Actually, the other main difference. Someone playing with a platform only risks things for themselves and other 'take no responsibility' people who download their changes.
When you are developing for a platform professionally, you and your company are responsible for building stable code that will effect non-coders who purchase the device. They are also responsible for dealing with 'my widget doesn't' work!' customer complaints, which a hobbyist can choose to ignore if they want to with any financial repercussions.
The same difference between a hobby and a profession.
Someone playing with a platform is doing it for their own (and community) fun. Someone developing for a platform is making their living off it and intends some part of their work to be sold to users.
There is also a matter of scale. Someone playing with a system might burn 10-20 hours a week on it, while a professional might be investing 40-60 hours/week on it.
I admit I am playing with a conceptual difference here, but GPLv3, in embedded space, is really gearing twards one conceptual group over the other.
GPLv3 does very little for 'developers', in fact it makes life more difficult for people who actually develop software. The group it does help are people who buy consumer devices (notice how industrial ones are exempt?) and want to fiddle around with them by putting different software on them. These people are not 'developing' for the platform, they are playing with it.
And keep in mind, GPLv3 does nothing to change a tinker's ability to look at or alter code, it merely stops embedded systems manufacturers from using a signing system on the hardware to prevent unauthorized software from running on it.
Re:So why can't the USER put it back in?
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, but no big powerful companies are in a position to sue Ford out of existence if people make after-market mods. Tivo faces very real legal threats that it really can not afford to fight.
As for your options... (b) is what they will probably have to do, which will once again make life worse for everyone, including the 1% who want to tinker. (c) will not help since the tinkerers will then start complaining that they are not being allowed to buy thier Tivo (since leasing is apparently also evil). (a) just doesn't make sense.. their 'model' in this case is 'not get sued into bankruptcy'.
And yes, they used to be able to sell Tivo before that had features like this, and they got threatened for doing it. They didn't wake up one day and say 'hey! let us screw our users and take away a really popular feature for no reason besides feeling like jerks!'.. they woke up one day and said 'if we keep this feature, we very well might not be able to sell ANY Tivos again, so sacrifice one feature to save the rest'.
I also find it amusing that the people who want to tinker with their Tivo are failing to support Neuro's DVR. So instead of rewarding a company that is trying to appeal to the FSF people, they are punishing a company that isn't 'doing enough'.
And the FSF wonder why embedded companies don't like them. People aren't willing to vote with their time or their wallets and help companies that do get it.. all they do is whine and make life difficult for companies that are giving back but still close their device.
They removed the ad-skipping because if they didn't, they would have to stop making Tivos. They couldn't let people add them back in for the same reason. If they wanted to keep making their machines for 99% of people, they had to stop 1% from changing the software on them.
So now they will probably have to stick with GPLv2 code, or switch to something non-linux based. So say goodby to any contributions back to the community they could have made.
Oh, it is legal and verified (though it is not unheard of for individuals to rig the machines anyway,.. I see cases of that every couple years), but it is still cheating from a player's (or public's) perspective. And casinos generally do not like talking about that bit of code.
Especially one ones that adjust their payout based off behavior of the last few minutes (i.e. anti-rapist code) so that if someone is doing well at the machine it will intentionally skew the odds further.
I am actually surprised the casino is risking brining this to court, if they do.
Gambling machines are weighted to weighted to cheat in favor of the casino. It could easily be argued, if the public was more aware of this, that designing the software to make sure enough people loose money would be more illegal then a bug causing the user to win more often then loose.
I think it is less outrage and more people see it as really petty and annoying to push "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux".
In addition to sounding childish, people generally don't like someone trying to explicitly control their use of language. Actually, that last bit does include a little outrage. People really don't like being told which word to use for something. It takes language from being democratic to being autocratic and there will always be people for whom that REALLY gets under their skin... and when a group that loves throwing around the word 'Freedom' does it, then it gets ironic, hypocritical, and downright grating.
True, while there is a need someone will be willing to fill it for the right price.
But I am not sure that taking the incentive for closed source away will create paid open source possitions. It is true that not all open source developers depend on closed-source income, but those cases usually still depend on selling _something_, usually a service or customization. Which again returns to in-house or web-style work. So they get their money via other companies that are doing something not directly software related.
The current ecosystem/model supports both closed and open development because there is room for both. Open source is not really the best way to fill the needs that closed software does and we would be a much less rich and varied environment without them.
Oh, and the game industry would be wiped out pretty quickly to say the least (that is the perspective I am coming from personally... embedded game products, including a tournament system that could not exist if it was open source, period)
You forget the next step.. open source software dies because any programmer who isn't doing web-work or in-house development for a company that only has software as a side effect finds themselves out of a job.
In other words, the 'community' no longer has the leisure time to develop stuff like this.
This is true, and the forums I watch are pretty alight with people commenting and complaining.
The problem is, the bdsm community is a lot like the game community... the activist part tends to be small but fairly vocal, but easily drowned out by 'moral majority' types. Companies might make small concessions (like renaming 'so called BDSM' to 'BDSM') but they generally won't take a chance going much further.
And of course, both communities suffer from the 'think of the children! there might be pedophiles!' taint.
People will care about AO games if companies start producing good AO games.
Right now because being rated AO makes selling a game so difficult the only ones that bother are 'shock' games that do nothing but focus on sex or super-bloody-violent. There is no point in making a game that _touches_ on sex for instance.
If there was a good channel for distributing AO games and a console allowed them, I could easily see attractive games being produced that integrated topics such as sexually in a mild way rather then avoiding it completely.
Imagine how much movies would suck if you had nothing between 'R' and 'XXX'. Plenty of movies exist that have adult themes in them as elements.. but if anything over 'R' was banned by DVD manufacturers (the equiv of not being able to produce a console title) then all that would go away... and you would have nothing but R (violence only, sex would not be ok) and 'Adult' movies.
I will agree that you should be able to modify your phone to run on Sprint's network (assuming it is the same protocol), but these networks are only 'kinda' public.
They are a public trust, but in order to gain access to them you have to have your equipment and software stack reasonably validated to make sure they won't mess up the network for other uses. This gets into the tricky issue of 'rights of the individual' vs 'rights of the group', but also quickly gets into the other sticky area, 'responsibilities of the individual'.
An older example: people keep bringing up how evil the phone companies used to be in that they did not allow other phones or answering machines etc to connect to the phone system. It seems like a silly complaint now since we look around and see all sorts of 3rd party phones. What people don't stop to realize is that the phone companies had a good ligitiment reason to not want to worry about 3rd party devices plugging into a rather simple switched network where one poorly designed unit could ruin service for thousands of people. Stability was a real issue at the time. The solution? Modern phone equipment is validated to make sure it is safe to use on the public networks.
Anyone _can_ go through this validation, but it takes the time, energy, and resources of a validation company to do so it is a little outside the price range of the average hobbyist. While this sounds horrible for the 'little' guy, believe me, you don't want any schmuck hooking up their equipment to a network you depend on.
Now, in modern days, the phone network also has more safties built into it. This took time and money, and probably could have killed a young industry (safely supporting any random 3rd party on critical networks is expensive).
So back towards responsibility.... ok, people want to fiddle with their iPhones. But how many of then want to deal with the consequences of some malformed packet they send out knocking people off the cell network. Apple was underwritten so they have some legal coverage and insurance against this happening.. but some random person? Those kinds of fines can ruin you, and eris forbid you knock out an emergency service call and someone ends up dead.
You forget that making a game cross platform also increases development time while cutting features since they have to write and test on multiple hardware platforms then optimize for the lowest common denominator.
For instance, if the PS3 is good at X but bad at Y, and the xbox 360 is good at Y but bad at X, then the engine developers generally will develop something that avoids both X and Y.
Granted this can be mitigated (for instance, a title released for PS3/360 will probably have a better graphics set then a Wii but little else different) but this method comes at the cost of complexity, code space, and testing time.
So cross platform ends up hurting everyone a little, while single platform hurts everyone who doesn't have that console quite a bit but skips a lot of the mess for the people who DO have them.
"Device" is the key word here. You are free to take apple's GPLed software that they modified and continue to modify it. You can even build your own device and install the software on it if you like.
You are not free to take a closed device designed to run on a closed network and change the software it is running.
GPL should cover software... it is disturbing that it also tries to change the behavior of the specific hardware that the software runs on.
Re:tivoisation
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with this type of argument is you are having to force your technical design based off idealogical legal requirements.
'Rolling the dice' on the server for a large number of connections is more secure and correct, but can be sufficiently inefficient as to make games unplayable. When possible, technical decisions should be made on technical merits.
The big question I would add to this.. who ended up with them?
If no one can find the paperwork or hardware, it would not surprise me if someone had used the schools purchasing system to resell some hardware for lining their own pockets.
So I am curious why they are not doing a bit of a legal investigation here. As far as we know, it could have been the IBM sale's rep who was involved.
*nod* I admit I was thinking in terms of only one application being loaded (possibly even replacing init), no daemons, and all threads being owned by either the kernel or the single application. So I probably should have specified that static takes up less RAM if and only if only one copy of the library needs to be loaded.
But as you point out, it all depends on exactly what is going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the other main difference. Someone playing with a platform only risks things for themselves and other 'take no responsibility' people who download their changes.
When you are developing for a platform professionally, you and your company are responsible for building stable code that will effect non-coders who purchase the device. They are also responsible for dealing with 'my widget doesn't' work!' customer complaints, which a hobbyist can choose to ignore if they want to with any financial repercussions.
The same difference between a hobby and a profession.
Someone playing with a platform is doing it for their own (and community) fun.
Someone developing for a platform is making their living off it and intends some part of their work to be sold to users.
There is also a matter of scale. Someone playing with a system might burn 10-20 hours a week on it, while a professional might be investing 40-60 hours/week on it.
I admit I am playing with a conceptual difference here, but GPLv3, in embedded space, is really gearing twards one conceptual group over the other.
Not really.
GPLv3 does very little for 'developers', in fact it makes life more difficult for people who actually develop software. The group it does help are people who buy consumer devices (notice how industrial ones are exempt?) and want to fiddle around with them by putting different software on them. These people are not 'developing' for the platform, they are playing with it.
And keep in mind, GPLv3 does nothing to change a tinker's ability to look at or alter code, it merely stops embedded systems manufacturers from using a signing system on the hardware to prevent unauthorized software from running on it.
Yes, but no big powerful companies are in a position to sue Ford out of existence if people make after-market mods. Tivo faces very real legal threats that it really can not afford to fight.
As for your options... (b) is what they will probably have to do, which will once again make life worse for everyone, including the 1% who want to tinker. (c) will not help since the tinkerers will then start complaining that they are not being allowed to buy thier Tivo (since leasing is apparently also evil). (a) just doesn't make sense.. their 'model' in this case is 'not get sued into bankruptcy'.
And yes, they used to be able to sell Tivo before that had features like this, and they got threatened for doing it. They didn't wake up one day and say 'hey! let us screw our users and take away a really popular feature for no reason besides feeling like jerks!'.. they woke up one day and said 'if we keep this feature, we very well might not be able to sell ANY Tivos again, so sacrifice one feature to save the rest'.
I also find it amusing that the people who want to tinker with their Tivo are failing to support Neuro's DVR. So instead of rewarding a company that is trying to appeal to the FSF people, they are punishing a company that isn't 'doing enough'.
And the FSF wonder why embedded companies don't like them. People aren't willing to vote with their time or their wallets and help companies that do get it.. all they do is whine and make life difficult for companies that are giving back but still close their device.
They removed the ad-skipping because if they didn't, they would have to stop making Tivos.
They couldn't let people add them back in for the same reason. If they wanted to keep making their machines for 99% of people, they had to stop 1% from changing the software on them.
So now they will probably have to stick with GPLv2 code, or switch to something non-linux based. So say goodby to any contributions back to the community they could have made.
Oh, it is legal and verified (though it is not unheard of for individuals to rig the machines anyway,.. I see cases of that every couple years), but it is still cheating from a player's (or public's) perspective. And casinos generally do not like talking about that bit of code.
Especially one ones that adjust their payout based off behavior of the last few minutes (i.e. anti-rapist code) so that if someone is doing well at the machine it will intentionally skew the odds further.
I am actually surprised the casino is risking brining this to court, if they do.
Gambling machines are weighted to weighted to cheat in favor of the casino. It could easily be argued, if the public was more aware of this, that designing the software to make sure enough people loose money would be more illegal then a bug causing the user to win more often then loose.
I think it is less outrage and more people see it as really petty and annoying to push "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux".
In addition to sounding childish, people generally don't like someone trying to explicitly control their use of language. Actually, that last bit does include a little outrage. People really don't like being told which word to use for something. It takes language from being democratic to being autocratic and there will always be people for whom that REALLY gets under their skin... and when a group that loves throwing around the word 'Freedom' does it, then it gets ironic, hypocritical, and downright grating.
Or even worse, you might work for a corporation!!!!
Only bad people work for corporations... good people work for non-profits or in academia.. or give talks for a living.
True, while there is a need someone will be willing to fill it for the right price.
But I am not sure that taking the incentive for closed source away will create paid open source possitions. It is true that not all open source developers depend on closed-source income, but those cases usually still depend on selling _something_, usually a service or customization. Which again returns to in-house or web-style work. So they get their money via other companies that are doing something not directly software related.
The current ecosystem/model supports both closed and open development because there is room for both. Open source is not really the best way to fill the needs that closed software does and we would be a much less rich and varied environment without them.
Oh, and the game industry would be wiped out pretty quickly to say the least (that is the perspective I am coming from personally... embedded game products, including a tournament system that could not exist if it was open source, period)
You forget the next step.. open source software dies because any programmer who isn't doing web-work or in-house development for a company that only has software as a side effect finds themselves out of a job.
In other words, the 'community' no longer has the leisure time to develop stuff like this.
This is true, and the forums I watch are pretty alight with people commenting and complaining.
The problem is, the bdsm community is a lot like the game community... the activist part tends to be small but fairly vocal, but easily drowned out by 'moral majority' types. Companies might make small concessions (like renaming 'so called BDSM' to 'BDSM') but they generally won't take a chance going much further.
And of course, both communities suffer from the 'think of the children! there might be pedophiles!' taint.
People will care about AO games if companies start producing good AO games.
Right now because being rated AO makes selling a game so difficult the only ones that bother are 'shock' games that do nothing but focus on sex or super-bloody-violent. There is no point in making a game that _touches_ on sex for instance.
If there was a good channel for distributing AO games and a console allowed them, I could easily see attractive games being produced that integrated topics such as sexually in a mild way rather then avoiding it completely.
Imagine how much movies would suck if you had nothing between 'R' and 'XXX'. Plenty of movies exist that have adult themes in them as elements.. but if anything over 'R' was banned by DVD manufacturers (the equiv of not being able to produce a console title) then all that would go away... and you would have nothing but R (violence only, sex would not be ok) and 'Adult' movies.
or more importantly, picking on the bdsm community doesn't inconvenience anyone who wants to admit it.
I will agree that you should be able to modify your phone to run on Sprint's network (assuming it is the same protocol), but these networks are only 'kinda' public.
They are a public trust, but in order to gain access to them you have to have your equipment and software stack reasonably validated to make sure they won't mess up the network for other uses. This gets into the tricky issue of 'rights of the individual' vs 'rights of the group', but also quickly gets into the other sticky area, 'responsibilities of the individual'.
An older example: people keep bringing up how evil the phone companies used to be in that they did not allow other phones or answering machines etc to connect to the phone system. It seems like a silly complaint now since we look around and see all sorts of 3rd party phones. What people don't stop to realize is that the phone companies had a good ligitiment reason to not want to worry about 3rd party devices plugging into a rather simple switched network where one poorly designed unit could ruin service for thousands of people. Stability was a real issue at the time. The solution? Modern phone equipment is validated to make sure it is safe to use on the public networks.
Anyone _can_ go through this validation, but it takes the time, energy, and resources of a validation company to do so it is a little outside the price range of the average hobbyist. While this sounds horrible for the 'little' guy, believe me, you don't want any schmuck hooking up their equipment to a network you depend on.
Now, in modern days, the phone network also has more safties built into it. This took time and money, and probably could have killed a young industry (safely supporting any random 3rd party on critical networks is expensive).
So back towards responsibility.... ok, people want to fiddle with their iPhones. But how many of then want to deal with the consequences of some malformed packet they send out knocking people off the cell network. Apple was underwritten so they have some legal coverage and insurance against this happening.. but some random person? Those kinds of fines can ruin you, and eris forbid you knock out an emergency service call and someone ends up dead.
Almost.
You forget that making a game cross platform also increases development time while cutting features since they have to write and test on multiple hardware platforms then optimize for the lowest common denominator.
For instance, if the PS3 is good at X but bad at Y, and the xbox 360 is good at Y but bad at X, then the engine developers generally will develop something that avoids both X and Y.
Granted this can be mitigated (for instance, a title released for PS3/360 will probably have a better graphics set then a Wii but little else different) but this method comes at the cost of complexity, code space, and testing time.
So cross platform ends up hurting everyone a little, while single platform hurts everyone who doesn't have that console quite a bit but skips a lot of the mess for the people who DO have them.
"Device" is the key word here. You are free to take apple's GPLed software that they modified and continue to modify it. You can even build your own device and install the software on it if you like.
You are not free to take a closed device designed to run on a closed network and change the software it is running.
GPL should cover software... it is disturbing that it also tries to change the behavior of the specific hardware that the software runs on.
The problem with this type of argument is you are having to force your technical design based off idealogical legal requirements.
'Rolling the dice' on the server for a large number of connections is more secure and correct, but can be sufficiently inefficient as to make games unplayable. When possible, technical decisions should be made on technical merits.
The big question I would add to this.. who ended up with them?
If no one can find the paperwork or hardware, it would not surprise me if someone had used the schools purchasing system to resell some hardware for lining their own pockets.
So I am curious why they are not doing a bit of a legal investigation here. As far as we know, it could have been the IBM sale's rep who was involved.
I think anyone who won't even be told _why_ they lost or have the ability to appeal deserves some sympathy.
Regardless of the merits or guilt of the case, the small claims system has an issue here that has clear abuse potential.
*nod* I admit I was thinking in terms of only one application being loaded (possibly even replacing init), no daemons, and all threads being owned by either the kernel or the single application. So I probably should have specified that static takes up less RAM if and only if only one copy of the library needs to be loaded.
But as you point out, it all depends on exactly what is going on.
I read 'too much to bear' as taking too much system resources rather then 'too hard'.
In an embedded system dynamic linking can eat up scarce resources. Static linking is faster to load, faster to run, and takes up less ram.
The interesting question then will be, what kinds of porn will the censor?
pornotube and xtube _do_ have restrictions on what you can upload.
Yet that is exactly what is happening.
It is also the reason I have not been interested in playing any of the new FF titles.
Conversely, I loose my cable modem connection about once a month or so, but the T1 has only been down once in the 5 years that I've been here.