We should translate the data to the FlightGear open source flight-sim format. Then hack that so it takes into account the lower gravity and lower air pressure. It would be interesting to see how planes designed for Mars would differ from those designed for Earth.
>That's exactly how I wish my manager would see my contribution to the company here.
I work on (no hissing now) proprietary software for the commercial market. At a previous employer, we had to sneak our names into the released project Easter Egg-style, as management didn't believe in putting our names on it. At my current company, my name is among those in the About box. Which company do you think I enjoy working for more?
My biggest mistake with the first company was not leaving it earlier...
>It's a copy. Every time you make a copy the quality degrades.
And then there's those MP3 clones. Some people think they're just about as good, others can't stand 'em. But you can fit 10 times as many in the same space!
The above has been claimed several times, but let's face it, Jar Jar isn't cute. For something to be cute, it generally has to be small and fuzzy. He's meant to be amusing, not cute, and apparently succeeds with some youngsters. He's more analogous to C3PO than the Ewoks.
-The licenses [...] could really be anything from GPL to BSD to in your face closed source.
Yes, but I think some form of open source is more likely.
I think your potential customers are *not* software vendors. Your customers are people who want a new feature added to a pre-existing program, and most of the time that will be some open source program they are using, not one they've written and sell. Thus they will be bound by the license terms. While they conceivably could just not distribute the changes written for their needs, this will add to their maintenance costs since future versions of the base app won't incorporate the changes and may conflict. Glue logic for connecting programs might not be distributed, but that tends to be more specialized to a particular company's needs anyway.
Also, I think the emphasis on open source by the service itself will tend to make that the dominant focus of the clients; those who need closed source help have other sources. Also, companies might be reluctant to distribute proprietary software to a programmer somewhat randomly contacted over the net.
>What if a developer produces crap, or nothing at all?
I would think that companies would use the same sort of safeguards one generally uses to ensure contractual compliance. Before hiring a contractor, references and/or a previous working relationship are important. During the contract, status reports and demonstration of current status show the work is coming along. Legal action can be used to deter outright fraud, and otherwise it doesn't take that much overhead to have some impression of how the work is coming along. And the more important the work is to the company, the more safeguards you use, the more checking on the progress, etc. Even the most honest, hardworking programmer could die in a car accident tomorrow, so you make sure you're not so dependent on his/her work that failure is not an option.
Note that for damages below a certain amount, small claims court is used, not full-fledged lawsuits. Small amounts simply aren't worth suing over.
>I'll try not to flame too much here, but you >obviously do not have any experience with any >teachers besides your (possible) education.
The wife of a friend I've known since I was 4 was an elementary school teacher (she's now a stay-at-home mom). She says pay was actually quite good. Note that Maryland (the state she taught in) almost certainly is on the high end in terms of teacher pay.
My public school teachers were for the most part very good. I made no insults to teachers and their skills, and am offended by your claims that I implied this in any way.
What *I'm* saying is that teaching and its pay should not be compared to tech jobs, because tech job salaries are inflated by demand and the fact there are relatively few of us with the mindset to do it well. Compare teaching to the average job of the college educated, not to programming. Most jobs aren't cushy, and many single parents (I infer that your mother is one) would have difficulty paying for college for a kid.
>I'm a technician in the manufacturing plant. I get every other week free.
Do you really consider yourself an average salaried worker in this respect? While some people can certainly get jobs with more time flexibility (contract programming comes to mind), or you can part-time for less money, I'd bet your average salaried worker gets about 3 weeks of vacation per year plus holidays. And if you change jobs, you tend to get reset to two weeks per year again.
Most slashdotters know about salaries for tech experts and take that as a baseline. Salaries for the majority of humanity are rather lower. Starting salary for a Baltimore area police officer (the only vaguely relevant number I have off-hand) is $28k. I know a public schoolteacher who is not yet 30 who makes substantially more than that.
Teachers are also extremely hard to fire for incompetence. Job security is a perk.
>My dad is a professor/assoc dean at a state university.
(I believe we were mainly talking about pre-collegiate teachers, esp. since salaries tend to be substantially higher in collegiate settings.) My dad is a professor and was department head. He had a lot more schedule flexibility than my mother ever did. Time pressure on profs is usually for getting grants for further research, not obligations from their immediate employer.
Last I checked, most teachers get much more vacation than your average salaried technoworker would ever get to take. And actually, the pay generally isn't that unreasonable in many areas.
>Let's just say smart management doesn't give away one of company's few technological advantages for some vague future benefit.
It seems to me that giving something to Linux is not necessarily giving away a technical advantage.
Seriously, SGI is not fundamentally in the operating system kernel business, it's what they build on top of that. If the IRIX kernel was replaced by a Linux kernel (I have no idea how practical that is or how the feature sets compare), then SGI could dispense with a large part of their R&D expenses (maintaining the IRIX kernel) without giving away anything that they really sell to customers. Even if they don't make such a move, XFS for Linux makes dual boot situations nicer, and compatibility with Linux is a feature.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is what effect this might have on *other* companies. Yeah, none of us want to become unpaid Microsoft coders. But there are plenty of other bits of code we'd love to have access to, graphics card drivers for one. Microsoft revealing their source code (clearly it's not open source, it's making the source to proprietary apps available but still restrictively licensed) might have a significant influence on other companies that currently protect even the most irrelevant IP like it was the Crown Jewels. The "If Microsoft did it, maybe we should" meme could be quite powerful and useful.
>You have a character like JarJar created specifically to be marketed to kids.
My four year old talks about Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker; he's shown no interest in Jar Jar Binks. Maybe he's too young for a character aimed at the kids?:-) (Or maybe it's just that he hasn't seen the movie yet.)
>What should I do to get involved in [open source]?
Find something that interests you, there are plenty of projects that solicit help. Surfing around freshmeat.net for a while might be a good way to pick out something that interests you. Or look at the free software bazaar (there's a link in another comment in this article.) Or if you think of something that's missing from Linux, start your own project.
>All they have to do is sell SDMI music at $1 per song, and raise the price of a 10-song CD to $40. Which will you buy then?
I'd buy used CDs. Those with less morals will download MP3s off of USENET or use CD recorders. Heck, I've got enough of a music collection now I can live with just hearing new songs on the radio. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the customer...
Or maybe I'd buy an older PC, and put SDMI on that. And keep MP3 on my other machine.
The "problem" with the Free Software Bazaar, at least in perception, is that I could spend a fair bit of time working on something for the bazaar reward, and then discover you paid someone else who finished his yesterday. Or we might dispute whether what I've done is of the quality you expect. These guys make it more of a contractual arrangement, along with incorporating a peer review system. The bazaar may work for small projects but not so well for larger ones.
Fundamentally, I think we all agree that programmers don't particularly want to close their source, and we'd more productive as a group if all our source was open. The only issue is getting paid for working, else we have to do something else for a living and programming would be a hobby. This is an alternative scheme for paying programmers for open source, and is worthy of seeing if it can be a viable system.
Thank you for pointing out some performance flaws in Linux's SMP implementation through your Mindcraft benchmark tests. We are making changes now and should be able to remove these bottlenecks.
We also wish to thank you for the list of bullet items on . While we disagree with the interpretation of some of these items, some are legitimate weaknesses of our OS and we are addressing them or will be soon. In gratitude, we have come up with a list of bullet items that you may wish to consider addressing in your operating systems.
1) Physical vs. logical drive locations (drive letters) 2) File organization (/home vs. put it anywhere) 3) Support for multiple operating system file systems 4) Lack of applications included in distribution 5) No built-in way to run progs on one machine and display on another 6) Limited platform support ..."
Respond to combativeness with friendliness. It'll drive 'em nuts!
"Dear Microsoft, Thank you for pointing out some performance flaws in Linux's SMP implementation through your Mindcraft benchmark tests. We are making changes now and should be able to remove these bottlenecks.
We also wish to thank you for the list of bullet items on . While we disagree with the interpretation of some of these items, some are legitimate weaknesses of our OS and we are addressing them or will be soon. In gratitude, we have come up with a list of bullet items that you may wish to consider addressing in your operating systems.
>What we need, and which may well happen within a few years, is a system like this for the desktop.
One magazine (PC Magazine?) did a review of thumb and voiceprint scanners. The best price/performance device, and one that they weren't able to circumvent via trickery, was the U.are.U fingerprint scanner, a ~$100 USB device. I'd love to have one, so simple even a small child can use it.
I tried websearching but couldn't find a homepage for it though.
How the heck are you "downloading" over USB? There are a few USB modems, but they are no faster than serial ones -- the phone lines are the bottlenecks. There's a couple of LAN devices that talk USB, but they're slower than ethernet, just easier to plug in. USB has its good points, but helping in download speed is not currently one of them.
>Nothing OpenSource has been able to surpass it's commercial equivalent
What about bash compared to just about any other command line interface?
I am given to understand that the GIMP is more scriptable than just about any other image editing program, which would make it better than Photoshop in that respect, although it lags in others.
> If you look at it realistically, placing the Linux kernel under the BSD license would have disasterous consequences. I wouldn't be surprised if in an instant several incompatible versions would pop-up, creating the same crap proprietary Unices once suffered from: incompatibilities and vendor-lockin.
So why hasn't this happened with *BSD?
Seriously, people here worry about Microsoft using Linux to create their own proprietary Unix. So why haven't they done this with BSD?
For my stuff, which I haven't had time to work on so it isn't out there, I will use the X license. I don't worry about people making money off of extending my code any more than I worry about people making money using my code, as my code will still remain free. Someone else's extension of my stuff won't, but I will be no worse off as a result.
Having Solaris capable of running Linux binaries, even of apps that will compile under Solaris, means you can have only one version on your file servers if you have both Linux and Solaris clients. It may also reduce administrative headaches in such situations by having administrators only need a single version.
Slashdot Mirror
We should translate the data to the FlightGear open source flight-sim format. Then hack that so it takes into account the lower gravity and lower air pressure. It would be interesting to see how planes designed for Mars would differ from those designed for Earth.
>That's exactly how I wish my manager would see my contribution to the company here.
I work on (no hissing now) proprietary software for the commercial market. At a previous employer, we had to sneak our names into the released project Easter Egg-style, as management didn't believe in putting our names on it. At my current company, my name is among those in the About box. Which company do you think I enjoy working for more?
My biggest mistake with the first company was not leaving it earlier...
>It's a copy. Every time you make a copy the quality degrades.
And then there's those MP3 clones. Some people think they're just about as good, others can't stand 'em. But you can fit 10 times as many in the same space!
Interesting, John's apostrophes are now represented by superscript 1s. Itake it that was easier than geting Word to stop doing "smart" quotes?
The above has been claimed several times, but let's face it, Jar Jar isn't cute. For something to be cute, it generally has to be small and fuzzy. He's meant to be amusing, not cute, and apparently succeeds with some youngsters. He's more analogous to C3PO than the Ewoks.
-The licenses [...] could really be anything from GPL to BSD to in your face closed source.
Yes, but I think some form of open source is more likely.
I think your potential customers are *not* software vendors. Your customers are people who want a new feature added to a pre-existing program, and most of the time that will be some open source program they are using, not one they've written and sell. Thus they will be bound by the license terms. While they conceivably could just not distribute the changes written for their needs, this will add to their maintenance costs since future versions of the base app won't incorporate the changes and may conflict. Glue logic for connecting programs might not be distributed, but that tends to be more specialized to a particular company's needs anyway.
Also, I think the emphasis on open source by the service itself will tend to make that the dominant focus of the clients; those who need closed source help have other sources. Also, companies might be reluctant to distribute proprietary software to a programmer somewhat randomly contacted over the net.
>What if a developer produces crap, or nothing at all?
I would think that companies would use the same sort of safeguards one generally uses to ensure contractual compliance. Before hiring a contractor, references and/or a previous working relationship are important. During the contract, status reports and demonstration of current status show the work is coming along. Legal action can be used to deter outright fraud, and otherwise it doesn't take that much overhead to have some impression of how the work is coming along. And the more important the work is to the company, the more safeguards you use, the more checking on the progress, etc. Even the most honest, hardworking programmer could die in a car accident tomorrow, so you make sure you're not so dependent on his/her work that failure is not an option.
Note that for damages below a certain amount, small claims court is used, not full-fledged lawsuits. Small amounts simply aren't worth suing over.
>I'll try not to flame too much here, but you
>obviously do not have any experience with any
>teachers besides your (possible) education.
The wife of a friend I've known since I was 4 was an elementary school teacher (she's now a stay-at-home mom). She says pay was actually quite good. Note that Maryland (the state she taught in) almost certainly is on the high end in terms of teacher pay.
My public school teachers were for the most part very good. I made no insults to teachers and their skills, and am offended by your claims that I implied this in any way.
What *I'm* saying is that teaching and its pay should not be compared to tech jobs, because tech job salaries are inflated by demand and the fact there are relatively few of us with the mindset to do it well. Compare teaching to the average job of the college educated, not to programming. Most jobs aren't cushy, and many single parents (I infer that your mother is one) would have difficulty paying for college for a kid.
>I'm a technician in the manufacturing plant. I get every other week free.
Do you really consider yourself an average salaried worker in this respect? While some people can certainly get jobs with more time flexibility (contract programming comes to mind), or you can part-time for less money, I'd bet your average salaried worker gets about 3 weeks of vacation per year plus holidays. And if you change jobs, you tend to get reset to two weeks per year again.
Most slashdotters know about salaries for tech experts and take that as a baseline. Salaries for the majority of humanity are rather lower. Starting salary for a Baltimore area police officer (the only vaguely relevant number I have off-hand) is $28k. I know a public schoolteacher who is not yet 30 who makes substantially more than that.
Teachers are also extremely hard to fire for incompetence. Job security is a perk.
>My dad is a professor/assoc dean at a state university.
(I believe we were mainly talking about pre-collegiate teachers, esp. since salaries tend to be substantially higher in collegiate settings.) My dad is a professor and was department head. He had a lot more schedule flexibility than my mother ever did. Time pressure on profs is usually for getting grants for further research, not obligations from their immediate employer.
>So remind me, how much do we pay our teachers?
Last I checked, most teachers get much more vacation than your average salaried technoworker would ever get to take. And actually, the pay generally isn't that unreasonable in many areas.
>Let's just say smart management doesn't give away one of company's few technological advantages for some vague future benefit.
It seems to me that giving something to Linux is not necessarily giving away a technical advantage.
Seriously, SGI is not fundamentally in the operating system kernel business, it's what they build on top of that. If the IRIX kernel was replaced by a Linux kernel (I have no idea how practical that is or how the feature sets compare), then SGI could dispense with a large part of their R&D expenses (maintaining the IRIX kernel) without giving away anything that they really sell to customers. Even if they don't make such a move, XFS for Linux makes dual boot situations nicer, and compatibility with Linux is a feature.
I had hoped that BeOS would do this with the BFS.
>how much work would _you_ get done sitting in a darkened room with 900GB of pr0n?
Hey! How do you know where I am?
> If GNU can adopt the XFree86 windowing system,
They didn't. Show me even a mention of this on http://www.xfree86.org. XFree86 isn't even under the GPL or LGPL, it uses the X license.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is what effect this might have on *other* companies. Yeah, none of us want to become unpaid Microsoft coders. But there are plenty of other bits of code we'd love to have access to, graphics card drivers for one. Microsoft revealing their source code (clearly it's not open source, it's making the source to proprietary apps available but still restrictively licensed) might have a significant influence on other companies that currently protect even the most irrelevant IP like it was the Crown Jewels. The "If Microsoft did it, maybe we should" meme could be quite powerful and useful.
>You have a character like JarJar created specifically to be marketed to kids.
:-) (Or maybe it's just that he hasn't seen the movie yet.)
My four year old talks about Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker; he's shown no interest in Jar Jar Binks. Maybe he's too young for a character aimed at the kids?
>What should I do to get involved in [open source]?
Find something that interests you, there are plenty of projects that solicit help. Surfing around freshmeat.net for a while might be a good way to pick out something that interests you. Or look at the free software bazaar (there's a link in another comment in this article.) Or if you think of something that's missing from Linux, start your own project.
>All they have to do is sell SDMI music at $1 per song, and raise the price of a 10-song CD to $40. Which will you buy then?
I'd buy used CDs. Those with less morals will download MP3s off of USENET or use CD recorders. Heck, I've got enough of a music collection now I can live with just hearing new songs on the radio. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the customer...
Or maybe I'd buy an older PC, and put SDMI on that. And keep MP3 on my other machine.
The "problem" with the Free Software Bazaar, at least in perception, is that I could spend a fair bit of time working on something for the bazaar reward, and then discover you paid someone else who finished his yesterday. Or we might dispute whether what I've done is of the quality you expect. These guys make it more of a contractual arrangement, along with incorporating a peer review system. The bazaar may work for small projects but not so well for larger ones.
Fundamentally, I think we all agree that programmers don't particularly want to close their source, and we'd more productive as a group if all our source was open. The only issue is getting paid for working, else we have to do something else for a living and programming would be a hobby. This is an alternative scheme for paying programmers for open source, and is worthy of seeing if it can be a viable system.
(Whoops, tab->space fires the submit key...)
"Dear Microsoft,
Thank you for pointing out some performance flaws in Linux's SMP implementation through your Mindcraft benchmark tests. We are making changes now and should be able to remove these bottlenecks.
We also wish to thank you for the list of bullet items on . While we disagree with the interpretation of some of these items, some are legitimate weaknesses of our OS and we are addressing them or will be soon. In gratitude, we have come up with a list of bullet items that you may wish to consider addressing in your operating systems.
1) Physical vs. logical drive locations (drive letters)
2) File organization (/home vs. put it anywhere)
3) Support for multiple operating system file systems
4) Lack of applications included in distribution
5) No built-in way to run progs on one machine and display on another
6) Limited platform support
..."
Respond to combativeness with friendliness. It'll drive 'em nuts!
"Dear Microsoft,
Thank you for pointing out some performance flaws in Linux's SMP implementation through your Mindcraft benchmark tests. We are making changes now and should be able to remove these bottlenecks.
We also wish to thank you for the list of bullet items on . While we disagree with the interpretation of some of these items, some are legitimate weaknesses of our OS and we are addressing them or will be soon. In gratitude, we have come up with a list of bullet items that you may wish to consider addressing in your operating systems.
1) Physical vs. logical drive locations
>What we need, and which may well happen within a few years, is a system like this for the desktop.
One magazine (PC Magazine?) did a review of thumb and voiceprint scanners. The best price/performance device, and one that they weren't able to circumvent via trickery, was the U.are.U fingerprint scanner, a ~$100 USB device. I'd love to have one, so simple even a small child can use it.
I tried websearching but couldn't find a homepage for it though.
How the heck are you "downloading" over USB? There are a few USB modems, but they are no faster than serial ones -- the phone lines are the bottlenecks. There's a couple of LAN devices that talk USB, but they're slower than ethernet, just easier to plug in. USB has its good points, but helping in download speed is not currently one of them.
>Nothing OpenSource has been able to surpass it's
commercial equivalent
What about bash compared to just about any other command line interface?
I am given to understand that the GIMP is more scriptable than just about any other image editing program, which would make it better than Photoshop in that respect, although it lags in others.
> If you look at it realistically, placing the Linux kernel under the BSD license would have disasterous consequences. I wouldn't be surprised if in an instant several incompatible versions would pop-up, creating the same crap proprietary Unices once suffered from: incompatibilities and vendor-lockin.
So why hasn't this happened with *BSD?
Seriously, people here worry about Microsoft using Linux to create their own proprietary Unix. So why haven't they done this with BSD?
For my stuff, which I haven't had time to work on so it isn't out there, I will use the X license. I don't worry about people making money off of extending my code any more than I worry about people making money using my code, as my code will still remain free. Someone else's extension of my stuff won't, but I will be no worse off as a result.
Having Solaris capable of running Linux binaries, even of apps that will compile under Solaris, means you can have only one version on your file servers if you have both Linux and Solaris clients. It may also reduce administrative headaches in such situations by having administrators only need a single version.