I think you need to be very careful when talking about 'paying back as much as you get'. It is very easy to underestimate even what a small contribution is worth. If somebody improves the kernel then that fix potentially benefits millions. The correct measure of contribution is not simply how much of the code base was improved but that multiplied by how many people it benefited. For clearly it is absurd to expect a company to contribute back the value it received to countless other people. Such a thing would be contributing millions of times more than you received.
Anyway that is how I would look at it. Measure benefit to the company as number of lines of code* used multiplied by the number of deployments. Measure contributions by a similar measure of number of lines contributed multiplied by the number of people using it. It is clear that even tiny amounts of contributions can easily outstrip what you've used yourself.
*I realise that LOC is not a good measure in practice. The concept still stands though. It is work contributed multiplied by the number of times it is used that matters in both directions.
When will SCO surpass Sun? Who else has the brilliant plan of charging $699 for something other people are giving away for free. Imagine it, SCO are making that much more for every copy of Linux they shift.
Surely this unique and exciting business plan of charging more than the opposition must eventually pay dividends.
I'd say it's had a huge impact. A lot of anti-corporate types have bleated on about it, consistently hoping to hell that it has an impact as proof of the evilness of allowing corporations into our FOSS world. I've had a lot of headaches reading the repetitiveness.
As it is the deal is irrelevant. All it has done is proven many have a capacity to shoot themselves (and those around them) in the foot. The only real damage has been done by our own. Of course MS knew that people would go off the deep end, which is the impact they hoped for. Makes the community look immature and that has the potential to scare off pointy headed types.
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
Clearly YANAL. Red Hat cannot make excessive changes to the source that are obviously made to obstruct modifications or building. The GPL does indeed specific what constitutes source code for a work.
You state that the FSF is an international operation and then state that it is necessary for them to own your software because of a problem that only exists in a small minority of countries on the planet. As a UKer I'll quite happily continue to own my own software and if there are patent issues then only insane countries who have software patents are affected by it.
I personally think Novell saw it as an opportunity to turn MS money against them. The funding has gone almost entirely on defeating real or perceived compatibility problems with Windows. Now open standards is preferable but I think we should approach this from the same direction as the FSF approached the Qt problem, fight it from both angles in case one fails.
People will argue about this for years to come though. Too much pride has been staked for anyone to really back down. I think we can almost all agree that it was practically an over hyped storm in a teacup though.
Suse is one of Novell's few growing product lines. I'm sorry, but it doesn't make any business sense at all to kill one of your few shooting star products to make a short term profit. Novell is in decline, only their Linux sector has grown on a continual basis, damaging that for a bit of cash that doesn't even cover the annual decline in their profit margin does not make sense at all. What exactly is Novell going to sell when they 'kill' Linux? Most of their other products are legacy and losing them money.
What Novell did was perhaps naive, they underestimated how volatile the reaction would be and how much harm that reaction could cause FOSS and as a consequence their own business. To make a quick buck by selling out their future though? I don't think so. As it stands most of the direct harm has been averted, however long term the complexity of the resultant GPLv3 will likely have unforeseen consequences when tested in court.
I think the reality is that many disliked Novell anyway in the same way many dislike Red Hat, an anti-corporate trend that some have in the FOSS world (entirely missing the point of FOSS in the process). When the MS deal came about they took their opportunity and attacked them and many were happy to go along without seeing the wood from the trees. The deal was almost entirely benign from our long term perspective, all it did is finally give MS some peace over some long standing Novell patents on networking.
To those who dislike Novell though I'm sorry to say that baring their total destitution they are going to be in the Linux community for a long time. Their future is tied to it as much as Red Hat now.
Yes and I think it was more to do with MS being worried about a few, sound, Novell patents than the opposite which is why Novell got a fair chunk of money out of it*. Of course, MS spun it to death wrt the Linux side of it but really that was a side issue to a much wider scale deal. Novell (and Linux) did far better out of the deal than MS but that doesn't stop a few doom mongers crying 'the end is nigh' or the FSF using it to pass a license that would have proved pretty unpopular otherwise (it has plenty of critics now even with the threat).
Microvell was never a real issue.
*think about this for a moment, how often does somebody pay you for the right to use their IP? Novell took the indemnification as an extra bonus, the main issue was MS paying a huge sum for Novell patents while Novell was struggling financially. Novell got a large sum of money, a sizeable increase in their user base (with MS as a distributor no less, validating Linux in the market) and, as a side issue, protection from weak patents for their consumers. It was never about fuding Linux, the biggest damage there was done by our own.
You miss the fact that more talented kids tend to perform better amongst their peers. The charter school can be average, the very fact they skim off the top will make those students perform better because they aren't being dragged down to the lowest common denominator.
You make the standard mistake in this sort of discussion, assuming that money or facilities is the overriding factor, it is not. Far more important is the attitude of the people who surround you. Forget looser regulation allowing them to more efficiently spend money, the key factor is by putting the top 10% together that section will improve greatly just by being placed together (without any real, absolute, hindrance to the average I might add though there may be a relative disadvantage because the best suddenly got better).
Anyway the mental environment is vastly more important than the physical reality. A well motivated person will do far more with less than a unconcerned person would manage with brilliant equipment.
I can't remember when the last time I saw a 'must have' function that wasn't common across all systems was (other than automated package management of course but you've already mentioned that). There is, in reality, little that is exclusive to programs like Word that come even close to the feature of using an open standard.
Most of these killer features are little more than party tricks of limited real use. Take the ribbon, a system that makes general functionality slightly more difficult to use in order to make less common functionality much easier to use. For me I'd rather see the general functionality made easier, the uncommon stuff is rare enough that the odd headache to use it makes sense if you are gaining fractions of a second every few seconds on the 99% use case. In other words the old system was better, a system that statically pinned the 99% solution to your toolbar and made it as easy as possible to use. Not a killer feature, in fact a detriment, yet many would propose that we should all drop whatever we are using to adopt this flawed idea and pay homage to the UI gods of Redmond.
There are countless other functions that are proposed as must have but really are detrimental. Vista has whole hosts of them. In the chase to differentiate from others, all they are doing is making things worse. E.G. the only real UI innovation I've seen in the last few years is OSX putting the menu bar in a place where you can move the mouse an infinite amount in the y axis and still not overshoot your target. Even that is limited, in that it is beneficial for a one app setup but detrimental if you have several apps open at once.
"While I can't speak volumes about Gnome and GTK. I can say that you views of KDE and QT do not appear to be based on facts, but more assumptions and preconceived notions."
Who would have thought there would be an argument lacking facts and based on assumptios and preconceived notions on slashdot. Next you'll be telling me people don't read the articles.
But I'm switching to FreeBSD or Solaris in the next few months, mainly because of idiots like you. It used to be, when somebody ran Linux, you knew they weren't completely useless. Lately, you can't really say that.
It's not that I don't like Linux, I just don't want to be associated with its users anymore. So your making a technical decision on the basis of people you don't know? That seems mildly retarded.
Half the people running Linux anymore don't know what the fuck their doing, they just want to be "geeks". Or they jsut want to bash Microsoft. Of course, they should choose their platform on the sole metric of trying to avoid idiots. If they did that then the world would be a brilliant place where the sun always shines and there are 3B copies of Jessica Alba so we can all be happy.
Think its a coincidence that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro, and it just happens to be the most dumbed down? Most people have better things to be doing than configuring things that can and should be automated. Computers are there to save effort, i.e. they are a tool. Ubuntu has everything I need to support a decent development environment, it just saves me a few hours of set up. Also don't try and tell me Debian has got to its level yet because I just installed Lenny on my laptop 2 days ago.
Honestly distros are not a right of passage. They are tools that should either do what you want or should go away (Ubuntu had some regressions with IDE polling and I didn't want to deal with their proprietary modules when installing my own kernel, so I replaced it. Might go back when 7.10 comes out but I doubt it). It certainly isn't about who can be the most elite though, frankly irrelevant and the only people who care about it are usually those who aren't quite as elite as they think.
You've obviously not seen any films about WW2. America did indeed win the war single handedly. They are famous for things like the victory in the Battle of Britain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you need to be very careful when talking about 'paying back as much as you get'. It is very easy to underestimate even what a small contribution is worth. If somebody improves the kernel then that fix potentially benefits millions. The correct measure of contribution is not simply how much of the code base was improved but that multiplied by how many people it benefited. For clearly it is absurd to expect a company to contribute back the value it received to countless other people. Such a thing would be contributing millions of times more than you received.
Anyway that is how I would look at it. Measure benefit to the company as number of lines of code* used multiplied by the number of deployments. Measure contributions by a similar measure of number of lines contributed multiplied by the number of people using it. It is clear that even tiny amounts of contributions can easily outstrip what you've used yourself.
*I realise that LOC is not a good measure in practice. The concept still stands though. It is work contributed multiplied by the number of times it is used that matters in both directions.
Does it run Lotus Notes?
These are facts and thus have no place here on Slashdot. Somebody should censor this post.
Don't be silly. We'd have those Godwin's law quoting Nazi's dominating the thread then.
Look GM is dying!
I assure you I am perfectly healthy.
Irate Chairthrowing Ballistic Missile?
When will SCO surpass Sun? Who else has the brilliant plan of charging $699 for something other people are giving away for free. Imagine it, SCO are making that much more for every copy of Linux they shift.
Surely this unique and exciting business plan of charging more than the opposition must eventually pay dividends.
What do you think these calls for change were! You cannot change a proprietary program.
Obama will bring change. IDE time outs will end. Gnome will be half way functional. NetworkManager will stop dropping my wireless signal.
Change is coming my friends and I for one welcome our change bringing overlord.
I'd say it's had a huge impact. A lot of anti-corporate types have bleated on about it, consistently hoping to hell that it has an impact as proof of the evilness of allowing corporations into our FOSS world. I've had a lot of headaches reading the repetitiveness.
As it is the deal is irrelevant. All it has done is proven many have a capacity to shoot themselves (and those around them) in the foot. The only real damage has been done by our own. Of course MS knew that people would go off the deep end, which is the impact they hoped for. Makes the community look immature and that has the potential to scare off pointy headed types.
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it."
Clearly YANAL. Red Hat cannot make excessive changes to the source that are obviously made to obstruct modifications or building. The GPL does indeed specific what constitutes source code for a work.
You state that the FSF is an international operation and then state that it is necessary for them to own your software because of a problem that only exists in a small minority of countries on the planet. As a UKer I'll quite happily continue to own my own software and if there are patent issues then only insane countries who have software patents are affected by it.
If they're mods aren't useful we haven't lost anything. Free loaders don't actually cost us a thing.
Yes but Solaris isn't locked down to Sun hardware.
I personally think Novell saw it as an opportunity to turn MS money against them. The funding has gone almost entirely on defeating real or perceived compatibility problems with Windows. Now open standards is preferable but I think we should approach this from the same direction as the FSF approached the Qt problem, fight it from both angles in case one fails.
People will argue about this for years to come though. Too much pride has been staked for anyone to really back down. I think we can almost all agree that it was practically an over hyped storm in a teacup though.
Suse is one of Novell's few growing product lines. I'm sorry, but it doesn't make any business sense at all to kill one of your few shooting star products to make a short term profit. Novell is in decline, only their Linux sector has grown on a continual basis, damaging that for a bit of cash that doesn't even cover the annual decline in their profit margin does not make sense at all. What exactly is Novell going to sell when they 'kill' Linux? Most of their other products are legacy and losing them money.
What Novell did was perhaps naive, they underestimated how volatile the reaction would be and how much harm that reaction could cause FOSS and as a consequence their own business. To make a quick buck by selling out their future though? I don't think so. As it stands most of the direct harm has been averted, however long term the complexity of the resultant GPLv3 will likely have unforeseen consequences when tested in court.
I think the reality is that many disliked Novell anyway in the same way many dislike Red Hat, an anti-corporate trend that some have in the FOSS world (entirely missing the point of FOSS in the process). When the MS deal came about they took their opportunity and attacked them and many were happy to go along without seeing the wood from the trees. The deal was almost entirely benign from our long term perspective, all it did is finally give MS some peace over some long standing Novell patents on networking.
To those who dislike Novell though I'm sorry to say that baring their total destitution they are going to be in the Linux community for a long time. Their future is tied to it as much as Red Hat now.
We don't have software patents though fortunately. You can't sue in the UK about comments/lies made wrt an American legal construct AFAIK.
Yes and I think it was more to do with MS being worried about a few, sound, Novell patents than the opposite which is why Novell got a fair chunk of money out of it*. Of course, MS spun it to death wrt the Linux side of it but really that was a side issue to a much wider scale deal. Novell (and Linux) did far better out of the deal than MS but that doesn't stop a few doom mongers crying 'the end is nigh' or the FSF using it to pass a license that would have proved pretty unpopular otherwise (it has plenty of critics now even with the threat).
Microvell was never a real issue.
*think about this for a moment, how often does somebody pay you for the right to use their IP? Novell took the indemnification as an extra bonus, the main issue was MS paying a huge sum for Novell patents while Novell was struggling financially. Novell got a large sum of money, a sizeable increase in their user base (with MS as a distributor no less, validating Linux in the market) and, as a side issue, protection from weak patents for their consumers. It was never about fuding Linux, the biggest damage there was done by our own.
You miss the fact that more talented kids tend to perform better amongst their peers. The charter school can be average, the very fact they skim off the top will make those students perform better because they aren't being dragged down to the lowest common denominator.
You make the standard mistake in this sort of discussion, assuming that money or facilities is the overriding factor, it is not. Far more important is the attitude of the people who surround you. Forget looser regulation allowing them to more efficiently spend money, the key factor is by putting the top 10% together that section will improve greatly just by being placed together (without any real, absolute, hindrance to the average I might add though there may be a relative disadvantage because the best suddenly got better).
Anyway the mental environment is vastly more important than the physical reality. A well motivated person will do far more with less than a unconcerned person would manage with brilliant equipment.
I have it on good authority that Ballmer owns a large collection of chairs.
I can't remember when the last time I saw a 'must have' function that wasn't common across all systems was (other than automated package management of course but you've already mentioned that). There is, in reality, little that is exclusive to programs like Word that come even close to the feature of using an open standard.
Most of these killer features are little more than party tricks of limited real use. Take the ribbon, a system that makes general functionality slightly more difficult to use in order to make less common functionality much easier to use. For me I'd rather see the general functionality made easier, the uncommon stuff is rare enough that the odd headache to use it makes sense if you are gaining fractions of a second every few seconds on the 99% use case. In other words the old system was better, a system that statically pinned the 99% solution to your toolbar and made it as easy as possible to use. Not a killer feature, in fact a detriment, yet many would propose that we should all drop whatever we are using to adopt this flawed idea and pay homage to the UI gods of Redmond.
There are countless other functions that are proposed as must have but really are detrimental. Vista has whole hosts of them. In the chase to differentiate from others, all they are doing is making things worse. E.G. the only real UI innovation I've seen in the last few years is OSX putting the menu bar in a place where you can move the mouse an infinite amount in the y axis and still not overshoot your target. Even that is limited, in that it is beneficial for a one app setup but detrimental if you have several apps open at once.
"While I can't speak volumes about Gnome and GTK. I can say that you views of KDE and QT do not appear to be based on facts, but more assumptions and preconceived notions."
Who would have thought there would be an argument lacking facts and based on assumptios and preconceived notions on slashdot. Next you'll be telling me people don't read the articles.
Honestly distros are not a right of passage. They are tools that should either do what you want or should go away (Ubuntu had some regressions with IDE polling and I didn't want to deal with their proprietary modules when installing my own kernel, so I replaced it. Might go back when 7.10 comes out but I doubt it). It certainly isn't about who can be the most elite though, frankly irrelevant and the only people who care about it are usually those who aren't quite as elite as they think.
./configure
make
make install
Port done.
You've obviously not seen any films about WW2. America did indeed win the war single handedly. They are famous for things like the victory in the Battle of Britain.
They were sued because you could not remove IE from the system.