If the authors have the right to pull the GPL, then wouldn't they have right to make previously free code closed source?
Yes and no. The license (GPL) is not revocable. However the owner of the copyright can do whatever he wants with the code, he is not subject to the license. It's perfectly legal to release the same code under multiple licenses simultaneously for instance, as Trolltech for instance does.
Say, for example, Microsoft wants to rein in all of the Linux code for which they have copyright (It is most likely quite a bit).
ROTFLMAO Yeah sure they do. I got some seafront property in oklahoma for sale too...
Would there be no legal problems with them doing so, thus crippling Linux?
EVEN IF they gained title to part of the kernel code, no they couldn't do that. To do that they would have to have title to ALL of it. This is why it's pretty well impossible for any large GNU project to ever go closed - too many people have copyrighted code in it, to close it you have to have every one of them sign on. Good luck just finding them all. And even if you did manage to find every single kernel hacker, and get each and every one to sign over their copyrights to you, the license is still not revocable. So all that would buy you would be the right to release a closed kernel - NOT to revoke the licenses on the kernels already released. So all that happens is the code forks.
Ummm... actually I work for Echostar, although I'm in the software side of the house working on our new Linux based set-top box.:-)
Ahh, thanks for making that clear. Our experiences are from radically different perspectives. I live in a rural area, with satellite the only option for tv. I don't mean the only option for premium channels, I mean the only option for TV period (well we get in one broadcast channel, but the signal is too weak to get video - it's sound only:P) Not that I am much of a TV person, but in this day and age it's nearly a necessity, and of course in this sort of community all the neighbors know each other and talk - they all have satellite TV in one form or another too.
The C-Band dishes just aren't an option for most people in an urban area.
No, but in urban areas there are broadcast television stations and cable.
Do you seriously think this is going to be a viable competitor to cable modems in areas where they are available? I wouldn't count on it. I get the impression a lot of cable modem users are into networked gaming...
As far as getting stuck with a "custom" dish, it's not much of an issue since we are giving away the dish, set-top and installation for free when you sign up for service.
That seems to be a fairly common offer with small dishes, several neighbors have gotten that sort of deal on tv service. It seems like a good deal at first, because of the low-to-no initial investment. But over a period of time the higher cost of service nullifies the advantage. We've had our C-Band for 6 years now, and compared to the small-dish solution we considered at that time, we made the initial hardware investment back before the first two years were up. The neighbors that got the small dishes have always wound up feeling like they got snookered.
In retrospect I do think my initial assessment was probably a bit harsh. We have people trying to sell us a small dish (for tv) all the time, and there is a kneejerk reaction that has grown out of the past 6 years experience against that, which I am afraid coloured my original post inappropriately. I certainly am not interested in the small dish television service, however if the price was right adding a small dish for internet only would make sense. We'll have to see how it compares with DSL though - the local phone company has announced DSL availability within the next month - it remains to be seen whether they can deliver. Their standard dial-up service has certainly not lead me to have high hopes.
From your comments I surmise you have no experience with satellite TV.
The reason EchoStar likes little dishes is because they tune only one satellite - the one EchoStar (or their competion if it's not an EchoStar dish) uses. Hence the "lock-in" factor I mentioned. The large (typically called "C-Band" although it can also access other bands) dish can access any satellite, and the large dish owner can buy programming from a number of competing providers, at lower cost because of the competiton of course, in addition to having access to hundreds of free channels.
If you had the choice between a standard modem that could access any ISP, and a custom modem that worked only with one ISP (and becomes useless if that ISP goes under, or if you decide for some reason to go to another,) would you really want the latter?
What are you doing wrong? On my machine (K6-233, 48 megs ram, much smaller and slower than yours) GTK apps work just fine. So you've gotta be doing something strange here.
Btw, did you see any improvement from the recompile? From what I've read the PIII is pretty well optimised for 386 code, and any gain from the pentium optimisation would be minor and likely offset by the larger size. Did you see any improvements when you recompiled?
everything they've done has been a favor...they're not legally (or even morally) bound to do ANYTHING for the "linux community".
Quite correct. No on is obligated to buy their product either. Vote with your dollars.
However, they currently have two engineers working full time on linux drivers, and they will be out "soon."
And they'll be binary only, which means they'll be useless for other operating systems, useless for linux on non x86 hardware, useless for configurations they don't anticipate, useless when the next xfree upgrade hits, contain bugs that you will not be able to fix...
XFree 4.0 has only been out for a month or so...give NVIDIA some time to make their driver...they're basically porting their whole driver architecture to Linux from Windows, and the code is apparently EXTREMELY complex. The last word I heard is that they're due out very soon...give them until May or so, then send a few (polite) email messages.
You can do this if you want. The last thing I want is a windows driver on linux. I'll just buy from their competitors. ATI and Matrox make damn fine hardware and provide enough information for open source drivers to be written.
Will iSKY support all platforms i.e. Macintosh, Linux, Solaris?
iSKY is planning on being able to support all platforms including Macintosh, Linux, Solaris and Windows. Basically the iSKY system will work no differently than a typical LAN.
That's good. The bad part is they're partnered with EchoStar and won't support the use of real satellite dishes, just those stupid mini dishes. Everyone wants to create a little lock-in I guess. Everyone but the clueful customers. I predict that they will not get enough customers and eventually go bankrupt. It's a shame, I could really use the bandwidth, even with the latency, but it looks like I'll be sticking with my dialup. DSL is supposed to be coming soon anyhow.
not if I want to make additions to it and publish my additions.
Let's see, what you are saying is you want to take a complex program that hundreds of developers spent millions of man-hours on, change a couple lines, sell it, and give those developers nothing. Sounds fair, right? If it's good enough for Bill Gates...
If you code something extensive enough to make a stand alone product, nothing is stopping you from making it a binary only product and selling it whether it's written for BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac, OS/2, etc. Whether anyone with a brain will want it is a different matter, but you are free to try. If you code something that cannot stand alone, an extension to another program, you have to abide by the license the programmers that wrote the original program specified. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
Filtering software in libraries is not censorship either. Everyone here gets all bent out of shape when there is a story on any corporation and their policies.
If it's a private library, no it's not censorship. It's stupid, and defeats the entire purpose of a library, but it's not censorship. Censorship would be bullying a sites ISP into yanking it, not blocking access to it on a particular machine that a particular person owns.
Last week, a FSF lawyer promoted anarchy, and many here cheered on. There is no such thing as a part time anarchist.
Anarchy doesn't mean anyone has an obligation to propogate your message at their expense, any more than freedom of speech does.
How very strange. It is at -2. Didn't realise that was possible, but I browse at -1 and at the end of the article is a note that there is 1 comment below my threshold... of course after manually changing to -2 I find out it's just a stupid troll waste of bandwidth *sigh* if you guys are gonna troll at least learn how to do it right? Is that too much to ask? Good trolls make people think - bad trolls just waste bandwidth.
Oh, btw, it's not censorship. You can yell censorship all you want, it just proves you don't know what the word means. The right to speak doesn't imply the right to commandeer someone elses resources to propogate your speech. This is the same argument all the lame email spammers use, and it's just as much pure BS in either case. Taco should log UberTroll's IP and send a nice little letter to his ISP...
[If Linux...] were under the BSD license someone could actually make a profit on it by securing their own work.
You mean by "securing" someone elses work, at least be honest. If you want to sell your own work you wouldn't care what license someone elses work was under, now would you?
BSD is a great system. Too bad it's under a license that invites parasites like you to steal it and resell it.
Your reply suffers from a lack of vision. You see "private schools" and you think of a private monopoly, as our "public schools" are a monopoly now. But what we are talking about is de-monopolising.
An effective school is not something that requires large sums of money. Absent government regulations like we are trying to repeal, the barriers to entry are quite low. Many many people are home-schooling their children now, and on average doing a great job even measuring by the tests the monopolists devised! In a world with seperation of school and state, you would not be forced to send your child to Pinkerton High, you would have an almost infinite range of choices. The catholics still have their own schools, despite decades of assault on them. With the end to the assault, more would come into being very quickly - religous and secular. Any one of the people who are now home-schooling their own children could easily (and in almost all cases would be glad to) open their doors to their neighbors children, perhaps for a small fee to help them defray their expenses, just so they can do what they love doing - raising children in a stimulating, natural educational environment.
One of Mann's primary goals was to produce a population that would willingly work in factories - the free people of these united States in those days generally would not do so for more than a couple years - to save a nest egg and start their own business.
Please, read more on this before you make up your mind, a great place to start is with the writings of John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991. Several of his pieces are available on the web, links and short excerpts are here.
It seems unlikely because you don't know the real history. It's still true. In the early 1800s Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and found that "There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare." That was a full 30 years before the first cumpulsory indoctrination camps were founded in this country.
My grandfather, born in 1901 (he died recently) in quite possibly the poorest county in the country, had a 6th grade education, dearly paid for by himself and his parents not "given" to him by a public school system. That 6th grade education was superior to what most college grads have now, he could read and write not only english but also latin, well, and a very small amount of greek. He knew more history than many history professors I have met, and could do algebra geometry trig and even a little basic calculus in his head. This was the sort of school system that the prussian model mandatory public system displaced in many areas, even poor ones.
Actually by the time he was born the prussian model had already been implanted in the US by Horace Mann and his ilk, so he was actually fortunate to have been born in such a poor and "backwards" area where such "enlightened" instutions had not yet penetrated. He went to a one room school, where students were not segregated from each other to prevent the natural mentoring of older students with younger ones, where "socialisation" was not twisted by unatural "class" divisions, where students were not expected to march from class to class in pavlovian response to bells timed to ring every time some real learning began, and where a child that finished a years work in a couple weeks was given the next years work with a smile and an 'attaboy' instead of being regarded as a dangerous threat to regimentation and class boundaries (as I was.)
Anyhow, enough ranting from me, don't believe me. The fact that I am a survivor of the youth concentration camps we call schools doesn't necessarily mean I am any more qualified than you to understand them, as you are doubtless in the same spot. Read what John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991, has to say, and only believe him if you find that what he says makes sense. I think it does.
You can find excerpts from and links to much of his work on the web here and it is, imhop, required reading for anyone concerned about what is wrong with our schools and how to fix them.
The problem is that folks get skittish about extended contracts. If they do that, they can count on selling fewer units. Barring the geeks that want to hack the things, the original idea was the best - no required contract to scare customers off, but not usable really without it, so most customers *will* keep the contract up anyway.
The hacking of the boxes really threw a kink in their plans, even if it was predictable to us, they obviously didn't see it coming. They need to figure out how to offer a hackable box that will be attractive enough to the geeks that we don't buy the loss-leader model, cheaply. Using a larger flash and adding a cheap ethernet jack might be just the ticket...
Excellent article, I think you caught the main points. My two cents - I am not sure the idea of selling "pre-hacked" models is a winner - first off any complication in the assembly line increases costs, second it seems possible that part of the appeal of the thing IS having to hack it yourself. But definately back off from the do not hack bs, definately sell it two at two different prices, one a loss leader with the isp obligation, the other at just over cost for the developers. Just over cost because the cheaper it is the more will be bought to be hacked, and netpliance should realise a gain in terms of technology on this down the road so it's still worthwhile.
The current situation cannot be favourable to them - even with the 90 day ISP requirement the thing is *still* a loss if that's all they get - comes to around $160 including the required ISP payments no? It's a tough spot they are in, but if they play it just right they could really do well. The trick is how to offer the non-techs the sort of attractive, loss-leader deal that will get them to order it, while making sure that the hackers actually pay enough they don't take a loss on those units.
The legal prohibition on hacking the boxes that are bought with service, combined with the availability of the same hardware at a reasonable price without the service and with a license to hack it, might work. Whether or not it would really depends on the morality of the hackers - I certainly hope that most of us would willingly pay $300 instead of $166 and not drive them out of business, but I cannot be sure of that, and if I were at netpliance I would be worried about that. Perhaps there would be a hardware change that is simple enough to not drive the cost up, but would make the hackable version worth a lot more to the geeks? Maybe a nic, or a larger flash chip...
Yes, technically when I buy a copy of Red Hat, I'm only paying them for the cost of distribution.
And for the support contract/warranty, which is where RedHat makes their money. Last I checked they won't send you a CD without you buying at least the one-month installation only support contract. Since they make it available via free FTP that's still fine by the GPL.
Re:How do I change Nscape6 to look like Windows/KD
on
Suck On Skins And UI
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· Score: 1
I also wish I could find how to get it to start without the sidebar.
Hrmm I turned off the sidebar the first time I ran it (menu=view|sidebar) and it never came back...
Nope. Go read the GPL. RMS specifically distinguishes between free as in "free beer", and free as in "freedom of speech". The GPL enforces the latter but not the former.
Nope to what? I have most certainly read the GPL. Have you? Where does the license grant you the right to sell a derivative work? It does not. It does grant that you can charge a fee for the costs of distribution - that does not give you the right to sell the program or a derivative work, just the media that it's distributed on (see cheapbytes.)
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
...
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above...
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
...
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
It means they are using an encrypted http protocol, basically. Like commercial sites use to protect credit card numbers and so forth. See whatis https for more info, although it's out of date (the protocol is no longer netscape only, and hasn't been for a long time, and 40 bit keys are definately not considered sufficient anymore) but it captures the essence of it.
It's also Free Software. All licensees are free to obtain the source, distribute it, create derivitive works, etc. However only the copyright holder can sell a derivitive work. Why is that so hard to understand?
Do I smell a BSD zealot? If so you need to go back to advocacy 101. You don't win any converts by asserting that the GPL is "not real Open Source" anymore than GPL zealots do anything but annoy people when they put down BSD in the same brainless way.
Bah, I misstyped, I admitted my mistake, time for you to get over it. It is indeed still the 10th decade of the 20th century. There was no year 0! Don't blame me, I didn't invent the Julian Calender! If I had I would have included a year 0 and things would be a lot less confusing:P
Everything that makes it a Mac is closed. Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, Quickdraw, etc. - it's all proprietary. What is "open" is Darwin - a mach kernel with a BSD personality - and that's nothing new. I use "open" in quotes btw because not only is it (obviously) not Free Software I don't think it even qualifies as Open Source. Read the APSL if you don't believe me - check out the termination clause in particular. Now I personally don't have any patents to infringe, but I'd still be an idiot not to recognise a poison pill when I saw it.
This is not to criticise Apple. What they are doing makes perfect sense from their position. It's smart business - smarter than their competition, and it will probably do exactly what they want it to do - improve their profitibility. What doesn't make sense is for the community to be such suckers for it! If MSFT had been smart enough to do the same thing with NT, how many of us would have bought it? How many of us were so enthusiastic when Sun released a few things under a similar license, the SCSL? But because it's Apple somehow it's different?
The same Apple that's threatened themes.org and GNUStep recently? What is wrong with this picture people?
Sure, Darwin is open source. But it's not OS 10. Any more than msdos.sys and io.sys are Windows. If MSFT had opened the source for those two files when they released windows 95 would you claim it was an open source OS and there was no need for Linux anymore?
Didn't think so. So why the double standard for Apple?
This is probably due to you reading too much. I know that's why I almost never get to moderate (only once, and that was after I was away from my connection for several days.) The way I understand it, they take the bell curve of how often different people request pages, and chop off the ends - i.e. if you are a real "regular" that checks in several times a day, or someone that only drops by once a year, then you are automatically excluded. The idea is to make sure the moderation is done by "average" readers.
Anyway, I think it's a bad idea, but if you really want to moderate, just log out, clear your cookies, and don't log in for several days. When you do log back in *poof* you have moderator access. Kinda funky.
This is called "voting with your feet." If enough of you do it maybe the rest of us could have decent discussions without 20 page posts about bestiality and similar nonsense wasting the bandwidth once again.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. The license (GPL) is not revocable. However the owner of the copyright can do whatever he wants with the code, he is not subject to the license. It's perfectly legal to release the same code under multiple licenses simultaneously for instance, as Trolltech for instance does.
ROTFLMAO Yeah sure they do. I got some seafront property in oklahoma for sale too...
EVEN IF they gained title to part of the kernel code, no they couldn't do that. To do that they would have to have title to ALL of it. This is why it's pretty well impossible for any large GNU project to ever go closed - too many people have copyrighted code in it, to close it you have to have every one of them sign on. Good luck just finding them all. And even if you did manage to find every single kernel hacker, and get each and every one to sign over their copyrights to you, the license is still not revocable. So all that would buy you would be the right to release a closed kernel - NOT to revoke the licenses on the kernels already released. So all that happens is the code forks.
Ahh, thanks for making that clear. Our experiences are from radically different perspectives. I live in a rural area, with satellite the only option for tv. I don't mean the only option for premium channels, I mean the only option for TV period (well we get in one broadcast channel, but the signal is too weak to get video - it's sound only :P) Not that I am much of a TV person, but in this day and age it's nearly a necessity, and of course in this sort of community all the neighbors know each other and talk - they all have satellite TV in one form or another too.
No, but in urban areas there are broadcast television stations and cable.
Do you seriously think this is going to be a viable competitor to cable modems in areas where they are available? I wouldn't count on it. I get the impression a lot of cable modem users are into networked gaming...
That seems to be a fairly common offer with small dishes, several neighbors have gotten that sort of deal on tv service. It seems like a good deal at first, because of the low-to-no initial investment. But over a period of time the higher cost of service nullifies the advantage. We've had our C-Band for 6 years now, and compared to the small-dish solution we considered at that time, we made the initial hardware investment back before the first two years were up. The neighbors that got the small dishes have always wound up feeling like they got snookered.
In retrospect I do think my initial assessment was probably a bit harsh. We have people trying to sell us a small dish (for tv) all the time, and there is a kneejerk reaction that has grown out of the past 6 years experience against that, which I am afraid coloured my original post inappropriately. I certainly am not interested in the small dish television service, however if the price was right adding a small dish for internet only would make sense. We'll have to see how it compares with DSL though - the local phone company has announced DSL availability within the next month - it remains to be seen whether they can deliver. Their standard dial-up service has certainly not lead me to have high hopes.
From your comments I surmise you have no experience with satellite TV.
The reason EchoStar likes little dishes is because they tune only one satellite - the one EchoStar (or their competion if it's not an EchoStar dish) uses. Hence the "lock-in" factor I mentioned. The large (typically called "C-Band" although it can also access other bands) dish can access any satellite, and the large dish owner can buy programming from a number of competing providers, at lower cost because of the competiton of course, in addition to having access to hundreds of free channels.
If you had the choice between a standard modem that could access any ISP, and a custom modem that worked only with one ISP (and becomes useless if that ISP goes under, or if you decide for some reason to go to another,) would you really want the latter?
What are you doing wrong? On my machine (K6-233, 48 megs ram, much smaller and slower than yours) GTK apps work just fine. So you've gotta be doing something strange here.
Btw, did you see any improvement from the recompile? From what I've read the PIII is pretty well optimised for 386 code, and any gain from the pentium optimisation would be minor and likely offset by the larger size. Did you see any improvements when you recompiled?
Quite correct. No on is obligated to buy their product either. Vote with your dollars.
And they'll be binary only, which means they'll be useless for other operating systems, useless for linux on non x86 hardware, useless for configurations they don't anticipate, useless when the next xfree upgrade hits, contain bugs that you will not be able to fix...
You can do this if you want. The last thing I want is a windows driver on linux. I'll just buy from their competitors. ATI and Matrox make damn fine hardware and provide enough information for open source drivers to be written.
That's good. The bad part is they're partnered with EchoStar and won't support the use of real satellite dishes, just those stupid mini dishes. Everyone wants to create a little lock-in I guess. Everyone but the clueful customers. I predict that they will not get enough customers and eventually go bankrupt. It's a shame, I could really use the bandwidth, even with the latency, but it looks like I'll be sticking with my dialup. DSL is supposed to be coming soon anyhow.
Let's see, what you are saying is you want to take a complex program that hundreds of developers spent millions of man-hours on, change a couple lines, sell it, and give those developers nothing. Sounds fair, right? If it's good enough for Bill Gates...
If you code something extensive enough to make a stand alone product, nothing is stopping you from making it a binary only product and selling it whether it's written for BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac, OS/2, etc. Whether anyone with a brain will want it is a different matter, but you are free to try. If you code something that cannot stand alone, an extension to another program, you have to abide by the license the programmers that wrote the original program specified. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
If it's a private library, no it's not censorship. It's stupid, and defeats the entire purpose of a library, but it's not censorship. Censorship would be bullying a sites ISP into yanking it, not blocking access to it on a particular machine that a particular person owns.
Anarchy doesn't mean anyone has an obligation to propogate your message at their expense, any more than freedom of speech does.
How very strange. It is at -2. Didn't realise that was possible, but I browse at -1 and at the end of the article is a note that there is 1 comment below my threshold... of course after manually changing to -2 I find out it's just a stupid troll waste of bandwidth *sigh* if you guys are gonna troll at least learn how to do it right? Is that too much to ask? Good trolls make people think - bad trolls just waste bandwidth.
Oh, btw, it's not censorship. You can yell censorship all you want, it just proves you don't know what the word means. The right to speak doesn't imply the right to commandeer someone elses resources to propogate your speech. This is the same argument all the lame email spammers use, and it's just as much pure BS in either case. Taco should log UberTroll's IP and send a nice little letter to his ISP...
You mean by "securing" someone elses work, at least be honest. If you want to sell your own work you wouldn't care what license someone elses work was under, now would you?
BSD is a great system. Too bad it's under a license that invites parasites like you to steal it and resell it.
Your reply suffers from a lack of vision. You see "private schools" and you think of a private monopoly, as our "public schools" are a monopoly now. But what we are talking about is de-monopolising.
An effective school is not something that requires large sums of money. Absent government regulations like we are trying to repeal, the barriers to entry are quite low. Many many people are home-schooling their children now, and on average doing a great job even measuring by the tests the monopolists devised! In a world with seperation of school and state, you would not be forced to send your child to Pinkerton High, you would have an almost infinite range of choices. The catholics still have their own schools, despite decades of assault on them. With the end to the assault, more would come into being very quickly - religous and secular. Any one of the people who are now home-schooling their own children could easily (and in almost all cases would be glad to) open their doors to their neighbors children, perhaps for a small fee to help them defray their expenses, just so they can do what they love doing - raising children in a stimulating, natural educational environment.
One of Mann's primary goals was to produce a population that would willingly work in factories - the free people of these united States in those days generally would not do so for more than a couple years - to save a nest egg and start their own business.
Please, read more on this before you make up your mind, a great place to start is with the writings of John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991. Several of his pieces are available on the web, links and short excerpts are here.
It seems unlikely because you don't know the real history. It's still true. In the early 1800s Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and found that "There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare." That was a full 30 years before the first cumpulsory indoctrination camps were founded in this country.
My grandfather, born in 1901 (he died recently) in quite possibly the poorest county in the country, had a 6th grade education, dearly paid for by himself and his parents not "given" to him by a public school system. That 6th grade education was superior to what most college grads have now, he could read and write not only english but also latin, well, and a very small amount of greek. He knew more history than many history professors I have met, and could do algebra geometry trig and even a little basic calculus in his head. This was the sort of school system that the prussian model mandatory public system displaced in many areas, even poor ones.
Actually by the time he was born the prussian model had already been implanted in the US by Horace Mann and his ilk, so he was actually fortunate to have been born in such a poor and "backwards" area where such "enlightened" instutions had not yet penetrated. He went to a one room school, where students were not segregated from each other to prevent the natural mentoring of older students with younger ones, where "socialisation" was not twisted by unatural "class" divisions, where students were not expected to march from class to class in pavlovian response to bells timed to ring every time some real learning began, and where a child that finished a years work in a couple weeks was given the next years work with a smile and an 'attaboy' instead of being regarded as a dangerous threat to regimentation and class boundaries (as I was.)
Anyhow, enough ranting from me, don't believe me. The fact that I am a survivor of the youth concentration camps we call schools doesn't necessarily mean I am any more qualified than you to understand them, as you are doubtless in the same spot. Read what John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991, has to say, and only believe him if you find that what he says makes sense. I think it does.
You can find excerpts from and links to much of his work on the web here and it is, imhop, required reading for anyone concerned about what is wrong with our schools and how to fix them.
The problem is that folks get skittish about extended contracts. If they do that, they can count on selling fewer units. Barring the geeks that want to hack the things, the original idea was the best - no required contract to scare customers off, but not usable really without it, so most customers *will* keep the contract up anyway.
The hacking of the boxes really threw a kink in their plans, even if it was predictable to us, they obviously didn't see it coming. They need to figure out how to offer a hackable box that will be attractive enough to the geeks that we don't buy the loss-leader model, cheaply. Using a larger flash and adding a cheap ethernet jack might be just the ticket...
Excellent article, I think you caught the main points. My two cents - I am not sure the idea of selling "pre-hacked" models is a winner - first off any complication in the assembly line increases costs, second it seems possible that part of the appeal of the thing IS having to hack it yourself. But definately back off from the do not hack bs, definately sell it two at two different prices, one a loss leader with the isp obligation, the other at just over cost for the developers. Just over cost because the cheaper it is the more will be bought to be hacked, and netpliance should realise a gain in terms of technology on this down the road so it's still worthwhile.
The current situation cannot be favourable to them - even with the 90 day ISP requirement the thing is *still* a loss if that's all they get - comes to around $160 including the required ISP payments no? It's a tough spot they are in, but if they play it just right they could really do well. The trick is how to offer the non-techs the sort of attractive, loss-leader deal that will get them to order it, while making sure that the hackers actually pay enough they don't take a loss on those units.
The legal prohibition on hacking the boxes that are bought with service, combined with the availability of the same hardware at a reasonable price without the service and with a license to hack it, might work. Whether or not it would really depends on the morality of the hackers - I certainly hope that most of us would willingly pay $300 instead of $166 and not drive them out of business, but I cannot be sure of that, and if I were at netpliance I would be worried about that. Perhaps there would be a hardware change that is simple enough to not drive the cost up, but would make the hackable version worth a lot more to the geeks? Maybe a nic, or a larger flash chip...
And for the support contract/warranty, which is where RedHat makes their money. Last I checked they won't send you a CD without you buying at least the one-month installation only support contract. Since they make it available via free FTP that's still fine by the GPL.
Hrmm I turned off the sidebar the first time I ran it (menu=view|sidebar) and it never came back...
Nope to what? I have most certainly read the GPL. Have you? Where does the license grant you the right to sell a derivative work? It does not. It does grant that you can charge a fee for the costs of distribution - that does not give you the right to sell the program or a derivative work, just the media that it's distributed on (see cheapbytes.)
It means they are using an encrypted http protocol, basically. Like commercial sites use to protect credit card numbers and so forth. See whatis https for more info, although it's out of date (the protocol is no longer netscape only, and hasn't been for a long time, and 40 bit keys are definately not considered sufficient anymore) but it captures the essence of it.
It's also Free Software. All licensees are free to obtain the source, distribute it, create derivitive works, etc. However only the copyright holder can sell a derivitive work. Why is that so hard to understand?
Do I smell a BSD zealot? If so you need to go back to advocacy 101. You don't win any converts by asserting that the GPL is "not real Open Source" anymore than GPL zealots do anything but annoy people when they put down BSD in the same brainless way.
Bah, I misstyped, I admitted my mistake, time for you to get over it. It is indeed still the 10th decade of the 20th century. There was no year 0! Don't blame me, I didn't invent the Julian Calender! If I had I would have included a year 0 and things would be a lot less confusing :P
A few?
Everything that makes it a Mac is closed. Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, Quickdraw, etc. - it's all proprietary. What is "open" is Darwin - a mach kernel with a BSD personality - and that's nothing new. I use "open" in quotes btw because not only is it (obviously) not Free Software I don't think it even qualifies as Open Source. Read the APSL if you don't believe me - check out the termination clause in particular. Now I personally don't have any patents to infringe, but I'd still be an idiot not to recognise a poison pill when I saw it.
This is not to criticise Apple. What they are doing makes perfect sense from their position. It's smart business - smarter than their competition, and it will probably do exactly what they want it to do - improve their profitibility. What doesn't make sense is for the community to be such suckers for it! If MSFT had been smart enough to do the same thing with NT, how many of us would have bought it? How many of us were so enthusiastic when Sun released a few things under a similar license, the SCSL? But because it's Apple somehow it's different?
The same Apple that's threatened themes.org and GNUStep recently? What is wrong with this picture people?
Sure, Darwin is open source. But it's not OS 10. Any more than msdos.sys and io.sys are Windows. If MSFT had opened the source for those two files when they released windows 95 would you claim it was an open source OS and there was no need for Linux anymore?
Didn't think so. So why the double standard for Apple?
You are, of course, correct. And boy is my face red.
This is probably due to you reading too much. I know that's why I almost never get to moderate (only once, and that was after I was away from my connection for several days.) The way I understand it, they take the bell curve of how often different people request pages, and chop off the ends - i.e. if you are a real "regular" that checks in several times a day, or someone that only drops by once a year, then you are automatically excluded. The idea is to make sure the moderation is done by "average" readers.
Anyway, I think it's a bad idea, but if you really want to moderate, just log out, clear your cookies, and don't log in for several days. When you do log back in *poof* you have moderator access. Kinda funky.
This is called "voting with your feet." If enough of you do it maybe the rest of us could have decent discussions without 20 page posts about bestiality and similar nonsense wasting the bandwidth once again.