Memo to open source moralists: Put a sock in it Those who look to technology for their religious fix are going to be sorely disappointed, despite the fact that a recent article in The Economist highlights a range of priestly types who see Christian principles throughout the open-source software movement. Perhaps. The problem is that different people see these exact same …
I'm FED UP of people saying "love thy neighbour" or anything moral is a religious thing.
As an atheist, I KNOW I am much more moral than many Christians I know.
Just LOOK at the highly religious tea-party in America, and how they don't want things like healthcare for all.
Just look at some of the religious loony commentators on Fox "news" and their outrageous, selfish, and intolerant views.
Thanks to your OVERUSE of ALL CAPS, I can't actually TELL if you're being SERIOUS. If you ARE, then I AGREE with your basic POINT, which is that MORALITY and RELIGION are not interdependent, but you come off sounding like a JACKASS. If you TROLLING by pretending to be an ATHEIST, then you actually ARE a jackass.
Geeze Tom, talk about pot/kettle.
I wasn't trolling - I was angered by remembering some of the things I've seen christians do in the name of christianity.
I was also angered by remembering someone telling me once I had great Christian values.
I'm not hiding - the only reason I posted anonymously was because I promised someone I wouldn't be online this week ;-)
Sorry Tom, you must have had a bad day, confusing *passion* [ there, I used * instead of CAPS just for you ] with trolling, and then coming off as a jackass in your reply.
Have a nice day
If it wasn't for the Stallman, we wouldn't have GNU, we wouldn't have free software and we wouldn't have the free software movement that we have. Linux distributions literally would not exist.
Richard Stallman can be a bit of an arse at times, but he is the idealist that we need to keep pushing at the proprietary evil that racks our industry. You might not like Richard Stallman's viewpoint, but for every Stallman there is a Ballmer, Jobs and Ellison at the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum.
We need a special double Fail icon for the Ultimate Fail this article is.
Fail again.
I didn't say there was anything evil about proprietary software, just the evil that comes from it.
A lot of what people don't like about MS and Oracle is their strong arm tactics leveraged by their closed source platform.
I would argue that the likes of Red Hat make a more honest living by providing services for cash rather than generating shonky software and banging it out by the million and still charging the earth for what is practically old rope.
The problem with RMS is that his ideals aren't just working in the English language. Free means both "free as in freedom" and "free as in no cost", so Free Software is usually interpreted as $0 software. Ironically, your RedHat exapmle is one that got slammed back when RedHat decided to go pay-only and turn the free RHL into Fedora... and it was slammed because they weren't giving RHEL for free.
Then there's the GNU/Linux debacle, which really puts off anyone outside the FOSS/FLOSS community. It's the IT version of Political Correctness gone mad:
A: I'm checking this cool OS called Linux
B: HERETIC! IT IS CALLED GNU/LINUX!
A: Err.. Okay, so this Linux..
B: GNOOOOOO LEEEENOOOKS! JOO SAY IT GNOO SLASH LINUX!
A: Um... Fuck it, if every Linux user is as demented as you, I'd rather suffer Windows.
Oh, and some people started using the unambiguous Spanish word "libre" instead of free; RMS still won't use Libre Software because he insists on using Free. This puritanism on terminology might be huting FOSS more than MS FUD.
Well, I think I already covered that bit with "...sometimes he can be an arse...".
I've never met the guy and I'm sure he switches people off with his arrogance (which is not great for his cause), but I agree with his ideals. More power to him I say.
Yes, the RedHat case is not helped by their stance. I think my point was more about the way they make their money (through effort, rather than minimal cost distribution) rather than their purity of morality :D
"Then there's the GNU/Linux debacle, which really puts off anyone outside the FOSS/FLOSS community. It's the IT version of Political Correctness gone mad:"
Way to sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth Telegraph reader!
In fact, the whole Android business proves RMS right yet again: you might be running Linux on your phone, but it isn't GNU/Linux, it's Android/Linux. You even get people acknowledging that your Android phone "isn't much of a Linux system" because it doesn't have all the usual user space tools and libraries.
By all means explain to people the difference between Android and "Desktop Linux" every time if you like, but I don't think you're in a position to criticise RMS somehow. Again, he's ahead of the curve. You, on the other hand, not so much.
If "free software" were really "free" it would be in the public domain. But it isn't so it's not. "Free software" is encumbered with restrictions in just the same way as proprietary software is encumbered. That you might approve of those restrictions does not mean that it's free: the FOSS idea of freedom seems to be that "freedom" consists of being legally required to do what Richard Stallman thinks you should do.
As for "North Carolina pastor Don Parris [arguing] that 'proprietary software limits my ability to help my neighbor, one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith'", well, he can either spend his own, effort, money, and time learning how to program and *then* give it away for free, or let him spend his own money and buy the software that his neighbor needs. Whining that his desire to be "altruistic" is hindered by someone else's desire to "get paid for their work" is not moral, it is profoundly immoral. There is a verse in the Bible commanding that "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn". (Deut 25:4). And more verses admonishing that "The workman is worthy of his hire". But then again, the Bible was written in a world in which slavery was common; I suppose that Parris thinks that slavery is still acceptable.
To me, there is nothing "moral" about forcing people to do what is "moral". And personally, I have only contempt for any ideology which is against people getting paid for their work.
The GPL, which I guess is what you're referring to, is basically about preserving that freedom.
His idea about free software is not just about giving software to the community, it is also about stopping others taking it away from you. I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with that idea.
Apart from the viral bit, which we could debate about :D, the license basically goes FURTHER than public domain whereby you can do what you want with the code and you must not take the code out of the public domain.
Without these protections, the freedom granted with the code would quickly disappear, I suspect.
The GPL a temporary bodge to prevent anyone from locking up the Source Code.
This is something that non-programmers don't get. The Source Code is the human-readable form of a program, that you can make changes to, before it gets compiled into the binary form that only a particular model of computer can understand.
There was a ton of Public Domain software for the Amiga and Atari ST written in the late 80s / early 90s. And it's all useless today, because it was shipped in binary form only, with no Source Code and hence no possibility to do anything else with it. A phone book program that only worked with 10-digit numbers would be useless nowadays, even if there was an emulator capable of running it on a modern computer. Updating it to handle today's eleven-digit numbers would be a fairly trivial task with the aid of the Source Code, but next to impossible without. You might as well just rewrite it from scratch.
Even worse is the BSD licence, which allows anybody to redistribute your software, modified or unmodified and with or without the Source Code. There is a real risk that someone could modify it just enough to make it slightly incompatible with the original, release it without Source Code and the new version become more popular than your original.
By insisting for you to distribute the Source Code with your software, the GPL ensures that everybody has the freedom to enjoy, study, share and adapt the software they use, by ensuring that nobody has the power to deprive anybody of any of those freedoms. Until access to Source Code is recognised by governments as a fundamental human right, it's the best compromise.
Incidentally, no Free Software or Open Source licence forbids charging money for software (that would be against the accepted definitions) -- they just don't forbid other people from charging less than you, or even nothing. I believe that is called a free market.
"To me, there is nothing "moral" about forcing people to do what is "moral". And personally, I have only contempt for any ideology which is against people getting paid for their work."
It's a good thing that no-one is forcing you to use the GPL then.
The point about the GPL is that it is a voluntary licence that people who create code are *free* to use if they would like to make their work available for others to freely use. It allows the people who have chosen that license to place an important restriction on those who want to re-use it "You can do what you want with it, but if you create some more software based on it, the recipients of that software must be free to do what they want with it too - you can't snaffle my work and then close it down".
Yes, it is a fundamentally ideological license - it is designed to service a particularly ideology, but there is no coercion involved - people who like the free ideology can choose to publish their software under the GPL if they wish, and people who want to build software on that code can use it - or not if they don't like the license.
As for "an ideology which is against people getting paid for their work.", there is absolutely nothing to stop anyone publishing their original code under a dual license.
I think the idea is that it's the *software* that has the freedom, not the *user*. Otherwise, like you say, it makes no sense.
It doesn't work anyway. Digium (creators of Asterisk) use the GPL to beat around the head anyone who tries to make money from value-add in their market without paying them a royalty. It's anti-competitive, in that case, and that has nothing to do with freedom. It also restricts the freedom of their users. Ironic that I can sell an Internet Explorer plugin without paying a dime to Microsoft, but I can't sell an Asterisk plugin without paying Digium their "GPL tax". And Digium are in no way unique. Go freedom!
If your Asterisk plugin needs to be compiled against the Source Code of Asterisk itself (and hence can be considered to contain code derived from Asterisk) then you are making a Derived Work, and so you run up against copyright. GPL says you can do this as long as you release it under the GPL, so that other people can benefit from your hard work exactly as you have benefitted from Digium's hard work. To release it other than under the GPL, you need a separate licence from Digium.
If your Asterisk plugin interacts with Asterisk *only* through published APIs (so-called "arms' length" interaction), then it is not a Derived Work and you can distribute it under whatever licence you like.
Of course, since the published API documentation often *is* the Source Code, you might have to have some intermediary paraphrase the description of the interface, just to be sure you were not in inadvertent breach of copyright. This "clean room" technique might still be cheaper than a licence from Digium.
If you wrote an IE plugin *that needed to be compiled against the IE Source Code*, Microsoft would most certainly be wanting money from you.
Did you actually bother to read the article or was a single, vaguely critical, reference to Stallman enough to light the blue touch paper and you just went off on one? The entire point of the article was that there is nothing about propriatory software that makes it evil. Indeed, as the article makes clear, Bill Gates has done far more for the poor and needy than Stallman ever will BECAUSE he made shit loads of money from selling Windows.
We really need a RTFA icon.
"Bill Gates has done far more for the poor and needy than Stallman ever will BECAUSE he made shit loads of money from selling Windows."
Correction: Gates made shitloads of money from coercing others to bundle Windows and other products. In addition, Stallman's ideas have been taken up by a lot of people worldwide to great effect, whereas Gates's charitable endeavours usually seem to play out against a backdrop of how various companies his foundation invests in might benefit somehow.
With Gates there are always strings attached.
Don't be ridiculous. There are other free compilers, and other free UNIX toolsets (ever heard of BSD?). There are even, believe it or not, competing philsophies about open source.
Linux would be just fine without gcc, without the GNU toolset, and without Stallman's moralistic highground of bullshit - a platform you obviously subscribe to, seeing as you use the word "evil" in relation to the *software industry*, for God's sake.
To misuse the word "evil" in such a way is the absolute epitome of "first world problem" syndrome. The only issue I can see with the article is that the author fails to hit us with the double whammy of how ridiculous it is that someone dedicates their life to fighting a very very small point of personal preference regarding who gets to edit source code, as if it had some deep moral aspect or even appreciable impact on the average person. Stallman isn't an idealist, he's a self-righteous prick with a disturbing tendency towards absolutism, and a following that can only be described as cultish.
Meanwhile, the "evil" Gates tackles real problems, such as poverty, poor sanitation, poor education, and so on, with the mountain of money he's made fighting this philosophical bullshit with practical reality and actual useful software. Which is kind of the point the article is making.
We need a special triple-fail icon for people who still think Stallman is sane.
You extoll Gates and his foundation for giving money to needy causes. You assume that he acquired that money legally and morally.
http://billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
You and I, with our taxes, paid his programmers to write Win95, and we weren't even asked if we wanted to. Gates got reimbursed by your taxes for every dollars worth of stock options he printed to "pay" the coders. While other companies were deducting employee expenses from their profits, thus reducing the amount they could spend on advertising and R&D, Gates didn't have such coder expenses, giving Microsoft a decided advantage and dramtically tilted the playing field in its favor. You've probably forgot about the fiasco DR DOBS Journal uncovered when they discovered that Microsoft specifically coded windows not to boot on top of any DOS except MSDOS. And, no doubt, you were not aware that the LA Times uncovered Microsoft's Astroturf campaign to flood Washington politicians with letters demanding that Congress and the DOJ stop "persecuting" Microsoft for "being successful". MS would probably gotten away with it if they hadn't used the names of dead people as signatories. It was that even that gave rise to the term "Astroturf". You certainly can't be so short of memory that you can't remeber the ISO Stadards Committee fiasco, or the offer to sell patents to folks willing to sue Linux, along with instructions on how to do so.
The success of Linux and FOSS in general is due ENTIRELY to the GPL and Richard Stallman, not Matt Asay or any number of people with a proprietary mindset acquired while using Windows and retained after migrating to Linux. They just can't seem to get away from that binary lock-in paradigm as the only way to make money.
What have YOU been smoking?
Without Stallman & GNU, we'd still have BSD. And remember, Linux was begat by Minix. True, the mostly-GNU-licensed tool chain (especially GCC) helped things along, but I think Linux & BSD would be pretty much where they are now without GNU. Alternative free tools were available (The Bourne Shell, vi and pcc come to mind; pretty much everything else can be created with those three) ... it's just that the GPL made it easier to include the GNU tools in the various "freeware" UNIX-like operating systems.
Regarding the Mother Theresa/Gates thing - it's an interesting question. I guess the difference is that Gates enriched himself in the process, whereas Mother Theresa didn't. He gave to others after his own wealth was assured, she spent a life picking people up out of the gutter.
That sounds more depricating of Gates than I intended. He is to be hugely commended for his generosity, and only he can know what it feels like to give so much away.
the argument that Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser but significant degree, and likely a good number of other less prominent software companies) have held the computational technology sector back to be about 10-15 years behind where it would it could be today. Not deliberately, of course, but as a side-effect of common business practices in the field.
What effect that lag has (detrimental or otherwise) on the general human condition is likely unknowable, but certainly all that money spent on their shonky over-priced product could have otherwise been spent on things that directly benefit people, without them acting as highly inefficient middle-men eventually passing on a tiny tiny part of their gains to help others.
"The argument that Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser but significant degree, and likely a good number of other less prominent software companies) have held the computational technology sector back to be about 10-15 years behind where it would it could be today."
Let me try a different argument: the fact that Microsoft managed to unify the market for both hardware and software and impose a common standard was the single most important factor of the rise of computer technology, and has been of immense value to the world.
Here's why:
01) By creating a standard platform, "Wintel", a huge market was created for a specific kind of hardware.
Microsoft, by forcing the *concentration of resources* on a single platform (Wintel), is the single biggest reason and pretty much the only reason why there are many hundreds of millions of computer users today: the dominance of the Wintel platform lead to constantly expanding markets which enabled a technological and economic bootstrapping process in which each technological innovation could generate enough income to generate a succeeding technological innovation along with the economies of scale needed to make that innovation affordable - which further expanded the market. (I.e. we buy progressively more capability for progressively less money, in a continuing process).
Beyond the amortization of physical capital, economies of scale also include the intellectual efforts invested on a single platform, as opposed to being scattered over a variety of platforms. It should be clear to anyone that if the engineering talent invested in x86 were scattered over a large variety of incompatible cpus, then that talent would have been less effective and would have accomplished far less, expressing itself in a large number of more primitive but higher-priced processors. Computers would be far less capable, and far more expensive, than they are today.
(This process eventually effected all computer components and lead to the creation of new components; as the size of the existing market increased, investment become more economically sound, and invention and innovation increased as the probability of returns on the effort invested in invention and innovation increased.)
Bear in mind that the process and fabrication technology needed to actually manufacture the cpu also benefited from the increased market for computers, another extremely important factor in the commoditization of personal computing. When you buy, let's say, a new graphics card, you don't buy "photolithography" but it still needed to invented and sold at an affordable price, or that graphics card could not be fabricated in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you wouldn't be able to run any FOSS on modern hardware if Wintel hadn't created the economic incentives that enabled modern hardware to exist in the first place.
02) Wintel's dominance enabled economies of scale in programming too! In much the same was as with hardware, it did so by concentrating immense intellectual investment on a specific platform, thereby making for more rapid progress than would have been the case with only a small number of people investing their effort. Had this same quantity of intellectual investment been scattered of many platforms, none of them would have progressed as far as they have.
****************
All of this should be familiar to anyone with a moderate degree of economic literacy, or who is familiar with the career of Cornelius Vanderbilt (a group of people probably to a large degree co-extensive with the first, now that I think about it.)
Other results:
03) The fact that computers were so affordable created a mass market for them, which encouraged the adaption of the technology to a mass market - what I have in mind here are GUI's, without which we would still be using the command line. The development of GUI's made computing far more accessible to a mass market .
04) The ubiquity of Windows enables computer skills learned at one enterprise to be transferred easily to another enterprise, if they both run Windows. (And most do.) This creates a more capable workforce, allowing for increased productivity. It also allows for greater employee mobility, from enterprise to enterprise, although such mobility is greatly effected by other factors too, of course.
(Of course, if you think that all of the foregoing is "evil", no one will stop you. But please pay careful attention to the following statement:)
What anyone thinks of Microsoft's business ethics is irrelevant. It is easy to moralistically examine anyone's behaviour in the real world and find it unacceptable. The actual outcome of Microsoft's behaviour has been immensely beneficial to the progress of personal computing, IT, and everything based on it, including all forms of consumer electronics such as smart phones, dvd players, mp3 players, digital cameras and so.
Mother Theresa actually did far more harm than good. As a conservative Catholic she not only helped to spread AIDS she actively encouraged it by teaching those she was 'helping' that contraception was against God. She preached that it is a womans duty to breed which lead to more mouths going unfed, less food to go around everyone and more deaths as a result. She thought more about getting the dying to Heaven than she did about caring for the sick and she has said so in her own words. It is also on record that one of her nurses left after Mother Theresa refused to help a child who would have lived with a course of antibiotics because he was going to meet God.
I am not saying she did this because she was an evil woman. She did it as she was deeply religious and thought she was doing good according to her faith. Even a logical argument about the hardship and suffering she was causing wouldn't have opened her eyes as she was blinded by 'The Truth'
I'm a "born again" "fundamentalist" Christian (lovely labels) but I don't quite see the question existing which this article is replying to. Acting ethically is totally separate to whether you open up your source code or not, it's what you use it for and how you treat those you pay to create it, and pay to use it.
RMS did not invent free software, he didn't invent open source software and didn't couple the two together, he just happens to have formed one formalisation of how it works.
It's more than likely that we'd be using free open source software based on a different rule set (licence) had he never existed. I'd say that he probably does as much to hold back FOSS as he does to further it.
A Matt Assay column I can almost agree with.
The Open Source Evangelists do need to "Shut Up" sometimes. Theres a time and a place for open source, and there's a time and a place for closed.
And this seach for "Openness" perfection that Matt's highlighted does make them seem a little puratanical...
Pretty well all technology can be used for good or evil. A frying pan can be used for cooking delicious, delicious bacon, or for splatting kittens. A searchable bible app can be used for spiritual enlightenment or for looking up inconsistencies for the next time Jehova's Witnesses show up. A grenade can be used for evil or for feeding a lakeside village really quickly. And so on.
Also, viewing things through a religious filter doesn't make the intent 'good' any more than a non-religious user is intrinsically evil. Quite the converse...many of the really horrible things in history have had a religious justification.
OK, then. Please point me to a licence (even a hypothetical one under which no software has ever actually been released) which *either* meets the definition of Open Source but not the definition of Free Software, *or* meets the definition of Free Software but not the definition of Open Source.
Beer, because I'm expecting to get thirsty during the wait.
Now don your asbestos, you'll be needing them.
billy g. has quite a lot of dosh to help the poor and the needy, and what's he doing with it? Why, parcel it out piecemeal, of course! He's got no vision (never had; go read his books, I dare you), and even while he's hired the supposedly finest around, he can't do any better. He's started his own cult for every microsoftee still believes they're "helping the world" while utterly failing to do so. They do some mean marketeering though.
Where Mother Theresa is arguably ineffective in the big picture taken on her own, at least she's an example that plenty of people can aspire to. Getting filthy rich is a lot more work and a lot harder; there's more than a little luck involved. It's not something people expect to be able to do.
And all that information technology? He's mostly *withheld* it from the masses by, oh, ignoring the internet until he no longer could, by making things so "intuitive" people give up in frustration, by quelling innovation through destroying other people's good ideas, stealing them then breaking the implementations, buying up start-ups then having the implementations succumb to internal politics or just shelving them after ditching the exec supposedly doing something with it, and so on, and so forth. At least Mother Theresa isn't sitting on mountains of potential and denying them to the world, sharing only the excrement. She's a lot more honest that way.
This comparison, taken in the "open source is only free if your time is free" sense, then yes, it's true. It's also an impressive way to miss the point. If open source evangelists can be argued out the door that way they need to learn better arguments, starting by learning to understand how businesses use software. But then, that's something even software companies often don't understand. Or the companies themselves (cue description of software on trading desks) for that matter, all of whom use you-know-whose software.
Perhaps other people would have given more to charity is they had not spent all their money renting Bill's software, or paying huge taxes so politicians can buy Bill's software.
I think whoever writes the software (or pays someone else to write software) gets to choose the license. I support Bill's right to rent out his third rate software at exorbitant rates. Google are Apple are welcome to spy on their customers who do not bother to read the terms and conditions that come with the products and services.
A religious leader using Agile, a continuous change model; that sounds like evolution to me, religious leaders would of course use the waterfall model where everything gets designed (intelligently) and then built.
Meanwhile in other news, the original JCL deck has been found
http://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/jcl.html
"But I can't disagree with those that argue that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has done more for the world's poor than Mother Theresa ever will. Yes, that evil, proprietary Windows software enriched the pocketbooks of millions of people, and the lives of hundreds of millions (perhaps billions?)."
Oh of course, because the world's poor can all afford computers running Microsoft Windows. How about you take your own advice and put a sock in it?
I think you may have missed the point a little. I don't think Matt's talking about the software, rather the large donations to worthy causes that selling bucketloads of the software has enabled him to make.
I don't think giving a copy of windows to someone (even if he'd done that) counts as 'doing more for the worlds poor'. Putting millions/billions into funds to cure nasty diseases does though (even if the funds are named after himself, a practice I rather dislike)
... is actually a poor proposition (and nevermind the pun) more often than most care to contemplate.
Take, say, missionaries going to darkest africa, doing what they can, massively reducing infant mortality. At the same time they're withholding condoms for the pope says so. 'Tis harsh to say but birthrates need to be high if infant mortality is high. Drop the latter but don't also drop the former, and you get... breeding like rabbits. It's also well-known that rabbits breed proverbially, then overgraze the landscape, die off like rats (who breed like same and die proverbially), the landscape recovers, and so does the rabbit population. If you don't want that to happen with humans (regular famines in darkest africa, anyone? with "relief" funding drives and food "aid" to match), then you'll have to either not drop the mortality rate, or you'll also have to drop the birthrate. What's religion doing for us there, hm?
To fix this sort of thing you need to look beyond the façade of what is all most people usually see. Think big, see the whole system, be a cynical biologist or something, and dare let things be if that's really the best. I see neither religion (looking for more believers and eventually tithes) nor big corporations (looking to please the shareholders with dividents) manage to look out for the long term. Most amazingly, neither do I see "philantropists" like that investor famous for his 30 year view manage that. The dimwit gave it all to billy "no vision" g!
"To fix this sort of thing you need to look beyond the façade of what is all most people usually see. Think big, see the whole system, be a cynical biologist or something, and dare let things be if that's really the best." I guess you mean that one has to buy into the whole "religion is the root of all evil" propaganda, like you have, right?
By the way, the reason for the birthrates being so high was the simple fact that so few children survived childhood. In many traditional societies, children are an economic necessity, as they provide a source of labour which is invested in the family's household economy. The fact that they have so many children is a result of intention, *not* as you seem think, ignorance of how to limit family size. The birthrate drops of its own accord when more children survive childhood, irrespective of what the Pope says about condoms, because people do no longer need the extra children, once they have had the "economically required" children. But there is a lag between the actual transition from high-mortality to low-mortality conditions, and people's realization that such a transition has occurred: it is this lag that is the prime cause of increasing population. That is to say, the mortality transition occurs first, and then people realize it, and adapt to it after the fact by limiting the number of childbirths. They can not, after all, be expected to adapt their birth practices to low-mortality conditions *before* those conditions exist and are easily observable. So it is while the adaptation to low-mortality conditions is taking place that the population undergoes a period of rapid growth.
In other words, people who live there calculate according to the situation in which they find themselves, and they are not nearly as stupid as you think.
And by the way, don't you think that it is at least possible that that dimwit "investor famous for his 30 year view" has a better view of things than you?
Er, no, you're not right. You might have noticed that I haven't even begun to deconstruct the religion angle there, beyond noting that it's religion that drives people to go there and "help" with not uniformly positive results. I'm saying that if you want to help with the one, you'd better also help with the other, lest you create more, different, and possibly bigger problems.
I do think there's an ethical angle here, where if you know or reasonably could have known that people would likely end up worse off with your help then maybe you should've rethought this "helping" thing. Though apparently for many refraining from acting is so much a no-no that doing anything regardless of what you're doing is preferrable. If that's what religion drives people to do then that is a bit of a problem.
It doesn't really matter if family size is a rational decision, as you say, for that ratio is no longer as useful as it once was. So if it's not supplying condoms, then it's education about the effects of what you've just done so that people will then rationally refrain from exploding the population. Though I don't know if it's all that rational. We know the reasons, but the mechanism might equally well be "tradition" instead of "rational deliberation".
If it was rational and provided with the necessary inputs, then we perchance could've foregone a couple of those intermediate, "passing" famines. We've been how long at "improving their phlight" and when was the last global cry for more food aid again?
And by the way, why are you asking me to out-think someone else when you're implying he'll know better than I do? So why don't you ask him for his reasons? Please do share the responses, if any. Personally I think his reasons have more to do with appearances than with substance, as so often in the do-goodery world. That, and that we're not actually moving forward as a result, by and large, was the complaint.
That what this is mostly all about. Its fine to be passionate about a product or a certain development but never forget that there are other solutions out there and those solutions may very well perform just as well as yours.
Most of all try not to lose perspective of the situation and /always/ respect anothers opinion.
Too many discussions are based on assumptions and guesses where people can have a very outspoken opinion (often based on true facts though) yet these assumptions don't always apply...
A simple example which I've discussed with many of my friends in past months: Costs of Open source vs. those of closed source. In my particular case me picking up Windows 2k3 for my 2 office servers vs. picking up, say, Ubuntu server LTS instead. After all; now I had to cough up (I paid a few hundred dollars) while I could have installed a Linux server OS for free.
My argument against that is that Linux would indeed have been free to pick up. But the hours which I had to invest in setting the whole thing up are not. Nor is the time I had to spent on maintenance. Example: Setup a software raid1 for the system partition(s) while also making sure that it can boot from both mirrors should one disk suddenly fail.
On Windows this takes me a few mouseclicks (make disk dynamic while making sure I have some unpartitioned space left on the other, next right click on the partition with the data (now called a volume) and select "add mirror"). The beauty here is that it even sets up the boot manager for me so that it resides on both disks.
On Linux this is a bit harder. It is advised to always layout a filesystem on the new raid. A bit rough if you want to keep your data. So what I used to do was to setup a virtual device (md0) using only the new partition (so create the new device with one partition, then layout the filesystem and after that actually copy the current data to the virtual device. Then (if possible) unmount your current mountpoint and replace it with the virtual device. After that simply attach your original partition to your raid1 (optionally formatting it first)). Needless to say but this takes much more time since you're basically copying your data twice. And that's not even touching the subject of having to reconfigure Grub so that it will reside on the mbr of both harddisks.
Now: in all honesty my knowledge is dated. Back in the time the easiest way to setup a boot manager was Lilo since it natively supported raid (so could install itself with one command in both MBRs).
Dated or not the time factor is something you can't deny here. I know this is 'merely' about installing ("how many times do you install an os?"), its also merely an example. Another argument of mine is support duration.
Some people don't like this opinion one bit. "You're basically selling out" (wtf?). While forgetting that I can be just as argumentative when it comes to using a Windows server as an internet server. I wouldn't do that either....
If you are going to shill for Microsoft you might want to get beyond fairly trivial things like RAID setup. There's usually a bit more to deciding what operating system you are going to use for any task than just the initial setup bits. Also, while those bits might be better or worse, they are a one time cost rather than an ongoing one.
Although I suspect that either RHEL or SLES or either of their gratisware versions would completely render your rant moot anyways.
One of this sites perpetual offenders does *exactly* what the OP and Matt Assay are talking about. Well done, jedidiah. No really. You are noting but an irreverent troll who cannot begin to image that others may have differing views and opinions, and even taste, of their own. Isn't it about time you grew up?
A bad argument is a bad argument regardless of whether or not you agree with it or not.
I have stated better arguments for running Windows myself.
Plus the criticism wasn't even accurate.
On the one hand, the other guys remarks were a genuine troll. They were genuine nonsense. Outdated perhaps but that's how real trolls operate. They argue against an outdated vision of the opponent. In the end it was useful because it was educational. You see, because of the nature of Free Software anyone can test out claims if they like.
That's exactly what I did. I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu and set it up with a RAID boot disk.
The process was not a thing like what that other guy was blithering about.
There is nothing "grown up" about accepting falsehoods and bad reasoning.
You do realize that when it comes to actually having to rely on the raid there is already a huge problem?
So, ok; replacing the HD. I don't know about you but I don't use the mdadmin command on a daily basis and as such would need time to check up on the syntax. Easily done through the manpage, but still time consuming. And yes; you can prepare for this up front and write everything down or script it, but all of that effort is basically adding up to my previous comment.
In my environment I replace the HD with a new one, boot the system and right click on the volume to add a new mirror. Done.
In Linux it doesn't quite work this way since I'd first need to setup a partition of equal size or larger. At least twice; one for my root and one for my swap. After doing that its time to attach the stuff and let it continue. The end result is still the same; it would take me more time.
But you're right, this is but one example.
Who's god you are talking about.
Since prety-much everyone who beleives in some sort of god will interpret said in their own image to a greater or lesser degree, there are prety-much as many versions of what-god-is/does/wants as there are beleivers. Clumping together in mutual ego-rubbing groups will occurr if the interpretations are close enough to ignore the minor differences, but in the end every one of them believes: "Of course god is just like me* and approves of me more than anyone else. I'm special in that way and being special makes me feel good. And anyone who disagrees is suspect/wrong/crazy/evil." Any claims otherwise are delusion or bold-faced lying.
It is a oft-harmless (though occasionally disturbingly dangerous) side-effect of the way the human brain tends to sort-of-work.
*Psychologically very much so, physiologically to a lesser but still great extent - how many white Christians habitually think of Jesus as a physiologically middle-eastern Jewish person? Even anciene Egyptian gods, while having somewhat animal physiology were behaviorally human.
Amazing how many otherwise intelligent people swallow the self-serving hype that comes out of the mouths of modern-day ultra-capitalists. It's no surprise that this small time wannabe has such drooling admiration.
Gates, and his empire built on FUD, can be said to have stolen from rich and poor alike; the fact that he has bought off his guilty conscience by donating a small portion of his ill-gotten gains should fool no-one other than himself.
The world would be a better and fairer place if Microsoft hadn't coerced its way into its current dominant position, however given that it did, things would be even worse if open source hadn't become such a serious competitor to Redmond's insatiable greed.
"when everyone is excited by Linux, Stallman pooh-poohs it as a non-free bastardization of his pristine GNU-Linux"
Really? Where has RMS ever said Linux is "non-free"!? Author just prove to be clueless. Or at least careless with his writing (sic). How is this dude part of the OSI!? Oh, yeah, it's the OSI...
Quote faith and/or scripture in a technical forum, and be prepared to summarily ignored. --jake, 23:14
Seriously, dude, leave it at your church. That's the only place that you'll find the majority of people agree with your completely unprovable so-called "faith".
Same goes for computer fanbois, of course.
Figure out your software needs, and then pick the OS and hardware that allow you to run that software (in that order), and you'll be golden. Nothing religious about it, if you're sane.
So Matt Asay thinks that someone who lies, cheats, extorts and bullies his way to an enormous fortune but then gives away a proportion of that fortune is as moral as someone who devotes their entire life to caring for the sick? Well, at least now we know that his understanding of ethics and morality is as glib and superficial as his understanding of matters technological.
I would never apply "dissatisfied with what exists and want better" tag to gates, if it wasn't for the fact that his mother/aunt/whatever, was ideally placed in IBM at a time when IBM were looking for a OS for the PC they threw together from off-the-shelf bits is response to the apple/II/mac/whatever, decided to engage in a bit of nepotism and throw a bit of work his way, mickysoft may have remained a supplier of programming languages.
Just think, you could have ended up with a sticker on your PC that said "MVS inside"
Most of what passes for innovation is just the refinement & development of earlier ideas
"But I can't disagree with those that argue that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has done more for the world's poor than Mother Theresa ever will."
What the hell has got to do with anything from a religious point of view? Mother Theresa gave everything she had. Bill's taken up a new hobby. From a Christian perspective Mother Theresa's on the way up. Bill? Who knows. Has he done anything selflessly?
(And, yes, yes, "There's no such thing as selflessness." I know. I've read de Sade.)
"You can't be moral without religion"
Bollocks. If you're incapable of defining your own moral code and need a highly debated, historical dubious, probably mythical morality to follow then, morally, you've already failed.
... the authors viewpoints have gone down yet another notch in my estimation.
WTF is he on about? Religion? It has *nothing* to do with software, there's just no sane comparison you can draw here!
It's about people's opinion, simple as.
It's also about freedom of choice - something religion doesn't value very highly.
Staunch Open Source supporters are coming from the viewpoint that there shouldn't be patents, closed source - that ideas should be shared in order to allow competition and creativity to thrive.
Stanch Closed Source supporters come from the other viewpoint - we put all our efforts and ideas into this, we're protecting our IP and will profit from it. If we give you our source code, we lose control.
Then there's shades of grey between those two lines in the sand.
Most people don't pick a side, they just use what suits them for the work they are currently doing.
Religion? Worst invention mankind has *ever* come up with, so please leave it OUT of discussions about technology. It has NO place here.
While I agree that "Technology is amoral and indifferent to religion", its creators (God Complex) and its users (Followers) are not.
When standing in a line that goes in a circle, it is hard to know where the middle and the end is.
Stallman helps to give perspective to a very broad system of beliefs, religious or not.
I appreciate his input.
I agree with the author's conclusion that technology is value neutral. But being a direct beneficiary of Mother Teresa's institution, I find the assertion that Bill Gates has done more than Mother Teresa indigestible. Also, philanthropy by a rich shareholder or owner of a company and the policies of a company are two distinctly different activities of two independent entities. Therefore, any attempt to paint proprietary software (or the diabolic litigious practices of such firms to the detriment of other open source vendors) as benign is like masking the wolf with the hide of a lamb.
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