the problem is really the term "hobby software". if you use the word "hobby" you probably mean something someone does in their free time without getting paid for it substantially. of course, a lot of free software is written like this, but most large projects have a team of professionals getting paid good money for their work. it would seem ridiculous to call something like the linux kernel or the gcc hobby software--many hundred people are employed full-time working on these projects.
your choice of words "compensation" is fud of the first degree. people who work on these projects don't need compensation but financial support.
summing up: free as in freedom not free as in price. it is something neither gates nor you seem to understand.
i had fun recently at work. a customer had sent us a template in wordxml for a document they wanted to be automagically created. we looked at the template and it was horrible (images repeated in strange positions, random text formatting, tables looking weird, etc). we sent the template back with the request that the customer get his act together. the template came back with minimal changes, so we sent it back again. this went to and fro for about a month and the accompanying emails became quite heated until i suggested that we look at the template in office 2003 (my colleagues use office 2007, which doesn't run on gnusense, my distribution of choice) and lo and behold it looked perfect. we ate those words with mustard on them hot from the oven of shame set on gasmark egg-on-our-faces.
of course, that put us in a spot of bother. i had already written the document generation classes in java, (which was a real pain btw, because wordxml is really bloated and illegible), and our boss had to call up the company and say "you know we said you should use word because it looks the same on every computer and everybody can read it? well...". the solution is still hanging in the air. total cost for the customer up to now must be about 30 000 euro.
okay, there are still a number of ifs here, but it looks like as of the release of sp2 for office microsoft is officially dead.
my question is, how did sun, ibm and google manage to put the pressure on adobe? It looks to me like offering native pdf support for office was the carrot for microsoft here.
i don't think microsoft can risk it. picture what would happen, if they came out with a buggy and mangled implementation of odf. ibm, sun and goodle, not to mention the eu and the governments of so many other countries would rip them to shreds.
i'm not denying implementing odf is a bad decision in the eyes of the share-holders. announcing support for odf is however something subtly different. maybe microsoft's scared of repercussions because of the corruption in the standardisation process for ooxml.
even the oldest parts of the bible were written somewhere around 1200-1000 bc. these are things like the psalms. genesis itself consists of at least three sources dated between 900 and 500 bc.
yes england is. the united kingdom was one of the founding members of the european council. the european convention on human rights is the highest law in england, just as it is in all member states.
strangely the title of your post makes sense. if gnu/linux is to come to "the desktop" it will have to do so by circumventing the monopolist. getting gnu/linux into the bios is one cool way of doing this.
just imagine what it will be like in 2 years, if a modified ubuntu could be found on every mother board.
you pay for gpled and lgpled code by following the terms of the copyright license. it is exactly this license that has made free software possible. complaining that it means that others can't make money off it without giving back is stupid. it wouldn't be there if this were otherwise.
microsoft could implement odf and suggest improvements to the standard. these would be considered live all other calls to improve a standard.
the only connection between your transferal of odf/ooxml on to OO.o/MSO is that MSO does not implement ODF. this is microsoft's free choice. it is regrettable, but microsoft is a public company which is allowed to ignore standards. if microsoft had decided to implement ODF we would not be having this conversation.
the people who want governments to communicate with the citizens and store information in standardised formats do not want this because they hate microsoft. they want this so that the information can be read by all and continue to be able to be read by all for ever. it surprises me that you do not know this.
i thought one of the major problems of ooxml is that it will only be implemented by other companies, not by microsoft, who will come out with a product that supports a broken version of ooxml and renders ooxml documents created in staroffice (for example) incorrectly.
i'm not sure there will always be an ubuntu, linspire, mepis or other. when you see what progress the purely free distributions have made in the last 5 years, you have to be impressed. the only things stopping me going purely free on all my computers are flash, (which i have installed on one of them) and some software to convert video formats to ogg video (which i suspect contains some non-free parts, or at least patent encumbered) parts).
you have to marvel at the man. he has really achieved his goal of enabling people to use their computers in freedom. of course there is an overlap between gobuntu and gnewsense (and debian as well) but who cares? they are all free software projects that means that work done on one project flows into the others.
well done mr stallman and all free software developers for sticking by your vision and making the world a better place.
we had something amusing happen at work recently. a customer sent us a template we could embed in their internet page to be dynamically populated. our boss convinced the company the best format would be microsoft xml from word 2003 (because the company uses word 2003). so they sent us the template and their was a lot wrong with it (images in the wrong place and wrongly scaled, missing borders, wrong font positioning etc. etc.). we sent the template back and asked them to correct it. they sent us a new version which had the same problems. we sent it back. this carried on for about a month until i suggested we find a version of office 2003 to view it in (those that use windows at work had been viewing the document in word 2007) and then everything looked perfect.
this of course left us with a problem. at some stage in the future the client will update some of their computers and install office 2007 or later. we cannot claim that we did not know about these problems. fortunately i'm just a code-monkey so i find it all highly amusing. at some stage i will tell my boss that there are java libraries for processing and creating odf files (at the moment we've been populating the word xml file by greping the text for strings and replacing these), and that sun makes a plugin for word. but i'll let him ferment for a few days first until he's really desperate.
sounds about right. at the moment i'm working for a software house that develops in house software. it must be at least as large as canonical and i can almost guarantee you haven't heard of it. ubuntu is gradually doing for desktop operating systems what mysql did for the database: turn an X billion dollar market into an X/10 billion dollar market. and a lot of unpleasant truths are being uncovered, well unpleasant for microsoft.
the gp happened across a site where a review of the software included a download link.
for those of us on modems, the size of the download has a lot to do with usability.
security has a lot to do with usability--if you can't use your computer because a security problem has been exploited, the usability does tend to suffer.
i don't see the usability flaw in the ubuntu software package manager. you say it takes longer because i have to use a different application to install the software than to find it, quite apart from the fact that many webpages offer ubuntu compatible debs for download. the advantages of apt are legion, while as the mac "software installer" is a huge security risk.
you see no difference between trying to educate people so they become self-sufficient and forcing them into an addiction? you have a strange view of the world.
the trouble with your griping is, the package manager on a gnu/linux distribution is vastly superior to any way osx or windows has to install software. just because you like things to be needlessly complex doesn't mean that the many million ubuntu users also like that.
apple is not an independent party here. the company has a vested interest in making itself look better and its competitors worse. moreover, apple would be able to steal personal information of install a kill switch and it may be in their interest to do so. if they did, i would have no way of knowing.
in fact i have absolutely no reason to trust apple and trust is earned, as they say.
sorry, we are having problem with english pronouns here. when i say "you" own it, i mean "you pl." own it. it belongs to humanity. so no you are not allowed to deprive me of it, because it also belongs to me.
the difference being that apple hides its code away and says "trust us!" while free software says "here's the code. check for yourself!"
this means that with apple i have to trust one company which is trying its best to sell its own product, whereas with free software i can check myself or i can trust thousands of people who have nothing to do with any company that is making money off it.
the difference being that there are thousands of people world-wide with access to the gnu/linux sourcecode trying to show how much it sucks compared with mac osx or windows. don't you think that if redhat started collecting information or had a remote kill switch, apple and microsoft would make sure you knew about it. heck it, the free software community wouldn't stand for something like that.
more important would be how much information is being collected about you by apple and microsoft to be sold to the highest bidder. or maybe the remote kill switch built into your computer.
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i find it frankly insulting that the op compared hitler with hussein.
the problem is really the term "hobby software". if you use the word "hobby" you probably mean something someone does in their free time without getting paid for it substantially. of course, a lot of free software is written like this, but most large projects have a team of professionals getting paid good money for their work. it would seem ridiculous to call something like the linux kernel or the gcc hobby software--many hundred people are employed full-time working on these projects.
your choice of words "compensation" is fud of the first degree. people who work on these projects don't need compensation but financial support.
summing up: free as in freedom not free as in price. it is something neither gates nor you seem to understand.
i had fun recently at work. a customer had sent us a template in wordxml for a document they wanted to be automagically created. we looked at the template and it was horrible (images repeated in strange positions, random text formatting, tables looking weird, etc). we sent the template back with the request that the customer get his act together. the template came back with minimal changes, so we sent it back again. this went to and fro for about a month and the accompanying emails became quite heated until i suggested that we look at the template in office 2003 (my colleagues use office 2007, which doesn't run on gnusense, my distribution of choice) and lo and behold it looked perfect. we ate those words with mustard on them hot from the oven of shame set on gasmark egg-on-our-faces.
of course, that put us in a spot of bother. i had already written the document generation classes in java, (which was a real pain btw, because wordxml is really bloated and illegible), and our boss had to call up the company and say "you know we said you should use word because it looks the same on every computer and everybody can read it? well...". the solution is still hanging in the air. total cost for the customer up to now must be about 30 000 euro.
okay, there are still a number of ifs here, but it looks like as of the release of sp2 for office microsoft is officially dead.
my question is, how did sun, ibm and google manage to put the pressure on adobe? It looks to me like offering native pdf support for office was the carrot for microsoft here.
i don't think microsoft can risk it. picture what would happen, if they came out with a buggy and mangled implementation of odf. ibm, sun and goodle, not to mention the eu and the governments of so many other countries would rip them to shreds.
i'm not denying implementing odf is a bad decision in the eyes of the share-holders. announcing support for odf is however something subtly different. maybe microsoft's scared of repercussions because of the corruption in the standardisation process for ooxml.
even the oldest parts of the bible were written somewhere around 1200-1000 bc. these are things like the psalms. genesis itself consists of at least three sources dated between 900 and 500 bc.
yes england is. the united kingdom was one of the founding members of the european council. the european convention on human rights is the highest law in england, just as it is in all member states.
strangely the title of your post makes sense. if gnu/linux is to come to "the desktop" it will have to do so by circumventing the monopolist. getting gnu/linux into the bios is one cool way of doing this.
just imagine what it will be like in 2 years, if a modified ubuntu could be found on every mother board.
you pay for gpled and lgpled code by following the terms of the copyright license. it is exactly this license that has made free software possible. complaining that it means that others can't make money off it without giving back is stupid. it wouldn't be there if this were otherwise.
microsoft could implement odf and suggest improvements to the standard. these would be considered live all other calls to improve a standard.
the only connection between your transferal of odf/ooxml on to OO.o/MSO is that MSO does not implement ODF. this is microsoft's free choice. it is regrettable, but microsoft is a public company which is allowed to ignore standards. if microsoft had decided to implement ODF we would not be having this conversation.
the people who want governments to communicate with the citizens and store information in standardised formats do not want this because they hate microsoft. they want this so that the information can be read by all and continue to be able to be read by all for ever. it surprises me that you do not know this.
i thought one of the major problems of ooxml is that it will only be implemented by other companies, not by microsoft, who will come out with a product that supports a broken version of ooxml and renders ooxml documents created in staroffice (for example) incorrectly.
i'm not sure there will always be an ubuntu, linspire, mepis or other. when you see what progress the purely free distributions have made in the last 5 years, you have to be impressed. the only things stopping me going purely free on all my computers are flash, (which i have installed on one of them) and some software to convert video formats to ogg video (which i suspect contains some non-free parts, or at least patent encumbered) parts).
you have to marvel at the man. he has really achieved his goal of enabling people to use their computers in freedom. of course there is an overlap between gobuntu and gnewsense (and debian as well) but who cares? they are all free software projects that means that work done on one project flows into the others.
well done mr stallman and all free software developers for sticking by your vision and making the world a better place.
oh this is so very true.
we had something amusing happen at work recently. a customer sent us a template we could embed in their internet page to be dynamically populated. our boss convinced the company the best format would be microsoft xml from word 2003 (because the company uses word 2003). so they sent us the template and their was a lot wrong with it (images in the wrong place and wrongly scaled, missing borders, wrong font positioning etc. etc.). we sent the template back and asked them to correct it. they sent us a new version which had the same problems. we sent it back. this carried on for about a month until i suggested we find a version of office 2003 to view it in (those that use windows at work had been viewing the document in word 2007) and then everything looked perfect.
this of course left us with a problem. at some stage in the future the client will update some of their computers and install office 2007 or later. we cannot claim that we did not know about these problems. fortunately i'm just a code-monkey so i find it all highly amusing. at some stage i will tell my boss that there are java libraries for processing and creating odf files (at the moment we've been populating the word xml file by greping the text for strings and replacing these), and that sun makes a plugin for word. but i'll let him ferment for a few days first until he's really desperate.
sounds about right. at the moment i'm working for a software house that develops in house software. it must be at least as large as canonical and i can almost guarantee you haven't heard of it. ubuntu is gradually doing for desktop operating systems what mysql did for the database: turn an X billion dollar market into an X/10 billion dollar market. and a lot of unpleasant truths are being uncovered, well unpleasant for microsoft.
the gp happened across a site where a review of the software included a download link.
for those of us on modems, the size of the download has a lot to do with usability.
security has a lot to do with usability--if you can't use your computer because a security problem has been exploited, the usability does tend to suffer.
i don't see the usability flaw in the ubuntu software package manager. you say it takes longer because i have to use a different application to install the software than to find it, quite apart from the fact that many webpages offer ubuntu compatible debs for download. the advantages of apt are legion, while as the mac "software installer" is a huge security risk.
you see no difference between trying to educate people so they become self-sufficient and forcing them into an addiction? you have a strange view of the world.
should i carry on?
the trouble with your griping is, the package manager on a gnu/linux distribution is vastly superior to any way osx or windows has to install software. just because you like things to be needlessly complex doesn't mean that the many million ubuntu users also like that.
apple is not an independent party here. the company has a vested interest in making itself look better and its competitors worse. moreover, apple would be able to steal personal information of install a kill switch and it may be in their interest to do so. if they did, i would have no way of knowing.
in fact i have absolutely no reason to trust apple and trust is earned, as they say.
sorry, we are having problem with english pronouns here. when i say "you" own it, i mean "you pl." own it. it belongs to humanity. so no you are not allowed to deprive me of it, because it also belongs to me.
the difference being that apple hides its code away and says "trust us!" while free software says "here's the code. check for yourself!"
this means that with apple i have to trust one company which is trying its best to sell its own product, whereas with free software i can check myself or i can trust thousands of people who have nothing to do with any company that is making money off it.
the difference being that there are thousands of people world-wide with access to the gnu/linux sourcecode trying to show how much it sucks compared with mac osx or windows. don't you think that if redhat started collecting information or had a remote kill switch, apple and microsoft would make sure you knew about it. heck it, the free software community wouldn't stand for something like that.
more important would be how much information is being collected about you by apple and microsoft to be sold to the highest bidder. or maybe the remote kill switch built into your computer.