No- the GPL is ensuring that the end user of the software is not restricted as to what they can do with such software. This includes redistribution.
I think what the previous poster was aluding to was that if I as a software developer choose to license my code to an end user under the GPL, even for a fee, there is no reason why that end user cannot then give that exact same software away to others.
Should that happen, I suspect that my revenue stream from software sales would dry up. Of course that's the purpose behind service revenue (you want that changed? that'll be $125/hr please) which many others have espoused (RMS, etc).
The upshot is that I really don't believe that the GPL is really appropriate for software that you mean to license for a fee. Of course I could be wrong-- can you (or anyone for that matter) name a company that is profitable from license fees from GPL software?
Umm.... keep in mind that not everything runs on a PC with a hard disk. Sometimes swapping isn't an option-- there's just no where to swap to.
The issue with the question is that it basically states that the user has no upper bounds on how much memory they can manually enter. What should happen is that either (1) when memory fills up, the user cannot enter more; or (2) when memory gets low, deallocate LUTs and shift to real time calculations at the expense of speed (and if memory still fills up, see #1)
Also, it may not be possible to add RAM to the system. I've worked on systems where I only had the 512 BYTES of RAM, plus a 2K ROM. Adding more RAM would have doubled, tripled, or more the cost of the end system which wasn't an option.
Microsoft has a patch out for CODE RED and has for some time. If you're still seeing CODE RED attacks that means that (1) someone is trying to infect you or (2) an infected box is trying to propogate itself.
In #1, it's the equivilant of a sniper trying to shoot out your tires, in #2 its the equivilant of the "other" admin being informed about a recall on thier tires, but not responding to it.
Basically, for the example given, the finger should point squarely at those admins who don't respond to the recall.
There's an interesting article over on CNET that talks about the Mono vs..NET thing.
What I found interesting was the following quote from the article:
Other constraints could hamper an open-source effort as well, Goodhew said. Creating software that implements the CLI standard will require Microsoft technology that will be released through ECMA, Goodhew said. And the license under which that software is released may not be compatible with the licenses that govern Mono and DotGNU, he said.
"Part of the ECMA (standardization process) provides a forum for us to license the intellectual property you will need to have to implement the standard," Goodhew said. "It's up to the implementers to make sure whatever license they choose to use is compatible with the ECMA licensing terms."
So Ximian may not be able to produce what they want to produce.
Frankly, it doesn't sound as if you're anywhere near ready to start your own (successful) business yet. The kind of information you're asking is so very basic that before you should do anything else you should go down to your neighborhood bookstore (B&N, Borders, whatever) and buy some books on the subject. That will start you in the right direction. And if you can't afford to do this, you can't afford your own business.
But, to summarize what you'll read, the single most important thing is planning ahead of time. I'm not talking about where your office will be or which accountant/lawyer to use, I'm talking about a full fledged business plan, including what service/product(s) you plan to offer/sell, how you plan on marketing it, how much you plan on charging, whether the market will bear the cost/competition, etc.
Remember- most new businesses fail not from lack of product, or bad products/services, but from lack of adequate planning, preparation, and research.
You will also need a good bit of cash reserves (setting aside any cash needed for the business). That is, assuming you're planning on going at it full time. A good rule of thumb would be to have enough cash for 6 months to a year just for yourself. My accountant recommended more, luckily my business was profitable in 3 months, you might not be so lucky, then again you may do better. Don't forget to figure in the cost of insurance and the various licenses/bonds you'll need.
After you've got your plan- shoot, the right accountant can help with the business plan (for a fee)- find yourself a good accountant. Explain to him what you want to do, and he'll help you out. These guys are professionals, and you can talk to them with complete candor and frankness since what you discuss will be kept between you. He'll be able to point you to the right place (SBA, Lawyers, banks, etc.) as well as deal with all the necessary tax forms, etc.
Again, and I can't stress this enough, PLAN PLAN PLAN. The old adage of measuring twice and cutting once really applies here.
Most of the high end Marriott hotels (Marriott, Rennaissance) I've stayed at have high speed access in the rooms provided by STSN.
There's a little box on the desk with an RJ-11 connection for modems, a USB port and a 10BaseT connection. The closet has a USB cable and a ethernet patch cable.
It's not free- generally there's a $10/day or so charge for the service.
STSN has a web site at STSN Home with a lookup function to find hotels with the service.
Actually, you may want to re-read the "Certification" topic again.... what they say is that they won't charge royalties on free/no cost games, but that you must still pay the certification fee.
I still don't see how they'll be able to force people to pay this, unless their development kit/API's are restrictively licensed. I can see how it could be "optional", to get a "powered by indrema" sticker or something.
All software applications and hardware accessories must meet technical certification requirement that ensure the end user is guaranteed a first rate, zero-configuration experience.
In terms of software applications Indrema offers two separate certification programs: For Profit Certifications and Free-ware Certification
Both Certification Processes carry a one-time charge for review of each software submission. For Profit Games that will be distributed for profit will also be charged a royalty for each title sold.
Games that are distributed for free, even if they ask for donations, will not be charged a royalty on a per game sold basis. The only charge that applies is the initial certification request.
Generally speaking the insiders can't sell their stock at the IPO. Usually, the stock sold at IPO is registered specifically for the IPO (i.e. the company passed a motion to create more stock for the IPO).
Most of the time it's not considered a good idea to let the people on the inside sell out as soon as the stock is valued and sellable. That's why there's usually a lock out period (180 days or so). If I had been an insider at VA and could sell the day it went IPO, I'd have been sorely tempted to sell everything, take the money and take the next 12 years or so off. That's the reason the investing community usually requires that insiders not be able to sell immediately.
Actually this gets even worse if you're a knowledgable insider- then you're pretty much required to file stating that you're going to sell, and until that filing takes place, you can't.
yet another volatile stock thats going to go up 100 points in the first day and then drop back to its original price
Why would the employees/owners of the company care? They're the ones with the stock options, who'll make a mint, and everyone else will be left carrying the can.
The employee's/owners care because there's a "lock up period" after the IPO where insiders (pretty much anybody having stock options) can't sell their stock. This is usually about 180 days after the IPO date. Then the options still aren't tradable until they're registered with the SEC (and when that happens tends to depend on whether or not TPTB think the employees will dump their options thus driving the stock price down or not).
I was lucky enough to get invovled with a pre-IPO company for 40k options at $1/share, watching it's stock price go from about $8 to almost $50, then drop to the $5 mark before the lockup was up.
Did I sell? yep. And glad of it too, the stock's been dropping into the $2's lately.
The reality is that most people still need to purchase support for their products. Whether that support is paid for honestly via a yearly contract, or via forced upgrades to the latest version of MS-Office due to incompatible file-formats, you're still paying support/maintenance fees for your software, one way or another
The problem with this argument is that OSS tends to cut out the forced upgrade angle since bug fixes, product enhancements, and what not are all provided free (as in beer). Therefore, the only support revenue streams you have are (1) purchase at retail of the distribution (i.e. Red Hat Deluxe) or (2) paid support plans.
This is much different than the continuing cycle of support & upgrade with proprietary softare. Don't forget that most, if not all commercial companies (Microsoft included) can charge for the initial retail, upgrade, and ongoing support revenue.
The bottom line is that you've got to sell a lot of software at $75 a pop (with installation support) to even start to make a dent. And you've got to keep doing it every year.
These SBC (Single Board Computers) are generally used in embedded applications where standard form factor PC's won't work. Additionally, you get the ability to use main-stream/common development tools rather than more esoteric ones. Depending on your market, you can use DOS, Windows, or Linux combined with tried and true development tools such as Visual C++ or gcc. Definitely makes training & debugging much easier.
I've used devices similar to build controllers for therapeutic water beds, various interfaces to hardware (non-computer, i.e. control surfaces on an aircraft, and the like).
When you need them, they're very useful, although generally you're trading size for price. The last intel based device I used was about 5"x8", but the smallest was the ucSIMM Module running the Motorola 68EZ328 or the DIMM PC running an i486.
When you pair up an intel based SBC with the solid state disks from M-Systems that's when things start getting interesting.
I, for one actually like having things like roads and schools and the various federal and/or state agencies dedicated to helping out in times of need -- you know, the little things like the fire department, police department, programs for bringing health care into rural areas, not to mention things like the military and FAA and the list goes on.
Just how do you think those things get paid for, if not for taxes? Like it or not, it is reasonable for the government to collect taxes in order to do those things that the government should do.
I may disagree with the methods used to collect those taxes (I really hate the idea of an "income tax" and would like to see something else), but that doesn't mean that the revenue is not needed.
Neither of us may agree with the way that the monies are spent- but that's what elections are for. If you don't like the way those liberal democrats are spending your hard earned money on social programs, then vote them out. Conversely if you don't like how much money those right winged conservative republicans are pouring into subsidies for big business, throw those bums out too!
No matter how you slice, though, unless we want to live in fear and anarchy we have to have government and that means taxes.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't gripe and complain come April 15...
Tomcat isn't ready for primetime yet. It's lacking many features that JServ already has (and has had for a while now). Just an example, but it still doesn't support servlet reloading. JServ does.
I'm running both side by side, and while I would like to use some of what Tomcat has (ex. support for Servlet 2.2), right now I can only deploy to JServ. Maybe when 3.1 is out I can switch.
You may want to brush up on multi-threaded programming- what you describe is exactly the way it is supposed to work (i.e. the order of thread execution is not guaranteed).
It sounds like you've seriously overdeveloped your app- if you're doing things sequentially, why put the actions in seperate threads? If you actually need threads for something, can the UI functions you describe be in one thread? Perhaps you should sychronize things using events.
YMMV, but I daily do development between 98, NT, Linux, and Solaris (on an UltraSparc) with Java and my code works the same on all platforms. Of course, I'm only doing Server Side applications and am not using AWT or Swing.
I'm not saying Java is all the hype made it out to be. In fact, all of the hype probably did more damage to Java over the long term than helped in the short term, but overall as a language it's not too shabby. As always, you should use the right tool for the job- maybe it's Java, maybe it's C, maybe it's Perl, maybe it's VB or Delphi. Depends on what needs to be done.
For the record, I've never been able to get a client side application using AWT or Swing to work the same between implementations.
Most commercial licenses (like NT) explicitly tell you that it isn't designed to work in life-critical areas like managing a nuclear power plant, hospital life support equipment, etc.
Of course, they'd probably settle anyway, just to try to avoid the bad press ("NT kills premature babies on incubator!" what a PR nightmare that would be)
Just because you're employed by a company, doesn't (necessarily) make you an "insider". The SEC has specific rules that denote who is considered an "insider"- noteably, officers, directors, and "key employees".
Basically, you're prohibited from trading (buying or selling) based on information that is not publicly available. This kind of thing would be major deals, meeting/failing to meet numbers, etc. For the most part, the lowly coders wouldn't really have a clue (other than "will we ship on time" which the PHB may do anyway).
Usually, the company puts out a policy, and you have to agree to the above, and (usually) you can't trade from a week or so before the end of the earnings period until a few days after the earnings are actually released.
With us coders, we just watched the calendar, marked off the blocks of dates we couldn't sell and made sure we had sold before hand. Voila! Cash in the bank!
What is saving the Linux/PowerPC vendors right now is that a Mac is far from an ideal Linux platform - it's relatively expensive and non-expandable for the MIPS compared to a cheap PIII system that'll run the same OS. For the most part, Macs lose as a Linux platform, so Apple isn't losing too much software profit to the Linux vendors (remember, the upgrades cost money now!). If they were losing more, Apple would squash them like bugs.
Maybe, Maybe Not. I just bought one of the new Mac G4/400 boxes specifically because of the price. I've been using various cheap intel boxes and have several problems (with hardware) that necessitated component replacement; not a trivial matter when I am in Florida, and the customer is in California.
As a possible replacement, I bought two Dell P3/600's, but for the price (over $2000 no monitor), when I saw the $1600 price on the G4, well it piqued my interest so I had to get one. Now, I'm not sure how well it performs next to the P3's, but if its anywhere close, then I've got a "brand name" machine (that looks cool) that I can install and (hopefully) reduce any hardware issues.
The only thing I'm a little worried about is having to boot into MacOS (to launch BootX) prior to starting Linux. Of course, I could be mistaken here, since FedEx won't deliver my copy of Yellowdog until this afternoon.
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No- the GPL is ensuring that the end user of the software is not restricted as to what they can do with such software. This includes redistribution.
I think what the previous poster was aluding to was that if I as a software developer choose to license my code to an end user under the GPL, even for a fee, there is no reason why that end user cannot then give that exact same software away to others.
Should that happen, I suspect that my revenue stream from software sales would dry up. Of course that's the purpose behind service revenue (you want that changed? that'll be $125/hr please) which many others have espoused (RMS, etc).
The upshot is that I really don't believe that the GPL is really appropriate for software that you mean to license for a fee. Of course I could be wrong-- can you (or anyone for that matter) name a company that is profitable from license fees from GPL software?
Umm.... keep in mind that not everything runs on a PC with a hard disk. Sometimes swapping isn't an option-- there's just no where to swap to.
The issue with the question is that it basically states that the user has no upper bounds on how much memory they can manually enter. What should happen is that either (1) when memory fills up, the user cannot enter more; or (2) when memory gets low, deallocate LUTs and shift to real time calculations at the expense of speed (and if memory still fills up, see #1)
Also, it may not be possible to add RAM to the system. I've worked on systems where I only had the 512 BYTES of RAM, plus a 2K ROM. Adding more RAM would have doubled, tripled, or more the cost of the end system which wasn't an option.
rob.
Microsoft has a patch out for CODE RED and has for some time. If you're still seeing CODE RED attacks that means that (1) someone is trying to infect you or (2) an infected box is trying to propogate itself.
In #1, it's the equivilant of a sniper trying to shoot out your tires, in #2 its the equivilant of the "other" admin being informed about a recall on thier tires, but not responding to it.
Basically, for the example given, the finger should point squarely at those admins who don't respond to the recall.
What I found interesting was the following quote from the article:
So Ximian may not be able to produce what they want to produce.Frankly, it doesn't sound as if you're anywhere near ready to start your own (successful) business yet. The kind of information you're asking is so very basic that before you should do anything else you should go down to your neighborhood bookstore (B&N, Borders, whatever) and buy some books on the subject. That will start you in the right direction. And if you can't afford to do this, you can't afford your own business.
But, to summarize what you'll read, the single most important thing is planning ahead of time. I'm not talking about where your office will be or which accountant/lawyer to use, I'm talking about a full fledged business plan, including what service/product(s) you plan to offer/sell, how you plan on marketing it, how much you plan on charging, whether the market will bear the cost/competition, etc.
Remember- most new businesses fail not from lack of product, or bad products/services, but from lack of adequate planning, preparation, and research.
You will also need a good bit of cash reserves (setting aside any cash needed for the business). That is, assuming you're planning on going at it full time. A good rule of thumb would be to have enough cash for 6 months to a year just for yourself. My accountant recommended more, luckily my business was profitable in 3 months, you might not be so lucky, then again you may do better. Don't forget to figure in the cost of insurance and the various licenses/bonds you'll need.
After you've got your plan- shoot, the right accountant can help with the business plan (for a fee)- find yourself a good accountant. Explain to him what you want to do, and he'll help you out. These guys are professionals, and you can talk to them with complete candor and frankness since what you discuss will be kept between you. He'll be able to point you to the right place (SBA, Lawyers, banks, etc.) as well as deal with all the necessary tax forms, etc.
Again, and I can't stress this enough, PLAN PLAN PLAN. The old adage of measuring twice and cutting once really applies here.
Most of the high end Marriott hotels (Marriott, Rennaissance) I've stayed at have high speed access in the rooms provided by STSN.
There's a little box on the desk with an RJ-11 connection for modems, a USB port and a 10BaseT connection. The closet has a USB cable and a ethernet patch cable.
It's not free- generally there's a $10/day or so charge for the service.
STSN has a web site at STSN Home with a lookup function to find hotels with the service.
FYI, the Wyndam Checkers hotel is listed.
rob.Just for the record, if someone was curious as to exactly what was fixed in a Windows service pack they could go to The Windows Service Pack Home Page and from there see What was fixed in Win2K Service Pack One which plainly lists problems with a detailed description.
rob.
Actually, you may want to re-read the "Certification" topic again.... what they say is that they won't charge royalties on free/no cost games, but that you must still pay the certification fee.
I still don't see how they'll be able to force people to pay this, unless their development kit/API's are restrictively licensed. I can see how it could be "optional", to get a "powered by indrema" sticker or something.
From the indrema site:
Generally speaking the insiders can't sell their stock at the IPO. Usually, the stock sold at IPO is registered specifically for the IPO (i.e. the company passed a motion to create more stock for the IPO).
Most of the time it's not considered a good idea to let the people on the inside sell out as soon as the stock is valued and sellable. That's why there's usually a lock out period (180 days or so). If I had been an insider at VA and could sell the day it went IPO, I'd have been sorely tempted to sell everything, take the money and take the next 12 years or so off. That's the reason the investing community usually requires that insiders not be able to sell immediately.
Actually this gets even worse if you're a knowledgable insider- then you're pretty much required to file stating that you're going to sell, and until that filing takes place, you can't.
The employee's/owners care because there's a "lock up period" after the IPO where insiders (pretty much anybody having stock options) can't sell their stock. This is usually about 180 days after the IPO date. Then the options still aren't tradable until they're registered with the SEC (and when that happens tends to depend on whether or not TPTB think the employees will dump their options thus driving the stock price down or not).
I was lucky enough to get invovled with a pre-IPO company for 40k options at $1/share, watching it's stock price go from about $8 to almost $50, then drop to the $5 mark before the lockup was up.
Did I sell? yep. And glad of it too, the stock's been dropping into the $2's lately.
You say:
The problem with this argument is that OSS tends to cut out the forced upgrade angle since bug fixes, product enhancements, and what not are all provided free (as in beer). Therefore, the only support revenue streams you have are (1) purchase at retail of the distribution (i.e. Red Hat Deluxe) or (2) paid support plans.
This is much different than the continuing cycle of support & upgrade with proprietary softare. Don't forget that most, if not all commercial companies (Microsoft included) can charge for the initial retail, upgrade, and ongoing support revenue.
The bottom line is that you've got to sell a lot of software at $75 a pop (with installation support) to even start to make a dent. And you've got to keep doing it every year.
These SBC (Single Board Computers) are generally used in embedded applications where standard form factor PC's won't work. Additionally, you get the ability to use main-stream/common development tools rather than more esoteric ones. Depending on your market, you can use DOS, Windows, or Linux combined with tried and true development tools such as Visual C++ or gcc. Definitely makes training & debugging much easier.
I've used devices similar to build controllers for therapeutic water beds, various interfaces to hardware (non-computer, i.e. control surfaces on an aircraft, and the like).
When you need them, they're very useful, although generally you're trading size for price. The last intel based device I used was about 5"x8", but the smallest was the ucSIMM Module running the Motorola 68EZ328 or the DIMM PC running an i486.
When you pair up an intel based SBC with the solid state disks from M-Systems that's when things start getting interesting.
Um... NO.
I, for one actually like having things like roads and schools and the various federal and/or state agencies dedicated to helping out in times of need -- you know, the little things like the fire department, police department, programs for bringing health care into rural areas, not to mention things like the military and FAA and the list goes on.
Just how do you think those things get paid for, if not for taxes? Like it or not, it is reasonable for the government to collect taxes in order to do those things that the government should do.
I may disagree with the methods used to collect those taxes (I really hate the idea of an "income tax" and would like to see something else), but that doesn't mean that the revenue is not needed.
Neither of us may agree with the way that the monies are spent- but that's what elections are for. If you don't like the way those liberal democrats are spending your hard earned money on social programs, then vote them out. Conversely if you don't like how much money those right winged conservative republicans are pouring into subsidies for big business, throw those bums out too!
No matter how you slice, though, unless we want to live in fear and anarchy we have to have government and that means taxes.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't gripe and complain come April 15...
According to the README, SUN says otherwise...
Of course, it is possible that they have native threads, but it hasn't been tested well enough to use in a production environment.
Tomcat isn't ready for primetime yet. It's lacking many features that JServ already has (and has had for a while now). Just an example, but it still doesn't support servlet reloading. JServ does.
I'm running both side by side, and while I would like to use some of what Tomcat has (ex. support for Servlet 2.2), right now I can only deploy to JServ. Maybe when 3.1 is out I can switch.
You may want to brush up on multi-threaded programming- what you describe is exactly the way it is supposed to work (i.e. the order of thread execution is not guaranteed).
It sounds like you've seriously overdeveloped your app- if you're doing things sequentially, why put the actions in seperate threads? If you actually need threads for something, can the UI functions you describe be in one thread? Perhaps you should sychronize things using events.
YMMV, but I daily do development between 98, NT, Linux, and Solaris (on an UltraSparc) with Java and my code works the same on all platforms. Of course, I'm only doing Server Side applications and am not using AWT or Swing.
I'm not saying Java is all the hype made it out to be. In fact, all of the hype probably did more damage to Java over the long term than helped in the short term, but overall as a language it's not too shabby. As always, you should use the right tool for the job- maybe it's Java, maybe it's C, maybe it's Perl, maybe it's VB or Delphi. Depends on what needs to be done.
For the record, I've never been able to get a client side application using AWT or Swing to work the same between implementations.
Most commercial licenses (like NT) explicitly tell you that it isn't designed to work in life-critical areas like managing a nuclear power plant, hospital life support equipment, etc.
Of course, they'd probably settle anyway, just to try to avoid the bad press ("NT kills premature babies on incubator!" what a PR nightmare that would be)
Just because you're employed by a company, doesn't (necessarily) make you an "insider". The SEC has specific rules that denote who is considered an "insider"- noteably, officers, directors, and "key employees".
Basically, you're prohibited from trading (buying or selling) based on information that is not publicly available. This kind of thing would be major deals, meeting/failing to meet numbers, etc. For the most part, the lowly coders wouldn't really have a clue (other than "will we ship on time" which the PHB may do anyway).
Usually, the company puts out a policy, and you have to agree to the above, and (usually) you can't trade from a week or so before the end of the earnings period until a few days after the earnings are actually released.
With us coders, we just watched the calendar, marked off the blocks of dates we couldn't sell and made sure we had sold before hand. Voila! Cash in the bank!
Maybe, Maybe Not. I just bought one of the new Mac G4/400 boxes specifically because of the price. I've been using various cheap intel boxes and have several problems (with hardware) that necessitated component replacement; not a trivial matter when I am in Florida, and the customer is in California.
As a possible replacement, I bought two Dell P3/600's, but for the price (over $2000 no monitor), when I saw the $1600 price on the G4, well it piqued my interest so I had to get one. Now, I'm not sure how well it performs next to the P3's, but if its anywhere close, then I've got a "brand name" machine (that looks cool) that I can install and (hopefully) reduce any hardware issues.
The only thing I'm a little worried about is having to boot into MacOS (to launch BootX) prior to starting Linux. Of course, I could be mistaken here, since FedEx won't deliver my copy of Yellowdog until this afternoon.
Rob