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ESR On O'Reilly Summit 182

Eric S. Raymond wrote in with his summary of the proceedings from the recent O'Reilly Open Source Summit. Click the link below to read his comments on the proceedings.
The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Flautist, and Hacker, Eric S. Raymond

The Open Source Summit report from the anonymous poster using the tag line "You can't handle the truth" got a crucial fact wrong -- and that fact is symbolic of a larger problem with the essay.

It was not, in fact, a guy from HP who flung at me "You've never run a business". It was one of our own; Larry McVoy, a hacker who is a sort of anti-Stallman -- he believes that unless the open-source community accepts direct-revenue-capture licenses we will all come to a horrible end.

The author seems to have filtered his view of the summit through a simplifying myth that regards hackers and businesspeople as poles apart, with all hackers on the "free software" side of the fence and all businessmen either opposed to open source or puzzled by it or out to exploit it in some sinister way.

That simplifying myth has no room in it for Larry McVoy. Nor for the half-dozen or so businesspeople in the room who really seemed to get it. The truth is, I didn't see "hackers vs. suits" at the Summit -- just a whole bunch of people trying in various ways to get a handle on a very powerful and complex phenomenon.

And you know what? Licenses, everybody's favorite subject for doctrinal warfare, *were never even discussed*. They just weren't a big issue. My sense was that everybody there understood the basic hacker-community social contract that the OSD expresses and accepted it -- *even the suits*. All the hot questions were posed at a higher level; so we've got this social contract, we know why it clobbers the hell out of closed-source methods, now what do we do with it?

Mr. "You can't handle the truth" apparently had some trouble assimilating it himself. I saw no evidence that anyone there was incapable of "getting it", and I saw no justification for alarmist fox-in-the-henhouse metaphors.

Some plain truth: businesspeople can't "crush" us because, fundamentally, they can't do *anything* to us except throw money or refrain from throwing money. They can't erase all our source archives. They can't stop tens of thousands of people from writing code every day for reasons that are outside the ken of material-scarcity economics. They can't prevent the open-source community from evolving in any cultural direction it damn well pleases. As well try to cut water with a sword...

The only way I can account for the tone of Mr. YCHTH's essay (or the less sophisticated rantings of J. Random Slashdotter) is by supposing that a lot of hackers have a sort of need to feel persecuted, a need to cast themselves as the little guy in a David vs. Goliath drama with eschatological stakes.

Reality is much more complicated than that. This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works. And it's safe to tell him, too, because big guys are relatively lousy with slings and we'll always be better than he is at it.

We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us.

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ESR On O'Reilly Summit

Comments Filter:
  • Read carefully. YCHTT stands for "You Can't Handle The Truth," which is what the anonymous poster used as a sig or tagline or something. YCHTT was being used as a way to refer to him, not as sarcastic nastiness.
  • You must be somewhat new here. Try reading around ESR's home page [tuxedo.org]. He used to have a scandalous picture of Adolf Hitler, with Bill Gates' face stuck on top. Actually, he originally had it on the OSI web site, which cause quite an uprage.

    He also once wrote a horrendous little childish play on the Halloween thing, with him as a character, also put up on the OSI site.

    Apparently public pressure has made him delete both of these. The only controversial thing left for people to see is only his Gun nut page [tuxedo.org].

    Hehehe. I guess this will start Yet Another Gun Control Flamewar.

    ---

  • ESR is quite the mature fellow.

    two things:

    1) I currently have no desire to mix my hacking with any business.

    2) If I did, I'd think twice about connecting my software with Open Source(tm). Why? ESR. He hasn't done anything amazingly embarrasing, but the Obi-wan thing, and more importantly the immature snippets from the AOL letter... maybe if this was hacker2hacker, but not hacker2businessman. I'm suprised Mr. "suit" Case didn't respond with "HAHA."

    I'd much rather be connected with the FSF/Free software movement. Plain and simple freedom.
  • Posted by Pepi:

    Larry did OS work for SUN (performance analysis
    mostly) among other things. He is also developing a versioning system that we're probably going to use for 2.3 (but who knows) - bitkeeper. At www.bitkeeper.com you can read more about the product and Larry.
  • Posted by Pepi:

    Larry did OS work for SUN (performance analysis mostly) among other things. He is also developing a versioning system that we're probably going to use for 2.3 (but who knows) - bitkeeper. At www.bitkeeper.com you can read more about the product and Larry.
  • Posted by Rodent of Unusual Size:

    See the BitMover [bitmover.com] site.

    #kenP-)}

    Ken Coar

  • Posted by Pepi:

    Eric is doing a lot of pivotal work, mostly in advocating opensource. This is just as important. On the side he also made fetchmail.
  • Posted by penguin in a tie:

    Is this Linus' post? I think this is Linus.
  • Posted by Pepi:

    I use fetchmail and so does lots of people, who have gotten past Netscape and other great readers (tm).
  • On topic:
    Since I obviously wasn't at the `summit' (why does that word seem so like one that only a suit would use?) it gets difficult to see what actually transpired. However, I'm not going to toss out what Scoville had to say just because ESR says that he's wrong. I have a hard time thinking that a man who wrote something like Elements of Style: Unix as Literature [performanc...puting.com] as being almost completely unable to comprehend what went on at that meeting. It would make more sense to think, all this being the third-hand information that it is and perceptions being what they are, that the truth of what went on is somewhere in between what Scoville and ESR say.

    Off topic (somewhat):
    ESR is the guy whose web pages originally told me about this world of hackers and Unix and free software and all that -- without which I would still be wallowing in the pits of MS hell -- but lately I've been losing some degree of respect for the guy.

    Calling Scoville ``Mr. `You can't handle the truth''' strikes me as both incredibly silly and strangely immature. I'm not sure where in Scoville's assessment of the `summit' that he might have even thrown a bit of mud ESR's way that would incite ESR to toss some back. You would think that someone who wants to be taken seriously for what he's trying to do would act just a tad bit more responsibly, wouldn't you?

    Futhermore, his dressing up as Obi-Wan Kenobi (or, perhaps more appropriately, PDP-1) at the Microsoft-Refund event was just as immature. Sure, it may have been a joke, but as a parallelism, ``how do you stop a rhino from charging--take away his credit card'' ceases to be as funny as it used to be at some point on most peoples' lives and just marks you as a schmuck if you tell it.

    I won't even start on the Perens-OSI cat fight since, for me, the jury's still out on that one...

    ESR has some pretty big balls (metaphorically speaking) to do what he's trying to do with free software. Straddling the fence between hackers (who tend to dislike most suits--with exceptions) and suits (who don't usually care about much more than the profit margins--with exceptions) is a very difficult task and he deserves credit for that. But if he keeps up with this immaturity trip, he might lose the support of at least one of the ``sides'' that he's trying to bring together.

    Sorry if I'm out of line with this; just a newbie's thoughts.

    --
    Jeramey Crawford

  • ``I'd much rather be connected with the FSF/Free software movement. Plain and simple freedom.''

    I can see your point and agree as well. It's really too bad that such a high price is placed on information.

    About the Obi-Wan thing, I actually thought that was a little humorous (despite being rediculous), but I'm trying to get Linux in use at the workplace and I really don't want to show the boss something like that. Bad image == no Linux at work. The more interesting my job can be, and the less I have to deal with expensive NT, the better.

  • Yes, I am definitely new. Although I heard about Linux a few years ago, I haven't had the chance to actually use it and learn it (and find that I really, really like it!) until the last 6 months to a year or so.

    I had heard about the Hitler-Gates picture but have never seen it. Um, what? I fail to see the connection between Adolph and Bill. No contest. One is worse than the other and I'm sure you know which one!

    I've also read the Halloween stuff, too. Not funny.

    I won't discuss guns if you won't.
  • > Every new technology is marked by dreams of freedom. Seldom are these dreams fulfilled.

    Hmmm. The near-ubiquity of transistor radios in the Third World, the green revolution that showed up all the Malthusian doomsday scenarios of the '70s for the nonsense they were, the Ford Model T that set in motion the incredible mobility of the rural population, the ability of a quarter of a billion people or so all over the planet to communicate with each other instantaneously via the Internet, the revolution in "freedom of the press" brought on by the Web -- but these dreams are "seldom fulfilled." OK, sure.

    If you're saying "Nothing is a panacea", that's true but trivially obvious. If you're saying any more than that, you're obviously quite wrong. Technological development in the last 150 years has vastly increased the empowerment of individuals.

    Craig [airnet.net]

  • > 1. cause the talented to work on projects that were of interest to the suits

    -- as thousands of the talented do every year when they graduate and get a [gasp!] job!

    > 2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits

    -- that is, actually paying money to some hackers for working on Linux! Eeeek!

    > 3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.

    -- that is, enlarging the community (Horrors!) by including people whose definition of "freedom" may not be exactly the same as RMS'. Aaagh!

    Craig [airnet.net]

  • > They are not drones whose vision of life exclusively consists of "graduate and get a [gasp!] job!".

    I don't know anyone whose vision of life consists exclusively of anything. Do you?

    Likewise I know very few people whose vision of life does not include food and shelter, though in some cases (notably RMS') in a rather minimalistic form.

    > You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why?

    Gee, I dunno. I just looked around and noticed that a hell of a lot more great software with source was available now than it was when I first started using it nearly ten years ago. Silly me, I thought it might be because more people were writing the stuff....

    > You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why?

    I assume it's all right for the same reason I assume gravity is all right; it's inescapable. "A group" is not a thing, it's a word for a number of people who choose to cooperate with each other in some area of endeavor. Show me somewhere a group all of whose members are there with the same motivations, values, and goals and I'll show you a group that is at the very least unlikely to be individualistic enough to do any really superb hacking....

    > Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL?

    The last time I looked, Linux depended for its GUI, for example, on X. Is that "more" free, "less" free, or "as" free as if X(Free!) were under the GPL?

    Note that the definition of "free" promulgated by the GPL is oddly one-sided; many of us object to the habitual use of "free software" as a synonym for "GPLed software", just as we'd object to restricting the phrase "Let's do lunch" (now trademarked by Frito-Lay) to proposal of occasions when we planned on consuming potato chips.

    Craig [airnet.net]

  • > RMS can tell you it already has done so ["crush" OSS], back in the late 70's/early 80's. Not by force, but by hiring away the best and brightest.

    Well, it clearly didn't do it very thoroughly.... In fact, what it [business] did was break up the AI Lab at MIT in the midst of the "artificial intelligence" marketing craze of that era, the sole long-term effect of which was to offend RMS' communal sensibilities (understandably enough) and inspire him to dedicate his considerable hacking talents to e.g. gcc and other utilities central to OSS. Prolog and its friends are at best confined to a tiny niche; OSS is in the process of squashing NT, Microsoft's Prime Weapon for dominating enterprise computing. Some "crush."

    But in spite of RMS' offended spirit, open software continued to be available from numerous other sources, both in academia (think about BSD and its associated stuff) and elsewhere. The "growth of the internet" by any reasonable metric started around 1983; basic free stuff -- like sendmail, vi, and so on -- were circulating from the very beginning. In 1991, when Linus first put up version 0.00whatever, the internet was a tiny fraction of its current size -- but it was big enough....

    RMS himself, by the way, points out that nearly two-thirds of a standard Linux distribution consists of non-GPLed software, so apparently the FSF, for all its valuable contribution to OSS, is still in the minority when it comes to defining the term "free software."

    Craig [airnet.net]

  • We're both probably getting tired and/or bored by this, so if you respond, I promise you'll have the last word....

    > The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business.

    I would say -- and this is ESR's whole point -- that your analysis is getting it exactly backwards. "The strongest evolutionary pressure" at this point is against the institution of proprietary software, and in particular against Microsoft's dominance of that institution. Linus (and RedHat) didn't go hat in hand to Intel, IBM, Netscape, and the rest begging to be saved and legitimized by commercial investment; they came to us. They want something from us, and as in any free-market transaction, they're trying to figure out (a) exactly what it is they want, and (b) what they can give us for it (whatever it is) in trade.

    Free software advocates (and I'm one of them) tend to grossly underestimate the power of their own movement, however disorganized and anarchic it may be (that's something else the suits don't understand, although their institution, the free market, is at least as disorganized and anarchic as ours, and resists all government efforts to "solve" that "problem". What, by the way, makes you think they're any more "coherent" than we are?) -- and to grossly overestimate the power of finance in this movement. We'll be OK no matter what the suits try to do.

    As to motivations, RMS is one of the very few the examples I know of who decided to write free software just so it would be FREE. (LessTif is probably another such case.) Much more typical is Spencer Kimball, who started to write The Gimp as an intellectual exercise. He was using Motif, discovered that it sucked eggs big time, and the result was GTK+. Likewise with WindowMaker, Blackbox, Lyx, and probably most of the kernel. Software freedom, for the most part, is a by-product rather than a goal -- note that Netscape freed their source not because of altruism but to hold on to market share.

    > ...a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. ... new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.

    OK, let me get this straight: somebody writes a fantastic new application for Linux that's just wonderful and superior. It's proprietary and costs money. You have a Linux system. You run free software. Somehow this guy selling his wonderful app has ... curtailed your freedom?

    How? Will your Linux suddenly do less than it could before? Will tar and emacs immediately stop working? Or will you simply have more options than before for using your machine (this particular option not being of interest to you because of your a) poverty, b) dedication to RMSFreedom, c) all of the above)?

    And what kind of freedom do you value when you would prefer to suppress this proprietary software, when other people may want it, be willing to pay for it, and not give a damn whether they even get the source, much less whether they can hack it however they like? Doesn't their freedom of choice matter?

    RMS' views on software freedom are purely religious -- i.e. you need to either accept on faith his moral system, in which case the GPL follows, or not accept it, in which case there is no rational way to defend it.

    The "pragmatist" school points out the engineering value of the open-source development process, which is discussible in empirical and rational terms. Guess which approach to open software advocacy is likely to pick up more adherents.

    For years now us Linux advocates have been petitioning major software companies to port their apps -- office suites, games, CAD, whatnot -- to Linux. Now they're poised to do so, and the response of the more insecure and easily frightened in our community is "EEk! Not commercialism! No, no, anything but that!"

    In the immortal words of Nero Wolfe, pfui.

    Craig [airnet.net]

  • And, of course, there are problems with gnome that are not had with KDE:
    • Core dumps

    Craig

  • >Of course business can't "crush" OSS in any real sense, short of social domination.

    RMS can tell you it already has done so, back in the late 70's/early 80's. Not by force, but by hiring away the best and brightest.

    I think it's really the growth of the internet and the advancement in the capabilities of computers that has made OSS more viable this time around. Fast downloads, a "supercomputer" on everyone's desk, and numerous free development tools means that the barriers to creation and distribution of open source are much lower than they were. Also, going proprietary has gotten tougher, as the sophistication of applications has gotten higher, not to mention Microsoft's competition-crushing nature.

  • I've been thinking about that myself. Get the patent, and publish a license granting an unlimited license to use the patent in GPL code only. At the discression of the patent holder, proprietary software must either pay for a license, or cannot get a license.

  • Actually, you couldn't be more wrong. Mr. Young would say back to Intel, "we can't do that, we'd lose market share." Most of RedHat's investors would be similarly displeased, and Intel wouldn't have a choice. Selling their stock won't reduce the money in RedHat either.

    Even if everyone rallies around Intel's move, the Linux community won't be too thrilled about a kernel fork which does them no good. Very shortly you'll find people using other distros. More than likely Mandrake or a similar distribution will offer "RedHat but with an unforked kernel", and RedHat will be dead.
  • The most important thing ESR said above was that the suits can't stop us. Just keep coding and keep doing what we've always done. They can't keep the community from going in whatever direction it wants to. Regardless of what happens to Linux commercially, it won't change how I treat it and how I use it. And everything I ever write will be some form of GPL, LGPL, or something similar.

    I don't care about world domination, I just want an OS that I enjoy using and that works well for me. World domination would be just icing on the cake. :-)
  • I think you confuse "lacking a sense of humor" with "being mature". In other words: You are thinking like a suit, not like a hacker.
  • And he is still doing more work than most, as Emacs maintainer. He also prefers dealing directly with other developers, rather than participating in public flame wars.

    (Initiating public flame wars is another matter ;-)
  • The practical effect if Red Hat (or some single other distribution) becomes dominant can be one of two:

    1) Red Hat does a great job. They stay dominant. Users and developers win.

    2) Red Hat does a poor job. Someone else takes their GPL'ed code, and does a better job. Users and developers win.

    So, what's to be afraid of?
  • The fact that ESR didn't look a little harder at the URL and work out that Thomas Scoville wrote the article suggests his response was written quickly in a less understanding mood than he might otherwise be in. (Yes, Scoville should have included an attribution on the original page, but I guess this was an oversight.)

    Of course business can't "crush" OSS in any real sense, short of social domination. It may be able to marginalise it, but so long as we can download the software we want from the net, I doubt that will have much impact either. But it's still fair to say that business doesn't "get" OSS. Offering bounties and investing in the companies perceived to be the leading players are illustrations of business "joining" the OSS movement the only way it knows how: by spending money for something tangible.

    Paying a programmer to write software only the business wants and then releasing the source will not realise the true benefits of OSS. Those occur when the programmer writes software he or she wants. (Pop quiz: name one leading female OSS programmer or explain why you can't. Worrying?) Where business can help is in paying those programmers so they don't otherwise lose time earning a living by undertaking unrelated activities. Unfortunately, that's only likely to happen where the programmer coincidentally happens to be creating something that the business wants. Red Hat *needs* a good desktop; it so happens that this is sexy stuff to many coders anyway, and they found people already working on a suitable package. IBM may have to look harder to find the folks coding enterprise features, but I'm sure they exist. The danger is that those projects succeed at the expense of related projects following other designs; this introduces imbalances into OSS output and potentially leads to software monopolies, although probably of better software than that provided by the proprietory world (eg. GNOME becoming the best-supported desktop).

    Ade_
    /
  • by shine ( 1502 )
    I don't think you can sit between ESR and RMS. RMS defined free software and provide the GNU license to make it work. ESR is just sugarcoating it to make it palatable to business. I doubt RMS cares whether business uses it or not.
  • This is exactly right. No one is going to go through all of the trouble (and expense) to patent something just so they can give it away.

    The best defense, at this point, is to simply write a lot of software so that other people can't claim copyrights due to your already existing "prior art."

    Or better yet, we can simply crush commercial software beneath our heels so that all software is free :).
  • This would certainly hurt RedHat, but there is nothing that says that RedHat is Linux. Not only that, but the two competing ideas might actually help Linux overall. After all, it would all be open source, and all of us would be free to choose which version of Linux we ran. So we would get more source, and more freedom into the community.

    The reason that Intel is pushing ODI is they think that they can get the Open Source community to write drivers for all of the *nixes (both open and closed). If ODI is really cool, it could happen. If it sucks, it won't.
  • The majority of people who are killed by handguns are criminals. Not all, but a majority.
    -russ
  • Eric, thank you for reminding all of us that social and political reality is seldom simple. That said, let me point out that while OSS can't be crushed, it could be marginalized. You may be sure that MS is already working on it.

    Every new technology is marked by dreams of freedom. Seldom are these dreams fulfilled. If the hope of OSS is to be fulfilled, we need more political subtlety than so far I see manifest. We can start by bringing some ideas back from the various doghouses to which they have been sent: ideas like organization, cooperation, and competition. If a healthy balance among them can be found, then OSS can come into the mainstream and stay.

  • Yesterday's "fox in the henhouse" essay, combined with the "bounty" article (Sun and Adobe offering money for open-source implementations of their pet concepts) made clear to me just how little many suits understand Open Source. See, true suits (not hackers in management positions) have a very difficult time understanding a gift culture. To them, things are measured in dollars. How often have suits and journalists (who don't get it either) said that they can't imagine good programmers giving away their work for free? My own take is this... *mediocre* programmers may only work for money. But the *good* programmers *must* hack, even for free, just as a good painter has to paint, even if she never makes a dime off it.

    Back to the bounty... by offering a bounty for implementation, they unwittingly undermine the very things that make Open Source work. The bounty encourages code hoarding (so no one else can use your work), and rush work (finish before the deadline). These are the very things that undermine the quality of commercial code. Open Source is a *quality* win because of constant review, and the lack of time pressures. Get all the help you can, and release when it's really finished.

    I think a lot of suits see Open Source as a free labor pool. Hence the bounties... paying a prize for an implementation is cheaper than hiring a couple of programmers to implement it in-house. And of course, no classic suits want to pay for the coders to write open source that their competitors can use. Adobe in particular looks bad here... by paying a bounty for tools for their highly proprietary PDF format, they look like they're bottom-feeding for cheap labor. If Adobe wants Open Source work around PDF, they can release a damn RFC documenting the format!

    But i must say, it is promising that they're at least realizing the value of Open Source implementations of standards like XSL, and are willing to put up some money to encourage it. Now, we just need them to spend their money effectively. I'd suggest that they follow Red Hat's fine example - pay for a core development team that releases open, early, and often. This has worked *extremely* well for GNOME and Enlightenment - by paying for full-time developers who release GPL, Red Hat has vastly accelerated the already swift Open Source development process, without sacrificing the peer review that makes Open Source so effective. The resulting high-quality software could well lead to GNOME and Enlightenment becoming interface standards for Linux (and Unix in general - in the current climate, commercial vendors may well pick it up), providing the tools for the user-friendly desktop journalists keep telling us we need to compete.
    This same logic applies to tools like XSL... Sun would benefit if XSL became an industry standard, especially if built around a standardized Open Source implementation that discourages proprietary extensions and platform-dependent bugs. It would be worth Sun's while, i think, to fund Open Source development of implementations for standards like XSL. Hell, i can see an industry Open Source consortium, with business funding full-time Open Source development for standardized tools which benefit the whole industry. This could be what the quote Open unquote Software Foundation (OSF) dreamed of being...
  • Red$at? A killer communist sattelite?

    I don't get it. RedHat thrives at the whim and pleasure of its users. I can concieve of no threat from them.

    Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing gnome/E in a distro. (and maybe my theme [aracnet.com] too? (please please please...)

    Leeb nowe. Lat helpee us nub.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Me too. Eric's essays (especially Homesteading the Noosphere) make me make the same eureka neuron connection[*].

    In a world of supposed plenty, there is no reason why a kalahari-style gift economy could not take root. All this advertising-to-create-demand-that-doesn't-exist is really backward. In fact, chapters 3-5 of Capital seem more relevant today than in 1840 when it was written.

    Boy that's off-topic.

    [*] if ESR is reading, i think this should be inducted into the Jargon File.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Remember the issue of Forbes with flowerchild Linus on the cover? It had a keen and very clueful story about IBM's negotiations with the Apache group; and how it was not money, but IBM's offer of privilaged access to the Win32 API that closed the "deal".

    This indicates to me that IBM really does seem to "get it". I couldn't venture to explain why. Maybe they still have some 60's-era hackers on staff waxing nostalgic.

    I'm kind of looking forward to the IBM distro, too. I hope they contribute, and not just assemble.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Celebrity certainly is fleeting. Ironically, this ESR "backlash" seems to be exactly what ESR himself predicts in his essays.

    Several months ago, ESR was cranking aout the essays. They were and are outstanding essays, and what I would call a "good gift", and we all revered him for it. Then ESR annotated and released the Halloween Documents. Also good gifts.

    Today however, Linus continues to give gifts, De Icaza gives gifts, Malda gives gifts, and Rasterman gives gifts. They are still in high esteem.

    ESR seems to have stopped giving good gifts and started just saying stuff, and some people have started to get upset.

    I would say the same of RMS, but IMO RMS has given the ultimate gift. Granddaddy RMS will stay off my list as a professional courtesy. :-)


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Stallman will stay off my list of heros-turned-lusers out of this incredible respect I have for the man.

    Didn't I just say that? :-P


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Hey, the phrase "glass cathedral" is an excellently turned phrase.
    Have to remember it for future use...
  • ESR concluded with the statement,
    " We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us. "

    I belive that ESR is correct.

    In the long run, the freedom that the GNU GPL gives to the software development, is likely to spread to other industries.

    Peace, love, software and physical life support!



  • When it comes to lack of freedom you can count on Bill Gates and the People's Republic of China to deliver. See the story at: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?9 90310.ecgateschina.htm
  • I needed closure on this important issue.

    Thanks for setting the record straight.

    Keep up the good work.

    cheers,
    smithdog
  • I agree. Aren't you glad that our self-appointed leaders aren't above petty flame wars?
  • Very well said indeed. I read that essay last night, and was a bit disturbed by it's tone and content. Nice to get a different view of this Forum from someone else who was there. That someone else being Mr. Raymond doesn't hurt, either. ;)

  • Intel is ticked becasue Linus has once again told them to take a hike with there Open Driver
    Interface. What does Intel do. They fork the linux kernel and add the desired Open Driver
    Interface themselves. These changes are then re-released under the GPL. This is perfectly legal,
    the GPL allowes for such a code fork. There is nothing Linus can do to stop them!


    Hmm... and what would Intel gain by doing this?

    ...richie
  • You're confusing Patent Law with Copyright Law and they are two separate (though somewhat related) issues. To create a PGPL would not Patent anything. To put the PGPL tag on anything wouldn't stop anyone from patenting your idea and suing you for not paying them royalties. To fix the problem with current patent law requires political action and educating politicians what is wrong with current U.S. (or your favorite country) Patent law. The problem is that current patent law was designed to protect inventors during the Industrial Revolution and hasn't been updated to protect the inventor in the Information Revolution.
  • As for crushing commercial software... How do you propose for me to pay my rent? I'm a professional programmer, paid by one of those "EVIL" commercial software companies. I agree that Open Source Software is a good thing, but if you use it to make my means of supporting myself non-existant, I'll fight OSS tooth and nail. And don't tell me that I can sell documentation or support. I'm not a technical writer and don't want to deal with clueless people full time. There are those who enjoy writing and helping users, but I prefer designing and coding code.
  • I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants. That the suits can't do what the hackers can do (avoiding the issue of the validity of the terms) isn't relevant. If more & more hackers start to be motivated by suitly concerns, they've corrupted us.

    Not to say that trying to get OSS accepted by suits is a bad thing, I don't think it is. But its certainly a gamble on our part. We can't say how this will turn out.
  • That's why we need the Doomsday device.
  • Actually, I'd say that it is totalitarianism that was always the problem more than Communism and Socialism. Which is to say that the ruling party never gave up their power to the proletariat like they were supposed to in true Marxism.
  • Excellent point on the bounties. I knew that there was something wrong with the bounty idea when I first read it, but I couldn't quite figure out what. You've captured it beautifully -- it really isn't open source when everyone is competing to win the money. Open source is all about cooperation. I think that many "suits" are seeing things in terms of free labor, and this pretty much proves it.

    Maybe they should select somebody in their company to be a project maintainer and pay developers a bounty by-the-line for code that gets accepted. Basically divide the $20,000 or whatever by lines of code submitted.

    I'd also like more companies to follow the Red Hat model by hiring free software programmers and basically funding them to continue to write free software. I don't like it that only one company is really doing that so far -- it gives them a little too much influence. But this influence could easily be mitigated if another company started doing the same thing. Problems could turn up when 2 companies want to influence the same project, but I think that they could both hire programmers, and the 2 teams would have to cooperate in order to prevent a code fork.
  • Your point is quite good but your example isn't phrased in programming terms. It might be better if you gave the example of the classic C phrase

    *dest++ = *src++;

    which is the most easily comprehended form for C-literate people, being turned into

    do
    {
    ch = *src;
    src++;
    *dest = ch;
    dest++;
    }
    while (ch != '\0');

    just to pad out the program statistics, but unfortunately also making it less maintainable and often slower.

    I hope it never comes to that.
  • Oops, I seem to have missed out the while() around the "classic C phrase". It should of course have been

    while (*dest++ = *src++);

    Maybe it's so classic that I've forgotten it. :-)
  • by ink ( 4325 )
    I hate "me too" posts, but

    ME TOO

    Very well done, and true, I might add. I have experienced the persecution complex first-hand (I am an ex-Amiga hacker) and it takes a bit to get over it.

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • I use mostly RH because it has a good balance between "ease of configuration" and "simplicity of configuration". But I very seldom use RH kernel. The first thing I do on every box I install is to take clean 2.0.36, add Alan's pre-patches, then secure-linux patch by Solar and often some others.

    Kernel is one of the most interchangable components in Linux distribution.
  • I enjoyed the article last night, and I like the one today. There is no need to say that one hated the article from last night to like the one written above. I agree with the author, that business will do little to harm open source since they are incapable of doing so.

    But there's no need for name calling or sarcastic nastiness ("YCHTT" or whatever it was) just because someone has a different take on the proceedings.

    I'm glad the conference went reasonably well. Anyone have pictures?
  • by Ryandav ( 5475 )
    Good essay!
  • It seems that Redhat's only real competition is Caldera...and Microsoft. If Caldera followed Redhat's lead, then the only ones dealing with a forked kernel are Debian, slackware and all the little guys that nobody is paying attention to.
  • Don't forget that the kde group hates gnome just as vigorously. I think it's because they feel kde is solid and easy to use and failing to adopt kde means that linux will have a bad reputation as being hard to use. IMHO, windows and icons won't make easy to use unless fundamental changes are made.
    See:
    http://members.xoom.com/kurtkilg/linux
  • Eric is doing his best. It is a hard job, one which most of us would be unwilling to take on,
    so tr and cut him some slack.

    I don't mean this as a blanket endorsement of his
    actions - there are things he does which make me
    quite unhappy. But he is trying to do the right
    thing.

    If you are unhappy with what Eric does, you should
    propose a better plan. Take the time and write it
    up and send it to the OSI. Maybe you'll be their
    next prez.
  • That would be me. I used to be a kernel hack at
    Sun and SGI (and before that at ETA which means you are really old if you remember them).

    I don't do anywhere near as much kernel hacking as
    I would like to do anymore. I'm working on the
    source management system which will be (I hope) used for the 2.3 Linux development effort. You
    can get an overview at http://bitmover.com/talks/linuxworld/index.html

    I'm also someone who argues with Eric a lot about business models. I've invested around $300K of my own money in working on BitKeeper and I need to
    make a return on my investment. But I'm also trying very hard to be a good guy in the open source world, so I'm creating a business model which works both for money and for free use of the product. I am very proud of the business model I've come up with, it is quite clever and it actually meets the current open source definition and still generates revenue.
  • I'm the guy who "flung" this at Eric. I meant no ill will by it and the writer who suggested that Open Source Summit turned "nasty" clearly didn't understand. Eric and I may disagree on some things, but in general, we agree on far, far, far more than we disagree on.

    My point to Eric was in response to one of his statements that I found problematic. He doesn't run a business and so he isn't in tune with some of the business issues. This is an area of open discussion between myself, the OSI board, and other business people. We're making progress.

    Eric did point out in his summary that I and the suits in the room were all trying to feel our way through this stuff and that the general sentiment was very positive and cooperative. I concur. It was a positve meeting, I'm glad I was there and I was honored to be included.
  • So?

    Communisim isn't all that bad (same for socialism). I think that many of the communist governments have failed because they (communism and socialism) are ideals. Ideals are hard to achieve in the "real" world.

    Fortunately, our community doesn't exist in the real world.

    And we should always be striving towards the ideal.

    -Alan
  • I don't think ESR misses the non-financial aspects
    of open source -- I believe he focuses upon the financial aspects because OS advocates have shied away from them historically, and because of his generally libertarian politics (appealing to the
    self-interest of others is usually easier than to their love for their fellows, and it's certainly easier to explain to the average person).

    Despite what some say, ESR is definitely a very spiritual person -- atheistic Discordian, but still spiritual. And he definitely is not blind to the non-financial aspects of OS, or of life in general, if his writings are any indication.

    And I'm sure he meant corrupt in the sense that "traditional business values" (profit over all else) will be "corrupted" by the superior virtues of the OS community -- honesty, integrity, etc.

    -damaged justice
    looking lame with a cut off sig and not bothering to fix it yet
  • That's an interesting idea.

    The problem that we've had with patents so far is that they're exclusive. The open source community designs things and doesn't patent them because it wants to share them openly. So the first proprietary interest that comes along can in theory grab up the patent rights and lock us out of things that we invented.

    RMS designed the GPL to 'hoard' software just like any other software license would, but the GPL requires that it be 'hoarded' by the General Public instead of by one powerful corporation. He took copyright laws that are intended to protect proprietary interests and used them to protect the public interest.

    We could do something similar with patents: promote a 'Patent General Public License' that would be written into patents (or simply applied by the patent holder) and would mark the invention as owned by the inventor (as all patents do) but available for use, modification, and redistribution by the general public, as the GPL does. In fact, the PGPL could require (in the case of software patents) that all implementations of the patented technology be released under the GPL.

    Armed with something like that, open-source developers could grab up the patent rights to hundreds of technologies, PGPL them, and then enforce the patents to keep them from being used in proprietary products.

    The great thing about this is that a patent protects a *technology*, not an implementation. So if the proprietary developers want to use our technologies, they can't make the end product proprietary. They have three options:

    1. Start developing free products. That's what we want, of course.

    2. Put the patented part of the product in a separate 'module', which they would have to distribute on a free (i.e. GPL) basis. The rest of the product could remain proprietary. This is almost as good as (1).

    3. Use a different technology. This is a patent, not a copyright, so they can't just reimplement our stuff. They have to find a totally different way to do what they're trying to do, or leave it out entirely. The idea of cutting out functionality should be scary enough that most companies will choose (1) or (2) and write lots of free software to make their own products work.
  • The consensus of the literature in criminology is that guns in private hands save lives and prevent crimes.

    The CDC-funded studies by Dr. Arthur Kellerman that claim to show otherwise have been pretty well discredited; you can find some relevant discussion in this Reason article [reason.com]. Kellerman's main sin seems to be selective use of data; he chooses to study a population that he thinks will support his thesis and finds excuses to throw out contrary examples until the data fits the thesis.

    The Lott/Mustard study [best.com] used the entire United States rather than a single city or county, and found a significant deterrence effect.

    Folks interested in either side of the issue should consider reading these two books:
    More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws [amazon.com] by John R. Lott
    Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America [amazon.com] by Gary Kleck.
  • ESR is indeed a developer: he is the maintainer of fetchmail.
  • I don't think most Linux users would reject something just because it's binary only. Since Red Hat is the distro of the newbie, I could see the scenario above taking place.
  • This war has died since Troll Tech created an Open-source license for QT. I still sense that there is alot of animosity and distrust in the GNOME camp though.
  • Thanks. You've just given me the motivation to set my threshold to 1. I don't need to read half-arsed comments from unproductive cowards with definition problems.




    --

  • I'm not so terribly worried about the suits. Remember that what they are getting out of us, they get from having an open source / free software community that works. So they're offering bounties? I don't see this as encouraging software hoarding, not when the *bounties are for open source*.

    Licenses are a problem. We're getting new ones every day, and people need to understand the implications of their licenses, and why they might or might not work. An example is the license IBM provided for postfix (or SecureMailer, or whatever the name of the month for that program is). The license provides that if someone *threatens* to sue IBM over an intellectual property dispute with the program, IBM can drop postfix and make you stop using it too. Small wonder the community is not falling over itself to get involved with postfix.

    Other problems I've noticed with postfix are instructive. Last I heard, it still did not scale well---large numbers of undelivered emails, as can happen when your net connection becomes spotty, clogged it up horribly. And when I was using it, I noticed that every few emails, it would refuse to deliver one. These problems can be solved, indeed, they may already be solved, but I see them as inevitable in an open source package whose one-year-long alpha test was closed. No bazaar there, and certainly Wietse Venema, one of the authors of SATAN, should have known better.

    The message in all this? If you want to participate in open source, research the matter a bit. Learn how people participate in the community. If you must write your own license, make sure it really works as an open source license. And use an open testing regime, if you really want to get people's attention. Even if you don't think your program is anywhere near ready for the world, use the glass cathedral (anonymous CVS and an open license from the start) to get people's attention and interest. Don't be embarrassed at the quality of your code; when it is ready for public consumption, the public will know. And they'll be glad you let them look over your shoulder.

    Open source is not created in a vacuum. You know it, I know it, and the suits will figure it out.

  • He was out shooting with all of us on Geeks and Guns night (last Thursday right after the Expo closed), that's where he was.

    _Deirdre
  • Why do you reject AFS? If you don't like that Transarc's version isn't free, why don't you get a free AFS [stacken.kth.se]?
  • Your comments are interesting, and I'm not trying to stop you - but I'd like to play the devil's advocate and poke a few holes in some of the statements you've made.


    Maybe they should select somebody in their company to be a project maintainer and pay developers a bounty by-the-line for code that gets accepted. Basically divide the $20,000 or whatever by lines of code submitted.


    Ouch. This sounds very Dibertian, as it will lead to


    code

    that

    looks

    like

    this


    from developers, and


    codethatlookslikethis


    from the maintainer after integration.


    I heartily agree with the principle, but so far I know of no mechanistic way of figuring out how "productive" a given programmer is by automatically examining their code. Current industry makes an approximation by paying programmers for their time at a rate dependent on what their boss feels reflects the quality of their work, but this doesn't work very well for paying contributors to Open Source projects, who aren't a part of the company and so can't be timed or evaluated as easily.


    Not that the conventional system is perfect, of course.


    But this influence could easily be mitigated if another company started doing the same thing. Problems could turn up when 2 companies want to influence the same project, but I think that they could both hire programmers, and the 2 teams would have to cooperate in order to prevent a code fork.


    That only holds true if the companies are altruistic enough to hold the quality of their software over the revenue and/or ego boost gained by having the project follow their own model. Realistically, if a serious dispute came up, I think that each company would fork the code and hope for the best. Remember, business by and large isn't altruistic. There are isolated exceptions, but IMO these will remain exceptions rather than the rule.

  • I don't know if you're a shill for CheapBytes.Com or not, but you did a heck of a job!
  • what if there was an "open patent" license, sort of a PGPL that prevented the patent's use in _proprietary_ works. I'm not proposing such a license, I just want to know what other people think of the idea.
    Luckily, such a thing is already available: it's a patent. A patent allows you to control how your invention is used, and to establish any licensing arrangement you like, and attempt to collect any fees you want (within limits of what the market will bear for your invention). If you hold a patent for software innovation X, you are entirely free to license it _only_ to people who will use it in non-proprietary ways, or people who will use it only in open-source software products, and collect a license fee for that privelige (thus illuminating the free beer vs. free speech distinction).

    The reason you so rarely see this done is that it costs thousands of dollars to get a patent, and people who bother to spend that money are usually viewing it as an investment on which they hope to get a return. But if you consider that your time as a skilled programmer is worth thousands of dollars anyway, and you'd otherwise spend it on writing more open-source code, you might want to try this. It would be an interesting experiment in yet another OSS paradigm.

    Then again, copyright is a lot cheaper, and more suitable to things that are likely to be done on a hobbyist basis. If patent protection for OSS becomes useful, maybe there could be some scheme to pool funds among many future users to cover the costs of the patent process.

  • Computerworld says [idg.net] "Many Linux developers would consider it a show of faith if Intel were to release the I2O specification. But what most people don't realize is that Intel doesn't actually have the right to unilaterally release the I20 spec. It's owned and managed by a consortium of companies under the I2O Special Interest Group (I20 SIG)."
    So number one, its not just up to Intel whether I2O works with Linux.
    Number two, I2O is being challenged [PC Week] [zdnet.com] by another industry consortium with an incompatible spec.
    Fragmenting the speedy IO market would be irrational, it would work against Intel's market share in the high end server/workstation market. Why would Intel strong arm Red Hat (taking for granted that they could, since you believe in evil corporate greed) to fork Linux into a smaller market? If anything, Intel probably would have a goal to EXPAND the market for workstation class machines using Intel hardware.
  • by mattc ( 12417 )
    Just look at how people run to SciTech Display Doctor (for example) as soon as it supports linux. 100% commercial. People care more if their latest video card works than about some abstract philosophy.

  • If you cannot make your point on technical merits without having to resort to the bugaboo of the Second Amendment, which is in absolutely no way related to the topic at hand, then your point fails, prima facie.

    It seems to me that the merits of his other arguments are closely tied to their own merits, which is to say, the merits that they have. In other words, the merits of A are generally the merits of A, and relate in a purely arbitrary way to the merits of C, W, theta, and thorn. To ascribe the merits (or lack of merits, in this case) of A to B you need a better excuse than mere proximity. Take for example the following two statements:

    A. Ronald Wilson Reagan was the President of the United States;

    B. That guy in Louisiana who just murdered several people in a church is a shining example of why we need more handguns in private hands, because if he'd been better armed he could have finished them all off and made a better news story.

    Well, gee. As for Reagan, a lot of people who lived through that depressing time can vouch for that, but, oh, boy -- B is a crock of shit! By your logic, if B is false, then A must also be false. Is that reasonable? The two are -- as you say of your own example -- completely unrelated.

    What if the statement about the second amendment had appeared in an adjacent post? Imagine for a moment if Rob Malda, in a fit of post-Linux World despondency, had added that line to the post without the author's knowledge or consent? YES I KNOW Rob wouldn't do that; the point is that you're attacking your perception of the poster's thought processes rather than the arguments in post itself. It's ad-hominem, and it's crap.


    He owns firearms to defend himself and his family with,

    Against what? His own insecurities? People who own guns are far more likely to be shot than people who don't. The majority of people in the U.S. who are killed with handguns are killed by family or by close friends -- by people they trust. The above-mentioned incident in Louisiana does not support this claim because one incident is not statistically significant; it's anecdotal and good for sound bites, but it tells us nothing about trends. Still, these things are very well documented, so unless you're going to go right off the deep end and claim that Kofi Annan has ordered the U.S. government to skew the statistics as part of a New World Order plan, you'll have to come to terms with the fact that the Constitution is one thing, and practical reality is another thing entirely. It may very well be that all the killings are worth it; it may very well be that the principle of the second amendment is valuable enough to be worth some hassles. But don't give me any of those tired old lies about self-defense. If the Second Amendment is worth keeping, it's worth keeping at the cost of the safety of our homes, not in defense of it.


    as a whole, the free software/open-source movement has the largest amount of mindshare, likely by an order of magnitude or more.

    Largest among whom, and compared to what? In my apartment, it's got a good solid 100% (not counting my cats :), but out there in the darkness i'm not so sure. I'd love to see it grow, of course, but even among developers it's not yet dominant.


    This incredible intellectual base is nothing without leadership, though, preferably leaders with differing styles and opinions so as to make the overall experience all the richer and more dynamic. RMS, Linus, ESR, Alan Cox, Daryll Strauss, etc. -- they all are important figures in our movement.

    I dig it, baby. Sing it loud!


    -j
  • To use an unrelated Point B in order to "reinforce" a Point A is jejeune and sophomoric.

    Hey, I never denied that. You're absolutely right. But if the point is unrelated, either ignore it or address it separately. The fact that Poster A above used an unrelated Point B has no effect on the validity of his Point A. Point A may very well be moronic and indefensible, but by addressing an entirely unrelated issue you've done nothing to demonstrate that.


    Attempting to taint someone's ideas by bringing up an unrelated subject which some may find distasteful is a sure way of announcing that you cannot win the debate on the facts of the matter.

    But, in a sense, isn't that what you're doing? You're "refuting" A by addressing B, just as the original poster "proved" A by addressing B -- but B just ain't relevant either way.


    Your citations regarding firearms are fairly commonplace. I won't even attempt to refute them, because I don't find it to be particularly relevant to the issue at hand -- which is whether or not ESR has a point in his essay.

    So I drifted off topic . . . :)


    Look at the amount of mindshare that Sun has, the amount that MS has, that HP and Apple and everyone else has. How much of this goes to redundancy, to reinventing the wheel? How much of it is lost to corporate left-hand right-hand? The open-source/free software movement manages to avoid most of those problems (through some arcane means which I don't think anyone fully understands).

    Ummm, yeah. To a large extent that's true, though there are exceptions like the ongoing KDE/GNOME gotterdammerung. On the other hand, free software has unique problems of its own. I worry a lot about the notion that free software tends more towards reimplementation than breaking new ground. Of course, nobody at MS or ZDNet who mutters about that stuff ever seems to notice that ~99% of proprietary software is just pointless wheel-reinvention, too. There's also the fact that by distributing the source, the reimplementers are adding a hell of a lot of value right there, even if they introduce no new features at all. It may be wheel-reinvention, but it's not pointless. On the whole, I'm optimistic, but not blissful.


    -j
  • You've got to admit that the FSF's website [fsf.org] is much nicer than OSI.ORG [osi.org].

  • You could fairly argue that Microsoft thrives at the whim and pleasure of its users, too. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping the approximately 250 million users of MS products from installing Linux and running Applix or Star, and demanding en masse that all their other application vendors port to Linux.

    Believe me, every MS product I use except one (Windows 95) I use by choice because it is truly better than the alternatives I have tried in some way. This same principle is why many people choose RedHat.

    The rest just go with brand name recognition and don't even consider the other choices. For a great many Linux users: Wipe that smug grin off your face - you're guilty, too!

  • I'd also like more companies to follow the Red Hat model by hiring free software programmers and basically funding them to continue to write free software. I don't like it that only one company is really doing that so far -- it gives them a little too much influence.

    I would like to point out that RedHat is not the only company sponsoring programmers to develop open source software:

    • O'Reilly is paying Larry Wall to work on Perl
    • SUSE is paying programmers to work on YAST (their admin tool) and X servers.
    • Sun payed the salary of Jon Osterhaut for many years while he worked on TCL (and other things)
    • The University of California at Berkely payed the salaries of many people who worked on the BSD releases (Of course, they also had that great fountain of free labor, also known as student developers)
    • And Netscape (now AOL) is paying the salaries of many programmers who are working on Mozilla

    I'm sure there are many I didn't mention; I just wanted to mention a few other companies that are paying people to work on open source projects.


  • Um, just to put a damper on your vitriole...I daresay esr has hacked upon more things than you have. And has been a part of the hacker community for way longer than you think.

    Don't take my word for it...take his. Eric's resume. [ccil.org]

    Some of the mentioned projects, in case you are feeling lazy:

    • [He] wrote the IEEE reference implementation of PILOT.
    • He was the principle co-developer of ncurses.
    • fetchmail, of course.
    • He wrote keeper, the archivist's robot assistant used to maintain the Metalab site. (aside from the fact that he is the co-maintainer of metalab.)
    • He is listed in the Linux credits file.
    • "Many of the new features in Emacs 19 were my work."-- esr

    I daresay that you've heard of some of these, maybe even used them? Why not do some research next time, before you put your foot in your mouth?

  • Eric has been part of the hacker community for a long time, he was part of it before Linux even existed. I think the reason so many people resent him now is that he's trying to act as the salesman/marketeer of the hacker culture, and most hackers instinctively hate salesmen and marketing.

    I've been suspicious of the idea myself, but I think it's naiive to believe that free software can take over the world just by being better, without any sales or marketing. Look at how many inferior products have come to dominate their industry segments (x86 architecture, PC system architecture, Microsoft anything) by force of superior marketing. And if we're going to have marketing than it should be led by one of our own.

    In fact, perhaps it's best that the marketing be done by someone who's known more for his analysis of the community on a social level than for hacking code.

    Calling Eric a suit is just too out there to even think about.
  • This seems a little abstract to me? Where are the indications that the 'suits' get it?

    "This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works."

    I don't think we should kid ourselves for a minute - if big business could coopt the process and extract money (directly or indirectly) they would. Witness large corps releasing non-free products for Linux and grabbing huge publicity bonanza's. I haven't seen Abisource or Debian mentioned too often on news.com. If big business truly recognized the 'social contract' and accepted it, why would they still be doing this?
  • The problem with MS is that it unethically
    crushes the competition. It is a monopoly.
    RedHat could NEVER be the same, since it
    distributes something that can be modified
    and distributed for free. They don't CONTROL
    anything.
  • I agree that patents are far more expensive than copyrights, but then again giving away code is more expensive than selling it, too.

    Once you've written a program, the only expense in giving the code away is "opportunity cost". That is, you own the code's copyright without having to pay anyone anything (at least, in the USA and other Berne Convention countries), and by giving it away you're giving up the opportunity to make money off that copyright.

    On the other hand, to get a patent, you have to pay a specialist mucho $$$ up front to write a proper application.

    If I had a patentable software idea, I'd rather just publish the idea, thereby preventing any later inventor from patenting it, and give the cash to some worthy charity.

  • Well, since licenses weren't discussed, let's discuss.

    I had this idea recently that I've been pondering about patents. I know they're generally evil and wreak havoc all over creation, but what if there was an "open patent" license, sort of a PGPL that prevented the patent's use in _proprietary_ works. I'm not proposing such a license, I just want to know what other people think of the idea.
  • Compete amongst ourselves. KDE vs. Gnome for instance. Notice all the animosity one camp has for the other. OSI vs. FSF, the same. There is no need for a Goliath. David can fight David.
  • And you've missed my point. PGPL would be a patent license. i.e. J. Random Hacker applies for and obtains patent #55555555555555, then licenses _the_patent_itself_ under PGPL. As opposed to GPL and LGPL which are software licenses (and yes, I agree, (L)GPL'd _can_ infringe patents, just not PGPL'd patents ;-) ).
  • I agree that patents are far more expensive than copyrights, but then again giving away code is more expensive than selling it, too.

    I understand that a patent holder can license the patent any way he/she/it chooses... The problem is that for those of us who might like to license a patent with the freedoms as GPL'd software, no such readily available license exists. Not only that, but the existence of such a license might prompt organizations like Red Hat, LinuxCare, and well, maybe even the FSF to patent stuff and release the patents under a freedom-added license.
  • Precisely, but not necessarily only in GPL'd works. BSD and other licenses are free, but not GPL. By giving PGPL the same viral characteristics as GPL, well, I'll use an example.

    foo is a program written by some guy, licensed with a BSD style license. foo doesn't use any patented stuff in it, doesn't infringe anything at all. Some other guy decides to use the code in a proprietary thingie, and does because he can (it's a BSD license, after all).

    bar is a program that does the same thing as foo and is also BSD licensed. But since bar uses a better algorithm covered by PGPL'd patent #xxxx, bar does what foo does, only better. Some other guy wants to use code from bar in a proprietary work, and can (because it's a BSD license), but must use a different algorithm because the patented/PGPL'd algorithm cannot go into a proprietary work.

    See the difference?
  • Not actually. The Qt license started the war, but now that the two GUIs exist and have established evangellical followings, it doesn't matter that Qt is free. People will still argue simply because there are competing platforms.

    And besides, it's still a good example to use for illustrative purposes.
  • They're on the same railroad, but not the same track. The GPL turns copyright law on its head by protecting code from proprietary use, whereas copyright law was actually designed to protect proprietary intrests. A PGPL should do the same for patents. It should turn patent law on its head by protecting ideas from proprietary use. The key benefit for the free software community is that rather than protecting just a specific implementation, it would be able to protect the technology as well, forcing proprietary developers not only to reimplement, but also redesign.
  • Open source is a very new thing in the business world. I suspect that over the next few years, we'll all be able to get paying jobs writing open source. I'm not a businessman, so don't ask me semantic questions about it, but look at Red Hat as an example. You won't have to deal with clueless people (well, no more than you do now) or write documentation (no more than you do now), but your organization probably will.
  • Thats why we need the bomb!


  • I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants.

    The book Open Sources talks about bilogical research going from academia to big business. When 75% of the researchers are working for pharmaceutical companies, there is more research on drug treatments than therapy treatments. SO all business has to do to corrupt the movement is throw bodies at writing OSS.

    What would happen if Microsoft went completely open source? I think we would see the group heading towards them just because of mass. J-- anyone?

  • I heard that ESR sneaks around at night dumping fluoride in out water supply too!
  • Hey, d00d--

    If you get tired of smoking that stuff yourself and want to sell it for a profit, you should probably avoid the L.A. ghettoes -- the CIA might get annoyed at you for cutting in on their turf.

Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing. -- Roy L. Ash, ex-president, Litton Industries

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