There are a number of problems with this argument, many of which we've seen before and we'll see again.
One of the first things to notice is that this article isn't thinking, it's emoting. It presents the vague, forboding thoughts of a number of people who, we are assured, know about such things (not to criticize a genius like Arthur C. Clarke, but a great sci-fi writer and an innovative thinker is not necessarily an accurate judge of the future of humanity). Moreover, no concrete ideas or predictions are presented. It's a perfect example of one of the most common errors of bad scientific thinking, the theory cannot be disproved. We are presented with vague references to the end of western civilization and the fall of the information age, all encapsulated into a nicely marketable buzzword- "cyberclysm."
But what, exactly, is this 'cyberclysm'? Will all our hard-drives overflow with information, causing the world to grind to a halt? Will 6 billion people suddenly get sick of it all and simultaneously burn their computers and become primitive herdsmen? Will everyone stop reading magazines and newspapers and books, forcing Katz and the Luddites et al. to get a real job? Nobody seems to know what this cyberclysm will be, they just have a really bad feeling. In fact, there is a reason for this. They make no concrete predictions because they cannot. Any prediction of doom that they could make would expose how utterly ludicrous this concept is. I challenge anyone to come up with a plausible scenario for this cyberclypse which will pass the laugh test when presented to a group of level-headed, intelligent people. I doubt such a scenario exists. Since they can't present rational predictions and ideas, they present us with emotions and feelings and we swallow it whole. It's easier to emote than to think, and there's no easier way to get someone on your side than to appeal to their fear. All of us have second thoughts about our technological lives, and the neo-luddites give us an excuse. "It's not my fault I'm unhappy, it's the societal information glut that's taking away my life."
And, lest we become too convinceed that we are the center of the universe, let us remember that a good 5.5 billion people on this planet, at least, would love to have the luxury of worrying about information overload. "Cyberclysm" seems a pretty strong word for an event that will affect, generously, 10% of the planet's population. Compared to the real problems that most of the people on this planet have to deal with, like whether they can make it through tomorrow without getting shot or bombed or fired or starved to death, this seems rather like whining about the stress brought on by not knowing how to spend all your money.
ANY trend predicts an apocalypse if you extrapolate far enough on a small enough set of data. It's hotter this decade than last decade. If this trend continues, in a thousand years we'll be able to melt lead in our refrigerators. People eat more than they did 30 years ago. In a hundred years, everyone will weigh half a ton and will have to be moved by crane. The number of cars on the street has gone up several million percent since the beginning of the century. By my calculations, the earth's entire mass will be converted to Toyotas in 10 years. As Dilbert says (and as I paraphrase), "I predict huge profitability by assuming that all positive trends will continue indefinitely, and all negative trends are temporary and will reverse themselves within 6 months." Or, to take an example from the late-19th-century version of environmentalism, horses are taking over the world. People were living farther and farther in the suburbs as urban sprawl kicked in, and driving farther and farther to work. As a result, horses were proliferating. Horse dung was inches deep on all the major roads, and grave space for dead horses was running out. The methae-pollution issue alone was extremely serious. Everyone was sure that industrial society would be brought to a halt by the horse crisis. Guess what? It wasn't. Instead someone named Henry Ford came along and made the whole issue moot.
The point is, forces balance. Situations change. Nothing keeps going forever. In this particular case, the cyberclysm prediction comes quite naturally, as long as one ignores any possible balancing forces. But, there are balancing forces here. Human beings are a species of moderation. We don't like extremes, and we tend to seek the middle ground. Any time a major force of change comes into human history, a balancing force immediately arises. The bigger the change, the stronger people's opposition to change.
This argument, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to the ideas of Karl Marx. He saw, in his own time, the power of capitalists seemingly rising out of control, until the inevitable result was a revolution, a capitalclysm if you will, when the system finally collapsed under its own weight. Marx, like the cyberclysm prophets, saw only one trend, one force, acting over a very short time period. He extrapolated this to infinity, predicting that unchecked capitalism would eventually grow so out of control that it would destroy itself. In making this prediction, he ignored that fact that capitalism was never 'unchecked.' He ignored the balancing effects of forces like democracy and the labor movement, which have so far prevented capitalism from achieving this exponential explosion. As a result, we have not had a single Marxist revolution anywhere in the world (and if you think otherwise, why is it that the most ostensibly Communist countries are those which had the least capitalist infrastructure before their revolutions? Shouldn't the revolution against capitalism have happened someplace where they actually had capitalism?).
The same applies here. As technology's role in our lives increases, opposition to it also increases, and people start seeking out more human interaction, and place more importance on getting things done themselves. The information glut begins to be balanced, steadily and smoothly, rather than in an apocalyptic revolution. This is why any specific cyberclysm prediction would sound so ridiculous. We all know how conservative humans are, and we all know that we only allow social trends to go so far before we get uncomfortable. That, in a nutshell, is why there will be no cyberclysm.
We all are used to thinking this way. When we are in a bad mood, the world is headed to hell in a handbasket. When we are in a good mood, things are doing all right, and the world is in its proper order. Our moods, and our own very local perceptions, are blown up into planetary trends. We love to take short term changes and extrapolate them to the end of the world. Katz and the people he's listening to have given in to this temptation.
Where do you stand on the whole Corel Linux beta issue, and why haven't we heard anything from the OSI about it? It would seem to be right up your alley.
Well, dude, as for your not being one of those people, last time I checked there was no astronaut draft, so whether you expose yourself to that risk is entirely up to you, even under the current system
I'm not going to argue the other points, except to say that I agree that privatization should give a more practical, ecconoical grounding to the space program. However, most major technological changes required some degree of government investment in order to get them off the ground, and the space program may still be in that stage. But, I think NASA should be doing everything it can to encourage private space programs, in order to get space travel out of that stage.
I agree with you, though probably for different reasons, that the ISS is a ridiculous project. It's just a bigger space shuttle, going in circles like we've been doing for the last 30 years. What we should be spending that money on is something truly new, like going to Mars, or a permanent manned Lunar station.
I agree 100% that the events at Columbine were interpreted by nearly everyone to fit their own prejudice, and that includes me. I, too, subscribed to the notion that these were geeks striking out against the repressive high school social world we all know and love. Now, I don't know what to think. Perhaps Chris Rock was right about all this when he said "Why can't people just be crazy anymore?" Maybe those two were just psychopaths with guns, and that's all there is to it. Maybe not. It's still too early to know.
Regardless of what happened to Klebold and Harris, what happened to the rest of society is clear. A huge portion of society used the Columbine massacre to reinforce and justify their pre-existing biases against outsiders, be they goths, geeks, gays, or whatever. Klebold and Harris may be beyond explanation, but this was not. It is this fear and hatred which needs to be challenged and combated, not because of what it did to the two killers, but because of what it did to us.
Anyone else wondering where Eric Raymond and the OSI are? This would seem to be right up their alley, but Perens seems to have beaten them to it. Come to think of it, I haven't heard anything out of them since the "Take my job, please" fiasco.
I have been (very mildly) a supporter of Raymond and the OSI for a while, but this is making me wonder. Hackers respect people who get the job done, and right now that looks a lot like Perens, and not Raymond. Come on, OSI, show us there's more to you than hot air!
While I agree that paranoia about child molestation has in some cases gone too far (to wit, "recovered memory" psychology, but that's another rant), this just isn't one of those cases.
I agree that an 18-year-old sleeping with a 16-year old is no problem (and I say this as a (barely) legal adult in a relationship with someone who is (barely) a minor), and as several people have pointed out, the law usually makes exceptions in those cases. Even if such cases aren't covered by the letter of the law, nobody enforces the law in such situations, not even the child-molestation demagouges. That would just be ridiculous, and everyone knows it.
This, on the other hand, is totally different. She was 13, he was 34! Sorry, that's not the same as the difference between me and my girlfriend. For crying out loud, she was still busy being born when he was old enough to drink! One can quibble about the age of consent, and the maximum age difference underneath it, but 13 is just out of the question, as is a 21-year age difference. A 13-year old simply cannot be regarded as an emotional and psychological adult when it comes to handling sexual advances from a middle-aged man.
If he really did what the FBI says he did (and, although the case agains him looks pretty bad, let us not forget the presumption of innocence), I have absolutely no qualms about sending him to jail for as long as the law provides. This case, at least, is no witch-hunt. The laws about this were written for exactly this sort of situation, and to fail to punish this sort of behavior would be unconscionable.
So, while I agree that there are some issues with our current shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to child molestation charges, this is hardly the case to be fighting these issues over.
"Sublicense" means to provide someone else with a license to use the software. Under the GPL (and this point is at the heart of the GPL), anyone has the right to sublicence GPL'ed software. It restricts the license they may grant, and the terms under which they can grant it (namely, that they provide it under the GPL, provide the source, etc.), but it explicitly allows sublicensing by anyone, without permission. If it didn't, I'd have to ask Linus for permission every time I gave someone a copy of Linux, which would defeat the whole purpose of the GPL.
I'm assuming you interpreted "sublicense" to mean "re-license under different terms," which is not correct. "Sublicense" just means to give someone a license when you are not the original owner of the IP in question.
A company hires you to work for them. They have bought (or rather, rented) a product (your labor and skills) which they expect to pay the company back more than they spend on you. As such, they have a certain right (not to say obligation) to ensure that they're getting their money's worth. As I see it, this is perfectly OK, at least within certain bounds.
First, they should make their monitoring policies clear. Monitoring performance is one thing, but secret monitoring is something else. Employees should know what they may be subject to, so that, if they don't like it, they have the option of finding another job without those restrictions. Second, they should monitor only the amount, not the content, of personal communications. As the ACLU rep in the article said, listening in on a phone call to a spouse is illegal, and a similar principle should apply to computers. However, the company should be able to keep an eye on whether the employee is e-mailing their spouse once a day, or every 5 minutes. Thirdly, any information gathered about an employee should be purged when they leave the company, unless said information is to be used in a legal action against the employee. Once the person is no longer employed by them, their right to know anything about her ends.
There is a separate issue, which several posters have pointed out. Regrdless of whether such monitoring is immoral (and I don't think it is, within the above limits), it's just plain bad for business. Nobody wants to work in an environment where they are being monitored 9-5 every day, and the psychological effects of being in an environment like that could be enormous, not to mention the effects of being prevented from taking a break every so often. It is accepted wisdom (does anyone know of any statistics on this?) that people are more productive when they are in a work environment where they feel comfortable, and monitoring their e-mail and calling them in for a meeting with the manager every time they play solitaire is pretty much the opposite of that.
Moreover, using this system to routinely monitor employees is a waste of resources. Looking for embezzlers and such is worthwhile, but not routine, wide-scale moitoring. There are much better ways of measuring an employee than how she uses her computer. The monitoring system measures input- how much time is being spent on work. But an intelligent company will realize that they don't care about inputs. They care about outputs, which are usually easy to measure by more conventional means (how much work the employee is actually getting done). The genius programmer who takes minesweeper breaks every hour, but pours out code at a spectacular rate, is worth more to a company (at least, to a smart company) than a dull, uninspired one who produces less, but faithfully spends all his time in the office doing work (at least, as far as his computer can tell).
I love it! "Markengrabbing" seems a better description of the concept than any comparable english word. I don't know if this duality exists in German, but to this English-speaker, the double meaning (Mark as in money, mark as in trademark) is hilariously appropriate. After all, in this day and age, grabbing trademarks is a much more profitable activity (witness the domain-name gold rush) than grabbing money.
Let me preface this by saying that I am well aware that there has been a fair amount of debate about banning ACs. I am also aware that I haven't paid much attention to this debate, and now I am pretty uninformed as to what the opinions are that are already out there (If someone could point me to a good thread on the topic, that would be cool). With that in mind, here's my thoughts on the AC problem.
As several people have pointed out, there are some problems with the current system. Granted, it does a pretty good job of dealing with trolls who have accounts. However, as several people have pointed out, most of the worst offenders are anonymous, in which case we have to resort to IP-based regulation. This, as several people have pointed out, has its own problems relating to dynamic IPs and so fourth.
Thus, the solution of permitting only people with accounts to post presents itself again. I think this is a very good idea. Here's why:
Studies have shown many times that anonymity has a way of reducing inhibitions. People do things behind a mask that they would never consider doing in broad daylight. Thus, many of the trolls that have been driving everyone so nuts lately probably wouldn't seem that unpleasant if you met them in person. Society imposes many restrictions on behavior which largely hinge on the fact that actions have consequences. If one of these trolls behaved like a troll in the real world, you would quickly find that you have no friends, no life, and your mom has cut off your allowance. Being socially stigmatized is an unbearably unpleasant experience. This can be bad when the stigma is unjustified, as so many of us nerds can attest, but it does impose a certain basic civility on society.
Anonymity short-circuits this whole system. When you're anonymous, you can do whatever you like, and there are no consequences (believe me, getting your messages flamed and moderated down is a bonus, not a consequence). This applies equally well to bathroom walls, prank phone calls, and Slashdot posts. The problem with the internet is that it makes it very easy to be anonymous and loud at the same time, and so the system of civility breaks on a larger scale than ever before.
If you had to have an account on Slashdot to post, this problem would go away fast, whether there were enforcement systems or not. The simple fact of having their masks ripped off would stop 75% of the trolls before they start. Unfortunately, the account still provides a certain degree of anonymity, and so we have enforcement systems to deal with the remaining 25%. Once we have accounts, enforcement by a variety of methods would be easy.
My favorite solution is the digital analog of people ignoring real-world trolls. There ought to be an option whereby I could have all posts from a specific account removed from my comment display, much like I can currently not see postings from Jon Katz if I so desire. Thus, if I get fed up with a particular troll, I can get him out of my face in a completely harmless way. Of course, some people will use this to ignore other people who have legitimate opinions that differ from their own. So what? If people want to be close-minded, let them. The nice thing is that it uses the absence of anonymity the way it's supposed to be used: to allow us to make our own personal choices about who we listen to. This approach hinges on the removal of AC posts.
There are, of course, a few valid reasons for anonymous postings. These constitute 1% (if that) of the anonymous postings on Slashdot right now. However, there are ways of implementing anonymity within the system, so that a person with an account can can make a posting that nobody but the system recognizes as hers. It still counts towards her Karma, and it's still subject to whatever enforcement systems exist (except perhaps the auto-ignore described above), but it permits her to be anonymous as far has her readers are concerned. My own thought is that perhaps one could buy an anonymous posting with some of your Karma (say, 2-3 points), thus ensuring that people only used anonymity when it was genuinely important. In other words, anonymity becomes something that you earn through good citizenship (and I think Karma is a pretty sensible measure of citizenship). In this context, anonymity could become a way to break through the auto-ignore and be heard by the people ignoring you- but it would only be worth using if you really had something worth saying.
Anyway, that's my $2E-2. Comments and criticisms are welcome, flames will be taken to heart and left to fester in what's left of my self-esteem.
I agree, except that rather than having a periodic knock-down, I think a more gradualistic approach might be appropriate. In the same way that only your more recent comments show up in your account summary, only your more recent comments should be used to compute your Karma.
On the other hand, it doen't really matter that much. In my experience, comments don't really get very interesting until they get up to 3. I tend to look at 2s and 1s as almost the same, because for moderation purposes, they almost are- the difference between 1 and 2 is so small that no moderator will bother to adjust those scores. Some of those 2s may be undeserved, but they aren't exactly a huge benefit, for the same reason that they don't tend to get moderated down to a more appropriate 1: it doesn't matter that much.
So yeah, if Rob ever has a free afternoon, a gradual Karma decay might be nice, but it's not that big a deal.
Full disclosure: I was, and may still be, a beneficiary of the automatic 2.
Enough people think that moderators are biased as it is. Giving moderators the power to delete posts would be disastrous. There are an awful lot of moderators, and I'm sure there are a few bad apples among them, even with all the controls that are established. The good thing about the system as it currently stands is that other moderators can counteract the effects of an evil moderator, and possibly even identify him as ineligible for moderation (The system is still vulnerable to the excesses of democracy, but I digress).
Giving the power of deletion to moderators would take away that balance, since once a message is deleted, nobody can undelete it, because nobody will know that it was there, except the poster (who will, of course, start bombarding Rob with e-mail about how he's being censored). I suppose you could set things up so that other moderators could see deleted posts, but then that wouldn't be deletion anymore, it would just be adding a -2 moderation level, which wouldn't really solve anything.
Furthermore, regardless of whether moerators actually did abuse their power, accusations of abuse and censorship would fly back and fourth, and everyone would start b*tching about how they are being censored. It just wouldn't be worth it.
As for CmdrTaco personally doing it, as you seem to be suggesting, that would be even worse. It's not like he doesn't have enough to do, and get enough flameage already, without becoming the Troll Police. There's just too many comments for one person to check them all, especially one person who happens to already be administering the site, and would also be way too much of a strain on that person. Rob claims to have asbestos skin, but I really doubt he'd want to take on this job, considering the (literally) thousands of flames he'd get for it.
The sale price of a house is an almost purely fictional value.
No more or less so than any other price. The price of housing, like the price of pork bellies or any other commodity, is just exactly the equilibrium value between supply and demand. Things cost what they cost because that's how much people will pay in order to maximize the profit of the buyer and the seller. There is no more "real" quanitity underlying price. If you want to put it that way, all prices are "almost purely fictional."
So, of course they want to sell it for as much as possible.
Uhm, real estate is not exactly unique in this respect. Where I come from, people who sell things generally do so because they want to make money. When I buy a sandwitch from the deli, they want to sell it for as much as possible. As it turns out, "as much as possible" turns out to be about $4.50, because if they charged any more, the losses from people who don't buy sandwitches will outweigh the gains from the increased price. Ditto real estate. The only difference is that people want a house a LOT more than they want roast beef on sourdough, and that difference in desire maps directly onto an increase in price.
There hasn't been enough of a tangible change in that property to justify it's suddenly increased value.
Yes there has. Silicon Valley has suddenly become a black hole of employment for anyone under 30 with a university education. It's nearly impossible to work in Silicon Valley if you live in New York. Therefore lots of people want to buy houses in S.V. More people want it, therefore it is more valuable. That's all there is to it. If a real estate prices a house at more than it's worth, the agent will get offers that are below the asking price. If the agent won't sell for less than the asking price, the buyers will go buy a house fron another, more reasonable agent, who will soon be much richer than the first one.
You keep referring to "the concrete value" of a thing, as though there really were such a thing, outside of how much people will pay for it. There isn't. Take gold. What is the concrete value of a gold bar? Can a chemist measure it's "concrete value" with the right tools? What are it's units of measure (in metric, of course)? The price of gold has been falling for years. Is there some undocumented physical process going on by which the "concrete value" is seeping out of the world's gold? Of course not. There's no such thing as "concrete value." There's just "value." It's units of measure are Dollars (or Yen or Pounds or Euros or whatever), and the only way to measure value is to try and sell it and see what people will pay.
You're right, liquidating MS would not produce $500 billion in assets if liquidated right now. But so what? The people who are paying for Microsoft stock think it's worth $500 billion, and so it is. Part of their calculation of that value is that Microsoft is extremely unlikely to totally liquidate itself in the near (or even long-term) future. It may be broken up by the courts, but that arguably will not result in the destruction of that much value.
It's not what you're missing, it's what you've got, namely a 27" TV with (presumably) good speakers. My TV is a 15-year-old 15" set with a speaker. Yes, you read that right, one speaker. Bye-bye stereo. That makes my computer visually equal and aurally far superior (Cambridge Soundworks subwoofer, baby!) to my TV. Why waste a pile of money on a goot TV setup and a good computer when you can combine the two into one and save yourself the trouble and money?
And yes, have a had friends over to watch movies on my computer, and we had a blast
OK, granted that QNX is the leader in real-time, I still don't see who they're selling this Amiga platform to. I'm sure most of the world's nuclear reactors already have computer systems, and probably don't feel like upgrading to Amiga just now.
Real-time is all very well and good for the technical applications that need it, but that is very much a niche market. There is absolutely no call for a real-time OS on the desktop. OK, maybe it gives you a bit of an edge on multimedia (at least, so they somewhat dubiously claim), but with today's hardware, I am utterly failing to notice any call for improved multimedia performance. And conversely, those folks who need realtime are probably A. not going to use a consumer desktop in the first place, and B. not going to care much whether their OS has the Amiga label or not
By the way, I think Amiga's sudden switch to Linux bears out my argument. Amiga figured out that QNX was a dead-end. In particular, I think they agree with my point that there is no room in this market space for another OS, so they went with one of the existing ones instead.
I just have one question. Who are they expecting to buy this stuff? I can't think of any reason, except for maybe sheer curiousity, to buy this system.
The key to any OS is long-term credibility. People have to believe that your OS will be around in 5 years, or they won't develop for it, they won't invest in it, and they sure as hell won't buy it. There are a few different ways to get long-term credibility. QNX has none of them. You can be the 2000-pound gorilla of the OS world, so big that you are guaranteed to still be around in 5-10 years. This is how Microsoft does it. You can be Open-Sourced, thus guaranteeing that your "air supply" will never be cut off, and you cannot be killed. This is how Linux does it. You can attempt to squeeze in between these two by selling to a market that the others fail to address, a market which is guaranteed not to go away. This approach is somewhat shaky in terms of long-term credibility, which is why Be (selling to multimedia types and computer proffessionals) and Apple (selling to newbies and home users) are so shaky. QNX doesn't even have that. They seem to be pushing QNX as THE platform for QNX developers. Hmmm...
Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs. POSIX support and X windows? Linux. Broad range of hardware support? Linux. Developer tools? Windows. The only original feature they seem to be offering is a superspiffy new hi-tech kernel, and a new GUI. My custom-compiled Linux kernel is running just fine, thank you very much. OS kernels are one area where newer is definitely not better. I want my kernel to be thoroughly tested, tried-and-true. As for the GUI, words fail me. In the extremely unlikely event that QNX has discovered some key aspect of GUI design that will revolutionize my productivity, I'll just download the Gnome/Enlightenment theme for it in a couple of weeks.
Taking all this into consideration, and reading between the lines on their web page, I think I've figured this out. Lacking any concrete market, they've somehow gotten ahold of the Amiga label, and intent to slap it onto a product that has nothing to do with Amiga (Whose real merit was its hardware, anyway) and hope that they can sell it to nostalgic Amiga-lovers. You Amiga folks out there, stay away. You're about to be saddled with an incompatible, dead-end OS with technical merit but no real-world value. Again.
I think those who are saying Metcalfe is out of touch may have a point. Check out the bottom of the article- "Bob Metcalfe is one of very few people who've ever successfully recompiled an operating system." I can only wonder whether he has no clue about Linux, or he really counts the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Linux hackers who have done a kernel recompile over the years as "very few."
Slashdot probably couldn't have been a tech Yahoo. First of all, Yahoo has so little revenue future that its stock valuation is flat-out insane. It's only a matter of time before investors figure this out and its stock price, and Yang and Filo's millions, go south in a big way. When that happens, the phrase "The Next Yahoo" is going to be the kiss of death.
Secondly, Slashdot is all wrong to be a Yahoo anyway. Yahoo is popular because it helps average Joe netuser get where he wants to go, and does so in a thoroughly user-friendly manner. Nearly everyone who surfs the web visits Yahoo at least once, and a lot of people visit it nearly every time they're on-line. Slashdot, on the other hand, appeals to only a niche market, and it's not terribly user-friendly either. You couldn't sustain a business on advertising, not with the kind of traffic levels that Slashdot currently gets. What would happen, inevitably, is that Slashdot would have to go mainstream, to broaden its appeal and attract more visitors, or else start charging for subscriptions. Is that what you really want?
I'm really stumped at to what you mean by "taking the easy money". Did you even read the whole article, or just the headline? This deal is not exactly making Rob and Hemos rich (And didn't you just say you want them to get filthy rich off Slashdot?). It is enabling them to keep the site running, and improve it in a variety of ways. The money wasn't the point, beyond what was needed to keep Slashdot, Rob, and Hemos alive and happy. It wasn't a "horrible business descision," because it wasn't a business descision at all.
Bravo on a smart descision, guys, and best of luck to you and to Slashdot.
So this means that I can arrange tickets in the comfort of my own home by staying up 'til midnight on May 11. Very nice for me. Not so nice for the poor folks who've been sitting in line for the past week and intend to do so for almost the next month, who are now on precisely the same footing as, and have no advantage over, lazy bastards like me on their sofas at home.
Linux has a future on Macs if Apple abandons their policy of not releasing developer info for their hardware. However, for the moment this looks unlikely. Good ol' proprietary Apple, making the world safe for Intel.
I think leadership is really the essence of the problem. As I have posted elsewhere, the hacker community doesn't have that much at stake as far as the OSI is concerned. Furthermore, neither of these guys matters all that much in terms of the software. Fetchmail can go on without ESR, and Debian can go on without Perens. These two aren't really that important. It's our strange relationship with leadership that really makes this such a point of contention.
Note:I must apologize in advance, this comment discusses U.S. politics, albeit in a non-partisan way, for purposes of comparison. My apologies to non-americans, who may not feel the full benefit of the comparison
Hackers as a rule, do not take well to leadership. Witness how ready we are to barbecue anybody who achieves any sort of prominence in the community. Witness my own struggles and failures as president of my high school's computer club. Only the most incredibly self-effacing, such as Linus, are spared. This anti-autoritarian streak is generally a Good Thing, keeping us from being dragged down a questionable path by a charismatic leader. It does, however, give the community an anarchistic character which is sometimes a hindrance.
Despite our hatred of them, we still have a very human need for leaders, if only as someone to blame things on. Thus figures such as RMS, Linus, and ESR rise to prominence and become our communitiy's equivalent of politicians. Unlike politicians, however, their prominence is not totally voluntary. We have so far avoided nosing into their personal lives for the most part. Their every public move, however, is subject to analysis, criticism, opposition, and flameage. The immediacy of the internet gives this a much more personal nature than is common in American politics. One is reminded, however, of William Safire's column a couple years back calling Hillary Clinton a "pathological liar," to which Bill essentially responed (in public, mind you) that if he were not the president, he'd give Safire a punch in the face.
In the case of Perens and ESR, the politician comparison is even more apt, because they have deliberately made themselves very publicly visible, in order to create change, in the community and outside it. And, like many American politicians, their personal rancor is as much for the public's benefit as for each other. There is a reason that this battle is not being waged in private e-mails, but being posted on websites and in mailing lists. Ad hominem arguments make great propaganda, and are surprisingly persuasive, even to us self-describedly smart people. I know my opinions on the APSL jumped back and fourth on a daily basis based solely on whose response I had read most recently. And, as with the Safire incident, what started as an essentially political matter has become very personal.
Reconciliation between ESR and Perens is probably impossible at this point. This particular issue will die out pretty quickly, although the flames will spring up pretty readily whenever the next liscencing debate comes up. The real lesson that I am taking from this, and that I hope others will take from this, is to question leadership. Oddly enough, this anti-authoritarian community has proved surprisingly ready to embrace authority and the assumptions that underlie it. Everyone equates ESR with Open Source, when the two are, of course, separate. ESR's faults are not Open Source's. Likewise, Free Software is more than RMS and Perens. More fundamentally, we are very willing to see these issues in black-and-white terms. Gnome xor KDE. Free Software xor Open Source. This sort of either-or thinking plays right into the hands of politicians. When there are only 2 ways of thinking, you have to not only agree with an idea, but you have to agree with a person, and that gives them power.
So, the real solution to this conflict is not (as I was inclined to suggest) that ESR and Perens shut up. Rather, we need to learn to take them with a grain of salt, and realise why these battles don't have to matter to us. Leadership is useful, and often worthwhile, but not when it limits our options, constrains our thinking, or distracts us from real issues.
Even the non-GPL licenses are strong enough for our purposes. If some company were to create a proprietary program out of software with a BSD- or X11-style license, it would be legal, but they still couldn't claim ownership of the original code. They could have their proprietary version, but we would still have our open version, which would pretty quickly outdistance the proprietary one owing to the advantages of open source development.
Apache, oddly enough, is a great example of the invulnerability of open/free software to conventional corporate attack. When IBM was working their deal with Apache, to include Apache on IBM servers in exchange for enhancements to the Apache NT port (which IBM didn't legally have to do, but did out of good faith), IBM's lawyers had a hell of a time becuase they couldn't figure out who they were signing a contract with- Apache just didn't exist as a legal entity. This led to one suit exclaiming, "You mean, we're signing an agreement with a website?" This same lack of a legal existence means that Apache can never be bought. Nobody can ever own or control it because it doesn't legally exist.
Let's be clear about what is at stake. The OSI is an effort to bring the practicalities, as well as the freedoms, of open-sourced software to the corporate world. In doing so it is trying to make the software world a better place. Who knows whether they will succeed, or are even on the right track. The worst that can happen is that the PHBs sieze on the notion of Open Source, fail to comprehend it and screw up, and move on to the next software fad. The future of Linux, and of free software, is NOT at stake. In other words, we stand to gain if the OSI succeeds, but we do not stand to lose if it fails.
The prospect of Linux, or the free software community in general, selling its soul and becoming corporate or proprietary is nearly impossible. There are several reasons for this.
The hobbyist comparison isn't all that relevant. This is completely different from what Gates was doing. Commercialization and popularity are not what made Microsoft a monster. Proprietary code made Microsoft a monster. Gates, by the way, was a major pusher against piracy in the hobbyist community even before Microsoft. Proprietary, un-free code has always been the foundation of his power. Corporations can profit from free sorftware, to be sure, but not in a heavy-handed Microsoft way.
The community wouldn't allow it. The fact that so many people have qualms about the road we are taking proves that. If Linux were to ever be subverted from its open and free ideals, all Linux development would immediately come to a halt. The recent growth of Linux regardless, the hacker community is still the heart, soul, and guts of Linux. No corporation has a prayer of keeping Linux vibrant without it. That, after all, is the whole message of the OSI, that open source development is not only more equitable and moral, but more effective.
The source is out there. Any attempt to subvert Linux, or any Free/OSS project, and make it proprietary, would fail, because the code is already out there, to be forked and continued openly. Even if somebody could claim ownership, you just can't make several million people delete the code from their computers.
The GPL. Above all, the GPL. Because of the GPL, barring some major revolution in copyright law, nobody can ever claim ownership of Linux, Apache, or any other free/OSS project. Nobody can own it, nobody can buy it, nobody can control it, except in the most trivial sense of, for example, Linus owning the name "Linux." The great merit of the GPL is that it ensures that free software will always be free.
The essence of it is, as long as we are here, as long as we want software that works, works well, and doesn't hold us hostage to the whims of corporate bean-counters, and as long as we are willing to work for it, free software and OSS can never lose.
This has been my one major frustration with the OSI lately. Their closed structure has caused them to apparently miss some important points until it was too late to correct them without losing face. This mailing list is a crucial step towards opening up.
The big questions now are, first, will the OSI's critics join the list, and participate fully in making sure there are no repeats of the ASPL debacle? Secondly, and equally importantly, will the OSI be able to listen to, and act on, the issues that are raised in the list?
This is a wonderful opportunity to begin to reconcile the OSI's proponents and opponents. Let's not blow it. Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, our eyes are on you. In this community especially, actions speak louder than words.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a number of problems with this argument, many of which we've seen before and we'll see again.
One of the first things to notice is that this article isn't thinking, it's emoting. It presents the vague, forboding thoughts of a number of people who, we are assured, know about such things (not to criticize a genius like Arthur C. Clarke, but a great sci-fi writer and an innovative thinker is not necessarily an accurate judge of the future of humanity). Moreover, no concrete ideas or predictions are presented. It's a perfect example of one of the most common errors of bad scientific thinking, the theory cannot be disproved. We are presented with vague references to the end of western civilization and the fall of the information age, all encapsulated into a nicely marketable buzzword- "cyberclysm."
But what, exactly, is this 'cyberclysm'? Will all our hard-drives overflow with information, causing the world to grind to a halt? Will 6 billion people suddenly get sick of it all and simultaneously burn their computers and become primitive herdsmen? Will everyone stop reading magazines and newspapers and books, forcing Katz and the Luddites et al. to get a real job? Nobody seems to know what this cyberclysm will be, they just have a really bad feeling. In fact, there is a reason for this. They make no concrete predictions because they cannot. Any prediction of doom that they could make would expose how utterly ludicrous this concept is. I challenge anyone to come up with a plausible scenario for this cyberclypse which will pass the laugh test when presented to a group of level-headed, intelligent people. I doubt such a scenario exists. Since they can't present rational predictions and ideas, they present us with emotions and feelings and we swallow it whole. It's easier to emote than to think, and there's no easier way to get someone on your side than to appeal to their fear. All of us have second thoughts about our technological lives, and the neo-luddites give us an excuse. "It's not my fault I'm unhappy, it's the societal information glut that's taking away my life."
And, lest we become too convinceed that we are the center of the universe, let us remember that a good 5.5 billion people on this planet, at least, would love to have the luxury of worrying about information overload. "Cyberclysm" seems a pretty strong word for an event that will affect, generously, 10% of the planet's population. Compared to the real problems that most of the people on this planet have to deal with, like whether they can make it through tomorrow without getting shot or bombed or fired or starved to death, this seems rather like whining about the stress brought on by not knowing how to spend all your money.
ANY trend predicts an apocalypse if you extrapolate far enough on a small enough set of data. It's hotter this decade than last decade. If this trend continues, in a thousand years we'll be able to melt lead in our refrigerators. People eat more than they did 30 years ago. In a hundred years, everyone will weigh half a ton and will have to be moved by crane. The number of cars on the street has gone up several million percent since the beginning of the century. By my calculations, the earth's entire mass will be converted to Toyotas in 10 years. As Dilbert says (and as I paraphrase), "I predict huge profitability by assuming that all positive trends will continue indefinitely, and all negative trends are temporary and will reverse themselves within 6 months." Or, to take an example from the late-19th-century version of environmentalism, horses are taking over the world. People were living farther and farther in the suburbs as urban sprawl kicked in, and driving farther and farther to work. As a result, horses were proliferating. Horse dung was inches deep on all the major roads, and grave space for dead horses was running out. The methae-pollution issue alone was extremely serious. Everyone was sure that industrial society would be brought to a halt by the horse crisis. Guess what? It wasn't. Instead someone named Henry Ford came along and made the whole issue moot.
The point is, forces balance. Situations change. Nothing keeps going forever. In this particular case, the cyberclysm prediction comes quite naturally, as long as one ignores any possible balancing forces. But, there are balancing forces here. Human beings are a species of moderation. We don't like extremes, and we tend to seek the middle ground. Any time a major force of change comes into human history, a balancing force immediately arises. The bigger the change, the stronger people's opposition to change.
This argument, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to the ideas of Karl Marx. He saw, in his own time, the power of capitalists seemingly rising out of control, until the inevitable result was a revolution, a capitalclysm if you will, when the system finally collapsed under its own weight. Marx, like the cyberclysm prophets, saw only one trend, one force, acting over a very short time period. He extrapolated this to infinity, predicting that unchecked capitalism would eventually grow so out of control that it would destroy itself. In making this prediction, he ignored that fact that capitalism was never 'unchecked.' He ignored the balancing effects of forces like democracy and the labor movement, which have so far prevented capitalism from achieving this exponential explosion. As a result, we have not had a single Marxist revolution anywhere in the world (and if you think otherwise, why is it that the most ostensibly Communist countries are those which had the least capitalist infrastructure before their revolutions? Shouldn't the revolution against capitalism have happened someplace where they actually had capitalism?).
The same applies here. As technology's role in our lives increases, opposition to it also increases, and people start seeking out more human interaction, and place more importance on getting things done themselves. The information glut begins to be balanced, steadily and smoothly, rather than in an apocalyptic revolution. This is why any specific cyberclysm prediction would sound so ridiculous. We all know how conservative humans are, and we all know that we only allow social trends to go so far before we get uncomfortable. That, in a nutshell, is why there will be no cyberclysm.
We all are used to thinking this way. When we are in a bad mood, the world is headed to hell in a handbasket. When we are in a good mood, things are doing all right, and the world is in its proper order. Our moods, and our own very local perceptions, are blown up into planetary trends. We love to take short term changes and extrapolate them to the end of the world. Katz and the people he's listening to have given in to this temptation.
Where do you stand on the whole Corel Linux beta issue, and why haven't we heard anything from the OSI about it? It would seem to be right up your alley.
Well, dude, as for your not being one of those people, last time I checked there was no astronaut draft, so whether you expose yourself to that risk is entirely up to you, even under the current system
I'm not going to argue the other points, except to say that I agree that privatization should give a more practical, ecconoical grounding to the space program. However, most major technological changes required some degree of government investment in order to get them off the ground, and the space program may still be in that stage. But, I think NASA should be doing everything it can to encourage private space programs, in order to get space travel out of that stage.
I agree with you, though probably for different reasons, that the ISS is a ridiculous project. It's just a bigger space shuttle, going in circles like we've been doing for the last 30 years. What we should be spending that money on is something truly new, like going to Mars, or a permanent manned Lunar station.
I agree 100% that the events at Columbine were interpreted by nearly everyone to fit their own prejudice, and that includes me. I, too, subscribed to the notion that these were geeks striking out against the repressive high school social world we all know and love. Now, I don't know what to think. Perhaps Chris Rock was right about all this when he said "Why can't people just be crazy anymore?" Maybe those two were just psychopaths with guns, and that's all there is to it. Maybe not. It's still too early to know.
Regardless of what happened to Klebold and Harris, what happened to the rest of society is clear. A huge portion of society used the Columbine massacre to reinforce and justify their pre-existing biases against outsiders, be they goths, geeks, gays, or whatever. Klebold and Harris may be beyond explanation, but this was not. It is this fear and hatred which needs to be challenged and combated, not because of what it did to the two killers, but because of what it did to us.
Anyone else wondering where Eric Raymond and the OSI are? This would seem to be right up their alley, but Perens seems to have beaten them to it. Come to think of it, I haven't heard anything out of them since the "Take my job, please" fiasco.
I have been (very mildly) a supporter of Raymond and the OSI for a while, but this is making me wonder. Hackers respect people who get the job done, and right now that looks a lot like Perens, and not Raymond. Come on, OSI, show us there's more to you than hot air!
While I agree that paranoia about child molestation has in some cases gone too far (to wit, "recovered memory" psychology, but that's another rant), this just isn't one of those cases.
I agree that an 18-year-old sleeping with a 16-year old is no problem (and I say this as a (barely) legal adult in a relationship with someone who is (barely) a minor), and as several people have pointed out, the law usually makes exceptions in those cases. Even if such cases aren't covered by the letter of the law, nobody enforces the law in such situations, not even the child-molestation demagouges. That would just be ridiculous, and everyone knows it.
This, on the other hand, is totally different. She was 13, he was 34! Sorry, that's not the same as the difference between me and my girlfriend. For crying out loud, she was still busy being born when he was old enough to drink! One can quibble about the age of consent, and the maximum age difference underneath it, but 13 is just out of the question, as is a 21-year age difference. A 13-year old simply cannot be regarded as an emotional and psychological adult when it comes to handling sexual advances from a middle-aged man.
If he really did what the FBI says he did (and, although the case agains him looks pretty bad, let us not forget the presumption of innocence), I have absolutely no qualms about sending him to jail for as long as the law provides. This case, at least, is no witch-hunt. The laws about this were written for exactly this sort of situation, and to fail to punish this sort of behavior would be unconscionable.
So, while I agree that there are some issues with our current shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to child molestation charges, this is hardly the case to be fighting these issues over.
"Sublicense" means to provide someone else with a license to use the software. Under the GPL (and this point is at the heart of the GPL), anyone has the right to sublicence GPL'ed software. It restricts the license they may grant, and the terms under which they can grant it (namely, that they provide it under the GPL, provide the source, etc.), but it explicitly allows sublicensing by anyone, without permission. If it didn't, I'd have to ask Linus for permission every time I gave someone a copy of Linux, which would defeat the whole purpose of the GPL.
I'm assuming you interpreted "sublicense" to mean "re-license under different terms," which is not correct. "Sublicense" just means to give someone a license when you are not the original owner of the IP in question.
A company hires you to work for them. They have bought (or rather, rented) a product (your labor and skills) which they expect to pay the company back more than they spend on you. As such, they have a certain right (not to say obligation) to ensure that they're getting their money's worth. As I see it, this is perfectly OK, at least within certain bounds.
First, they should make their monitoring policies clear. Monitoring performance is one thing, but secret monitoring is something else. Employees should know what they may be subject to, so that, if they don't like it, they have the option of finding another job without those restrictions. Second, they should monitor only the amount, not the content, of personal communications. As the ACLU rep in the article said, listening in on a phone call to a spouse is illegal, and a similar principle should apply to computers. However, the company should be able to keep an eye on whether the employee is e-mailing their spouse once a day, or every 5 minutes. Thirdly, any information gathered about an employee should be purged when they leave the company, unless said information is to be used in a legal action against the employee. Once the person is no longer employed by them, their right to know anything about her ends.
There is a separate issue, which several posters have pointed out. Regrdless of whether such monitoring is immoral (and I don't think it is, within the above limits), it's just plain bad for business. Nobody wants to work in an environment where they are being monitored 9-5 every day, and the psychological effects of being in an environment like that could be enormous, not to mention the effects of being prevented from taking a break every so often. It is accepted wisdom (does anyone know of any statistics on this?) that people are more productive when they are in a work environment where they feel comfortable, and monitoring their e-mail and calling them in for a meeting with the manager every time they play solitaire is pretty much the opposite of that.
Moreover, using this system to routinely monitor employees is a waste of resources. Looking for embezzlers and such is worthwhile, but not routine, wide-scale moitoring. There are much better ways of measuring an employee than how she uses her computer. The monitoring system measures input- how much time is being spent on work. But an intelligent company will realize that they don't care about inputs. They care about outputs, which are usually easy to measure by more conventional means (how much work the employee is actually getting done). The genius programmer who takes minesweeper breaks every hour, but pours out code at a spectacular rate, is worth more to a company (at least, to a smart company) than a dull, uninspired one who produces less, but faithfully spends all his time in the office doing work (at least, as far as his computer can tell).
I love it! "Markengrabbing" seems a better description of the concept than any comparable english word. I don't know if this duality exists in German, but to this English-speaker, the double meaning (Mark as in money, mark as in trademark) is hilariously appropriate. After all, in this day and age, grabbing trademarks is a much more profitable activity (witness the domain-name gold rush) than grabbing money.
Let me preface this by saying that I am well aware that there has been a fair amount of debate about banning ACs. I am also aware that I haven't paid much attention to this debate, and now I am pretty uninformed as to what the opinions are that are already out there (If someone could point me to a good thread on the topic, that would be cool). With that in mind, here's my thoughts on the AC problem.
As several people have pointed out, there are some problems with the current system. Granted, it does a pretty good job of dealing with trolls who have accounts. However, as several people have pointed out, most of the worst offenders are anonymous, in which case we have to resort to IP-based regulation. This, as several people have pointed out, has its own problems relating to dynamic IPs and so fourth.
Thus, the solution of permitting only people with accounts to post presents itself again. I think this is a very good idea. Here's why:
Studies have shown many times that anonymity has a way of reducing inhibitions. People do things behind a mask that they would never consider doing in broad daylight. Thus, many of the trolls that have been driving everyone so nuts lately probably wouldn't seem that unpleasant if you met them in person. Society imposes many restrictions on behavior which largely hinge on the fact that actions have consequences. If one of these trolls behaved like a troll in the real world, you would quickly find that you have no friends, no life, and your mom has cut off your allowance. Being socially stigmatized is an unbearably unpleasant experience. This can be bad when the stigma is unjustified, as so many of us nerds can attest, but it does impose a certain basic civility on society.
Anonymity short-circuits this whole system. When you're anonymous, you can do whatever you like, and there are no consequences (believe me, getting your messages flamed and moderated down is a bonus, not a consequence). This applies equally well to bathroom walls, prank phone calls, and Slashdot posts. The problem with the internet is that it makes it very easy to be anonymous and loud at the same time, and so the system of civility breaks on a larger scale than ever before.
If you had to have an account on Slashdot to post, this problem would go away fast, whether there were enforcement systems or not. The simple fact of having their masks ripped off would stop 75% of the trolls before they start. Unfortunately, the account still provides a certain degree of anonymity, and so we have enforcement systems to deal with the remaining 25%. Once we have accounts, enforcement by a variety of methods would be easy.
My favorite solution is the digital analog of people ignoring real-world trolls. There ought to be an option whereby I could have all posts from a specific account removed from my comment display, much like I can currently not see postings from Jon Katz if I so desire. Thus, if I get fed up with a particular troll, I can get him out of my face in a completely harmless way. Of course, some people will use this to ignore other people who have legitimate opinions that differ from their own. So what? If people want to be close-minded, let them. The nice thing is that it uses the absence of anonymity the way it's supposed to be used: to allow us to make our own personal choices about who we listen to. This approach hinges on the removal of AC posts.
There are, of course, a few valid reasons for anonymous postings. These constitute 1% (if that) of the anonymous postings on Slashdot right now. However, there are ways of implementing anonymity within the system, so that a person with an account can can make a posting that nobody but the system recognizes as hers. It still counts towards her Karma, and it's still subject to whatever enforcement systems exist (except perhaps the auto-ignore described above), but it permits her to be anonymous as far has her readers are concerned. My own thought is that perhaps one could buy an anonymous posting with some of your Karma (say, 2-3 points), thus ensuring that people only used anonymity when it was genuinely important. In other words, anonymity becomes something that you earn through good citizenship (and I think Karma is a pretty sensible measure of citizenship). In this context, anonymity could become a way to break through the auto-ignore and be heard by the people ignoring you- but it would only be worth using if you really had something worth saying.
Anyway, that's my $2E-2. Comments and criticisms are welcome, flames will be taken to heart and left to fester in what's left of my self-esteem.
I agree, except that rather than having a periodic knock-down, I think a more gradualistic approach might be appropriate. In the same way that only your more recent comments show up in your account summary, only your more recent comments should be used to compute your Karma.
On the other hand, it doen't really matter that much. In my experience, comments don't really get very interesting until they get up to 3. I tend to look at 2s and 1s as almost the same, because for moderation purposes, they almost are- the difference between 1 and 2 is so small that no moderator will bother to adjust those scores. Some of those 2s may be undeserved, but they aren't exactly a huge benefit, for the same reason that they don't tend to get moderated down to a more appropriate 1: it doesn't matter that much.
So yeah, if Rob ever has a free afternoon, a gradual Karma decay might be nice, but it's not that big a deal.
Full disclosure: I was, and may still be, a beneficiary of the automatic 2.
The problem with this idea is, who would do it?
Enough people think that moderators are biased as it is. Giving moderators the power to delete posts would be disastrous. There are an awful lot of moderators, and I'm sure there are a few bad apples among them, even with all the controls that are established. The good thing about the system as it currently stands is that other moderators can counteract the effects of an evil moderator, and possibly even identify him as ineligible for moderation (The system is still vulnerable to the excesses of democracy, but I digress).
Giving the power of deletion to moderators would take away that balance, since once a message is deleted, nobody can undelete it, because nobody will know that it was there, except the poster (who will, of course, start bombarding Rob with e-mail about how he's being censored). I suppose you could set things up so that other moderators could see deleted posts, but then that wouldn't be deletion anymore, it would just be adding a -2 moderation level, which wouldn't really solve anything.
Furthermore, regardless of whether moerators actually did abuse their power, accusations of abuse and censorship would fly back and fourth, and everyone would start b*tching about how they are being censored. It just wouldn't be worth it.
As for CmdrTaco personally doing it, as you seem to be suggesting, that would be even worse. It's not like he doesn't have enough to do, and get enough flameage already, without becoming the Troll Police. There's just too many comments for one person to check them all, especially one person who happens to already be administering the site, and would also be way too much of a strain on that person. Rob claims to have asbestos skin, but I really doubt he'd want to take on this job, considering the (literally) thousands of flames he'd get for it.
The sale price of a house is an almost purely fictional value.
No more or less so than any other price. The price of housing, like the price of pork bellies or any other commodity, is just exactly the equilibrium value between supply and demand. Things cost what they cost because that's how much people will pay in order to maximize the profit of the buyer and the seller. There is no more "real" quanitity underlying price. If you want to put it that way, all prices are "almost purely fictional."
So, of course they want to sell it for as much as possible.
Uhm, real estate is not exactly unique in this respect. Where I come from, people who sell things generally do so because they want to make money. When I buy a sandwitch from the deli, they want to sell it for as much as possible. As it turns out, "as much as possible" turns out to be about $4.50, because if they charged any more, the losses from people who don't buy sandwitches will outweigh the gains from the increased price. Ditto real estate. The only difference is that people want a house a LOT more than they want roast beef on sourdough, and that difference in desire maps directly onto an increase in price.
There hasn't been enough of a tangible change in that property to justify it's suddenly increased value.
Yes there has. Silicon Valley has suddenly become a black hole of employment for anyone under 30 with a university education. It's nearly impossible to work in Silicon Valley if you live in New York. Therefore lots of people want to buy houses in S.V. More people want it, therefore it is more valuable. That's all there is to it. If a real estate prices a house at more than it's worth, the agent will get offers that are below the asking price. If the agent won't sell for less than the asking price, the buyers will go buy a house fron another, more reasonable agent, who will soon be much richer than the first one.
You keep referring to "the concrete value" of a thing, as though there really were such a thing, outside of how much people will pay for it. There isn't. Take gold. What is the concrete value of a gold bar? Can a chemist measure it's "concrete value" with the right tools? What are it's units of measure (in metric, of course)? The price of gold has been falling for years. Is there some undocumented physical process going on by which the "concrete value" is seeping out of the world's gold? Of course not. There's no such thing as "concrete value." There's just "value." It's units of measure are Dollars (or Yen or Pounds or Euros or whatever), and the only way to measure value is to try and sell it and see what people will pay.
You're right, liquidating MS would not produce $500 billion in assets if liquidated right now. But so what? The people who are paying for Microsoft stock think it's worth $500 billion, and so it is. Part of their calculation of that value is that Microsoft is extremely unlikely to totally liquidate itself in the near (or even long-term) future. It may be broken up by the courts, but that arguably will not result in the destruction of that much value.
It's not what you're missing, it's what you've got, namely a 27" TV with (presumably) good speakers. My TV is a 15-year-old 15" set with a speaker. Yes, you read that right, one speaker. Bye-bye stereo. That makes my computer visually equal and aurally far superior (Cambridge Soundworks subwoofer, baby!) to my TV. Why waste a pile of money on a goot TV setup and a good computer when you can combine the two into one and save yourself the trouble and money?
And yes, have a had friends over to watch movies on my computer, and we had a blast
OK, granted that QNX is the leader in real-time, I still don't see who they're selling this Amiga platform to. I'm sure most of the world's nuclear reactors already have computer systems, and probably don't feel like upgrading to Amiga just now.
Real-time is all very well and good for the technical applications that need it, but that is very much a niche market. There is absolutely no call for a real-time OS on the desktop. OK, maybe it gives you a bit of an edge on multimedia (at least, so they somewhat dubiously claim), but with today's hardware, I am utterly failing to notice any call for improved multimedia performance. And conversely, those folks who need realtime are probably A. not going to use a consumer desktop in the first place, and B. not going to care much whether their OS has the Amiga label or not
By the way, I think Amiga's sudden switch to Linux bears out my argument. Amiga figured out that QNX was a dead-end. In particular, I think they agree with my point that there is no room in this market space for another OS, so they went with one of the existing ones instead.
OK, I get it. Mea Culpa.
I just have one question. Who are they expecting to buy this stuff? I can't think of any reason, except for maybe sheer curiousity, to buy this system.
The key to any OS is long-term credibility. People have to believe that your OS will be around in 5 years, or they won't develop for it, they won't invest in it, and they sure as hell won't buy it. There are a few different ways to get long-term credibility. QNX has none of them. You can be the 2000-pound gorilla of the OS world, so big that you are guaranteed to still be around in 5-10 years. This is how Microsoft does it. You can be Open-Sourced, thus guaranteeing that your "air supply" will never be cut off, and you cannot be killed. This is how Linux does it. You can attempt to squeeze in between these two by selling to a market that the others fail to address, a market which is guaranteed not to go away. This approach is somewhat shaky in terms of long-term credibility, which is why Be (selling to multimedia types and computer proffessionals) and Apple (selling to newbies and home users) are so shaky. QNX doesn't even have that. They seem to be pushing QNX as THE platform for QNX developers. Hmmm...
Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs. POSIX support and X windows? Linux. Broad range of hardware support? Linux. Developer tools? Windows. The only original feature they seem to be offering is a superspiffy new hi-tech kernel, and a new GUI. My custom-compiled Linux kernel is running just fine, thank you very much. OS kernels are one area where newer is definitely not better. I want my kernel to be thoroughly tested, tried-and-true. As for the GUI, words fail me. In the extremely unlikely event that QNX has discovered some key aspect of GUI design that will revolutionize my productivity, I'll just download the Gnome/Enlightenment theme for it in a couple of weeks.
Taking all this into consideration, and reading between the lines on their web page, I think I've figured this out. Lacking any concrete market, they've somehow gotten ahold of the Amiga label, and intent to slap it onto a product that has nothing to do with Amiga (Whose real merit was its hardware, anyway) and hope that they can sell it to nostalgic Amiga-lovers. You Amiga folks out there, stay away. You're about to be saddled with an incompatible, dead-end OS with technical merit but no real-world value. Again.
I think those who are saying Metcalfe is out of touch may have a point. Check out the bottom of the article- "Bob Metcalfe is one of very few people who've ever successfully recompiled an operating system." I can only wonder whether he has no clue about Linux, or he really counts the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Linux hackers who have done a kernel recompile over the years as "very few."
Slashdot probably couldn't have been a tech Yahoo. First of all, Yahoo has so little revenue future that its stock valuation is flat-out insane. It's only a matter of time before investors figure this out and its stock price, and Yang and Filo's millions, go south in a big way. When that happens, the phrase "The Next Yahoo" is going to be the kiss of death.
Secondly, Slashdot is all wrong to be a Yahoo anyway. Yahoo is popular because it helps average Joe netuser get where he wants to go, and does so in a thoroughly user-friendly manner. Nearly everyone who surfs the web visits Yahoo at least once, and a lot of people visit it nearly every time they're on-line. Slashdot, on the other hand, appeals to only a niche market, and it's not terribly user-friendly either. You couldn't sustain a business on advertising, not with the kind of traffic levels that Slashdot currently gets. What would happen, inevitably, is that Slashdot would have to go mainstream, to broaden its appeal and attract more visitors, or else start charging for subscriptions. Is that what you really want?
I'm really stumped at to what you mean by "taking the easy money". Did you even read the whole article, or just the headline? This deal is not exactly making Rob and Hemos rich (And didn't you just say you want them to get filthy rich off Slashdot?). It is enabling them to keep the site running, and improve it in a variety of ways. The money wasn't the point, beyond what was needed to keep Slashdot, Rob, and Hemos alive and happy. It wasn't a "horrible business descision," because it wasn't a business descision at all.
Bravo on a smart descision, guys, and best of luck to you and to Slashdot.
So this means that I can arrange tickets in the comfort of my own home by staying up 'til midnight on May 11. Very nice for me. Not so nice for the poor folks who've been sitting in line for the past week and intend to do so for almost the next month, who are now on precisely the same footing as, and have no advantage over, lazy bastards like me on their sofas at home.
I suppose there's still the line for seats, tho.
Linux has a future on Macs if Apple abandons their policy of not releasing developer info for their hardware. However, for the moment this looks unlikely. Good ol' proprietary Apple, making the world safe for Intel.
I think leadership is really the essence of the problem. As I have posted elsewhere, the hacker community doesn't have that much at stake as far as the OSI is concerned. Furthermore, neither of these guys matters all that much in terms of the software. Fetchmail can go on without ESR, and Debian can go on without Perens. These two aren't really that important. It's our strange relationship with leadership that really makes this such a point of contention.
Note:I must apologize in advance, this comment discusses U.S. politics, albeit in a non-partisan way, for purposes of comparison. My apologies to non-americans, who may not feel the full benefit of the comparison
Hackers as a rule, do not take well to leadership. Witness how ready we are to barbecue anybody who achieves any sort of prominence in the community. Witness my own struggles and failures as president of my high school's computer club. Only the most incredibly self-effacing, such as Linus, are spared. This anti-autoritarian streak is generally a Good Thing, keeping us from being dragged down a questionable path by a charismatic leader. It does, however, give the community an anarchistic character which is sometimes a hindrance.
Despite our hatred of them, we still have a very human need for leaders, if only as someone to blame things on. Thus figures such as RMS, Linus, and ESR rise to prominence and become our communitiy's equivalent of politicians. Unlike politicians, however, their prominence is not totally voluntary. We have so far avoided nosing into their personal lives for the most part. Their every public move, however, is subject to analysis, criticism, opposition, and flameage. The immediacy of the internet gives this a much more personal nature than is common in American politics. One is reminded, however, of William Safire's column a couple years back calling Hillary Clinton a "pathological liar," to which Bill essentially responed (in public, mind you) that if he were not the president, he'd give Safire a punch in the face.
In the case of Perens and ESR, the politician comparison is even more apt, because they have deliberately made themselves very publicly visible, in order to create change, in the community and outside it. And, like many American politicians, their personal rancor is as much for the public's benefit as for each other. There is a reason that this battle is not being waged in private e-mails, but being posted on websites and in mailing lists. Ad hominem arguments make great propaganda, and are surprisingly persuasive, even to us self-describedly smart people. I know my opinions on the APSL jumped back and fourth on a daily basis based solely on whose response I had read most recently. And, as with the Safire incident, what started as an essentially political matter has become very personal.
Reconciliation between ESR and Perens is probably impossible at this point. This particular issue will die out pretty quickly, although the flames will spring up pretty readily whenever the next liscencing debate comes up. The real lesson that I am taking from this, and that I hope others will take from this, is to question leadership. Oddly enough, this anti-authoritarian community has proved surprisingly ready to embrace authority and the assumptions that underlie it. Everyone equates ESR with Open Source, when the two are, of course, separate. ESR's faults are not Open Source's. Likewise, Free Software is more than RMS and Perens. More fundamentally, we are very willing to see these issues in black-and-white terms. Gnome xor KDE. Free Software xor Open Source. This sort of either-or thinking plays right into the hands of politicians. When there are only 2 ways of thinking, you have to not only agree with an idea, but you have to agree with a person, and that gives them power.
So, the real solution to this conflict is not (as I was inclined to suggest) that ESR and Perens shut up. Rather, we need to learn to take them with a grain of salt, and realise why these battles don't have to matter to us. Leadership is useful, and often worthwhile, but not when it limits our options, constrains our thinking, or distracts us from real issues.
Even the non-GPL licenses are strong enough for our purposes. If some company were to create a proprietary program out of software with a BSD- or X11-style license, it would be legal, but they still couldn't claim ownership of the original code. They could have their proprietary version, but we would still have our open version, which would pretty quickly outdistance the proprietary one owing to the advantages of open source development.
Apache, oddly enough, is a great example of the invulnerability of open/free software to conventional corporate attack. When IBM was working their deal with Apache, to include Apache on IBM servers in exchange for enhancements to the Apache NT port (which IBM didn't legally have to do, but did out of good faith), IBM's lawyers had a hell of a time becuase they couldn't figure out who they were signing a contract with- Apache just didn't exist as a legal entity. This led to one suit exclaiming, "You mean, we're signing an agreement with a website?" This same lack of a legal existence means that Apache can never be bought. Nobody can ever own or control it because it doesn't legally exist.
Let's be clear about what is at stake. The OSI is an effort to bring the practicalities, as well as the freedoms, of open-sourced software to the corporate world. In doing so it is trying to make the software world a better place. Who knows whether they will succeed, or are even on the right track. The worst that can happen is that the PHBs sieze on the notion of Open Source, fail to comprehend it and screw up, and move on to the next software fad. The future of Linux, and of free software, is NOT at stake. In other words, we stand to gain if the OSI succeeds, but we do not stand to lose if it fails.
The prospect of Linux, or the free software community in general, selling its soul and becoming corporate or proprietary is nearly impossible. There are several reasons for this.
- The hobbyist comparison isn't all that relevant. This is completely different from what Gates was doing. Commercialization and popularity are not what made Microsoft a monster. Proprietary code made Microsoft a monster. Gates, by the way, was a major pusher against piracy in the hobbyist community even before Microsoft. Proprietary, un-free code has always been the foundation of his power. Corporations can profit from free sorftware, to be sure, but not in a heavy-handed Microsoft way.
- The community wouldn't allow it. The fact that so many people have qualms about the road we are taking proves that. If Linux were to ever be subverted from its open and free ideals, all Linux development would immediately come to a halt. The recent growth of Linux regardless, the hacker community is still the heart, soul, and guts of Linux. No corporation has a prayer of keeping Linux vibrant without it. That, after all, is the whole message of the OSI, that open source development is not only more equitable and moral, but more effective.
- The source is out there. Any attempt to subvert Linux, or any Free/OSS project, and make it proprietary, would fail, because the code is already out there, to be forked and continued openly. Even if somebody could claim ownership, you just can't make several million people delete the code from their computers.
- The GPL. Above all, the GPL. Because of the GPL, barring some major revolution in copyright law, nobody can ever claim ownership of Linux, Apache, or any other free/OSS project. Nobody can own it, nobody can buy it, nobody can control it, except in the most trivial sense of, for example, Linus owning the name "Linux." The great merit of the GPL is that it ensures that free software will always be free.
The essence of it is, as long as we are here, as long as we want software that works, works well, and doesn't hold us hostage to the whims of corporate bean-counters, and as long as we are willing to work for it, free software and OSS can never lose.This has been my one major frustration with the OSI lately. Their closed structure has caused them to apparently miss some important points until it was too late to correct them without losing face. This mailing list is a crucial step towards opening up.
The big questions now are, first, will the OSI's critics join the list, and participate fully in making sure there are no repeats of the ASPL debacle? Secondly, and equally importantly, will the OSI be able to listen to, and act on, the issues that are raised in the list?
This is a wonderful opportunity to begin to reconcile the OSI's proponents and opponents. Let's not blow it. Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, our eyes are on you. In this community especially, actions speak louder than words.