RSS is a form of RDF, and so this idea of an "extension" is a little both misleading and confusing.
Part of the point of RDF is that you can embed lots of vocabularies in a single document. You can say, for example, that a RSS publisher has an attribute FoaF document, or even arbitrary FoaF properies. Or you could use an RDF version of vCard, or RDF iCal...
That's all been part of the Semantic Web for a long time.
It seems that instead of the standards, the proposal is for yet another complete extension from Microsoft.
I think RDF needs help getting the full adoption it needs, but based on what Microsoft has done to other standards (Kerberos, SPF, HTML, etc.) I don't think that this will end up being the right approach to fix any problems RSS has.
In the past, you'd have to round people up and convince them to attack the monster on the hill.
With IBM's new technology, thousands of villagers can be gathered with the click of a button. Added value to pitchfork and torch supplies through direct targeted advertisement.
I never hear people (outside of a few kernel developers) saying things like "You know, I thought about buying an iPod but decided not to because it didn't have an open firmware"
Few people say that, but almost as you yourself argue, there are few developers working on such issues. We retain freedoms for everyone, but only a small percentage of people can use those freedoms at a given time.
That's okay, it's still important.
So, basically, you can keep going and going until you reach some bottleneck at which point you aren't in control anymore and are reliant on other people to get things done. It's tempting to think that the transition line is at the boundary between software and hardware, but this line isn't all that clear - hardware is hard to "fork" because it exists physically and has duplication cost, yet the purpose of copyright is to allow you to make something with a zero copy cost have non-zero copy cost so it can fit into our economy. Even when that privilege is not used, like with GPLd software, it doesn't stretch down the whole stack because that GPLd software still requires controlled things like hardware and electricity to be useful.
I don't think the transition line is at hardware and software, but software is an easier fight then hardware, though so much hardware now has firmware loaded on boot- the line blurs further.
Put simply, there is no black/white open/closed divide. There are only shades of grey between one end of the spectrum and the other. We should strive for openness as it has several properties which help our society Get Things Done, but at no point should openness overrule getting things done as that's putting the cart before the horse.
"Black and white" and even "shades of grey" is dualistic thinking. The issues are multifaceted, but saying that we shouldn't try is essentially saying we should give up. Why give up now, when we've made so much progress? We struggled for years for where we are now. The number of Free Software users is a critical mass. Companies are now working with us. We have a large, powerful community- now's when we can put pressure on the companies to do the right thing. We're winning the battle, so let's not give up now.
These companies want a binary layer so they can build binary drivers.
What people tend to forget about this is that it's a bad idea- from most every perspective.
The Linux kernel was written as a Free Softwate alternative to the existing *nix systems.
We have thousands of drivers in the kernel from a combination of development efforts. Sometimes a driver is written by an independant kernel developer, and sometimes it's written from the company producing the hardware, working alongside the community.
What these companies want is to be able to have thier cake without giving back to the community. This is a very slippery slope at the least, and illegal at best, since these sorts of links to binary kernel drivers have been long known to be illegal to distribute alongside the kernel (unless special previsions are made, such as a userland driver).
Also, binary drivers have been known to be buggy and essentially removie the kernel developers from a position where they have control over the kernel as a whole project. I won't even go into the issues associated with a possible security hole in a binary driver, or a binary driver with, for example, spyware in it.
The arguement for it is, of course, that this might mean more drivers. This is a test of our strength as a community. Doing the right thing is harder. It means we won't have all the hardware at all times, and certainly not the newest thing. But we retain control over our computers.
It's hard to say no, but this looks like a clear case where we have to.
This is yet another article saying that "If only Linux was a single unified force, it would be good." with a few sentences about interfaces at the front.
Let me dispell some of the myths. First, people don't want things to change. It's wrong.
If that were true, no one would have moved to OS X. "iPod, what's an iPod? I listen to music on my walkman."
People aren't going to change to GNU/Linux for no reason, but once they make the switch, we don't need it to look and behave like Windows. We have our own interfaces, and they work. OS X doesn't look like Microsoft Windows and people don't have that much trouble using it.
Some of the interface integration ideas he presents are allright- some of them are already in place, and others will take more work.
But the idea we need to drop KDE or GNOME, and drop distributions is old and tiring.
The simple fact is that when you consolodate for the sake of a unified force, you remove what makes the Free Software world great- competition.
If we'd all consolodated with Slackware in 92, we wouldn't have had packages. If we'd consolodated behind, say GNUStep, we wouldn't have had KDE, or GNOME, and so on.
The idea of lots of distributions and lots of interfaces and lots of every app is to let them all go, find which work best, borrow ideas, and, in the end, everyone benefits.
If we'd decided to "consolodate" and make an incompatible change, then that change would have to be left out. Once that happens, progress stops, and then someone else comes along and steals the rug from right under us.
Even "Consolodated" OSes like FreeBSD are, like GNU/Linux, collections of programs from other places.
I can't believe these articles still make it to Slashdot. They're old and tired.
For the ideals of Open Source, indeed, there's no reason not to use Windows Open Source software, but from the perspective of a Free Software advocate, there's a very real reason to want the sort of "software stack" mentioned.
The idea of Free Software is to replace all proprietary software with Free Software. It was the intention of the GNU project to clone Unix part by part.
When a program is built that runs on the Free platforms, it strengthens the entire movement.
Free Software for Windows can be a positive goal, but does not help the goal of replacing all proprietary software since the platform itself is non-Free.
It all depends on your goal.
Sometimes, Free Software on Windows can be a good thing. Firefox and OpenOffice.org, Gaim and Gimp have all been helpful for Windows users I know in evaluating GNU/Linux desktops. Since they're used to the program, the transition is easier.
But what all of those programs have in common is that they run in both GNU/Linux and Windows, and not Windows exclusively.
This seems like just another company offering to be the engine for lots of dating sites.
What we really want, if our goal is interoperability, is something similar to the FoaF project's RDF description framework for describing people, then using technology to match them up.
In fact, using something like FoaF, we can describe people in more than the "29 dimensions of compatibility"- we can look at things like interests, where they blog, geography, etc.
As for releasing source, Google's business model is based upon advertising, so it's not in their interest to release the source that would allow people to quickly create identical competitors. They spent the time and money on the development, it's theirs to apply their business model to.
You're missing the point of the original post, which is that the product is based on OpenOffice.Org, which is released (I believe) under the GPL.
The idea of the GPL was to give everyone an equal opportunity. With the increasing number of services based on Free Software with slight modifications and then released as a web service, the GPL becomes a de-facto BSD license, which wasn't the purpose.
There's discussion in the Free Software community to rectify this problem by requiring ASPs, if they make changes to code that's under the GPL, to be required to release those changes, in the same way they would if they'd given the code away in binary form.
For the user, this is the same situation. If I get a copy of a binary or I use a web site, it's the same effect, as distribution. Therefore the GPL3 may include a clause to require the same effect of giving a binary as making a service.
It took me a long time to appreciate why this was necessary, but with this latest announcement, I think it is.
What you really mean is, "I would like to get someone else to change thier code and they didn't want to!"
The whole point in this Free Software stuff is, if you think this is a bad thing, you're free to make a competing version. If enough people have trouble like what you're describing, they will join forces and either your fork will work out, or you'll be able to convince Firefox to change thier minds.
Thier policies toward code changes have nothing to do with thier license agreement.
I'm not arguing this. The discussion was the value of Public Domain vs Copyright. Public Domain doesn't intersect trade secrets.
But, in the end, someone does indeed own these documents, the banks, owners, etc. Maybe there's a way to encourage, rather than compell, them to turn over documents that are no longer of use to the company, but which could benefit the public.
I don't know a way to do this, but maybe someone smarter than me can figure it out.
Agreed. Copyleft serves two major purposes, and one of them is not addressed by Public Domain.
The first, of course, is to make work available to the public.
The second is to protect the author from others using thier work against them (ie share and share alike).
But even with copyrights, if a work is not published, but is something internal (say, the code to Google servers), then 50, 75, 100 years can pass, and even though it may (may!) end up technically in the public domain, it's still a trade secret, and if it never gets published externally, it's not public domain.
Copyleft and CC address this issue by getting more works out, but Copyleft and CC only cover works that are specifically placed under those licenses, which are not the majority of works. Both are essentially workarounds for a system that is fundamentally broken and has lost its balance of profit vs public good.
Windows installers stink compared to GNU/Linux package systems RPM and deb.
I don't know what a "productivity program" is. For me it's an email program and a terminal with SSH.
The multitasing in OS/2 was nice, but it's also very nice in other OSes.
As for multimedia, I don't know about OS/2 and I've only seen Windows Media Player from afar. I'm a Free Software user.
LVM and JFS are available on GNU/Linux though many people think that ext3 and xfs are better than jfs.
What I'm saying is that OS/2 doesn't have anything that no other OS today has, and that doesn't make it a good candidate to spend all the effort on cloning.
Slashdot Mirror
[Insert Stuart Little Joke Here]
Fair enough. I was't aware that RSS 2 isn't RDF based.
But even XML namespaces makes any extension like this pretty much unecessary.
It's a shame that RSS couldn't still be RDF... RDF needs more "killer apps".
RSS is a form of RDF, and so this idea of an "extension" is a little both misleading and confusing.
Part of the point of RDF is that you can embed lots of vocabularies in a single document. You can say, for example, that a RSS publisher has an attribute FoaF document, or even arbitrary FoaF properies. Or you could use an RDF version of vCard, or RDF iCal...
That's all been part of the Semantic Web for a long time.
It seems that instead of the standards, the proposal is for yet another complete extension from Microsoft.
I think RDF needs help getting the full adoption it needs, but based on what Microsoft has done to other standards (Kerberos, SPF, HTML, etc.) I don't think that this will end up being the right approach to fix any problems RSS has.
In the past, you'd have to round people up and convince them to attack the monster on the hill.
With IBM's new technology, thousands of villagers can be gathered with the click of a button. Added value to pitchfork and torch supplies through direct targeted advertisement.
That's a flawed argument since we have working hardware.
I never hear people (outside of a few kernel developers) saying things like "You know, I thought about buying an iPod but decided not to because it didn't have an open firmware"
Few people say that, but almost as you yourself argue, there are few developers working on such issues. We retain freedoms for everyone, but only a small percentage of people can use those freedoms at a given time.
That's okay, it's still important.
So, basically, you can keep going and going until you reach some bottleneck at which point you aren't in control anymore and are reliant on other people to get things done. It's tempting to think that the transition line is at the boundary between software and hardware, but this line isn't all that clear - hardware is hard to "fork" because it exists physically and has duplication cost, yet the purpose of copyright is to allow you to make something with a zero copy cost have non-zero copy cost so it can fit into our economy. Even when that privilege is not used, like with GPLd software, it doesn't stretch down the whole stack because that GPLd software still requires controlled things like hardware and electricity to be useful.
I don't think the transition line is at hardware and software, but software is an easier fight then hardware, though so much hardware now has firmware loaded on boot- the line blurs further.
Put simply, there is no black/white open/closed divide. There are only shades of grey between one end of the spectrum and the other. We should strive for openness as it has several properties which help our society Get Things Done, but at no point should openness overrule getting things done as that's putting the cart before the horse.
"Black and white" and even "shades of grey" is dualistic thinking. The issues are multifaceted, but saying that we shouldn't try is essentially saying we should give up. Why give up now, when we've made so much progress? We struggled for years for where we are now. The number of Free Software users is a critical mass. Companies are now working with us. We have a large, powerful community- now's when we can put pressure on the companies to do the right thing. We're winning the battle, so let's not give up now.
The BIOS is indeed an issue, and there are efforts underway to make a Free BIOS.
But why not try our best to have as much control as we can?
These companies want a binary layer so they can build binary drivers.
What people tend to forget about this is that it's a bad idea- from most every perspective.
The Linux kernel was written as a Free Softwate alternative to the existing *nix systems.
We have thousands of drivers in the kernel from a combination of development efforts. Sometimes a driver is written by an independant kernel developer, and sometimes it's written from the company producing the hardware, working alongside the community.
What these companies want is to be able to have thier cake without giving back to the community. This is a very slippery slope at the least, and illegal at best, since these sorts of links to binary kernel drivers have been long known to be illegal to distribute alongside the kernel (unless special previsions are made, such as a userland driver).
Also, binary drivers have been known to be buggy and essentially removie the kernel developers from a position where they have control over the kernel as a whole project. I won't even go into the issues associated with a possible security hole in a binary driver, or a binary driver with, for example, spyware in it.
The arguement for it is, of course, that this might mean more drivers. This is a test of our strength as a community. Doing the right thing is harder. It means we won't have all the hardware at all times, and certainly not the newest thing. But we retain control over our computers.
It's hard to say no, but this looks like a clear case where we have to.
This is yet another article saying that "If only Linux was a single unified force, it would be good." with a few sentences about interfaces at the front.
Let me dispell some of the myths. First, people don't want things to change. It's wrong.
If that were true, no one would have moved to OS X. "iPod, what's an iPod? I listen to music on my walkman."
People aren't going to change to GNU/Linux for no reason, but once they make the switch, we don't need it to look and behave like Windows. We have our own interfaces, and they work. OS X doesn't look like Microsoft Windows and people don't have that much trouble using it.
Some of the interface integration ideas he presents are allright- some of them are already in place, and others will take more work.
But the idea we need to drop KDE or GNOME, and drop distributions is old and tiring.
The simple fact is that when you consolodate for the sake of a unified force, you remove what makes the Free Software world great- competition.
If we'd all consolodated with Slackware in 92, we wouldn't have had packages. If we'd consolodated behind, say GNUStep, we wouldn't have had KDE, or GNOME, and so on.
The idea of lots of distributions and lots of interfaces and lots of every app is to let them all go, find which work best, borrow ideas, and, in the end, everyone benefits.
If we'd decided to "consolodate" and make an incompatible change, then that change would have to be left out. Once that happens, progress stops, and then someone else comes along and steals the rug from right under us.
Even "Consolodated" OSes like FreeBSD are, like GNU/Linux, collections of programs from other places.
I can't believe these articles still make it to Slashdot. They're old and tired.
Migration, yes, but not monitoring with automatic migration AFAIK.
For the ideals of Open Source, indeed, there's no reason not to use Windows Open Source software, but from the perspective of a Free Software advocate, there's a very real reason to want the sort of "software stack" mentioned.
The idea of Free Software is to replace all proprietary software with Free Software. It was the intention of the GNU project to clone Unix part by part.
When a program is built that runs on the Free platforms, it strengthens the entire movement.
Free Software for Windows can be a positive goal, but does not help the goal of replacing all proprietary software since the platform itself is non-Free.
It all depends on your goal.
Sometimes, Free Software on Windows can be a good thing. Firefox and OpenOffice.org, Gaim and Gimp have all been helpful for Windows users I know in evaluating GNU/Linux desktops. Since they're used to the program, the transition is easier.
But what all of those programs have in common is that they run in both GNU/Linux and Windows, and not Windows exclusively.
If one goes down, just restart it from your clean backup IN SECONDS. Better yet, do it automatically.
Where does Xen let you do that?
AFAIK that's planned, but doesn't yet exist.
It wasn't five years ago- it was ONE year ago, and I saw the transition of product names. "The names change, but the binaries remain the same."
The product certainly didn't fit my criteria for "good" or "stable", but I didn't say it sucked.
Ah ADIC's SNFS... I remember when it was CFS (Cluster File System), and I remember hours of problems...
Driver memory leaks... Nodes that dissapear. Boxes stopping for no apparent reason.
And the performance wasn't great.
If I were using Windows, I could start my computer in seconds.
And have it then crash in... seconds.
This seems like just another company offering to be the engine for lots of dating sites.
What we really want, if our goal is interoperability, is something similar to the FoaF project's RDF description framework for describing people, then using technology to match them up.
In fact, using something like FoaF, we can describe people in more than the "29 dimensions of compatibility"- we can look at things like interests, where they blog, geography, etc.
As for releasing source, Google's business model is based upon advertising, so it's not in their interest to release the source that would allow people to quickly create identical competitors. They spent the time and money on the development, it's theirs to apply their business model to.
You're missing the point of the original post, which is that the product is based on OpenOffice.Org, which is released (I believe) under the GPL.
The idea of the GPL was to give everyone an equal opportunity. With the increasing number of services based on Free Software with slight modifications and then released as a web service, the GPL becomes a de-facto BSD license, which wasn't the purpose.
There's discussion in the Free Software community to rectify this problem by requiring ASPs, if they make changes to code that's under the GPL, to be required to release those changes, in the same way they would if they'd given the code away in binary form.
For the user, this is the same situation. If I get a copy of a binary or I use a web site, it's the same effect, as distribution. Therefore the GPL3 may include a clause to require the same effect of giving a binary as making a service.
It took me a long time to appreciate why this was necessary, but with this latest announcement, I think it is.
If you'd watched Neon Genesis Evangelion then you'd know we can simply fight off the angels with giant robots.
I agree. Open Source isn't really a helpful thing.
Free Software on the other hand, is an important social movement.
Every part of the development is totally closed.
What you really mean is, "I would like to get someone else to change thier code and they didn't want to!"
The whole point in this Free Software stuff is, if you think this is a bad thing, you're free to make a competing version. If enough people have trouble like what you're describing, they will join forces and either your fork will work out, or you'll be able to convince Firefox to change thier minds.
Thier policies toward code changes have nothing to do with thier license agreement.
There's no point in GPLing something you never intend to distribute.
RMS addresses this when talking about how GPL effects the software industry.
The second is a swipe against BSD, using your own code, making a few changes, then making it non-Free.
I'm not arguing this. The discussion was the value of Public Domain vs Copyright. Public Domain doesn't intersect trade secrets.
But, in the end, someone does indeed own these documents, the banks, owners, etc. Maybe there's a way to encourage, rather than compell, them to turn over documents that are no longer of use to the company, but which could benefit the public.
I don't know a way to do this, but maybe someone smarter than me can figure it out.
Agreed. Copyleft serves two major purposes, and one of them is not addressed by Public Domain.
The first, of course, is to make work available to the public.
The second is to protect the author from others using thier work against them (ie share and share alike).
But even with copyrights, if a work is not published, but is something internal (say, the code to Google servers), then 50, 75, 100 years can pass, and even though it may (may!) end up technically in the public domain, it's still a trade secret, and if it never gets published externally, it's not public domain.
Copyleft and CC address this issue by getting more works out, but Copyleft and CC only cover works that are specifically placed under those licenses, which are not the majority of works. Both are essentially workarounds for a system that is fundamentally broken and has lost its balance of profit vs public good.
If "Marketing" is central to the author, then maybe they'll change the name.
I know "marketing" isn't part of software I write, at least not mass-market marketing
Your comparisons are against Windows.
Windows installers stink compared to GNU/Linux package systems RPM and deb.
I don't know what a "productivity program" is. For me it's an email program and a terminal with SSH.
The multitasing in OS/2 was nice, but it's also very nice in other OSes.
As for multimedia, I don't know about OS/2 and I've only seen Windows Media Player from afar. I'm a Free Software user.
LVM and JFS are available on GNU/Linux though many people think that ext3 and xfs are better than jfs.
What I'm saying is that OS/2 doesn't have anything that no other OS today has, and that doesn't make it a good candidate to spend all the effort on cloning.