Sure, but not every game can/should be a massive multiplayer one. And not every gamedev company can afford an infrastructure/advertisement needed for that.
Moreover, GPL'd client makes it harder to combat cheating (code IS documentation in some manner) and AGPL'd server (if you're unlucky enough to have to use AGPL'd code when writing the server) makes it impossible to prevent clones.
Selling GPL'd code is not that profitable as GPL explicitly allows redistribution at no cost. And selling the support requires that small company in question should have sufficiently large staff to handle all the numerous clients which is a contradiction (it's a small company after all). Besides, if your video player requires tech support to be used, it's probably a bad video player.
Imagine that you wanted to start your car making business... and then you find out, that unless you are able to build a Ferrari, you'll fail: the market is filled with crude and unsafe (but extremely cheap) Chineese cars, which you can't compete with on price.
That is the situation where GPL leads us to. Inability for small companies to profit from mplayer code means that only large companies like Microsoft or Apple will be able to sell closed source video players.
As someone said: "people paint for free. People do not tend to clean toilets for free". That's why open source projects often lack the style and visual appeal of closed source - because it's boring to code!
BSD allows us to "paint", leaving closed source firms (Apple?) to "clean the toilet", making the project more appealing to user. With GPL, you have to "clean the toilet" yourself, as software company is not likely to build upon your project (not everything can be sold for "support" - think about game development for example).
1) Democratic nation (e.g. one where voting results really matter) cannot be that oppressive. Ok, some particular police chief might try to "help" his friend congressman that way, but such behavior cannot be common throughout a democratic nation - it wouldn't be called "democracy" otherwise.
2) And if we're talking about non-democratic nations (e.g. dictatorships), then there's no need to check how people actually voted. You can rig, you run single candidate elections, you can do whatever you want - you generally don't care how people vote, you know the results will be in your favor anyway.
Ability to check your own vote make authorities accountable, giving more control into the hands of the people. Sure, it can be abused by some. But in countries where such abuse would matter (democratic ones), this is not likely to happen by definition. In countries where such abuse is likely to happen (dictatorships etc), there are more effective ways to control how people vote (and votes don't matter anyway).
I can't believe that American people fear losing their jobs so much that they would agree to such things... At least in Russia the main threat comes from government, not from private business owners ("bosses"). That's why ability to check how the vote is counted is much more important (for me).
You can always change the job or even become a freelancer, but there's just no way for you to change the government that rigs the votes (unless you're a part of an organized paramilitary force...)
I'm not stupid. I can't just believe that you have less freedom in US than we do in Russia. If only my boss tried to "check how I voted", I would have quit my job. We have the problem with governments rigging the votes, not the bosses.
"And open it up to being hacked even more readily?"
...
"So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?"
No, why can't they make those things secure? Give everyone an unique ID or just use existing ones that you have in US (SSN?).
And about checking votesheets manually - if one has the ability to rig the machines, then one can easily render "unwanted" votesheets invalid by placing additional markings on them (e.g. checking more than one candidate - at least that's how they do in Russia) and manual checking won't help either.
The key advantage of e-voting would be an ability to personally check how one's vote is counted.
Just make it available online so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections) together with other statistics (how many people voted in his/her district etc).
I don't understand the problem with e-voting. Paper trail is no easier to check. Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually? I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway, which will be probably even more prone to rigging than certified e-voting system.
Both FOSS and commercial developers understand that. But commercial developers concentrate their efforts on what will pay off the most (or they are not going to get paid). It's not like commercial developers have no incentive to improve their code - they do, but they quite often don't have time for that.
FOSS developers just do whatever they like, sometimes it happens to be what user would also like, but there's no guarantee. So yes, you *MAY* get cleaner code (it's not guaranteed as well) in FOSS projects, but what's the point of having clean code if it does not do what I want.
If you knew that NetBSD had better kernel architecture than Linux (it is probably true), would you like to make a switch?
I don't care about Microsoft programmers not using their own GUI libraries and creating ugly code full of hacks as long as they can afford maintaining it and as long as it does not crash for me.
That's something that open source writers do not really understand: users don't really care about what's under the hood. We're not living in perfect world, either.
The problem with free software is that people often do not feel motivated to work on tedious and repetitious parts of the problem. You know, things like making GUI more attractive, giving user more control (without having them learn application source code) etc.
Not to mention the fact that free software projects are quite often unmanaged, they lack clear vision and most of them are following/copying existing commercial tools/projects, or at the very least they are based on them.
So they pay the same amount of money no matter where you send the package in US? I can already see the ways to abuse this system, but given low postage costs, it wouldn't probably be a problem for fedex/whatever you have out there.
I really like your way of thinking that internet should not be billed like a cellphone. I'm glad to hear that bandwidth is that abundant in States.
I assume that you wouldn't mind sharing your connection with me, then - for a fixed sum of money, of course? Why not share something that's UNLIMITED, after all?:-)
Well, I'm Russian citizen and there's no one among my friends (programmers like me) who are going to return to Russia once they get into US. They take every possibility to stay there.
Don't know anything about Indians though, but I can't imaigine that someone could "buy land and live well" in a backward country once you are accustomed to living in the first-world one. You would have to not only buy land, but also change laws in your homeland, change habits of your fellow countrymen, etc etc that's just too much work for a single person.
P.S. I'm not in US myself, but I'm also working abroad - and I'm doing my best not to return to Russia.
And about the countries that don't allow (or make it extremely difficult) to immigrate into them: sure, right now the most of countries are like that. But shouldn't we learn the lesson from history, that the more "open" for immigration the country was (vide USA), the more competitive society it developed?
People are the most valuable asset - if whole Earth's population decided to move to your country, you'd be in control of the whole planet (okay, that's the extreme case, but it's just to show that countries stripped off their 'brainware' cease to exist, because it's people who define what the country is, not its laws/land/traditions/etc).
I think that people should be allowed to freely choose where they want to live. It would also help the economics - labour force would be extremely mobile and you wouldn't have to outsource anything to China/India because you'd be able to hire the same Chineese/Indians right on the place.
And I don't think that US would be flooded: once living standards drop because of too much cheap labour force, people will stop coming in.
In current globalized world, anti-immigration laws are very much like Soviet registration system that bound people to the places where they were born.
I think that the most of international students in the US are planning to settle there sooner or later. So "reduces number of American students" argument is invalid - those students will eventually become Americans, too.
Lowering wages? Well... The golden billion of human population finally starts to feel the globalization effects.
You cannot "immigrate illegally". Why do you, the freedom-loving Americans, deny the people the basic right of moving anywhere they want to?
It's unnatural, unfair and counterproductive to criminalize people for just coming to your country. Why not go further and impose Soviet-like registration of citizens, penalizing them for moving from state to state or even from city to city "illegally"? It's the same way of thinking.
They can have little or no connection to realworld communists, but IMO the word can still be applied to them, given their pro-community POV ("Copyright vs. Community" etc).
Which rights? GNU cybercommunists think that you have the right to give away any program that is sold/licensed/etc to you, and every license that forbids that is "unethical".
Why don't they extend their four freedoms on other goods? Shouldn't we get the access to "sources" of other information (video, audio, textual) we buy/own/license, too?
Well, as I said, I read about the events from Estonian POV so I know the details (and about not desecrating bodies as well) - but thanks for providing yet another view on the subject (the more the better). Initially, news available in Russian (including blogs of those living in Estonia) were far more dramatic.
About preferring Nazis over Soviets: obviously, there are your fellow countrymen who prefer them. So the rumours about pro-Nazi sentiments in Baltic countries are not unfounded.
And about calling me a comrade: I'm no communist. Actually, despite I'm Russian citizen, I'm not an ethnic Russian as well. I have relatives across the Europe (including Baltic states), so I don't identify myself with single ethnic group. That's why I despise nationalist movements, seeing them no better than "religious wars" about what OS/desktop environment/language is better. The reason why I was willing to participate was because I do respect people who fought the Nazism, not because I want Estonia back to Russia (actually, I don't care - if Europe wants to have itself fragmented into small factions, so be it). And I refrained from participation upon reading more on the subject and finding out that it was more about Russian nationalism than anti-Nazi resistance.
That's because they don't just dislike government: they dislike Russians as a nation. The memorial does not depict authorities, it is a "commoner", a soldier like millions.
About sympathies: yes, both Nazi and Stalinists enjoy some support in their respective countries. But even people who do not support those regimes may still be emotionally linked to German or Russian side, just because they share common ethnicity and/or nationality. I remember talking to one young German who said: "thinking about WW II makes me sad, because we lost - but OTOH, had we won, it would be even worse".
Nowadays Russians do not feel themselves responsible for the deeds of the past, they don't often know POV of other nations and disregard all accusations as propaganda, just because "we're not animals, we couldn't be that evil - they say that because they want to humiliate us". And indeed, quite often the accusations you hear are so wild that they discredit the western opinion in Russian eyes altogether.
And also do not forget, most of todays 20- or 30-years olds have been growing up in late USSR, pretty different from one of Stalinist era. What was an "evil empire" for you, was a peaceful and calm (compared to post-Soviet conflicts) realm for us. Wherever we're now, in Israel or in States, we still cannot fully accept your "evil empire" image: it was our childhood, it was bright, everything was easy and everyone was peaceful. That's the USSR Russians (and other ex-Soviet emigrees) remember and that's the USSR they long for.
I remember how I was also enraged upon hearing about Estonian plans and yes, I wanted to join the resistance (or "cyber-war" as they called it immediately in the West). But a bit later when emotions calmed down I changed my mind, because it all was immature and not that effective anyway (and yes, reading about the events from Estonian POV helped me to get calm, too).
Let God/History/Nature/whatever be the judge for Estonians, not me. If they prefer Nazis over Soviets, so be it. They made their choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but not every game can/should be a massive multiplayer one. And not every gamedev company can afford an infrastructure/advertisement needed for that.
Moreover, GPL'd client makes it harder to combat cheating (code IS documentation in some manner) and AGPL'd server (if you're unlucky enough to have to use AGPL'd code when writing the server) makes it impossible to prevent clones.
Selling GPL'd code is not that profitable as GPL explicitly allows redistribution at no cost. And selling the support requires that small company in question should have sufficiently large staff to handle all the numerous clients which is a contradiction (it's a small company after all). Besides, if your video player requires tech support to be used, it's probably a bad video player.
Imagine that you wanted to start your car making business... and then you find out, that unless you are able to build a Ferrari, you'll fail: the market is filled with crude and unsafe (but extremely cheap) Chineese cars, which you can't compete with on price.
That is the situation where GPL leads us to. Inability for small companies to profit from mplayer code means that only large companies like Microsoft or Apple will be able to sell closed source video players.
As someone said: "people paint for free. People do not tend to clean toilets for free". That's why open source projects often lack the style and visual appeal of closed source - because it's boring to code!
BSD allows us to "paint", leaving closed source firms (Apple?) to "clean the toilet", making the project more appealing to user. With GPL, you have to "clean the toilet" yourself, as software company is not likely to build upon your project (not everything can be sold for "support" - think about game development for example).
Sometimes it's impractical. Try to code your own mplayer. Or GCC.
I think there's a contradiction here:
1) Democratic nation (e.g. one where voting results really matter) cannot be that oppressive. Ok, some particular police chief might try to "help" his friend congressman that way, but such behavior cannot be common throughout a democratic nation - it wouldn't be called "democracy" otherwise.
2) And if we're talking about non-democratic nations (e.g. dictatorships), then there's no need to check how people actually voted. You can rig, you run single candidate elections, you can do whatever you want - you generally don't care how people vote, you know the results will be in your favor anyway.
Ability to check your own vote make authorities accountable, giving more control into the hands of the people. Sure, it can be abused by some. But in countries where such abuse would matter (democratic ones), this is not likely to happen by definition. In countries where such abuse is likely to happen (dictatorships etc), there are more effective ways to control how people vote (and votes don't matter anyway).
I can't believe that American people fear losing their jobs so much that they would agree to such things... At least in Russia the main threat comes from government, not from private business owners ("bosses"). That's why ability to check how the vote is counted is much more important (for me).
You can always change the job or even become a freelancer, but there's just no way for you to change the government that rigs the votes (unless you're a part of an organized paramilitary force...)
I'm not stupid. I can't just believe that you have less freedom in US than we do in Russia. If only my boss tried to "check how I voted", I would have quit my job. We have the problem with governments rigging the votes, not the bosses.
"And open it up to being hacked even more readily?"
...
"So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?"
No, why can't they make those things secure? Give everyone an unique ID or just use existing ones that you have in US (SSN?).
And about checking votesheets manually - if one has the ability to rig the machines, then one can easily render "unwanted" votesheets invalid by placing additional markings on them (e.g. checking more than one candidate - at least that's how they do in Russia) and manual checking won't help either.
The key advantage of e-voting would be an ability to personally check how one's vote is counted.
Just make it available online so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections) together with other statistics (how many people voted in his/her district etc).
I don't understand the problem with e-voting. Paper trail is no easier to check. Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually? I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway, which will be probably even more prone to rigging than certified e-voting system.
Both FOSS and commercial developers understand that. But commercial developers concentrate their efforts on what will pay off the most (or they are not going to get paid). It's not like commercial developers have no incentive to improve their code - they do, but they quite often don't have time for that.
FOSS developers just do whatever they like, sometimes it happens to be what user would also like, but there's no guarantee. So yes, you *MAY* get cleaner code (it's not guaranteed as well) in FOSS projects, but what's the point of having clean code if it does not do what I want.
If you knew that NetBSD had better kernel architecture than Linux (it is probably true), would you like to make a switch?
I don't care about Microsoft programmers not using their own GUI libraries and creating ugly code full of hacks as long as they can afford maintaining it and as long as it does not crash for me.
That's something that open source writers do not really understand: users don't really care about what's under the hood. We're not living in perfect world, either.
The problem with free software is that people often do not feel motivated to work on tedious and repetitious parts of the problem. You know, things like making GUI more attractive, giving user more control (without having them learn application source code) etc.
Not to mention the fact that free software projects are quite often unmanaged, they lack clear vision and most of them are following/copying existing commercial tools/projects, or at the very least they are based on them.
So they pay the same amount of money no matter where you send the package in US? I can already see the ways to abuse this system, but given low postage costs, it wouldn't probably be a problem for fedex/whatever you have out there.
:-)
I really like your way of thinking that internet should not be billed like a cellphone. I'm glad to hear that bandwidth is that abundant in States.
I assume that you wouldn't mind sharing your connection with me, then - for a fixed sum of money, of course? Why not share something that's UNLIMITED, after all?
Well, I'm Russian citizen and there's no one among my friends (programmers like me) who are going to return to Russia once they get into US. They take every possibility to stay there.
Don't know anything about Indians though, but I can't imaigine that someone could "buy land and live well" in a backward country once you are accustomed to living in the first-world one. You would have to not only buy land, but also change laws in your homeland, change habits of your fellow countrymen, etc etc that's just too much work for a single person.
P.S. I'm not in US myself, but I'm also working abroad - and I'm doing my best not to return to Russia.
And about the countries that don't allow (or make it extremely difficult) to immigrate into them: sure, right now the most of countries are like that. But shouldn't we learn the lesson from history, that the more "open" for immigration the country was (vide USA), the more competitive society it developed?
People are the most valuable asset - if whole Earth's population decided to move to your country, you'd be in control of the whole planet (okay, that's the extreme case, but it's just to show that countries stripped off their 'brainware' cease to exist, because it's people who define what the country is, not its laws/land/traditions/etc).
I think that people should be allowed to freely choose where they want to live. It would also help the economics - labour force would be extremely mobile and you wouldn't have to outsource anything to China/India because you'd be able to hire the same Chineese/Indians right on the place.
And I don't think that US would be flooded: once living standards drop because of too much cheap labour force, people will stop coming in.
In current globalized world, anti-immigration laws are very much like Soviet registration system that bound people to the places where they were born.
I think that the most of international students in the US are planning to settle there sooner or later. So "reduces number of American students" argument is invalid - those students will eventually become Americans, too.
Lowering wages? Well... The golden billion of human population finally starts to feel the globalization effects.
You cannot "immigrate illegally". Why do you, the freedom-loving Americans, deny the people the basic right of moving anywhere they want to?
It's unnatural, unfair and counterproductive to criminalize people for just coming to your country. Why not go further and impose Soviet-like registration of citizens, penalizing them for moving from state to state or even from city to city "illegally"? It's the same way of thinking.
Ok, that sounded childish, but look how often (and in which way) the word "community" is used by Free Software Foundation.
They can have little or no connection to realworld communists, but IMO the word can still be applied to them, given their pro-community POV ("Copyright vs. Community" etc).
Which rights? GNU cybercommunists think that you have the right to give away any program that is sold/licensed/etc to you, and every license that forbids that is "unethical".
Why don't they extend their four freedoms on other goods? Shouldn't we get the access to "sources" of other information (video, audio, textual) we buy/own/license, too?
If you dislike Nano so much, why your own homepage address is nanovox.com? What kind of name is that anyway? :-)
Well, as I said, I read about the events from Estonian POV so I know the details (and about not desecrating bodies as well) - but thanks for providing yet another view on the subject (the more the better). Initially, news available in Russian (including blogs of those living in Estonia) were far more dramatic.
About preferring Nazis over Soviets: obviously, there are your fellow countrymen who prefer them. So the rumours about pro-Nazi sentiments in Baltic countries are not unfounded.
And about calling me a comrade: I'm no communist. Actually, despite I'm Russian citizen, I'm not an ethnic Russian as well. I have relatives across the Europe (including Baltic states), so I don't identify myself with single ethnic group. That's why I despise nationalist movements, seeing them no better than "religious wars" about what OS/desktop environment/language is better. The reason why I was willing to participate was because I do respect people who fought the Nazism, not because I want Estonia back to Russia (actually, I don't care - if Europe wants to have itself fragmented into small factions, so be it). And I refrained from participation upon reading more on the subject and finding out that it was more about Russian nationalism than anti-Nazi resistance.
That's because they don't just dislike government: they dislike Russians as a nation. The memorial does not depict authorities, it is a "commoner", a soldier like millions.
About sympathies: yes, both Nazi and Stalinists enjoy some support in their respective countries. But even people who do not support those regimes may still be emotionally linked to German or Russian side, just because they share common ethnicity and/or nationality. I remember talking to one young German who said: "thinking about WW II makes me sad, because we lost - but OTOH, had we won, it would be even worse".
Nowadays Russians do not feel themselves responsible for the deeds of the past, they don't often know POV of other nations and disregard all accusations as propaganda, just because "we're not animals, we couldn't be that evil - they say that because they want to humiliate us". And indeed, quite often the accusations you hear are so wild that they discredit the western opinion in Russian eyes altogether.
And also do not forget, most of todays 20- or 30-years olds have been growing up in late USSR, pretty different from one of Stalinist era. What was an "evil empire" for you, was a peaceful and calm (compared to post-Soviet conflicts) realm for us. Wherever we're now, in Israel or in States, we still cannot fully accept your "evil empire" image: it was our childhood, it was bright, everything was easy and everyone was peaceful. That's the USSR Russians (and other ex-Soviet emigrees) remember and that's the USSR they long for.
I remember how I was also enraged upon hearing about Estonian plans and yes, I wanted to join the resistance (or "cyber-war" as they called it immediately in the West). But a bit later when emotions calmed down I changed my mind, because it all was immature and not that effective anyway (and yes, reading about the events from Estonian POV helped me to get calm, too).
Let God/History/Nature/whatever be the judge for Estonians, not me. If they prefer Nazis over Soviets, so be it. They made their choice.