The reason was a "get it done" attitude and not worrying or caring about politics. Agreed. Worse is better. In his announcement, Linus talks about all the dirty hacks he used, and how non-portable the program was. And yet eventually it became ported nearly everywhere.
And I'm sure they'd call everybody who thinks differently "plebians" as well. It doens't make it true, it just makes you look like a dick. It is true. The common person will find a game between chess masters boring. And as somebody who has only a casual interest in poker, I find that no limit is certainly more exciting to watch on TV than limit. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't think "plebian" means "dumb fuck". The guy with a plebian's interest in poker could be very smart, but just not interested in deep, technical strategies.
Has Mozilla forgotten their mission ? [...] "The Mozilla Foundation was established in July 2003 as a California not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the public benefit." And in August 2005 they created the for-profit Mozilla Corporation to handle the +$50 million a year they get from Google.
OSS is supposed to be a *different* business model, with a *broader* vision, benefitting the public, not just Google proxies or lackies. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Ah, but you are free to legally decompile the source and do whatever you want with it. But Stallman wanted the source.
All these closed-source vendors would go out of business because they'd only be able to sell a very small number of copies before somebody put it up on the Internet What do you think GPL3, DRM, and "trusted computing" is all about? If the hardware is locked down tight enough you won't be able to get at the binary. Then there's the "software as a service model", which GPL3 won't even address because while combatting DRM was pushing the envelope, requiring server operators to release source would have been busting through it.
Sure, it's a trade-off, but it's arguable that it would be a worthwhile one. Personally, I agree, though I'd probably just prefer drastic reform on copyright duration and a repeal of the DMCA. But if you're talking about the GPL, you have to be very clear about *your* beliefs vs Stallman's. The general claim is that the GPL needs copyright. Since Stallman created the GPL, it makes sense to default to his viewpoint, and ironically for Stallman and his followers, the claim is true.
If we didn't have copyright laws, we wouldn't need the GPL anyway! Stallman created the GPL. He was driven to do so by not having access to source code for a printer driver. He had the binary, but not the source, and he wanted to hack the source. So he created the GPL to say you must provide the source. Without copyright the GPL has no teeth, and the printer driver can be binary only.
No copyright, no GPL. People are free to create binary-only derivatives of your source code. A bitter pill for pro-GPL, anti-copyright advocates to swallow, isn't it?
And we all need suckers like him to buy the latest overpriced, overhyped hardware, so that we can wait a couple of years and buy the next generation for 1/10 the cost. [...] Look at the people who paid $500 for a 15" LCD screen with crap specs, when you can now buy a 20" for $150.00. In general I agree with you, but then if you've got the money why wait years and years for something? I bought a 19" LCD screen something like 6 years ago for around $700. Still works great and it saved me a bunch of desktop real estate, something that was nagging me for a while. It would have been several years of more waiting to get something cheap.
Now, I still haven't upgraded my TV from over 10 years ago because it's expensive and not compelling -- to me. But for some people it's a big deal, so whatever.
My most recent Linux installs are on new machines, with the users ASKING for linux to be installed Your original post said that you didn't support Windows users and that you offered people Ubuntu Live CDs to try out. I don't know how your business operates, how you advertise, or the path that somebody has taken when they ask you for a Linux install. What I'm saying is that I suspect your sample is quite biased, and not indicative of a big trend in the general population.
The king is dead. Long live the King. That announcement isn't made until after the king is dead.
if I fix it, it will break again subject to the three R's of windows; Reboot the machine. Reload the application. Reinstall the Operating System. [...] Nowadays, I just give people a Ubuntu live install to try And when their Ubuntu breaks, will the three R's be any different? I was talking to a non-techie, and he was complaining about the non-native speakers that he could barely understand when he called support. He asked me what I do when my machine breaks. I told him I fix it myself. I did not recommend Ubuntu because I know eventually it'll break and he'll be no better off, and blame me. There's no silver bullet.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. I don't think this simple peice of wisdom factors into M$'s business plan. I agree that Vista is not a compelling upgrade, but people will get it when they buy a new machine. And new devices will be sure to support it. And so it will be the path of least resistance. It's good to be the king.
Now, admittedly GPL can't exist without copyrights, but if there were none then we wouldn't have a need for it. The fundamental idea behind the GPL is that you must provide source code with binaries, so that the person receiving the software can modify it. GPL can only enforce this with copyright. If copyright did not exist, Stallman's world of no closed software could only exist with a special law that forces you to provide source.
Copyright is simply the government telling you what you cannot do with your property. Like the GPL? It says I cannot compile software and give it away without source.
So, you might wonder why I believe (or maybe not)? Yes, I do. Instead of referring to some old writer, why do you believe? And in particular, why Christianity?
All that happened during was McCarthyism is that a few movie writers and producers lost their jobs, and had to work in England making big bucks, before moving back to the U.S. to make big bucks. You're glossing over just how bad it was. It was a modern-day witch hunt. It wasn't just Hollywood types losing their jobs. Just because the Japanese internment was an awful thing doesn't making the rise of McCarthyism any better. Read up on it.
But now is the first time, at least in the U.S., that the classical Western liberal values are no longer what our culture aspires to. It is the first time that authoritarianism has been widely popular to the masses. So, the Japanese internment and McCarthyism were classical Western liberal values? The War on Drugs? Racial quotas?
Is anybody clamoring for Bush as permanent dictator? Doesn't it appear that the trend of eroding freedoms is reversing? Is there not free speech being excercised? Are you not allowed to leave the country? Choose your own career? Live your life in relative freedom?
Too much "the sky is falling" for me and "now is a uniquely bad moment in history".
Would you be willing to share with me a couple of your "fundamental inconsistencies?" Sure, but I'm sure you've heard them all before.
Why are there so many religions around the world, with completely different views? Wouldn't God want to deliver the same message to everybody, at all times? Why am I expected to believe a *particular* two thousand year old book that was first orally handed down, then written by a committee of men who decided what was "canon", then modified, translated, and interpreted over the centuries? Why can't God give each person a clear message, instead of receiving his message through such a noisy channel that provides no compelling evidence?
My personal view is that if you look at religions all around the world, they are invented by people to explain nature and codify cultural ethics. Witch doctors, human sacrafices, rain dances, Sun gods, Lightning Gods, etc. Christianity has its roots in old Jewish stories, but mixed mixed with a more populist message. There's no fundamental reason to believe it over any other religion.
Then there's the conflicting messages. In Biblical stories, God at times seems petty, vengeful, and cruel. At others he is loving and forgiving. And everybody has their own spin on these stories, going back to the "old, translated, written by men book" problem.
And at the end of the day, the Bible provides no answers that couldn't have been made up by men, and that in fact seems the most likely explanation. Certainly evolution, geology, physics, and cosmology have provided more profound, usable, and testable answers. Answers which the Catholic Church felt threatened by and so they tried to repress them.
I'm curious what your thoughts on these issues are.
Thankfully I read it from an earlier link to the story. At 3-4 pages, there isn't much point in reading it after you just summarized the whole thing. You know, a lot of the pleasure derived from reading a story comes from discovery.
I agree with my sibling poster. I have signatures disabled too. The "brief message from the bottom of your heart" is just an off-topic advertisement and detracts from the forum. But I'm glad to hear you say you'll remove it.
Oh come off it. Physics has a history of changing the underlying model. The current theory states that randomness is inherent, but something may come along and invalidate that theory. It may seem extremely unlikely given the current understanding, but the idea of physics being turned on its head is not unprecedented.
have you tried playing Xbox 360 games on an SDTV? good luck reading the text if you don't have an enormous TV in the first place Yeah, that really pisses me off. There's no excuse for it, yet nearly every damn game suffers this problem. No quality control from Microsoft.
Now is the first time things are getting worse, instead of better. McCarthyism was getting better? The Internet is getting worse? You can look through over 200 years of history and find lots of examples where things got better, got worse, maybe both at the same time.
Interestingly Ravi Zacharias says that if all you can do is ridicule a major religious system, you simply have not studied it enough. I started out as a "believer" because that's the way I was raised. Yet the more questions I asked and the deeper I dug, the more disillusioned I became. At some point I realized that religion was complete bullshit. And so it only becomes natural to ridicule beliefs that don't make any sense, though in general I don't raise the subject with people unless it comes up in conversation.
My view of people like you is that they fit the facts around their beliefs. Fundamental inconsistencies are waved away. There is no answer for the most basic of questions. But you'll happily dream up some personal explanation, while other believers come up with different ones. Meanwhile, most of the people who actually follow the religion haven't thought critically at all about it, and just use it as a security blanket.
You might want to think more critically and re-read that post you replied to. "Windows" is mentioned, not Microsoft. "Sounds like someone is used to programming Windows drivers" [emphasis mine].
And indeed, Obsid's reply to yours backs up that assertion with a lot of evidence, where the "someone" would be Samsung.
Seems like most of the money in open source is not in support. Red Hat sells "enterprise" versions of their software that forbid you from freely installing and copying via trademark poisoning, but I guess the FSF ultimately puts up with it because Red Hat releases their sources. Then there's the Trolltech model of dual-licensing under GPL and a corporate friendly, proprietary license. Then there's the Mozilla model of getting $50 million from Google for being the default search engine. Then there's the Sleepycat model of being bought out by Oracle. Then there's the Ruby on Rails model of selling books. Etc.
But ultimately, I think the vast majority of people who write open source software don't make a living off it. They have day jobs where they write proprietary software.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a very frank person.
No copyright, no GPL. People are free to create binary-only derivatives of your source code. A bitter pill for pro-GPL, anti-copyright advocates to swallow, isn't it?
Now, I still haven't upgraded my TV from over 10 years ago because it's expensive and not compelling -- to me. But for some people it's a big deal, so whatever.
Is anybody clamoring for Bush as permanent dictator? Doesn't it appear that the trend of eroding freedoms is reversing? Is there not free speech being excercised? Are you not allowed to leave the country? Choose your own career? Live your life in relative freedom?
Too much "the sky is falling" for me and "now is a uniquely bad moment in history".
Why are there so many religions around the world, with completely different views? Wouldn't God want to deliver the same message to everybody, at all times? Why am I expected to believe a *particular* two thousand year old book that was first orally handed down, then written by a committee of men who decided what was "canon", then modified, translated, and interpreted over the centuries? Why can't God give each person a clear message, instead of receiving his message through such a noisy channel that provides no compelling evidence?
My personal view is that if you look at religions all around the world, they are invented by people to explain nature and codify cultural ethics. Witch doctors, human sacrafices, rain dances, Sun gods, Lightning Gods, etc. Christianity has its roots in old Jewish stories, but mixed mixed with a more populist message. There's no fundamental reason to believe it over any other religion.
Then there's the conflicting messages. In Biblical stories, God at times seems petty, vengeful, and cruel. At others he is loving and forgiving. And everybody has their own spin on these stories, going back to the "old, translated, written by men book" problem.
And at the end of the day, the Bible provides no answers that couldn't have been made up by men, and that in fact seems the most likely explanation. Certainly evolution, geology, physics, and cosmology have provided more profound, usable, and testable answers. Answers which the Catholic Church felt threatened by and so they tried to repress them.
I'm curious what your thoughts on these issues are.
Commenting on posts is a meta-topic. It's community pressure that shapes a community. Personal advertisements are completely off topic.
Yeah, it was a "me too" post, but I felt the point deserved some backup. "me too" is lame so I summarized in my own words.
Thankfully I read it from an earlier link to the story. At 3-4 pages, there isn't much point in reading it after you just summarized the whole thing. You know, a lot of the pleasure derived from reading a story comes from discovery.
I agree with my sibling poster. I have signatures disabled too. The "brief message from the bottom of your heart" is just an off-topic advertisement and detracts from the forum. But I'm glad to hear you say you'll remove it.
Oh come off it. Physics has a history of changing the underlying model. The current theory states that randomness is inherent, but something may come along and invalidate that theory. It may seem extremely unlikely given the current understanding, but the idea of physics being turned on its head is not unprecedented.
My view of people like you is that they fit the facts around their beliefs. Fundamental inconsistencies are waved away. There is no answer for the most basic of questions. But you'll happily dream up some personal explanation, while other believers come up with different ones. Meanwhile, most of the people who actually follow the religion haven't thought critically at all about it, and just use it as a security blanket.
You might want to think more critically and re-read that post you replied to. "Windows" is mentioned, not Microsoft. "Sounds like someone is used to programming Windows drivers" [emphasis mine].
And indeed, Obsid's reply to yours backs up that assertion with a lot of evidence, where the "someone" would be Samsung.
+1 Interesting
Seems like most of the money in open source is not in support. Red Hat sells "enterprise" versions of their software that forbid you from freely installing and copying via trademark poisoning, but I guess the FSF ultimately puts up with it because Red Hat releases their sources. Then there's the Trolltech model of dual-licensing under GPL and a corporate friendly, proprietary license. Then there's the Mozilla model of getting $50 million from Google for being the default search engine. Then there's the Sleepycat model of being bought out by Oracle. Then there's the Ruby on Rails model of selling books. Etc.
But ultimately, I think the vast majority of people who write open source software don't make a living off it. They have day jobs where they write proprietary software.