If some company uses open source solutions and these solutions prove to be scalable and flexible that company will feel reluctant to stop using a winning formula. There are a lot of regular newbe users who start to use open source products and when they have used them for some time start to contribute to it. I think that it takes a while before people start contributing. I rather see all poorer countries with emerging markets using open source like hell without paying any contribution, than seeing MicroSoft gaing foothold there. Sooner or later countries like China and India will contribute lots of code, is my firm belief.
From the article: 'In the tech world, where consumer trends can rise and fall and product cycles are short, that's more often the exception than the rule. The penalty for a delay can be severe -- even catastrophic. One of the biggest risks in postponing a product launch is being out-hustled to market by rivals.'"
Vista got delayed.... Caution stampeding rivals at the horizon!
I as a nerd am not so interested in the pornbusiness. I can understand the link between the internet and the porn business. But what I don't understand is why this should be stuff that matters and how this is new for nerds. In fact I don't get the news value of this post at all. Being a nerd doesn't mean we wank all day so that these kind of superficial topics would be of any interest.
Wouldn't it be a great idea if there was some organisation where you could get a quick free (as in beer and freedom!) independent advice about the law (for each country different advices)of writing code related to GPL licence. This would help a lot of student, hobbyist to understand hwat their legitimate position is as a writer of software.
This would help people who love the ideal of freedom as a practice for coding and it would make the GPL become better accepted. It would also help organisations to match their policies with the GPL license. This would be especially intersting for schools, but maybe you know a lot of other interesting examples for yourself to share with others on this thread.
-----
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong. -- Lao-Tzu (600 B.C.)
Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us --Stephen Covey
I mentioned it on a reply on my own message, as a simple way for some kind of preventing most people from sending mails to my old school. My effort was to explain how organisations who don't have integrated the possibilty to write GPL code by student, can make it very hard to contribute. I have in other replies also explained how non-transparent the policies are explained. The biggest risc is if a student thinks it is ok to write GPLcode (because some maner says it's ok) and later hears from the lawyer that it is not ok. Then such a student has to ask the existing project to remove his contributed code. That is something to chew on, when these things are not properly taken care of.
I know now that I should take more time for the law proportion fo writing software (far beyond understanding the GPL). But when you sign a contract and have never ever coded once in your life, you are not going to instanly understand al that stuff. So yes, it was my mistake. That I already said, the issue remains that if a school doesn't provide the means for a student to write GPL code, than something is wrong. Especially if you know the reason why they made such contract. More on that later.
"In this case the most the school can do it say that they own the code you wrote and they can stop you adding your code into the GPL project. Since they don't own the code already in the GPL project they wouldn't be allowed to distribute it themselves without violating the GPL."
As I mentioned earlier, it was not an already available project which I contributed to. It was a program which I and another friend of mine have written under the GPL.
"If you wrote a program in the school subject to a contract then you were not permitted to release that program under the GPL (and you certainly shouldn't have transferred copyrights you didn't own to the FSF)."
The problem is that the lwayer of the school says something completely different then the people of the board and on the workfloor. This uncertainty makes it confusing for students, especially new ones which haven't yet an understanding of the way of law works. The law is difficult and a licensence nor a contract are enough to understand what your rights are. Besides that, the problem was that the some people suddenly said that I wasn't permitted to write GPL'd code, while others say "there can always be made some arrangements for it" The school can decide to transfer all rights to the original creator, mostly done when a student leaves the school. However they some times might give rights of your code to other people. So some managers say: "you can write GPL'd code and don't make any fuss about it. License GPL as you please" while the lawyer says "it is simply impossible to write GPL'd code, no matter what case. No exceptions possible."
So when someone schoolmanager who you trust is telling you "Gpl is fine" and you're a new student, than this is the perception. If they have some reason to use your project they wil refer you to their lawyer and he will say "GPL and other licencing is not fine, it is illegimate!". As a consequence a lot of students are using GPL libraries and other GPL code in their projects, so their projects become GPL also. Then the school finds a strudent projects to profile their institution with and they transfer the rights to those students. If you helped their project, all rights of your original code are tranferred to them. Then they don't let you know about it until something goes wrong (no proactivity) they will refer you to their lawyer who will say all other managers from school are wrong and it is impossible to GPL projects. Then you start to learn about law and code. On our school we didn't get any teaching in that kind of stuff and laws are different everywhere. GPL v3 is not some simple document because of different laws in every country regarding these issues.
The reason why they made such contract was to be able to present students work, without someone asking you to pay for a license. If I GPL source code everyone will be able to present the students work. If there is a gentlements agreement to mention the school the stduents is from, there would be no problem whatsoever. They just haven't thougt about fitting in a possibility to write GPL code in their legal policies. Their legal policies and their maniging policies are thus not compliant and confusing for students. And those policies are not clear for anyone, which is dangerous for the student and FSF projects.
I was so lucky i had made my own project. It would be much harder to explain an existing project to remove previously submitted code. I am glad this was not the case. It was already difficult enough.
I have tried to get informed walking the official way the school provided. It still is strange why so
that organisation makes it so hard to get a official statement about these issues. That was the relevancy to the original subject.
Being the writer of the article you refferring at, you're completely right. But that is not the main issue, the issues are for as far as I am concerned:
* the lawyer from the school said litteraly that I wasn't allowed to write GPL'd code on the school, and I think that should change. Not for my sake as an individual, but for the sake of modern ways of learing from source and contribution to the society as an institution.
* these kind of contracts are confusing for students who not yet now something about software and legal issues (which is not something to be ashamed for when you apply for a school).
* The ignorance of the institution I was refering to to change their policies, such that they took attention, consideration and applience for the GPL. It's about be aware of GPL and not anly to the word "Free Software".
the contract is only on print available. The GPL'ed project is not rightfully GPL'd so I am not allowed to speak of the project to say that it is a project from FSF. I created all the code myself with some other guy. It was not an already existing project we contributed to. The description of the project is to hard to explain for me in English, it's already hard to explain in few words of my own native language.
I wasn't aware of the contract because it's just some sentences between a lot of others, which are easily overread. It's was my own stupid mistake not to read every little letter. And so have a lot of ather students. This however does not make it possible for a student to use licences, because that is only entitled to the one who owns such code, which is the school. That is the issue I tried to put across.
The organisation which I was talking about was the HKU http://www.hku.nl/ and the group of students which wanted to make buck with my "not legitimate" GPL'd code is http://www.remini.nl/.I want to add they even had the nerve said to other people that I didn't developed on their code... I wanted to helpout and contribute something to them and the world of Free Software, instead I was only allowed them to help without getting any credits nor contributing something to the society. It is hard to fight for your Freedom ideals when it comes to software, but I feel still strong to fight.
The two students (they are girls) then got problems with eachother and now only one of them tries to sell and rent the stuff on code they couldn't develop themselves. Please don't slashdot them and be angry, because it would help me nor free software. I tried to be polite as possible to them. The fight with tem about the code is over. I have lost that fight.
I happened to be a victim myself and it made me very aware that some people who do not understand FOSS that they only use because of the lower costs, but don't manage their business policies to account for FOSS licenses.
I was a student on a school where they had a contract that said that anything I did create for my study they got the ownership rights of (of which the right of use is derivated from, typically arranged using licences). That contract you had to sign along with other papers needed to register to their administration (saying no means you can't follow the study) . As a bachelor student I helped out 2 students who where about to be kicked off from their master programme (this I heard from their mentors..). I used a plenty of GPL software (also LGPL audio libraries) and I made myself some GPL software too. The project became a succes, the two students I helped out suddenly got all the credits (that's another story, not relevant now) and the school wanted to sell their succes story en help the two students to form a company after their succesful graduation.
This is where the situation of fundamental ignorant behaviour towards the GPL became apparrent to me. The schools opinion was that all of my source code belonged to the students. The conflict couldn't be worse, since I transferred all my rights to the FSF (including my copyright). The schools point was that this tranfer was not legimate, since my school was convinced I made this code for a school project. So the GPL licence was not valid in this situation. They also said that if I would use anycode, I would be sewed to court and that if I would need any information that I had to write to their lawyer
So I did. I explained him the importance of GPL software for universities and other educational organisations. I explained also that this contract made it impossible to use any LGPL or GPL software. I explained this was especially a problem for the audio technology faculty of this organisation, because they did a lot of programming using Free Software and even got courses in some software that was Free (as in freedom). If there was a conflict for me, it was for the large part of this faculty. The other problem was that almost nobody of the students was aware of the contract nor its consequences. He took my point and said I was right and this should be taken account for. He would speak to the board about it. I said I wanted to write an article called "How educational organisations embrace Free Software".
After kept waiting for a long time I decided to go to the board myself (I was luckily graduated very succesfully). This guy didn't understand one bit of it, nor would he be so smart to get informed by the experts from his organisation and thought that I was threathening somehow, to use my publication to get my GPL'ed software back. I explained him this was not the case, but I still got a very stupid ignorant reply. This proved lack of policies which account for the GPL and the right to learn and write Free Software.
But this isn't one case on its own. There are more schols with this kind of problem. Maybe this is why MIT has it's own "free" licence? How to fight for your rights to party with freesoftware on your school? How do we begin to fight?
Ohw it's not that hard to translate these documents from arabic, one of the letters says clearly:
"Hello this is Saddam. They will forge some evidence. But eventually videos caught by hidden camera's will show that Bush was taking a geography exam. He tried to find Korea. Everytime his teacher said "weapons of mass destruction" he points with a stick to the map, but wrongly. Out of frustration he would say "bring them some freedom anyway".
But some else amazes me the most, he has a talent for working the twig.
PS Bushes psychological warfare will not help. All rogue states know he is lousy in geography."
I don't care only about some 10%. Compiling from source, means that you learn to know which packages are sometimes a pain in th *ss to compile. There are a lot of practices where all the benefits of rolling your own binaries is total a waist of precious time.
But in some conditions people want to use open source code, want to compile them and hate to be dependant on some company or organisation which does all the compilation for you. Ofcourse you can always compile the stuff you want, but for the sake of clarity and control it can be a good thing to have some source packaging system like BSD ports or portage (gentoo). For Developpers this is a great thing. trying to get your granny to learn OpenBSD will definately earn you geekpoints, but if she is not a developer she wouldn't probably need it.
Other people want to investigate what stuff is new in general and they want to do it in some managed way. The source based gentoo was the first linux to boot on macintel hardware. Having knowledge of your system (including code) and gives maximum control to hack.
For the linux distributing organisations it can be less trouble to distribute source, it relieves you of the wait of time to compile every piece of source to some specific platform and use the valuable time to to more important things, bug fixes or porting.
Source is especially useful when there is only source available and no binary. If you are a security expert and you have written some revolutionary malloc (fuzzy stuff to prevent happy heap hacking) you can easily try to spot the new bugs. Research and knowledge sharing is a valid reason to compile from source. Source code is also great for amateurs who want to learn about all about *nuxes and accompanied freedoms in theory and also in practice.
And there are lot of other uses to which compiling is a great thing to do. But if you only like things out of the box, you're completely waisting your time, then go binary. It's nice to know there is some open source to see and have the proof of compiling it, if no one would care about compiling from source we all would not care about binaries also and everyone would be using probably Windows.
"Use the source Luke"
The ability to self-reflect is so important to science. When wondering inspires to think free without any form of ethical norm, science will flourish. These days it's hard to see the Islamitic countries (Except the Turks), with a lot of self reflection. Religion, and dictatorish leaders clearly don't inspire to modern scientific achievements. To me it looks as if these countries are too busy with tring to win some ego due the domination of the culture from the west. So on what moment in history?
In the medieval ages a lot of western countries had the same problem. A lot of modern thoughts were forgotten because of the long domination of a fundamentalistic Christianism.
"That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
Why not call it by its name? What's wrong with giving actual numbers? If someone gives these guys money why not advertise it?
Anyway, of course this kind of money helps firefox to progress. But what I don't like is the idea that this project may act too much dependend and not transparant. I like Google's money to be in open source project, but I hate the idea this project will be seduced by corporate interests instead of user interest that will maybe occur in th future. As a user and open source developer I highly value transparency.
I think the more arrogant Microsoft is, thinking it can get way with this (like they might have in America), the more the risk for them that they overplay their hand. It might surprise Microsoft when it is banned from Europe if they would play it on the hardway. The EU has already a "free software first" policy and Europeans have a lot of interests in their own software industry which they will not let it hijack by Microsoft, this is the reason for the EU to start with this fine anyway. We'll see what comes next. It might get ugly;-)
EU wants to play hardball? If they're smart, Microsoft could REALLY play this off to their advantage, making themselves look like a victim and getting the EU to back down.
Europe can't afford to lose so much face. Don't forget This little country called: The Netherlands, has invested $1000.000.000.000 in... Don't forget the free software business in Europe is pretty strong. They will lose all the good paying governmental clients in the long run, because of the free software first policy sooner or later. If they play hardball I bet it will be a lot sooner they would love to.
Don't forget the EU has already taken a very hard ball position already, they might not care about it. Europe is a very good market and Europeans tend to have very good diplomacy with a lot of countries outside of Europe. It might be really stupid to go that far.
Once the people get angry, I'm sure the officials would change their minds real quick.
A lot of people (including some strong companies are allready quite angry on microsoft and are quite willing to fill the gap with other software. Apple would not be the last. It's not that big problem, it's already happening.
Europe is very different from Amerika. You will not believe it, but Europe may become surprisingly united and harsh because of this. That would not in Microsofts interest at all.
How can a company which is depending on the advertise business, stockholders and operation on world level between all the cultural disputes (China) stay an not evil company? Who decides: the clients, a nation or the stockholders?
Besides that, what good is a google application which shares as a unwanted side-effect sensitive business documents without the knowledge of the respected companies?
When it comes down to money,some evil stockholders, countries or clients will take on the power game. And I guess it will heappen when google has a real bad financial quarter. So we have to wait for that for a while I guess. We'll see how google will evolve.
When you buy/use a specific software package for the first time, you probably investigated that it meets your needs. If it is exacly what you need, a update with added functionality is probably most often just a little annoyance. And all spyware and DRM pains are the toys for evil companies.
In FOSS software you have also up en downgrades, but and there you won't have the troubles of spyware or DRM, nor the problem that you cannot find older versions, or that you have paid for something they can practice all their evil company stuff with. So for these people FOSS will become more and more a solution. After a cold turkey from all the closed source stuff, maybe they will find a nice addiction to open software.
I feel relieved, I had the severe ilness called upgrad-ites myself, long ago. Then I moved over to OpenBSD and Linux. Since then I have decent support, better solutions for no cost, ultra flexibillity and all using free and open standards (and no virusses). I am now a complete stranger tot all the non-foss-fuss.
Security is not a feature, security is design. This ultimely means that security should provide good default values, knowledge about how to prevent buffer underruns/overruns and most importantly knowledge how to use a system. This means that security only will need tools to help a system architect and developer to confront him with his limits of his human brain and have a well documented yet very simple concise system and low speed development cycles.
Open source is great because of the many eyes, knowledge sharing and having nothing to do with corporate tradeoffs (the users have the largest voice. But it stinks in the fact that any noob can make programs which are badly designed and are a serious risk to security, however someone may learn faster form the mindsharing in the open source world. To have a well concise system so much more is needed than just some bugfixes. OSS is just a proof that closed source coorporate software is not good with security, but it isn't proof of sound security.
Most interesting is OpenBSD with it's oustanding default values, it's very own high profile malloc which prevents coders for lot of buffer underrunes/overruns, outperforming other malloc implementations. It has a very high quality of manpages and if you want to do something then you have to RTFM. That's what security should be, other than some less known bugs. I would even suggest that it would be better in the name of security that people would use program derivation (which is a very concise way to do formal verification). PIE and all other solutions maybe look practical, but they don't solve the lacking attention for "secure by design".
In my environment I hear a lot of people buying laptops mainly because you can fold them away and saving space. Some people want to buy laptops and do all kinds of demanding things on their battery, which is simply unrealistic. If you buy a multimedia machine with a lot of "bells and whistles" then you should expect very short battery times, bye bye dream. If you consider games to be not fast enough yet, allthough your desktop has a serious expensive 3D card, laptops will never be as good.
If laptops are not good workstations / gaming stations or burning batteries, they still have aesthetics and can be easily put out of sight. Which most of not-geeks would prefer. Office work can be done to perfection with a seriously effcient equiped laptop (centrino for example), presentations and 5 hours battery life.
A nonconformistic gamer doesn't buy a laptop, it's a nice ac-adapter-driven media-center, and a nonconformistic company owner/ salespeople probably want one. For aesthetics there is so much room for improvement, Apple has some answers. However I would like to see a good looking efficient laptop or a good looking nonbox like desktop computer, great at games and playing media (broadcasting over the net) And in the mean time,unless youre in the office stuff, why even pay so much for so little portabillity and power?
There is no guarantee or formula to predict how long a company / product will exist, closed or not.
A business advantage is that even a halted open source project can be revived, it is always for you to use. And if some company thinks something is missing they can add it. So if you are a company dependant of open software, you want to have a thriving community behind the specific products you use in the first place, besides some support of some OSS-business.
Support first
Professionals don't neccesary care about "free" they want to have a certain level of support. So for OSS companies it's just how they can compete with the support of it's closed source rivals. I think this explains why a lot of business people still haven't really grasped the concept of open source.
product second
For a lot of people "open source" is a relatively new term. They have problems understanding it, let alone knowing what to do with it. Product / market share comparisons are a better basis to promote open software for someone who has never heard of it.
Ah it's just a hype. Such suicide clubs don't tend to survive. In the end all those clubs stop existing anyway, that's probably why they are suicide clubs... (Don't mod this as informative)
Why not use an open roof, that will coll down to. Especially when it rains. That will cool down the cpu's to. That's real energy consumption. And when the sun is shining you can get a nice brown tan too.
Quantum mechanics shows that all objects are waves and therefore may be > coherent . Quantum coherence is usually not an event which can be macroscopicly be sensed.
Slashdot Mirror
If some company uses open source solutions and these solutions prove to be scalable and flexible that company will feel reluctant to stop using a winning formula. There are a lot of regular newbe users who start to use open source products and when they have used them for some time start to contribute to it. I think that it takes a while before people start contributing. I rather see all poorer countries with emerging markets using open source like hell without paying any contribution, than seeing MicroSoft gaing foothold there. Sooner or later countries like China and India will contribute lots of code, is my firm belief.
From the article: 'In the tech world, where consumer trends can rise and fall and product cycles are short, that's more often the exception than the rule. The penalty for a delay can be severe -- even catastrophic. One of the biggest risks in postponing a product launch is being out-hustled to market by rivals.'"
Vista got delayed.... Caution stampeding rivals at the horizon!
I as a nerd am not so interested in the pornbusiness. I can understand the link between the internet and the porn business. But what I don't understand is why this should be stuff that matters and how this is new for nerds. In fact I don't get the news value of this post at all. Being a nerd doesn't mean we wank all day so that these kind of superficial topics would be of any interest.
Wouldn't it be a great idea if there was some organisation where you could get a quick free (as in beer and freedom!) independent advice about the law (for each country different advices)of writing code related to GPL licence. This would help a lot of student, hobbyist to understand hwat their legitimate position is as a writer of software.
This would help people who love the ideal of freedom as a practice for coding and it would make the GPL become better accepted. It would also help organisations to match their policies with the GPL license. This would be especially intersting for schools, but maybe you know a lot of other interesting examples for yourself to share with others on this thread.
----- Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong. -- Lao-Tzu (600 B.C.)
Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us --Stephen Covey
I mentioned it on a reply on my own message, as a simple way for some kind of preventing most people from sending mails to my old school. My effort was to explain how organisations who don't have integrated the possibilty to write GPL code by student, can make it very hard to contribute. I have in other replies also explained how non-transparent the policies are explained. The biggest risc is if a student thinks it is ok to write GPLcode (because some maner says it's ok) and later hears from the lawyer that it is not ok. Then such a student has to ask the existing project to remove his contributed code. That is something to chew on, when these things are not properly taken care of.
I know now that I should take more time for the law proportion fo writing software (far beyond understanding the GPL). But when you sign a contract and have never ever coded once in your life, you are not going to instanly understand al that stuff. So yes, it was my mistake. That I already said, the issue remains that if a school doesn't provide the means for a student to write GPL code, than something is wrong. Especially if you know the reason why they made such contract. More on that later. "In this case the most the school can do it say that they own the code you wrote and they can stop you adding your code into the GPL project. Since they don't own the code already in the GPL project they wouldn't be allowed to distribute it themselves without violating the GPL."
As I mentioned earlier, it was not an already available project which I contributed to. It was a program which I and another friend of mine have written under the GPL.
"If you wrote a program in the school subject to a contract then you were not permitted to release that program under the GPL (and you certainly shouldn't have transferred copyrights you didn't own to the FSF)."
The problem is that the lwayer of the school says something completely different then the people of the board and on the workfloor. This uncertainty makes it confusing for students, especially new ones which haven't yet an understanding of the way of law works. The law is difficult and a licensence nor a contract are enough to understand what your rights are. Besides that, the problem was that the some people suddenly said that I wasn't permitted to write GPL'd code, while others say "there can always be made some arrangements for it" The school can decide to transfer all rights to the original creator, mostly done when a student leaves the school. However they some times might give rights of your code to other people. So some managers say: "you can write GPL'd code and don't make any fuss about it. License GPL as you please" while the lawyer says "it is simply impossible to write GPL'd code, no matter what case. No exceptions possible."
So when someone schoolmanager who you trust is telling you "Gpl is fine" and you're a new student, than this is the perception. If they have some reason to use your project they wil refer you to their lawyer and he will say "GPL and other licencing is not fine, it is illegimate!". As a consequence a lot of students are using GPL libraries and other GPL code in their projects, so their projects become GPL also. Then the school finds a strudent projects to profile their institution with and they transfer the rights to those students. If you helped their project, all rights of your original code are tranferred to them. Then they don't let you know about it until something goes wrong (no proactivity) they will refer you to their lawyer who will say all other managers from school are wrong and it is impossible to GPL projects. Then you start to learn about law and code. On our school we didn't get any teaching in that kind of stuff and laws are different everywhere. GPL v3 is not some simple document because of different laws in every country regarding these issues.
The reason why they made such contract was to be able to present students work, without someone asking you to pay for a license. If I GPL source code everyone will be able to present the students work. If there is a gentlements agreement to mention the school the stduents is from, there would be no problem whatsoever. They just haven't thougt about fitting in a possibility to write GPL code in their legal policies. Their legal policies and their maniging policies are thus not compliant and confusing for students. And those policies are not clear for anyone, which is dangerous for the student and FSF projects.
I was so lucky i had made my own project. It would be much harder to explain an existing project to remove previously submitted code. I am glad this was not the case. It was already difficult enough. I have tried to get informed walking the official way the school provided. It still is strange why so that organisation makes it so hard to get a official statement about these issues. That was the relevancy to the original subject.
Being the writer of the article you refferring at, you're completely right. But that is not the main issue, the issues are for as far as I am concerned:
* the lawyer from the school said litteraly that I wasn't allowed to write GPL'd code on the school, and I think that should change. Not for my sake as an individual, but for the sake of modern ways of learing from source and contribution to the society as an institution.
* these kind of contracts are confusing for students who not yet now something about software and legal issues (which is not something to be ashamed for when you apply for a school).
* The ignorance of the institution I was refering to to change their policies, such that they took attention, consideration and applience for the GPL. It's about be aware of GPL and not anly to the word "Free Software".
the contract is only on print available. The GPL'ed project is not rightfully GPL'd so I am not allowed to speak of the project to say that it is a project from FSF. I created all the code myself with some other guy. It was not an already existing project we contributed to. The description of the project is to hard to explain for me in English, it's already hard to explain in few words of my own native language. I wasn't aware of the contract because it's just some sentences between a lot of others, which are easily overread. It's was my own stupid mistake not to read every little letter. And so have a lot of ather students. This however does not make it possible for a student to use licences, because that is only entitled to the one who owns such code, which is the school. That is the issue I tried to put across.
The organisation which I was talking about was the HKU http://www.hku.nl/ and the group of students which wanted to make buck with my "not legitimate" GPL'd code is http://www.remini.nl/ .I want to add they even had the nerve said to other people that I didn't developed on their code... I wanted to helpout and contribute something to them and the world of Free Software, instead I was only allowed them to help without getting any credits nor contributing something to the society. It is hard to fight for your Freedom ideals when it comes to software, but I feel still strong to fight.
The two students (they are girls) then got problems with eachother and now only one of them tries to sell and rent the stuff on code they couldn't develop themselves. Please don't slashdot them and be angry, because it would help me nor free software. I tried to be polite as possible to them. The fight with tem about the code is over. I have lost that fight.
I happened to be a victim myself and it made me very aware that some people who do not understand FOSS that they only use because of the lower costs, but don't manage their business policies to account for FOSS licenses.
I was a student on a school where they had a contract that said that anything I did create for my study they got the ownership rights of (of which the right of use is derivated from, typically arranged using licences). That contract you had to sign along with other papers needed to register to their administration (saying no means you can't follow the study) . As a bachelor student I helped out 2 students who where about to be kicked off from their master programme (this I heard from their mentors..). I used a plenty of GPL software (also LGPL audio libraries) and I made myself some GPL software too. The project became a succes, the two students I helped out suddenly got all the credits (that's another story, not relevant now) and the school wanted to sell their succes story en help the two students to form a company after their succesful graduation.
This is where the situation of fundamental ignorant behaviour towards the GPL became apparrent to me. The schools opinion was that all of my source code belonged to the students. The conflict couldn't be worse, since I transferred all my rights to the FSF (including my copyright). The schools point was that this tranfer was not legimate, since my school was convinced I made this code for a school project. So the GPL licence was not valid in this situation. They also said that if I would use anycode, I would be sewed to court and that if I would need any information that I had to write to their lawyer
So I did. I explained him the importance of GPL software for universities and other educational organisations. I explained also that this contract made it impossible to use any LGPL or GPL software. I explained this was especially a problem for the audio technology faculty of this organisation, because they did a lot of programming using Free Software and even got courses in some software that was Free (as in freedom). If there was a conflict for me, it was for the large part of this faculty. The other problem was that almost nobody of the students was aware of the contract nor its consequences. He took my point and said I was right and this should be taken account for. He would speak to the board about it. I said I wanted to write an article called "How educational organisations embrace Free Software".
After kept waiting for a long time I decided to go to the board myself (I was luckily graduated very succesfully). This guy didn't understand one bit of it, nor would he be so smart to get informed by the experts from his organisation and thought that I was threathening somehow, to use my publication to get my GPL'ed software back. I explained him this was not the case, but I still got a very stupid ignorant reply. This proved lack of policies which account for the GPL and the right to learn and write Free Software.
But this isn't one case on its own. There are more schols with this kind of problem. Maybe this is why MIT has it's own "free" licence? How to fight for your rights to party with freesoftware on your school? How do we begin to fight?
Ohw it's not that hard to translate these documents from arabic, one of the letters says clearly:
"Hello this is Saddam. They will forge some evidence. But eventually videos caught by hidden camera's will show that Bush was taking a geography exam. He tried to find Korea. Everytime his teacher said "weapons of mass destruction" he points with a stick to the map, but wrongly. Out of frustration he would say "bring them some freedom anyway".
But some else amazes me the most, he has a talent for working the twig.
PS Bushes psychological warfare will not help. All rogue states know he is lousy in geography."
I don't care only about some 10%. Compiling from source, means that you learn to know which packages are sometimes a pain in th *ss to compile. There are a lot of practices where all the benefits of rolling your own binaries is total a waist of precious time. But in some conditions people want to use open source code, want to compile them and hate to be dependant on some company or organisation which does all the compilation for you. Ofcourse you can always compile the stuff you want, but for the sake of clarity and control it can be a good thing to have some source packaging system like BSD ports or portage (gentoo). For Developpers this is a great thing. trying to get your granny to learn OpenBSD will definately earn you geekpoints, but if she is not a developer she wouldn't probably need it. Other people want to investigate what stuff is new in general and they want to do it in some managed way. The source based gentoo was the first linux to boot on macintel hardware. Having knowledge of your system (including code) and gives maximum control to hack. For the linux distributing organisations it can be less trouble to distribute source, it relieves you of the wait of time to compile every piece of source to some specific platform and use the valuable time to to more important things, bug fixes or porting. Source is especially useful when there is only source available and no binary. If you are a security expert and you have written some revolutionary malloc (fuzzy stuff to prevent happy heap hacking) you can easily try to spot the new bugs. Research and knowledge sharing is a valid reason to compile from source. Source code is also great for amateurs who want to learn about all about *nuxes and accompanied freedoms in theory and also in practice. And there are lot of other uses to which compiling is a great thing to do. But if you only like things out of the box, you're completely waisting your time, then go binary. It's nice to know there is some open source to see and have the proof of compiling it, if no one would care about compiling from source we all would not care about binaries also and everyone would be using probably Windows. "Use the source Luke"
The ability to self-reflect is so important to science. When wondering inspires to think free without any form of ethical norm, science will flourish. These days it's hard to see the Islamitic countries (Except the Turks), with a lot of self reflection. Religion, and dictatorish leaders clearly don't inspire to modern scientific achievements. To me it looks as if these countries are too busy with tring to win some ego due the domination of the culture from the west. So on what moment in history? In the medieval ages a lot of western countries had the same problem. A lot of modern thoughts were forgotten because of the long domination of a fundamentalistic Christianism.
"That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
Why not call it by its name? What's wrong with giving actual numbers? If someone gives these guys money why not advertise it?
Anyway, of course this kind of money helps firefox to progress. But what I don't like is the idea that this project may act too much dependend and not transparant. I like Google's money to be in open source project, but I hate the idea this project will be seduced by corporate interests instead of user interest that will maybe occur in th future. As a user and open source developer I highly value transparency.
I think the more arrogant Microsoft is, thinking it can get way with this (like they might have in America), the more the risk for them that they overplay their hand. It might surprise Microsoft when it is banned from Europe if they would play it on the hardway. The EU has already a "free software first" policy and Europeans have a lot of interests in their own software industry which they will not let it hijack by Microsoft, this is the reason for the EU to start with this fine anyway. We'll see what comes next. It might get ugly ;-)
EU wants to play hardball? If they're smart, Microsoft could REALLY play this off to their advantage, making themselves look like a victim and getting the EU to back down. Europe can't afford to lose so much face. Don't forget This little country called: The Netherlands, has invested $1000.000.000.000 in... Don't forget the free software business in Europe is pretty strong. They will lose all the good paying governmental clients in the long run, because of the free software first policy sooner or later. If they play hardball I bet it will be a lot sooner they would love to. Don't forget the EU has already taken a very hard ball position already, they might not care about it. Europe is a very good market and Europeans tend to have very good diplomacy with a lot of countries outside of Europe. It might be really stupid to go that far. Once the people get angry, I'm sure the officials would change their minds real quick. A lot of people (including some strong companies are allready quite angry on microsoft and are quite willing to fill the gap with other software. Apple would not be the last. It's not that big problem, it's already happening. Europe is very different from Amerika. You will not believe it, but Europe may become surprisingly united and harsh because of this. That would not in Microsofts interest at all.
Well, I always knew there was something fishy with miucrosofts recycle bin...
How can a company which is depending on the advertise business, stockholders and operation on world level between all the cultural disputes (China) stay an not evil company? Who decides: the clients, a nation or the stockholders?
Besides that, what good is a google application which shares as a unwanted side-effect sensitive business documents without the knowledge of the respected companies?
When it comes down to money,some evil stockholders, countries or clients will take on the power game. And I guess it will heappen when google has a real bad financial quarter. So we have to wait for that for a while I guess. We'll see how google will evolve.
When you buy/use a specific software package for the first time, you probably investigated that it meets your needs. If it is exacly what you need, a update with added functionality is probably most often just a little annoyance. And all spyware and DRM pains are the toys for evil companies. In FOSS software you have also up en downgrades, but and there you won't have the troubles of spyware or DRM, nor the problem that you cannot find older versions, or that you have paid for something they can practice all their evil company stuff with. So for these people FOSS will become more and more a solution. After a cold turkey from all the closed source stuff, maybe they will find a nice addiction to open software. I feel relieved, I had the severe ilness called upgrad-ites myself, long ago. Then I moved over to OpenBSD and Linux. Since then I have decent support, better solutions for no cost, ultra flexibillity and all using free and open standards (and no virusses). I am now a complete stranger tot all the non-foss-fuss.
Security is not a feature, security is design. This ultimely means that security should provide good default values, knowledge about how to prevent buffer underruns/overruns and most importantly knowledge how to use a system. This means that security only will need tools to help a system architect and developer to confront him with his limits of his human brain and have a well documented yet very simple concise system and low speed development cycles.
Open source is great because of the many eyes, knowledge sharing and having nothing to do with corporate tradeoffs (the users have the largest voice. But it stinks in the fact that any noob can make programs which are badly designed and are a serious risk to security, however someone may learn faster form the mindsharing in the open source world. To have a well concise system so much more is needed than just some bugfixes. OSS is just a proof that closed source coorporate software is not good with security, but it isn't proof of sound security.
Most interesting is OpenBSD with it's oustanding default values, it's very own high profile malloc which prevents coders for lot of buffer underrunes/overruns, outperforming other malloc implementations. It has a very high quality of manpages and if you want to do something then you have to RTFM. That's what security should be, other than some less known bugs. I would even suggest that it would be better in the name of security that people would use program derivation (which is a very concise way to do formal verification). PIE and all other solutions maybe look practical, but they don't solve the lacking attention for "secure by design".
In my environment I hear a lot of people buying laptops mainly because you can fold them away and saving space. Some people want to buy laptops and do all kinds of demanding things on their battery, which is simply unrealistic. If you buy a multimedia machine with a lot of "bells and whistles" then you should expect very short battery times, bye bye dream. If you consider games to be not fast enough yet, allthough your desktop has a serious expensive 3D card, laptops will never be as good.
If laptops are not good workstations / gaming stations or burning batteries, they still have aesthetics and can be easily put out of sight. Which most of not-geeks would prefer. Office work can be done to perfection with a seriously effcient equiped laptop (centrino for example), presentations and 5 hours battery life.
A nonconformistic gamer doesn't buy a laptop, it's a nice ac-adapter-driven media-center, and a nonconformistic company owner/ salespeople probably want one. For aesthetics there is so much room for improvement, Apple has some answers. However I would like to see a good looking efficient laptop or a good looking nonbox like desktop computer, great at games and playing media (broadcasting over the net) And in the mean time,unless youre in the office stuff, why even pay so much for so little portabillity and power?
There is no guarantee or formula to predict how long a company / product will exist, closed or not.
A business advantage is that even a halted open source project can be revived, it is always for you to use. And if some company thinks something is missing they can add it. So if you are a company dependant of open software, you want to have a thriving community behind the specific products you use in the first place, besides some support of some OSS-business.
Support first
Professionals don't neccesary care about "free" they want to have a certain level of support. So for OSS companies it's just how they can compete with the support of it's closed source rivals. I think this explains why a lot of business people still haven't really grasped the concept of open source.
product second
For a lot of people "open source" is a relatively new term. They have problems understanding it, let alone knowing what to do with it. Product / market share comparisons are a better basis to promote open software for someone who has never heard of it.
Ah it's just a hype. Such suicide clubs don't tend to survive. In the end all those clubs stop existing anyway, that's probably why they are suicide clubs... (Don't mod this as informative)
Why not use an open roof, that will coll down to. Especially when it rains. That will cool down the cpu's to. That's real energy consumption. And when the sun is shining you can get a nice brown tan too.
Quantum mechanics shows that all objects are waves and therefore may be > coherent . Quantum coherence is usually not an event which can be macroscopicly be sensed.