"why shouldn't you have to pay for it in the software world?"
Because someone has already coded AND offered it for free.
Would you pay for your bread, meat, eggs, etc... if the grocery store next door was offering the same thing or close to it for free? It's really just competition in action. Sure, the motivations are a bit different between someone giving something away and someone just trying to undercut the competition while still making a profit but it is still just competition in action. Isn't that how a free market is supposed to work? The individual/business/group which can supply the need the best and for the best price wins while the other has to adapt.
Now how about if seeing they are losing business to the free store your old pay-grocery store started investing in appliance companies. Suddenly the new refrigerators chill only their food and not food from the free store. Kind of anti-competitive isn't it? That's the kind of game that proprietary companies have been playing for years. It's why 'linux fanatics' get so vocal against proprietary software and big corporations. That's exactly what Apple and Microsoft are doing by pushing an html standard that supports only one proprietary codec.
"RMS... force people..."
RMS has not and can not force anyone to contribute anything, neither can anyone else whether they want to or not. Just like it is a proprietary code owner's right to not release their code and to sell it under the license and business model they chose so it is in the 'free software' world. If I use my time and my effort to write a piece of code I get the right to chose how and if I want to share it. If I want to be able to make it available for free to users and to other altruistic coders who will also contribute to the collection of free software I shouldn't automatically have to give it away to freeloading proprietary developers who will take my code as their own and base their closed works on it that they do not share freely. But, if I don't care about this I can just release it as Freeware too. It's the author/owner's choice! That's a basic right of owning property.
Arguments of how one can make a profit with a business model based on free software, why do anti-GPL people think they are ENTITLED to use a GPL coder's work as they please? If the GPL coder isn't entitled to the proprietary coder's work then why should the opposite be true?
Oh, and btw, the GPL is about openness of code, the ability to see and modify the source. It isn't about money. You CAN charge for GPL software, look at all the Linux distros which do exactly that! You just can't prevent someone from copying or modifying GPL'd software. And why should you? The author owns it and the author chose to not give you the right of limiting distribution! If you want it closed then write it yourself!
I've been trying to understand this audit since it occurred. As I read the document you linked to here there is no way to include any undocumented features/bugs from the Windows API. Wouldn't this mean that any software which makes use of them could never be run in ReactOS?
Actually, ReactOS uses Wine's code. Improvements are ported back and forth between the two too. Wine provides the API, ReactOS porvides the kernel and shell where traditional Wine use is X-Windows and Li/Unix.
But now that is exactly what WILL happen. If you try to market your good idea on your own then a large corporation with expensive lawyers will show up and use patents for brain-dead obvious ideas that your idea happens to depend on to sue you out of existence.
Good to know that you neither bathe nor brush your teeth. Or if you do anyway it's a half-ass rush job. Please do not share an elevator, car, small room, etc.. with me. Thank you.
As for all the replies about people actually finding uses for a tablet. Sure... I have no doubt a tablet CAN be useful. However, does it really add that much size, weight, power consumption to have a minimally sized slideout, foldup, etc... keyboard? Judging by the ones I see on pocket sized phones I really don't think so. All it really does is kill the Apple style.
You think you don't need a keyboard because your tablet is useful already? Maybe you don't. Of course you don't NEED a tablet at all either! But I would just about guarantee that if your tablet DID have a keyboard it would be more convenient to use in many situations. That doesn't mean it has to be as bulky as a laptop. Just a little slide out/pop out/fold out querty would be great! Hey, just one the size of the one on my Droid would add virtually nothing to the size of any tablet in relation to the volume the tablet already occupies.
While we are at it? What's with these tablet/phone/random mobile device OSs? Yes, you need your menus arranged a little differently to fit on the screen and some controls work better with a touch screen than others. But why do they use their own unique APIs? Think of the 'apps' we could have if they shared APIs with desktop OSs! Writing a desktop app? Just swap out a few controls and slide things around a bit, recompile and congrats! It's a mobile app too!
We should not have to re-invent computing just to go mobile!
One exception I do see is the eReader. For that you really do want an eInk type display, easy to see in the light. eInk is still a bit behind in terms of color and resolution though so you will still want a non-eReader mobile device. Therefore a eReader is ok as a one-purpose device so I can see where it isn't necessary to have a keyboard or a fully functional OS. This is a temporary situation though, only valid until the daylight readable displays catch up in both quality and price.
I hope they can at least get the geek market. I know, so many of us are already just about married to either iOS or Android but come on... think about it. What's better, two versions of the same api, one for desktop and one for mobile devices making it VERY EASY TO PORT the same app to both platforms or the current paradigm?... Virtually no effort applied towards coding a mobile app is useful on the desktop or vice versa.
And yes... KDE IS trying to go after the mobile market (tablets AND phones). KDE is based on Qt. In trying to turn it from being just a desktop GUI API into a mobile environment Qt has had a lot of the functionality added to it that KDE was originally handling itself. Now KDE is full of stuff that it does itself that Qt has it's own classes and methods for. This is supposed to be getting merged better, making KDE into more of a meta environment that can be a desktop or something else.
We would be a lot better off if Sharp had added a GSM chip to the Zaurus years ago. It would have probably started out not available in the US though. I'm not sure they could have ever come up with a reasonable agreement with any of the cellphone carriers here.
The pharmaceutical industry lives on despite the parasites because if people don't buy the product they die. In the tech industry things can get even worse because as companies stop innovating and patent cost margins rise people can just quit buying the product. If the corporate giants insist on playing patent warfare then maybe they will cause enough damage that we finally get a popular support behind patent reform, or just dumping the corrupted patent system altogether. If it's too late to fix things then maybe they can just be broken so bad that they get replaced.
Wayland is the best motivation I have seen for becoming an active developer of X11 applications yet. I hope that the developers that made Linux great will stick with X and the new kids can fork the desktop until they realize they are just wasting their time re-implementing OSX.
You give far too much credit to the consumers to think that will work. More likely, the majority will pay no attention to such tools and when a service they want to use runs slow they will blame the service and be happy to buy the monopoly service which is backed by their local broadband provider instead. Net neutrality translated to norm-speak is tl;dr.
If we don't like the current laws then lets offer alternatives. How about these for drone rules?
Your drone is your property therefore you can legally fly it wherever you can legally go with certain exceptions...
No drones over roadways. Yah, that one's a real joy killer but imagine driving down the road at highway speeds and somebody's drone fails overhead and goes through your windshield.
No drones over other people's residential property without permission under a certain height. (To prevent looking through people's windows. Sorry Tom)
No drones in the height range that commercial aircraft fly or near an airport. (pretty much a no-brainer to prevent collisions) Perhaps this results in a set ceiling a personal drone can not go over. Or.. if you want to allow for really high drones (like the stratospheric balloons which have become popular) then drones can cross through the forbidden height range so long as they only remain in this range for the time necessary to either rise above it or come back down.
Drones would be allowed in privately owned 'public' places like businesses and campuses (since you can legally walk your body there anyway) however the owner has the right to ban them. Violating an owner's ban would be considered trespassing just like if the owner banned you yourself. However, drones would still be allowed in 'banned' places so long as they remain a certain height over the tallest building (for privacy) as this would be considered public air space and not part of their property.
There, how is that? Obviously this is not the law currently. Don't try to follow it and certainly don't blame me if you get in trouble doing so. It's just my personal opinion of what the law should be.
Well, I don't really agree with these rules either. However... as for the comparison.. A spacecraft fired out over the ocean and to a height where it will burn up if it re-enters improperly is probably not as safety critical as a drone which is likely to be flown over top of a heavily populated city. Of course.. I am assuming the drone is much larger and heavier than the little quad-copter shown in the article's picture. Also, although imaging from space is pretty good I don't think satellites are likely to get a good view through your window and into your home yet. Are they? A drone could pretty easily.
I love this dual speed free/non-free model. If we had this here I would buy the fast service for browsing use but then would wifi-enable every project, sensors, robots, etc... using the free access. That would be awesome! It's never going to happen in the US though. In this environment I bet if one telecom did this the others could sue and actually succeed at shutting it down based on it hurting their business model or something like that.
Hmm... I can see the point about privacy. I can also see a point about giving Facebook the right to own the data that users do 'sign' over to them when they upload it and run whatever algorithms on it that they want.
As governments everywhere are installing more and more cameras in public places and developing facial recognition software themselves I have to wonder if this isn't really about trying to keep their own capabilities out of the hands of the common people. Oh well, I live in the US where I can do whatever I want so long as I can find a big name corporate backer to buy the politicians for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm... So where was he really all that time he was supposed to be shooting?
"why shouldn't you have to pay for it in the software world?"
Because someone has already coded AND offered it for free.
Would you pay for your bread, meat, eggs, etc... if the grocery store next door was offering the same thing or close to it for free? It's really just competition in action. Sure, the motivations are a bit different between someone giving something away and someone just trying to undercut the competition while still making a profit but it is still just competition in action. Isn't that how a free market is supposed to work? The individual/business/group which can supply the need the best and for the best price wins while the other has to adapt.
Now how about if seeing they are losing business to the free store your old pay-grocery store started investing in appliance companies. Suddenly the new refrigerators chill only their food and not food from the free store. Kind of anti-competitive isn't it? That's the kind of game that proprietary companies have been playing for years. It's why 'linux fanatics' get so vocal against proprietary software and big corporations. That's exactly what Apple and Microsoft are doing by pushing an html standard that supports only one proprietary codec.
"RMS... force people..."
RMS has not and can not force anyone to contribute anything, neither can anyone else whether they want to or not. Just like it is a proprietary code owner's right to not release their code and to sell it under the license and business model they chose so it is in the 'free software' world. If I use my time and my effort to write a piece of code I get the right to chose how and if I want to share it. If I want to be able to make it available for free to users and to other altruistic coders who will also contribute to the collection of free software I shouldn't automatically have to give it away to freeloading proprietary developers who will take my code as their own and base their closed works on it that they do not share freely. But, if I don't care about this I can just release it as Freeware too. It's the author/owner's choice! That's a basic right of owning property.
Arguments of how one can make a profit with a business model based on free software, why do anti-GPL people think they are ENTITLED to use a GPL coder's work as they please? If the GPL coder isn't entitled to the proprietary coder's work then why should the opposite be true?
Oh, and btw, the GPL is about openness of code, the ability to see and modify the source. It isn't about money. You CAN charge for GPL software, look at all the Linux distros which do exactly that! You just can't prevent someone from copying or modifying GPL'd software. And why should you? The author owns it and the author chose to not give you the right of limiting distribution! If you want it closed then write it yourself!
In the United States cosmonaut launches YOU into space
Quite the opposite actually, an open source OS would probably continue to run those older drivers for a very long time.
I've been trying to understand this audit since it occurred. As I read the document you linked to here there is no way to include any undocumented features/bugs from the Windows API. Wouldn't this mean that any software which makes use of them could never be run in ReactOS?
Hard telling without being there but that is probably because of the author quoting or paraphrasing very small pieces of a much larger conversation.
Actually, ReactOS uses Wine's code. Improvements are ported back and forth between the two too. Wine provides the API, ReactOS porvides the kernel and shell where traditional Wine use is X-Windows and Li/Unix.
But now that is exactly what WILL happen. If you try to market your good idea on your own then a large corporation with expensive lawyers will show up and use patents for brain-dead obvious ideas that your idea happens to depend on to sue you out of existence.
Why? So a bunch of script kiddies would turn their attention to some coffee shops and Tor nodes?
Good to know that you neither bathe nor brush your teeth. Or if you do anyway it's a half-ass rush job. Please do not share an elevator, car, small room, etc.. with me. Thank you.
Such a device, controlled and branded by the NYTimes (or any other single source media company) mmm... Nah...
Take it apart and use the display with Chumby guts.... I see potential there.
YES YES YES A voice of reason!
As for all the replies about people actually finding uses for a tablet. Sure... I have no doubt a tablet CAN be useful. However, does it really add that much size, weight, power consumption to have a minimally sized slideout, foldup, etc... keyboard? Judging by the ones I see on pocket sized phones I really don't think so. All it really does is kill the Apple style.
You think you don't need a keyboard because your tablet is useful already? Maybe you don't. Of course you don't NEED a tablet at all either! But I would just about guarantee that if your tablet DID have a keyboard it would be more convenient to use in many situations. That doesn't mean it has to be as bulky as a laptop. Just a little slide out/pop out/fold out querty would be great! Hey, just one the size of the one on my Droid would add virtually nothing to the size of any tablet in relation to the volume the tablet already occupies.
While we are at it? What's with these tablet/phone/random mobile device OSs? Yes, you need your menus arranged a little differently to fit on the screen and some controls work better with a touch screen than others. But why do they use their own unique APIs? Think of the 'apps' we could have if they shared APIs with desktop OSs! Writing a desktop app? Just swap out a few controls and slide things around a bit, recompile and congrats! It's a mobile app too!
We should not have to re-invent computing just to go mobile!
One exception I do see is the eReader. For that you really do want an eInk type display, easy to see in the light. eInk is still a bit behind in terms of color and resolution though so you will still want a non-eReader mobile device. Therefore a eReader is ok as a one-purpose device so I can see where it isn't necessary to have a keyboard or a fully functional OS. This is a temporary situation though, only valid until the daylight readable displays catch up in both quality and price.
I hope they can at least get the geek market. I know, so many of us are already just about married to either iOS or Android but come on... think about it. What's better, two versions of the same api, one for desktop and one for mobile devices making it VERY EASY TO PORT the same app to both platforms or the current paradigm?... Virtually no effort applied towards coding a mobile app is useful on the desktop or vice versa.
And yes... KDE IS trying to go after the mobile market (tablets AND phones). KDE is based on Qt. In trying to turn it from being just a desktop GUI API into a mobile environment Qt has had a lot of the functionality added to it that KDE was originally handling itself. Now KDE is full of stuff that it does itself that Qt has it's own classes and methods for. This is supposed to be getting merged better, making KDE into more of a meta environment that can be a desktop or something else.
We would be a lot better off if Sharp had added a GSM chip to the Zaurus years ago. It would have probably started out not available in the US though. I'm not sure they could have ever come up with a reasonable agreement with any of the cellphone carriers here.
The pharmaceutical industry lives on despite the parasites because if people don't buy the product they die. In the tech industry things can get even worse because as companies stop innovating and patent cost margins rise people can just quit buying the product. If the corporate giants insist on playing patent warfare then maybe they will cause enough damage that we finally get a popular support behind patent reform, or just dumping the corrupted patent system altogether. If it's too late to fix things then maybe they can just be broken so bad that they get replaced.
I think you've been read too many times
Ooh Ooh Can we pave over the half that Sarah Palin comes from?
Wayland is the best motivation I have seen for becoming an active developer of X11 applications yet. I hope that the developers that made Linux great will stick with X and the new kids can fork the desktop until they realize they are just wasting their time re-implementing OSX.
Wayland can suck it.
Offer the money as Adwords credit at campaign time. There.. how much did I just save them?!
You give far too much credit to the consumers to think that will work. More likely, the majority will pay no attention to such tools and when a service they want to use runs slow they will blame the service and be happy to buy the monopoly service which is backed by their local broadband provider instead. Net neutrality translated to norm-speak is tl;dr.
If we don't like the current laws then lets offer alternatives. How about these for drone rules?
Your drone is your property therefore you can legally fly it wherever you can legally go with certain exceptions...
No drones over roadways. Yah, that one's a real joy killer but imagine driving down the road at highway speeds and somebody's drone fails overhead and goes through your windshield.
No drones over other people's residential property without permission under a certain height. (To prevent looking through people's windows. Sorry Tom)
No drones in the height range that commercial aircraft fly or near an airport. (pretty much a no-brainer to prevent collisions) Perhaps this results in a set ceiling a personal drone can not go over. Or.. if you want to allow for really high drones (like the stratospheric balloons which have become popular) then drones can cross through the forbidden height range so long as they only remain in this range for the time necessary to either rise above it or come back down.
Drones would be allowed in privately owned 'public' places like businesses and campuses (since you can legally walk your body there anyway) however the owner has the right to ban them. Violating an owner's ban would be considered trespassing just like if the owner banned you yourself. However, drones would still be allowed in 'banned' places so long as they remain a certain height over the tallest building (for privacy) as this would be considered public air space and not part of their property.
There, how is that? Obviously this is not the law currently. Don't try to follow it and certainly don't blame me if you get in trouble doing so. It's just my personal opinion of what the law should be.
Well, I don't really agree with these rules either. However... as for the comparison.. A spacecraft fired out over the ocean and to a height where it will burn up if it re-enters improperly is probably not as safety critical as a drone which is likely to be flown over top of a heavily populated city. Of course.. I am assuming the drone is much larger and heavier than the little quad-copter shown in the article's picture. Also, although imaging from space is pretty good I don't think satellites are likely to get a good view through your window and into your home yet. Are they? A drone could pretty easily.
Just a little devil's advocate.
I love this dual speed free/non-free model. If we had this here I would buy the fast service for browsing use but then would wifi-enable every project, sensors, robots, etc... using the free access. That would be awesome! It's never going to happen in the US though. In this environment I bet if one telecom did this the others could sue and actually succeed at shutting it down based on it hurting their business model or something like that.
Hmm... I can see the point about privacy. I can also see a point about giving Facebook the right to own the data that users do 'sign' over to them when they upload it and run whatever algorithms on it that they want.
As governments everywhere are installing more and more cameras in public places and developing facial recognition software themselves I have to wonder if this isn't really about trying to keep their own capabilities out of the hands of the common people. Oh well, I live in the US where I can do whatever I want so long as I can find a big name corporate backer to buy the politicians for me.
If only it worked that way. Then the iPhone7 would flop and the world would be rid of the iPhenomenon.