. It makes it more difficult to sell shrink-wrapped style software for money, especially commodity goods.
I own none of the rights to any of the software I have ever written. But I've been able to make plenty of money writing software. My current company usually does not hold the rights to the software it develops.
Most of the companies I've written code for do not sell software. They sell hardware, provide consulting services, or use the applications internally.
Most of the code written by all developers is not for shrink-wrapped products. Most of the code written is for business specific applications, frequently by a team of in-house developers who get paid quite handsomely. And if the company does not re-sell that software, the issue of the GPL is moot to them.
But yes, commodity software, such as the Unix OS and supporting utilities, CD rip and burn software, web browsers, etc. will eventually have very low profit margins (regardless of the GPL.) It's too easy for someone to reimplement and undercut your prices if you have significant margins. Because distribution costs are so low for software, once someone has developed the product, there is little incentive to not compete on price.
But again, contrary to the impression you get by walking through the software aisle of your favorite computer store, that isn't what most software engineers are doing for a living. And for many of categories of developers, the GPL does not significantly limit their freedoms.
Actually, you can't ship the library, or use the header files for the library, or anything else without making copies on your own system.
Copying these files without a license from the author is a violation of the copyright on these files.
To use these files, you must have a license, which in this case is the GPL. If the GPL puts certain restrictions on your own code as terms of that use, you must agree to it, or refrain from using the library.
It is not that hard to save 6 months worth of salary. When you get your next annual raise, just put all of the difference in the bank. (Give yourself a cost of living raise, if you feel like it.) If you're a hot-shot computer jock, you'll be getting 10% a year in the early part of your career.
Do this for three years. You won't be impacting your standard of living at all, but you'll be putting over 20% of your salary into savings. (And you'll have accumulated almost 6 months salary already.)
Then go ahead and let your raises increase your standard of living, but keep saving 20%. Your live will be much less stressful.
Also, the "credit protection plan" is still a rip-off. All they do is pay the minimum payment on your cards. Even with $5000 charged, your minimum payment is going to be on the order of $150, depending on your card. And then you have to pay back the $5000 at whatever absurd rate of interest you've signed up for. Heck, leaving money on a credit card is a rip-off.
And if you only have a month worth of savings, you'll be in a bind when the first round of interviews don't work out; the job from the second round falls through on the Intellectual property agreement; and your pick of jobs from the third round takes 2 weeks to finalize the offer.
Let me suggest the motley fool books on personal finance someday.
Except that courts have ruled that copying from the CD-ROM to your hard-disk (or hard-disk to RAM) is making a copy. This requires the copyright holder's permission and is not part of your rights gained when buying the CD.
Therefore, unless you agree to the license, you don't have any legal right to copy the software to your hard disk.
Further, copying the software (to RAM or Hard Disk) in excess of the license IS a copyright violation.
This is a defect (bug) in the copyright law, IMO.
First, the executive branch isn't representative of the people's will. It implements the Constitution.
Second, we aren't a democracy. We are a constitutional republic. There's a tremendous difference.
Last, Clinton certainly didn't get any kind of majority in either of his terms. Didn't stop him from acting as president.
You, and the company, also don't pay federal, state or FICA taxes on perks, depending on how they are provided. Given 15% FICA, 28% federal, 6% state (for my state), that's about a 50% discount.
So if they pay for a car, you can drive a $40k car instead of a $20k car for the same cost to your take home pay.
I'd love to move even my monthly cell-phone and internet access bill to pre-tax money. That would save me close to $500 a year.
For non-Americans, YMMV.
Just as a reminder, unless you pay for software, you won't get any kind of warranty. (Even if you do pay for software, you probably won't get one either. Checked your shrinkwrap agreement lately?)
There is absolutely no way that any OSS developer is going to risk being sued becaused they "signed" some "testing standards" statement and a jury might rule that they didn't meet all of the requirements. Lawyers, Doctors, and other professionals get paid, and buy insurance to protect them in the event they get sued. An unpaid OSS developer will never be able to afford that insurance.
A much simpler solution is to just publish the test plan for the package. Then the user of the software can decide if it has been adequately tested. Just because the author (or a third party) claims that it has been tested to a certain level doesn't mean anything, especially if the certification is accompanied by a disclaimer of liability.
I work for a software consulting company and one of the deliverables on every project is the test plan. But every customer is not willing to pay for exaustive testing (and in some cases really don't have any need for that level of QA.) On some projects, the test plan might be "we ran through the changes and it appears to work". In other cases, it would be thousands of test cases, with both automated regression tests and manually executed cases. For a program that prints labels for a CD, you don't really need extensive QA. For a compiler, you do.
It certainly wouldn't HURT for some person or group to publish different levels of certification, along with suggested test plans, tools for managing test cases and plans, and automated test tools (perhaps based on DejaGNU, etc.) Sounds like an excellent Open Source project in fact. Providing tools to actually help authors and development teams would be much more useful (and much more work) than creating a committee to write up some bogus standards that aren't really appropriate for any specific project.
If the author of this question is really serious about the quality of OSS, then I'd suggest that they just go test something. If you're concerned about the quality standards for a specific piece of software, contact the author and volunteer to set up an automated regression test system and generate sufficient test cases to prove it works. I'm sure that the developer would welcome the assistance. Open Source works much better when led by example, rather than by creating some arbitrary standards.
Actually, in the States AT&T Wireless's web enabled phones are all based on a CDPD network, which is packet switched.
Note that you may not be able to use the voice network while connected to the CDPD network, but that's a different issue.
WAP includes the ability to run on everything from connection based systems, SMS messaging, to CDPD or other packet based networks.
But content is much more relevant than connection mechanism. After all, most people on the Internet today use a circuit switched system (analog phone line and modem) rather than a direct packet based system.
I knew some of the folks in the 'cruz Geek Houses and visited on several occasions. But I suspect that they are not ever going to happen, at least quite like that, elsewhere.
Why?
Geek houses started because it was a good idea to actually buy a house in California, but they were immensely expensive for 20-somethings to afford. So several geeks got together and bought a big house. That won't happen in Atlanta, for example, where any geek barely out of school can afford a decent place to live.
Second, Geek Houses existed to provide network access (at all) and later high speed (T1) access before cable-modem and DSL become popular. Today, to be a "True" Geek House, you'd need to be talking about a DS-3/T-3 into your house. People with a real need for speed. But I haven't heard anyone who really thinks they need 25% of a T3 on a regular basis. And since anyone can get DSL or Cable Modem, and set up a $150 firewall box, it is not very geeky to have a house connected to the Internet these days.
I suspect that the Geek House phenomenon was limited to places like California where real estate was absurdly expensive, and to a time when network access was difficult and expensive. Atlanta is not the place, now is not that time.
An Atlanta Resident, with a suburban house wired with 3 cat-5 and RG-6 to every room.
A bigger problem with the current system is that in many places, such as Metro Atlanta, there are huge numbers of political entities. Between a dozen counties, twice that number of cities and towns, and several unincorporated areas (including the nationally known Buckhead), no one in the metro area would know where to find a given site.
In the last 16 years, I've lived in 8 different political jurisdictions right here in Metro Atlanta. Do you think I want to change my email address every time I move? Do you think a business wants anything other than www.<company>.atl.ga.us?
Last I checked, there was generally nothing to stop you from giving out your license key to everyone in the world. When searching for comments about software packages (that we were about to buy), I've turned up quite a few license keys on "warez" groups.
It is trivial to copy executables, CD Images, and 16 character license keys. That's why copyright law makes it illegal.
Making the source available doesn't make that kind of copying one bit more difficult. And just me, but I generally find, for using the software, a copy of the redhat install disk to be much more useful than a copy of the redhat source RPM disk.
Source is really only useful when you need to find out what something is doing, or need to add a feature. The rest of the time, it's just insurance.
SKG
A much better solution would be to require ALL software to have the source-code published to receive copyright protection. It would go on file with the Library of Congress, just like any other copyrighted work.
First, this would fix the problem of a competitor stealing your code in a "closed source" project, because there would be no closed source. I'm sure a market would come into existance for a program to search a competitor's software for bits of yours.
It would make it possible for people to make "after-market" versions, much like customized cars. The original manufacturer would still sell copies, but people should have the right to purchase a modified version of a peice of software if they require it. Patches could be distributed by any third party that you want to contract to do the work.
It might make it somewhat easier for people to copy an algorithm, but that's ok, IMO. There's always patents to protect algorithms.
Actually, I don't think that the Web Surfing Cell Phones are the answer. Nor is turning the PDA into a Cell Phone. As you point out, the Qualcomm thing just doesn't cut it. But any integration of a phone and PDA has to make compromises.
A better solution is to use Bluetooth. Bluetooth can be used as a "Person Area Network". If your cellphone has Bluetooth and your PDA has Bluetooth, then you can surf from your PDA with no problems. And you can dial a number on your PDA. But you don't have to worry about not being able to access your PDA if your phone's battery dies. And if you change cell phone providers, No Problem, as long as your new phone is Bluetooth enabled as well.
I want a bigger screen, and different input, than you can possibly fit on a cell-phone. And in the end, I just want about 14 buttons on my cell phone so I can dial a phone number.
Don't try to force things together that just don't fit.
SKG
It's my understanding, based on the published details about the CSS algorithm, that it wouldn't be hard to reverse engineer it again.
A simple brute-force search can be used to decode the keys, and a known plain text attack can break the algorithm used to decode the data.
The judge makes it very clear that if the reverse engineering was done legally, there would be no case. So someone should just do it. (And not use the Xing player at all.)
Just get a couple of college grad students in math to work a couple of weekends, and we're done. Can someone provide some "known plain-text" and the matching encrypted data? (This would presumably be fair use, if it's not enough to play even a frame of a movie.) Multiple samples, at several K each, are probably useful for decryption but not sufficient to actually generate a useful MPEG stream.
Just document the steps used to break it, and the issue becomes terribly moot.
Anyone? Anyone?