But what about
What about me, I'm an Apatheist, how many of us are bloody likely to care to tick any box in that question?
428 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Aug 2006
I think you might have to go back to your Quick and Easy Free and Open Source for Microsoft Engineers book. It doesn't say "Free software is about hacking together a mess of code in order to extract ever greater amounts of money from support". It says something along the lines of "The economics of code distribution, like most other creative works, has fallen to zero. If you still would like to earn money you can do a couple of things: a) lock your product up and milk your customers like cattle (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple), b) Get paid for performing code creation (Independent SMEs) or c) Get paid for supporting the software in an business context, with a note that you should probably push a bit of that money into development in order to keep your customers."
Sometimes I think Microsoft people learn about FOSS on the back of cornflake packets.
Is this post a rallying point for Microsoft employees is there one bloke with 50 accounts on el reg who likes to dress Microsoft up?
The phone is closed, the software is closed, it's a pointless exercise in wasting economic effort and should be thrown away with blackberry, symbian and ios.
It's the programmer's right to see his license abided by. It's Apple's business to make sure their terms are no so outrageously draconian that they step on copyleft licenses. Although at least Apple didn't explicitly ban GPL like Microsoft did.
There is a real political battle going on and all this talk of features, functions and other such rubbish is a distraction from the ready fitted shackles you're all buying.
Because Microsoft are well known for being one of the biggest bads out there in software land? Because FOSS is known to be multi-fold more efficient to write, better coded and more stable.
There are only two reasons why a FreeDesktop deployment would fail; heavy outside influence or making really poor deployment choices. So either the folk in charge are stupid, or they are corrupt. Does it matter which one?
It's likely the whole lot of h2g2's content is going down a black hole anyway. The licensing terms mean that every single contributor would have to be contacted in order to relicense their work as creative commons before it could be moved anywhere like wikipedia.
This is why licensing for the unthinkable future is so damn important.
I'll attempt to translate from what Asay said, to what Asay should have said if he only knew the words:
You can be the best open-source coat tails surfer in all of the inter tubes, but unless you've got the business nous to set the road between the new users you've acquired and the inevitable and required investment in research and development... then what you've done is commodised the market to a standstill.
It's your business's choice if it wants to pass money from over charging support services to the programmers (al la Red Hat), or if it wants to simply advertise and accept development jobs directly (Most smaller foss businesses), but the point is clear that you can't just have an eternal 'tin of beans' in software that you keep on re-selling.
You'll find Free Software people have a much bigger problem with the Apple's cult of personality than say Microsoft (but only just). After all Apple defines itself as a company of super style, definitiveness and a self gratifying moral position where as the Free Software personality defines itself on responsible ownership, chaotic freedom and a neighbourly moral position.
Basically Apple scares the bajesus out of various groups because it's more than a company, it's an ideology. And to see Obama praise the leader (and greatest advocate) of the ideology doesn't exactly say much about Obama's ideology. Although it comes as no surprise to me, Obama's administration was always toadying up to big media and silicon valley. Anyone who had a big cheque book or mass market of listeners or readers or quite often, both.
And it's still not right, a tariff connection to the internet assumes that everyone is in the lovely and comfortable middle classes and can pay for this wacky access to this obviously premium and luxury service called the interwebs and the only thing that stops them paying is because they don't have to.
I'm unhappy because once again the poor are told they aren't worthy to have access to education, culture or social services because of their inability to access large amounts of reoccurring and secure funding. After all giving fair access would just be prejudicial to their standing and make them insolent to their betters.
Only the well off are calling for prejudicial fees after all.
There is a way, Mr Coward, of developing and supporting free and open source without flushing your business down the toilet.
After all open source is about market economics, not monopolies. Anyone can make vast money from a monopoly. It takes a real capitalist to see a free market and make a go of it.
All praise Red Hat. etc etc.
Authoritarianism vs Libertarian. Personally I always favoured the industrial/new money world to the old Feudalism, sure the new system is a bit more fragmented and we have lost of people who don't have a title but still find themselves with money/land or what have you. But I think we've put together an impressive set of systematic functions to cope with the scary freedom.
It's no less what we do in the Free Software world. Making the freedom understandable and systematic.
Apple of course, and Jobs and anyone who aspires to his thinking, is two sandwiches short of a Lordship psychosis.
As an Ubuntu guy I can say honestly that OpenOffice.org's database management systems are the worst. It's easier to set up your own mysql database and populate that than deal with the hideously grotesque mail merge, bibliography or other features. Pro tip, try and use bibliography on a default ubuntu install. heh.
I don't use Microsoft Office, I don't really know what that product does. I just know oo.o isn't a good db app.
ID Cards cost 10Bn in the hands of a few people, most outside of the UK. benefit to uk economy 1Bn.
Benefit "fraud" 25Bn in the hands of the many, spending money in the UK. benefit to uk economy 25Bn.
I say we let them have the money, it's a damn site better for the economy than giving money to bankers and wankers.
Linux is a commercial bit of software, just because it's open source doesn't make it a charity or a governmental institution. Or perhaps you think open source is some sort of hobby?
Commercial == Your paid to write code
Free and Open Source == Your Users aren't treated like chumps
I'd like to get paid for not treating my users like chumps please.
Because Linux isn't an operating system, despite the rubbish from Torvalds on the subject. It's a kernel, it does kernely things. that's it, nothing more.
It's the entire stack of things, the entire FDO stack, the entire POSIX compliant user land. All of it. And that aint Linux, that's something else no one quite has a word for. Someone once called it "The industry" which I thought was apt.
I wouldn't pin my hopes on Asus as a leading light in Linux deployment, they basically took one of the worst desktops, shoved it on an underpowered OLPC ripoff and called it good without much in the way of support, training or even information.
On the other hand at least Dell makes netbooks with a real distro.
When you sell things, they should be honest things, the buyer must be aware of what they are buying and what they're rights are. Normally we don't have to consider the goods of sales act in relation to buying a Banana, but for reasons of a deficiency in business ethics and basic morality Microsoft seems to think it's quite acceptable to abuse the general public with OEM deals, price fixing, standards fraud, bribery and legal attacks which means no one has a clue what they're really buying or what they actually own. Unless your a lawyer I guess.
With all that, what they can't seem to do is actually produce honest products that are valuable to the advancement of society or at least the advancement of aesthetics. They're products don't do anything, don't go anywhere, they're all one shot and very boring deliberate evolutionary dead-ends for some computer historian in 100 years.
Microsoft: Make it all open source, make your money honestly, tear up the OEM deals and place your business in the free market instead of hiding away from capitalism. Be transparent and stop doing amoral things.
The largest App Store is Debian, your talking out of your hat if you think linux hasn't had an app store for a decade and a half.
The main problem with deb is the inability to earn money from development, but that could change, attitudes towards paying for FOSS are shifting and the freetards are being reformed. At least such a system would be miles better than anything based on Microsoft's bad karma.
I think your right that people can be way too fickle about spelling. I wouldn't mind if the English language was well formed and standardised, but it's not, it's just an evolved mess which is based on consensus. I take my grammar with a dose of logic and have taken to deliberately ignoring some daft rules such as 'its' for the 'it has' possessive contraction.
A study I read seemed to indicate that students that uses SMS were much better at language than those that didn't. Perhaps it wasn't always spelled correctly, but I hear it's good for your comprehension and I think we give kids these days less credit then they deserve for being able to switch context and type more appropriately.
* Myn's the oen with the dyslexics for dummies book in the pocket.
Linux isn't an OS while Ubuntu is an OS. Linux has the unfortunate trait of being only a kernel and nothing more.
Of course we don't have a generic name for the set of tools we've built up, but I know I aint going to be calling it Gnu and I aint going to be calling it Linux, both those idiots have had their egos stroked enough to forget the piles and piles of input from the rest of the community.
Get Microsoft to stop the corruption, the closed market and the FUD.
Little hard to complain at Ubuntu for not doing it's best with a couple of billion in production still not being good enough, where's your wallet eh?
We don't stand a chance and you know it, it's got nothing to do with quality of product and everything to do with monopoly.
So we have to keep spending money on making chances until one of them works.
Rolf:
Because the BSD and Apache licenses produce a weak commons, it's a protected area that is guaranteed in some for to remain free as in accessible. It's no good having licenses that can so easily be enclosed.
It's the misunderstanding of FOSS that makes people use BSD style licenses, they think it's a charity, they think it's altruism, it's not, it's industrial revolution.
In the recourse available.
It's no good having laws like this if you want appeal your case, let someone know that your being held by the government, be sure you won't be murdered, have a fair trial, have a moral law and fair and appropriately flexible sentencing.
Even some of our system is not written down, it just makes so much sense to not hit someone over the head before trial.
Doesn't pay Apple or Microsoft anything for normal Ubuntu, those were special deals with Dell so that _Dell_ was out of the firing line for _selling_ Ubuntu.
Liability is going to be an increasingly interesting legal field both for software in general and Free and Open Source especially.