"Regarding shrink wrapped applications, sure, corporate users would probably prefer those over some downloaded from an FTP site"
Actually, I think corporate users would like to have access to the source, and generally could have just one person do the build. If you use an application a lot, then each bug costs you appreciably and the advantage to being able to fix it yourself (possibly by hiring someone to fix it) is significant.
What companies do like, I think, is having a company behind the software that is motivated to fix most of the bugs and to do further development. So a company that allows people to see and modify their source -- even if they can't distribute it or reuse it in other apps -- is probably close to optimal for most businesses.
Also, more and more companies are getting fast internet connections. To them, a download may in fact be preferable to having to arrange a purchase or send someone out to buy a program.
'I suppose SGI, IBM, and so on, are making a benevolent contribution to the self proclaimed "linux community"?'
I suspect Corel, at least, is driven in part by Larry Ellison's personal dislike for Bill Gates. But hey, if we get more open source (in the case of Corel, mostly Wine) out of it...
Yeah, it seems a little strange to me that geeks with access to all the porn and supermodel pictures their modems and T1 lines can carry get so worked up over candid shots of clothed women. I guess that's raging hormones for ya...
>Their concern is, will we get beat out the door because of the free software concept of the community?
Do you mean, will you not be able to sell a proprietary thing because the Linux community is so adamantly pro-free software? The answer is no. Applixware hasn't been burned to the ground, Opera's plan to port to Linux received positive feedback, etc. The Linux community is not monolithic; while there's a strong desire that the OS be free and open, many of us are willing to pay for useful closed-source applications.
If you're worried that open sourcers will just duplicate your idea, the answer is they will, and so will other closed-sourcers. The only way to survive selling proprietary software is to keep improving it, whether you're on Linux or not.
>How do you people who code for free survive?
Some are students, some work for companies like Netscape and Red Hat, some do open source stuff in their free time, and some help the open source effort by improving tools they need for their jobs (like Corel helping out with Wine.)
"While the developers work hard for free, Red Hat is getting fat."
If you don't like others basing their work on something you've done for free, then release it under a different license. None of the developers has been forced to contribute to Linux.
I haven't quite released my free source yet (still getting some details cleaned up), but when I do, I encourage you to find a way to make a healthy profit off of it. It doesn't hurt me any.
I think some people just hate the idea that anyone else is making money.
Yeah, when my house got broken into they stole the better stereo stuff, a portable CD player, and jewelry, but dang it! They didn't steal my computer! It would have been less hassle than it was to get Quantex to replace my broken CD drive (this was ~4 years ago.)
Again, please forgive my ignorance, but is the installer (run as root) prevented from setting the SUID bit? If not, couldn't it just copy over some common executable with its own version, that behaves identically except for enabling the PSN?
Forgive me as a less than expert Linux user, but is there utility in having a security level between root and the average user? It seems like one might want to run installers at such a level, with write access to/usr/local/bin or some such. Can this be reasonably duplicated for most installations with group permissions?
Petreley misses the real advantage to developers of an open source OS. It's not the level playing field, it's having no insurmountable obstacles to doing one's development. With Windows, driver or OS problems are largely unsolvable -- if it doesn't work, you're out of luck. And if the documentation is wrong, you have no way of knowing how the code really works.
Likewise, open source development tools can be a big win, simply because developers can fix problems with them. I work doing NT development with Visual C++, and there are an amazing number of little delays here and there. I try to open a file -- and type the filename well before the "File Open" dialog appears. I'd also like to see color syntax highlighting for parentheses and brackets, but there's no way for me to do it with Visual C++. Open source dev tools would be nice not because of the cost -- the cost is far less than salaries -- but because of the things I could fix and improve, and thus save time and get more done.
Two of the people who died in the crash of the Valujet crash were relatives of my wife. Commercial airline travel is substantially safer per mile travelled than automobile travel, but less safe than bus travel or train travel.
I did get on a plane within two days of them dying, anyway.
Can anyone point me to a good description of exactly how X, Gnome, KDE, window managers, GnuStep, et al fit together? Some sort of layered block diagram with OS, layered by X, etc. would be extremely helpful to this somewhat confused person.
>Why should I (hypothetically) provide you with an opportunity to support your family?
Let me put it this way. Suppose you do something, and you have a choice of GPLing it or some other license. Assume for the sake of argument that as far as you can tell, your choice will have no effect on you, including effects on future software available to you. However, choosing a non-GPL license will allow someone else the opportunity to make a living. Which would you choose?
Now, you can certainly make a case that releasing under the GPL makes it more likely that extensions, bug-fixes, etc. will appear also under the GPL, so your motivation for GPL'ing stuff is that. That's perfectly reasonable. What I object to is the "I'm not making money off this, so I'll be damned if anyone else can either" stance. Choose your license based on how it affects you, not on the fear that it might help someone else make money.
>Whoever said that the free software community exists to provide software to lazy and greedy people?
Are you upset that Robert Young of Red Hat is making good money selling GPL'ed software?
Are you upset that Tim O'Reilly is making good money on books about GPL'ed software?
Are you upset that numerous internet entrepeneurs are making good money selling services using GPL'ed software?
Then why are you so upset that someone might make money selling proprietary extensions to your open source code? That person is at least as likely as the others to make open contributions to the tools that help him or her build their extensions.
I note that based on Rob's poll, you can make a reasonable assumption that very few Slashdot'ers have ever had to support a family. Eliminating opportunities for others to make money to support their family is not in and of itself a good thing.
I get 30-50 spams a day in my "main" account. So I did a couple of things. First, I set up a second account, which I only tell of to friends. Second, I set up rotating e-mail aliases, which I use for newsgroup posting. Every once in a while I change the older of the two aliases and use that new one as my address on newsgroup posting. It's not perfect, but it has cut way down on the spam to the trusted account.
Note that my e-mail address above is a munged version of the untrusted account. Someday soon it will go the way of the dinosaur.
P.S. If you munge your account, munge at the highest level -- just before the.com,.net, etc. Otherwise your provider's mailer will still have to deal with all the foo@dontspamme.bar.com e-mail and send out bounce messages.
It seems to me what is needed is someone or some group to maintain a list of manufacturers of various computing products, and their stance/level of support for Linux et al. (It may need to be handled on a per-product level.) So if I want to check out the Linux-readiness of a system or upgrade, I'd just look up the hardware I'm thinking about on this site, and I could easily make an informed choice.
The site might also solicit companies and organizations to sign on to indicate what level of support for Linux they demand, to serve as a prod to hardware companies to nudge them towards opening their products. A few big names on the list (or a big list of names) might be more effective than the occasional e-mail from a customer requesting/demanding open products.
So if you're not a programmer but want to help the Linux, etc. effort, here's a potential role to play.
Mandrake, Debian, et al are all available at Cheapbytes for about the sale amount as the sales tax you would pay if you bought a copy of Windows 98. Downloading is not required.
Mandrake in particular is based on Red Hat with modifications aimed at being a better distribution for end users, so it (at least from a code point of view) might be a better way for Linux to go mainstream.
>Devices like that are very useful for certain scientific and visualization applications [...]
I disagree. If you're doing work like that you'll want to spend the extra money for a better system. This is too viewpoint-dependent to spend a significant time working with, a slight move of your head and the perspective gets screwed. Better to use LCD shutter glasses, along with a system that guarantees the frame-switching will always be done. (You need to guarantee that the right image is displayed every shutter switch, difficult without a real-time OS or some sort of hardware to do it.)
Why is socialist in this context seen as a perjorative? When I talk of socialist, I think of things like taxpayer-funded medicine, social welfare, subsidized schooling, etc.; basically any situation where the government plays a role in allocating resources to individuals, rather than a pure capitalist "trade labor for resources" system. As European tax rates are higher than U.S. rates even with the higher U.S. defense spending, I place Europe further along the individualismsocialism scale than the U.S. It's not meant as a perjorative or a compliment, just a statement.
When I dislocated my shoulder three years ago, I was in a nasty brace for a while and a sling after that, so I nearly got the company I worked for to get some of those for me. Turned out I was able to get enough freedom with the sling to do full-fledged typing, so we didn't end up getting them, but if you're one-armed I think it wouldn't be a bad idea.
Another alternative no one has mentioned is the chord keyboard, one of which is commercially known as the Bat. Again, I've never actually tried it, although there are times when I hate the cost of moving from keyboard to mouse.
My personal idea, free for any takers, is the "mouse keyboard." Basically, movement of the keyboard itself (or perhaps just pressure, a la SpaceTec's spaceorb et al) would serve as mouse movements. This would be meant for more as a supplemental device -- there's no reason you should have to be stuck with just one mouse/trackball/etc.
Linux is not any harder to install than Windows 98
on
Free the Open Source
·
· Score: 1
Add me as another person agreeing to the above statement. As an install, I managed to get a command prompt out of Red Hat 5.1 within about an hour of starting the installation. I tried to upgrade from Windows 95 to 98, and almost trashed my machine. I went to bed with it seemingly hung in the same part of the installation it had seemingly hung four times before, and when I woke up it had timed out and allowed the installation to finish. I *then* had to remove the CD-ROM driver stuff from config.sys and autoexec.bat, and then reinstall S3/Virge drivers since it had kindly replaced mine with ones with a much more limited set of resolutions and color depths.
And all this just so I could start getting USB peripherals -- most especially a scanner -- so once Linux has better support for USB I'm in better shape for switching over completely.
Only thing I haven't gotten working on Linux is PPP (why the Sam Hill doesn't the default Red Hat kernel include PPP support? I was able to recompile the kernel, but sheesh!), once I have the time to work that out I may switch over for most of what I do.
Slashdot Mirror
"Regarding shrink wrapped applications, sure, corporate users would probably prefer those over some downloaded from an FTP site"
Actually, I think corporate users would like to have access to the source, and generally could have just one person do the build. If you use an application a lot, then each bug costs you appreciably and the advantage to being able to fix it yourself (possibly by hiring someone to fix it) is significant.
What companies do like, I think, is having a company behind the software that is motivated to fix most of the bugs and to do further development. So a company that allows people to see and modify their source -- even if they can't distribute it or reuse it in other apps -- is probably close to optimal for most businesses.
Also, more and more companies are getting fast internet connections. To them, a download may in fact be preferable to having to arrange a purchase or send someone out to buy a program.
'I suppose SGI, IBM, and so on, are making a benevolent contribution to the self proclaimed "linux community"?'
I suspect Corel, at least, is driven in part by Larry Ellison's personal dislike for Bill Gates. But hey, if we get more open source (in the case of Corel, mostly Wine) out of it...
Yeah, it seems a little strange to me that geeks with access to all the porn and supermodel pictures their modems and T1 lines can carry get so worked up over candid shots of clothed women. I guess that's raging hormones for ya...
>Their concern is, will we get beat out the door
because of the free software concept of the community?
Do you mean, will you not be able to sell a proprietary thing because the Linux community is so adamantly pro-free software? The answer is no. Applixware hasn't been burned to the ground, Opera's plan to port to Linux received positive feedback, etc. The Linux community is not monolithic; while there's a strong desire that the OS be free and open, many of us are willing to pay for useful closed-source applications.
If you're worried that open sourcers will just duplicate your idea, the answer is they will, and so will other closed-sourcers. The only way to survive selling proprietary software is to keep improving it, whether you're on Linux or not.
>How do you people who code for free survive?
Some are students, some work for companies like Netscape and Red Hat, some do open source stuff in their free time, and some help the open source effort by improving tools they need for their jobs (like Corel helping out with Wine.)
"While the developers work hard for free, Red Hat is getting fat."
If you don't like others basing their work on something you've done for free, then release it under a different license. None of the developers has been forced to contribute to Linux.
I haven't quite released my free source yet (still getting some details cleaned up), but when I do, I encourage you to find a way to make a healthy profit off of it. It doesn't hurt me any.
I think some people just hate the idea that anyone else is making money.
Yeah, when my house got broken into they stole the better stereo stuff, a portable CD player, and jewelry, but dang it! They didn't steal my computer! It would have been less hassle than it was to get Quantex to replace my broken CD drive (this was ~4 years ago.)
Again, please forgive my ignorance, but is the installer (run as root) prevented from setting the SUID bit? If not, couldn't it just copy over some common executable with its own version, that behaves identically except for enabling the PSN?
Forgive me as a less than expert Linux user, but is there utility in having a security level between root and the average user? It seems like one might want to run installers at such a level, with write access to /usr/local/bin or some such. Can this be reasonably duplicated for most installations with group permissions?
Petreley misses the real advantage to developers of an open source OS. It's not the level playing field, it's having no insurmountable obstacles to doing one's development. With Windows, driver or OS problems are largely unsolvable -- if it doesn't work, you're out of luck. And if the documentation is wrong, you have no way of knowing how the code really works.
Likewise, open source development tools can be a big win, simply because developers can fix problems with them. I work doing NT development with Visual C++, and there are an amazing number of little delays here and there. I try to open a file -- and type the filename well before the "File Open" dialog appears. I'd also like to see color syntax highlighting for parentheses and brackets, but there's no way for me to do it with Visual C++. Open source dev tools would be nice not because of the cost -- the cost is far less than salaries -- but because of the things I could fix and improve, and thus save time and get more done.
Two of the people who died in the crash of the Valujet crash were relatives of my wife. Commercial airline travel is substantially safer per mile travelled than automobile travel, but less safe than bus travel or train travel.
I did get on a plane within two days of them dying, anyway.
>Not only was this drug-addled rubbish bumped up to one
Everyone but ACs gets a 1 score by default, no moderators were involved.
Can anyone point me to a good description of exactly how X, Gnome, KDE, window managers, GnuStep, et al fit together? Some sort of layered block diagram with OS, layered by X, etc. would be extremely helpful to this somewhat confused person.
>Why should I (hypothetically) provide you with an opportunity to support your family?
Let me put it this way. Suppose you do something, and you have a choice of GPLing it or some other license. Assume for the sake of argument that as far as you can tell, your choice will have no effect on you, including effects on future software available to you. However, choosing a non-GPL license will allow someone else the opportunity to make a living. Which would you choose?
Now, you can certainly make a case that releasing under the GPL makes it more likely that extensions, bug-fixes, etc. will appear also under the GPL, so your motivation for GPL'ing stuff is that. That's perfectly reasonable. What I object to is the "I'm not making money off this, so I'll be damned if anyone else can either" stance. Choose your license based on how it affects you, not on the fear that it might help someone else make money.
>Whoever said that the free software community exists to provide software to lazy and greedy people?
Are you upset that Robert Young of Red Hat is making good money selling GPL'ed software?
Are you upset that Tim O'Reilly is making good money on books about GPL'ed software?
Are you upset that numerous internet entrepeneurs are making good money selling services using GPL'ed software?
Then why are you so upset that someone might make money selling proprietary extensions to your open source code? That person is at least as likely as the others to make open contributions to the tools that help him or her build their extensions.
I note that based on Rob's poll, you can make a reasonable assumption that very few Slashdot'ers have ever had to support a family. Eliminating opportunities for others to make money to support their family is not in and of itself a good thing.
"Be claims (and has consistantly claimed) that they were not supporting the newer PPC boxes because Apple would not give them technical information."
So how come this isn't stopping LinuxPPC?
I get 30-50 spams a day in my "main" account. So I did a couple of things. First, I set up a second account, which I only tell of to friends. Second, I set up rotating e-mail aliases, which I use for newsgroup posting. Every once in a while I change the older of the two aliases and use that new one as my address on newsgroup posting. It's not perfect, but it has cut way down on the spam to the trusted account.
.com, .net, etc. Otherwise your provider's mailer will still have to deal with all the foo@dontspamme.bar.com e-mail and send out bounce messages.
Note that my e-mail address above is a munged version of the untrusted account. Someday soon it will go the way of the dinosaur.
P.S. If you munge your account, munge at the highest level -- just before the
It seems to me what is needed is someone or some group to maintain a list of manufacturers of various computing products, and their stance/level of support for Linux et al. (It may need to be handled on a per-product level.) So if I want to check out the Linux-readiness of a system or upgrade, I'd just look up the hardware I'm thinking about on this site, and I could easily make an informed choice.
The site might also solicit companies and organizations to sign on to indicate what level of support for Linux they demand, to serve as a prod to hardware companies to nudge them towards opening their products. A few big names on the list (or a big list of names) might be more effective than the occasional e-mail from a customer requesting/demanding open products.
So if you're not a programmer but want to help the Linux, etc. effort, here's a potential role to play.
>One action...two results... Business as usual for the Prez. Let's Roast Microsoft.
Yes, but Clinton only screwed one person...
Mandrake, Debian, et al are all available at Cheapbytes for about the sale amount as the sales tax you would pay if you bought a copy of Windows 98. Downloading is not required.
Mandrake in particular is based on Red Hat with modifications aimed at being a better distribution for end users, so it (at least from a code point of view) might be a better way for Linux to go mainstream.
Personally I would say that's two good reasons... ;-)
>Devices like that are very useful for certain scientific and visualization applications [...]
I disagree. If you're doing work like that you'll want to spend the extra money for a better system. This is too viewpoint-dependent to spend a significant time working with, a slight move of your head and the perspective gets screwed. Better to use LCD shutter glasses, along with a system that guarantees the frame-switching will always be done. (You need to guarantee that the right image is displayed every shutter switch, difficult without a real-time OS or some sort of hardware to do it.)
Why is socialist in this context seen as a perjorative? When I talk of socialist, I think of things like taxpayer-funded medicine, social welfare, subsidized schooling, etc.; basically any situation where the government plays a role in allocating resources to individuals, rather than a pure capitalist "trade labor for resources" system. As European tax rates are higher than U.S. rates even with the higher U.S. defense spending, I place Europe further along the individualismsocialism scale than the U.S. It's not meant as a perjorative or a compliment, just a statement.
When I dislocated my shoulder three years ago, I was in a nasty brace for a while and a sling after that, so I nearly got the company I worked for to get some of those for me. Turned out I was able to get enough freedom with the sling to do full-fledged typing, so we didn't end up getting them, but if you're one-armed I think it wouldn't be a bad idea.
Another alternative no one has mentioned is the chord keyboard, one of which is commercially known as the Bat. Again, I've never actually tried it, although there are times when I hate the cost of moving from keyboard to mouse.
My personal idea, free for any takers, is the "mouse keyboard." Basically, movement of the keyboard itself (or perhaps just pressure, a la SpaceTec's spaceorb et al) would serve as mouse movements. This would be meant for more as a supplemental device -- there's no reason you should have to be stuck with just one mouse/trackball/etc.
Add me as another person agreeing to the above statement. As an install, I managed to get a command prompt out of Red Hat 5.1 within about an hour of starting the installation. I tried to upgrade from Windows 95 to 98, and almost trashed my machine. I went to bed with it seemingly hung in the same part of the installation it had seemingly hung four times before, and when I woke up it had timed out and allowed the installation to finish. I *then* had to remove the CD-ROM driver stuff from config.sys and autoexec.bat, and then reinstall S3/Virge drivers since it had kindly replaced mine with ones with a much more limited set of resolutions and color depths.
And all this just so I could start getting USB peripherals -- most especially a scanner -- so once Linux has better support for USB I'm in better shape for switching over completely.
Only thing I haven't gotten working on Linux is PPP (why the Sam Hill doesn't the default Red Hat kernel include PPP support? I was able to recompile the kernel, but sheesh!), once I have the time to work that out I may switch over for most of what I do.
>So your definition of "good" writing contains numerous spelling errors and poor grammar?
:-)
Maybe CmdrTaco edits his articles.
P.S. Just teasing Rob, keep up the good work!