That's just fucking retarded. Where's the business case for spending an insane amount of manpower to replicate an entire software stack on two operating systems with none of the components that that software stack relies upon, where both have a combined market share under fifteen percent? Where's the monetary return? Why would they do it for any realistic reason? Because it makes idiots like you feel better? Get real and get the stupid out of your head. Microsoft is out to make money. If being a good little open source citizen helps them in some areas, awesome, they do it. If it would be a boondoggle, as your incredibly fucking retarded idea out of your incredibly fucking retarded mouth is, they'll laugh and can it.
They already essentially can. They can buy a copy, do whatever they like to it, and install it for a customer--so long as there's a license for it, I don't care. (The products in question are CMS modules, for three major CMSes, to accomplish one particular and incredibly annoying, though rare, task. It's not meant for an end user.) Hell, I do this myself--I put it down on a client's bill and charge them 20% over what the regular cost is.
Even though some free-software advocates think it's nothing, allowing your customers to customize their deployments is a great benefit. Don't start using a script obfuscater.
I have to be able to read it if they submit a trouble ticket. My software is...verbose in its error messages.:P I don't get many errors, though.
I just think it's possible to add both freedom to redistribute and rewards for external contributions to this, while keeping it commercial. These could really grow the whole ecosystem.
I don't, because the next guy might have no problem with redistributing it at a price point of $0. I cannot compete with $0 no matter what I do. Support is not the answer; if my software needed to be supported actively beyond one or two bug reports a month (like, paid support contracts), I wouldn't be writing good software, I'd be writing shit and expecting to get paid for it. No thanks.
It this because the source would help players cheat?
Yes, along with registration cracks. Of course both will happen in time, but they keep the honest people honest.
Three of my four commercial products are built on LAMP, so the source is already available. The other (not released yet) is a game, and I think for obvious reasons it's not going to be open-source. Plenty of mod hooks, though, and if people actually want more places to customize it, I'm amenable to working in more.
Except that there very much is a fifth. A good project manager enables his people to get their jobs done more effectively, and shields them from administrative bullshit.
Just because your PMs have sucked doesn't mean the rest of us haven't worked for great ones.
Except that other spreadsheets use the same behavior, and it has a good reason for existing: because it updates references as you paste.
Consider the following situation, which is a really simple and really common one: the cell A2 is set to "=A1 * 5". You cut and paste it to B3, and it becomes "=B2 * 5". If you copied this to the clipboard in the standard way that others applications do, you lose these references. And Excel does copy to the shared clipboard when you hit Ctrl-C, don't get me wrong. That's how you paste into Word. But if you removed the section from the Excel sheet before doing a paste into the same (or different) sheet, it is possible to get into a state where reference fix-up is not doable, and so Excel's developers have decided to ensure that it remains in a sane state at all times. The alternative is to have it removed on a cut, and then fail to actually paste if it cannot manage reference fix-up. That's worse.
There are other ways to do it--OpenOffice does it differently--but they're not taking into account something rather important: Excel's not necessarily targeting you. Excel's bread and butter are the accountants, auditors, etc. who rarely, if ever, touch the mouse. Since Lotus 1-2-3 they've done it this way. In some ways it's a historical oddity, and everything else has grown up around it. This is true. But given the work habits of the people Excel is really targeting, who are primarily keyboard-focused, this method of copy-and-paste is easier to deal with. Shift-highlight, Ctrl-X, you can still see what you're working with until you paste (generally into the same sheet, even).
Are there other ways to do it? Sure. Is this one entirely defensible, and intended to better serve Excel's primary targeted userbase? I think so. The difference between this and the Ribbon is that the Ribbon improves usability for the target users; I don't think changing Excel's copy/paste system would do that for their target users.
I don't fail to see any of those benefits. I'm just saying that they're not as beneficial to smaller organizations as some of the other folks (not you) in this thread have been crowing about.:-)
Zed's had a lot of clients, and has some really good references from them. I think they'd be more interested in those than what he does in his personal time.
If you count the number of characters, yes. But if you count the bug-report/feature request implicit in the new code, as well as the functionality, it'd be worth far more.
But I don't need their code. A bug report or feature request, on something that makes me money, is going to be addressed post-haste, because I realize that my reputation and my good software are the only ways I stay in business.
The business value of a bug report and test case for any major software (Windows, Photoshop, Norton's crap, etc) is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars, and they'd usually pay testers/coders/managers a significant portion of that to discover the problem.
Sure. I sell my software for about $15. It's not worth that much to me.
IMHO you'd be a sap to help a business without expecting payment, and a realistic amount. You might volunteer the work the first time if it helps you too, but if they don't volunteer adequate (what they'd pay a consultant) payment you'll be less likely to do so again.
I agree entirely. Which is why I take it out of the equation by keeping my own work closed-source, and open-sourcing that which I either have to by copyleft requirements (though since I generally avoid the GPL this is not a common occurrence) or that which I don't find commercially viable or important.
Most people don't give a fuck about customizable toolbars--in fact, I'd argue that they're more of a problem than a solution. If everyone's using custom toolbars, there's no standardization for when you have to use another machine. Good defaults--and the Office 2007 ones are very, very good--are better than customization for a consumer-oriented application. The Quick Launch bar can hold anything you absolutely need.
A dual-licensed version opens up the possibility of forking and taking business away from me, which I find unacceptable. I can fix bugs just as well as they can, and make money off of it. And because my good name is invested in the product and there is no community for me to foist bugs off onto, I am encouraged to make sure those bugs are addressed myself, to my own standards.
So, in other words--yes, I am better off.
I open-source what I don't intend to use for commercial purposes, or what is based on other open-source components with copyleft licensing terms. What makes me money stays closed.
Whoops. Get educated, now with fewer typos. I'm sure that you'll get pissy and stop reading because he's mean, no matter how right he is, but hey. He's the originator of the term "freetard," and his examples are awesome: people like you who try to pooh-pooh proprietary software--proprietary software that does it better--because of ridiculous and silly assertions, because it's not "free" (and while you did not use the term your leading to that point is transparent).
Well, of course, but that's kind of missing the maintainers' point--to make money off it.:-P
You also run into the problem that most patches are probably worth about two bucks at most, and contributors will have an overblown idea of how much it's worth, leading to community discord, forking, etcetera. It causes more problems than it solves.
Which is why I keep anything I want to make money off of quite safely closed-source.
You're right that no dialog box should ever go "Are you sure? [No] [Yes]" and that's been true in GNOME since 2.0 came out seven years ago. Maybe you're not using GNOME apps?
Sorry, I was being flip. Let me explain.
The GNOME HIG is backwards. The "Do This" button (the "[Yes]" above) is always put at the rightmost position, and is also keyboard-highlighted (neither behaviors ones I consider to be good). The "Cancel" button (the "[No]" above) is always to the left. This creates weird inversions from other environments, inversions that don't need to exist and don't have a good reason for existing. A good example is Firefox--when you close Firefox and reopen it, you get a dialog box that asks if you want to "Start New Session" or "Restore Previous Session" (I don't remember the exact verbiage offhand). On Windows and OS X, the buttons are in one order. On GNOME, the buttons are reversed.
It's a case of different-to-be-different and it absolutely sucks. When you have as a base assumption that the "Don't Do Anything" button is always in the bottom right corner, it provides some assurance and mental training to the user--if you don't want something to be done, just hit the button in the bottom right corner, regardless of what it's label is. In GNOME, the "Don't Do Anything" button can be anywhere along the button row, and you can't take advantage of muscle memory to find it. I personally think that it's the result of techies trying to build for normals: a techie is more used to the keyboard being a control mechanism, so they'll just hit Enter or Escape or the keyboard accelerators rather than click the buttons, so it matters less to them where the buttons actually are. Techie types are also more likely to not trigger dialogs where they want to cancel, so they're more likely to want to say "OK, yes, get on with it" and putting the "Do This" button in the bottom right helps take advantage of their muscle memory--at the cost of the people that they actually want using GNOME.
It also gets uglier in that GNOME applications do the wrong thing when ported to OSes with sane HIGs.
Fluendo [fluendo.com] offers paid codec support. Of course, you have to pay. Fluendo is integrated in Ubuntu and you are prompted to purchase the Fluendo codecs when you run into a file with an unsupported codec.
I'm well aware. That's unacceptable. "Oh, here's how to do it, but you have to pay"--no. It's not going to work until someone (hi, Canonical) cuts a deal with Fraunhofer to supply legal codecs at zero cost to the desktop.
Is that cheap? No. Is it easy? No. Is it the only way people will actually take Ubuntu seriously? Yeah, probably. Getting a "hurp, you must pay!!11" message is ludicrous. Nobody's going to take your supposed "good OS" seriously if you're pulling that shit, no matter how reasonable it appears to the techie crowd.
Good points. I'm pretty sure that it'd measure up to Office 97, or perhaps Office 2000. But with 2007, Microsoft put a lot of thought into how people actually work, and it shows.
HCI analysis is very much lacking in the open-source world, to our detriment.
And people bitch endlessly about the UI revamp. They'd bitch endlessly about Excel's C&P changes. The difference is that Excel's C&P behaviors mimic what people expect out of a spreadsheet and a change to these behaviors is not necessarily a good thing.
If you really want different behavior, there are add-ons out there.
Forced obsolescence, huh? I guess that's why Office 2003 has a compatibility pack for DOCX support.
And no, nobody pissed in my coffee--but when you start throwing around freetard comments like "renting software," I'm pretty sure any reasonable person is going to think you a freetard, and act accordingly.
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There's at least one idiot in this discussion who doesn't know what promissory estoppel is.
That's just fucking retarded. Where's the business case for spending an insane amount of manpower to replicate an entire software stack on two operating systems with none of the components that that software stack relies upon, where both have a combined market share under fifteen percent? Where's the monetary return? Why would they do it for any realistic reason? Because it makes idiots like you feel better? Get real and get the stupid out of your head. Microsoft is out to make money. If being a good little open source citizen helps them in some areas, awesome, they do it. If it would be a boondoggle, as your incredibly fucking retarded idea out of your incredibly fucking retarded mouth is, they'll laugh and can it.
Too bad open source has nothing to do with any of that.
The pro-piracy folks around here say that copying isn't theft. I'd say that'd apply here too.
They already essentially can. They can buy a copy, do whatever they like to it, and install it for a customer--so long as there's a license for it, I don't care. (The products in question are CMS modules, for three major CMSes, to accomplish one particular and incredibly annoying, though rare, task. It's not meant for an end user.) Hell, I do this myself--I put it down on a client's bill and charge them 20% over what the regular cost is.
Even though some free-software advocates think it's nothing, allowing your customers to customize their deployments is a great benefit. Don't start using a script obfuscater.
I have to be able to read it if they submit a trouble ticket. My software is...verbose in its error messages. :P I don't get many errors, though.
I just think it's possible to add both freedom to redistribute and rewards for external contributions to this, while keeping it commercial. These could really grow the whole ecosystem.
I don't, because the next guy might have no problem with redistributing it at a price point of $0. I cannot compete with $0 no matter what I do. Support is not the answer; if my software needed to be supported actively beyond one or two bug reports a month (like, paid support contracts), I wouldn't be writing good software, I'd be writing shit and expecting to get paid for it. No thanks.
It this because the source would help players cheat?
Yes, along with registration cracks. Of course both will happen in time, but they keep the honest people honest.
Three of my four commercial products are built on LAMP, so the source is already available. The other (not released yet) is a game, and I think for obvious reasons it's not going to be open-source. Plenty of mod hooks, though, and if people actually want more places to customize it, I'm amenable to working in more.
Actually, Anonymous Coward's user ID is 666.
No joke. Look it up.
This is exactly why I don't call myself a software engineer, nor would I.
Except that there very much is a fifth. A good project manager enables his people to get their jobs done more effectively, and shields them from administrative bullshit.
Just because your PMs have sucked doesn't mean the rest of us haven't worked for great ones.
Except that other spreadsheets use the same behavior, and it has a good reason for existing: because it updates references as you paste.
Consider the following situation, which is a really simple and really common one: the cell A2 is set to "=A1 * 5". You cut and paste it to B3, and it becomes "=B2 * 5". If you copied this to the clipboard in the standard way that others applications do, you lose these references. And Excel does copy to the shared clipboard when you hit Ctrl-C, don't get me wrong. That's how you paste into Word. But if you removed the section from the Excel sheet before doing a paste into the same (or different) sheet, it is possible to get into a state where reference fix-up is not doable, and so Excel's developers have decided to ensure that it remains in a sane state at all times. The alternative is to have it removed on a cut, and then fail to actually paste if it cannot manage reference fix-up. That's worse.
There are other ways to do it--OpenOffice does it differently--but they're not taking into account something rather important: Excel's not necessarily targeting you. Excel's bread and butter are the accountants, auditors, etc. who rarely, if ever, touch the mouse. Since Lotus 1-2-3 they've done it this way. In some ways it's a historical oddity, and everything else has grown up around it. This is true. But given the work habits of the people Excel is really targeting, who are primarily keyboard-focused, this method of copy-and-paste is easier to deal with. Shift-highlight, Ctrl-X, you can still see what you're working with until you paste (generally into the same sheet, even).
Are there other ways to do it? Sure. Is this one entirely defensible, and intended to better serve Excel's primary targeted userbase? I think so. The difference between this and the Ribbon is that the Ribbon improves usability for the target users; I don't think changing Excel's copy/paste system would do that for their target users.
They don't have to buy the forked project for me to lose money on the deal.
I don't fail to see any of those benefits. I'm just saying that they're not as beneficial to smaller organizations as some of the other folks (not you) in this thread have been crowing about. :-)
Zed's had a lot of clients, and has some really good references from them. I think they'd be more interested in those than what he does in his personal time.
If you count the number of characters, yes. But if you count the bug-report/feature request implicit in the new code, as well as the functionality, it'd be worth far more.
But I don't need their code. A bug report or feature request, on something that makes me money, is going to be addressed post-haste, because I realize that my reputation and my good software are the only ways I stay in business.
The business value of a bug report and test case for any major software (Windows, Photoshop, Norton's crap, etc) is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars, and they'd usually pay testers/coders/managers a significant portion of that to discover the problem.
Sure. I sell my software for about $15. It's not worth that much to me.
IMHO you'd be a sap to help a business without expecting payment, and a realistic amount. You might volunteer the work the first time if it helps you too, but if they don't volunteer adequate (what they'd pay a consultant) payment you'll be less likely to do so again.
I agree entirely. Which is why I take it out of the equation by keeping my own work closed-source, and open-sourcing that which I either have to by copyleft requirements (though since I generally avoid the GPL this is not a common occurrence) or that which I don't find commercially viable or important.
Oh, go to hell.
Most people don't give a fuck about customizable toolbars--in fact, I'd argue that they're more of a problem than a solution. If everyone's using custom toolbars, there's no standardization for when you have to use another machine. Good defaults--and the Office 2007 ones are very, very good--are better than customization for a consumer-oriented application. The Quick Launch bar can hold anything you absolutely need.
A dual-licensed version opens up the possibility of forking and taking business away from me, which I find unacceptable. I can fix bugs just as well as they can, and make money off of it. And because my good name is invested in the product and there is no community for me to foist bugs off onto, I am encouraged to make sure those bugs are addressed myself, to my own standards.
So, in other words--yes, I am better off.
I open-source what I don't intend to use for commercial purposes, or what is based on other open-source components with copyleft licensing terms. What makes me money stays closed.
Of course. I keep my for-profit code nice and closed-source.
Whoops. Get educated, now with fewer typos. I'm sure that you'll get pissy and stop reading because he's mean, no matter how right he is, but hey. He's the originator of the term "freetard," and his examples are awesome: people like you who try to pooh-pooh proprietary software--proprietary software that does it better--because of ridiculous and silly assertions, because it's not "free" (and while you did not use the term your leading to that point is transparent).
Get educated.
Well, of course, but that's kind of missing the maintainers' point--to make money off it. :-P
You also run into the problem that most patches are probably worth about two bucks at most, and contributors will have an overblown idea of how much it's worth, leading to community discord, forking, etcetera. It causes more problems than it solves.
Which is why I keep anything I want to make money off of quite safely closed-source.
You're right that no dialog box should ever go "Are you sure? [No] [Yes]" and that's been true in GNOME since 2.0 came out seven years ago. Maybe you're not using GNOME apps?
Sorry, I was being flip. Let me explain.
The GNOME HIG is backwards. The "Do This" button (the "[Yes]" above) is always put at the rightmost position, and is also keyboard-highlighted (neither behaviors ones I consider to be good). The "Cancel" button (the "[No]" above) is always to the left. This creates weird inversions from other environments, inversions that don't need to exist and don't have a good reason for existing. A good example is Firefox--when you close Firefox and reopen it, you get a dialog box that asks if you want to "Start New Session" or "Restore Previous Session" (I don't remember the exact verbiage offhand). On Windows and OS X, the buttons are in one order. On GNOME, the buttons are reversed.
It's a case of different-to-be-different and it absolutely sucks. When you have as a base assumption that the "Don't Do Anything" button is always in the bottom right corner, it provides some assurance and mental training to the user--if you don't want something to be done, just hit the button in the bottom right corner, regardless of what it's label is. In GNOME, the "Don't Do Anything" button can be anywhere along the button row, and you can't take advantage of muscle memory to find it. I personally think that it's the result of techies trying to build for normals: a techie is more used to the keyboard being a control mechanism, so they'll just hit Enter or Escape or the keyboard accelerators rather than click the buttons, so it matters less to them where the buttons actually are. Techie types are also more likely to not trigger dialogs where they want to cancel, so they're more likely to want to say "OK, yes, get on with it" and putting the "Do This" button in the bottom right helps take advantage of their muscle memory--at the cost of the people that they actually want using GNOME.
It also gets uglier in that GNOME applications do the wrong thing when ported to OSes with sane HIGs.
Fluendo [fluendo.com] offers paid codec support. Of course, you have to pay. Fluendo is integrated in Ubuntu and you are prompted to purchase the Fluendo codecs when you run into a file with an unsupported codec.
I'm well aware. That's unacceptable. "Oh, here's how to do it, but you have to pay"--no. It's not going to work until someone (hi, Canonical) cuts a deal with Fraunhofer to supply legal codecs at zero cost to the desktop.
Is that cheap? No. Is it easy? No. Is it the only way people will actually take Ubuntu seriously? Yeah, probably. Getting a "hurp, you must pay!!11" message is ludicrous. Nobody's going to take your supposed "good OS" seriously if you're pulling that shit, no matter how reasonable it appears to the techie crowd.
Good points. I'm pretty sure that it'd measure up to Office 97, or perhaps Office 2000. But with 2007, Microsoft put a lot of thought into how people actually work, and it shows.
HCI analysis is very much lacking in the open-source world, to our detriment.
And people bitch endlessly about the UI revamp. They'd bitch endlessly about Excel's C&P changes. The difference is that Excel's C&P behaviors mimic what people expect out of a spreadsheet and a change to these behaviors is not necessarily a good thing.
If you really want different behavior, there are add-ons out there.
Forced obsolescence, huh? I guess that's why Office 2003 has a compatibility pack for DOCX support.
And no, nobody pissed in my coffee--but when you start throwing around freetard comments like "renting software," I'm pretty sure any reasonable person is going to think you a freetard, and act accordingly.