Open Source In the Datacenter: It Was Never About Innovation 100
An anonymous reader writes "The secret to open source innovation, and the reason for its triumphal success, has nothing to do with the desire to innovate. It's because of the four freedoms and the level playing field (and agility) that was the end result. It's like Douglas Adams' definition of flying: you don't try to fly, you throw yourself at the ground and miss. This article explains why it was never about innovation — it was always about freedom. Quoting: 'When the forces of economics put constant downward price pressure on software, developers look for other ways to derive income. Given the choice between simply submitting to economic forces and releasing no-cost software in proprietary form, developers found open source models to be a much better deal. Some of us didn't necessarily like the mechanics of those models, which included dual licensing and using copyleft as a means of collecting ransom, but it was a model in which developers could thrive.'"
Most Software Is Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
90% of everything is crap, but at least with open source you can find out why instead of waiting for the developers who can't reproduce your problem.
Re:Most Software Is Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
90% of everything is crap, but at least with open source you can find out why instead of waiting for the developers who can't reproduce your problem.
Don't forget a total lack of license management, the purgatory of IT. Essentially, with Open Source, you can spend less time dealing with how to get the software, and more time working on interesting stuff.
Re:Most Software Is Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not even about just getting the software, it's about preempting lawsuits. Better to just go GPL/BSD/PD since they are easier to comply with.
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Remember GPL is a license to redistribute, not a EULA. Nothing to comply with if you're just using the thing.
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Unless it's AGPL, in which case it does, for most normal people's definition of "using".
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yup.
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of course.
and the MBA mind thinks of GPL software like so: "we got it for free, so we should be able to mark it up and sell it for a squillion dollars...and lock it up so we've got a monopoly".
that's why they love the BSD license, and why there's so much corporate propaganda promoting BSD.
(there's nothing wrong with the BSD license. it's just easily exploitable - by design - by MBA arsehole types)
The BSD license is perfect for MBA types who think that externalising expenses (like software developer salarie
More Shit for/from US economics! (Score:2)
Capitalism requires innovation, for added-value or decreased cost, to increase profits.
Increased cost increasing profit is exploitation externalization for a corporate-welfare economy/state [IOW: Screw the consumer].
The present un-American economic model of US is flawed and crippling our progeny, failing posterity, and externalizing US providence.
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PS: I have probably been in IT longer than you have been masturbating. Which actually says a hell of a lot...
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"90% of everything is crap, but at least with open source you can find out why instead of waiting for the developers who can't reproduce your problem."
Everybody is skirting the simple and fundamental truth: without sufficient freedom (i.e., with no alternative to corporate lock-up of tools and resources), innovation simply would not happen. So trying to artificially separate the two is just nonsense. Without any competition, there is virtually no motivation to innovate.
Innovation comes from motivation (which often means competition). If there is no competition, there is no motivation, and innovation simply doesn't happen.
I mean, Jesus Christ, Americ
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"Competition motivates (or rather drives) innovation -- it does so by putting a cost on lack of innovation."
This was a big part of my point.
" A person in a desert, while being completely alone, is encouraged to innovate by sheer forces of physics. A virus threatening our species survival would encourage innovation in a country based on capitalism or communism. Or probably any other system, maybe with the exception of theocracy."
The problem with your speech here is that you are postulating only scenarios that foster innovation. Monopoly and oligopoly actively suppress innovation, because any freedom- or competition-leaning change in the status quo threatens their hold on the market.
"The funny thing is, the laws that You are so adamantly trying to overturn are usually in place to try and protect small firms from larger ones"
And what laws would those be? It's funny, because I haven't mentioned anything of the sort. Though I could, if you want to go there. But don't make assumptions about what I'd say, because you would very likely be wrong.
"The Americas predicament is the result of its hubris as a worlds superpower. "
Thi
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"Come on You capitalist crusaders, let's see a little smoke. If what you believe is true (that lack of competition is the source of lack of innovation), go and create competition to The Big Government, and may the best person win. I'm sure they will try to innovate a solution, and not act like a capitalist -- that is smack You down with its unfairly distributed power."
You have obviously never read Adam Smith. Or if you did, you didn't understand it.
Even Smith knew that capitalism would require anti-trust regulation, and he stated as much quite clearly. Monopoly, or its friends "corporatism" and its alias "Crony Capitalism" are not actual capitalism, at all. They are, quite exactly, what Mussolini described when he defined the term "Fascism".
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"I love it when people are trying to say that monopoly is not the goal of capitalism. Every firms goal in the free market is to dominate the whole market. Not to create the best product, or provide competition, but to earn the most money, and the best way to do that is a monopoly."
Congratulations. You've won the "Didn't Read What The Other Person Just Wrote" award.
You DO know that Adam Smith is the person who defined capitalism, yes?
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"Obviously You have _only_ read Adam Smith. And maybe Atlas Shrugged."
I mean seriously? Saying "You've only read Adam Smith about capitalism" is kind of like saying "You've only read J.K. Rowling about Harry Potter."
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I mean, Jesus Christ, America. We can see it happening right now in China. They were shit in the world economy (and their own economy, for that matter) until the government started letting businesses actually profit and compete with others (i.e., more capitalism).
The Corporatism part is quite right, after all the corporatist state envisioned by Mussolini was a system of lobbies, regulated by formal mechanisms. However, when Deng Xiaoping turned China towards a market economy (but not really a capitalist one) in the 80s, China was already doing comparatively better than India or Brazil, two capitalist states that a few decades early were in a better position than post-revolutionary China. The actual Chinese economic system is a bit complex and not really capitalist,
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"The actual Chinese economic system is a bit complex and not really capitalist, its big players are state owned and the banking system (that is the capitals) is mainly state-owned or under the firm grip of the state."
That's why I didn't write "capitalist". I wrote "more capitalist". The people who run companies today are allowed to keep (some of) the profit. They allowed capitalist incentive to infiltrate many of the markets.
But remember what the U.S. government has often seemed to have forgotten: capitalism requires non-interference from government in order to work. India, China, and Brazil all had too much government intervention in the economy for true capitalism to function. The more capitalist they have become,
this is "news"? (Score:3)
This is just an opinion piece, not even remotely news.
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This is just an opinion piece, not even remotely news.
And is it "stuff that matters"? Not to me it isn't.
Re:this is "news"? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just an opinion piece, not even remotely news.
And is it "stuff that matters"? Not to me it isn't.
You fellers (or whatever) are stuck in the past. The closest thing to a motto on the front page now is at the bottom, and it says Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service.
Why FOSS? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I don't get - if there is a downward pressure on prices on developers, how does adapting an Open Source model help them? It's not like they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code.
Also, the 'four freedoms' have never been about making better software, as RMS never tires of pointing out (and it shows). They've been an end in itself. If you write a software - no matter how bad, but simply put it under a A/L/GPL license, RMS would be pleased. Your software respects the 'freedom' of your neighbors, who you must help, as per Freedom 2.
But I doubt that the desire to put Open Source in the datacenter had anything to do with any 'freedom'. It was about putting better software out there. Since the existing datacenter hardware was tied to the support contracts that a Microsoft or Sun/Oracle or HP would provide, moving to FOSS meant that any datacenter that adapted it would determine its own support timelines, since the open source meant that they could hire their own developers to maintain it beyond upstream support, and also, the upstream projects had no strong reason to EOL a version, unlike commercial entities.
The innovation part - this part is not completely true about FOSS, since there ain't millions of programmers interested in the project, and so the software usually doesn't get examined except by its developers, and maybe some very interested customers. Where FOSS helps is that if a customer has esoteric hardware, the software can usually be ported to it to exact the maximum life out of the system, as well as provide a uniform software platform for heterogenous computing environments.
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One thing I don't get - if there is a downward pressure on prices on developers, how does adapting an Open Source model help them? It's not like they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code.
Its not the developer's source that needs to be open, its what they use. Where I work we use C#, but were almost set up with python and other FOSS. Its only because the python guys were idiots wanting a TON of money (more than IIS and SQLServer would have costs with others) for not knowing what they were doing we stayed with C#. Next time the same question comes up I would be shocked if python/MariaDB doesn't win just because setting up a web site with that is a fraction of the cost. C# worked for us ON
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One thing I don't get - if there is a downward pressure on prices on developers, how does adapting an Open Source model help them? It's not like they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code.
That suggests (maybe even begs) the question, can they get extra money for it if they reveal their source code? You always reveal your source code to your employer in a "traditional" programmer-getting-paid relationship involving corporations (or at least companies) and groups of programmers, marketers, et cetera.
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Yeah, the article mixes a couple different subjects that don't really have a whole lot to do with each other much of the time - development and datacenters. Most developers aren't doing anything remotely relevant to the datacenter.
Open source works in the datacenter because it's cheap, relatively easy to manage, and because tools are available that let it scale up fairly easily.
And while there are successful, large projects that are open source... it's harder to see the argument that open source is the tool
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it's harder to see the argument that open source is the tool of choice for developers
It depends on the developers. Certainly here in the land of slashdot groupthink you can see that some of them have wised up to the relative ease of Open Source software development. People fix bugs for you in the best case, and at minimum you get to benefit from the work of others when you link OSS libraries or what have you.
It's notable though that OSS is only getting more popular in development tools. You're more and more likely to be using OSS compilers and even IDEs today when you do software developmen
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If you're doing serious HPC you might well be using a language that Intel doesn't even have a compiler for.
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Could someone explain how CopyLeft ransom works?
I'll explain to you how CopyLeft works if you pay me.
If you pay year-after-year, I'll keep you updated with how it works over the time and... I'll even allow you to call me twice per year.
Everyone wants something for free (Score:2)
Why pay when you can have it fo free?
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Re:Everyone wants something for free (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not everything in the cloud is open or free. Amazon Web Services are proprietary and metered, for example, and lots of people still use them. Why is that?
I think it's because AWS decided to support two of the four freedoms, and those are the important ones. Basically, give people tools, and let them build what they want with them, without having to ask anyone for permission.
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I will sell you the letter "R" for $500 bucks!
Innovation rarely exists. (Score:5, Insightful)
When people say Innovative, we think of something that when we see it, we go Wow this is so cool I would never think of of that myself, and usually throws the rest of the industry in catch up mode.
Now the iPhone (not the iPad) was an innovative idea. Phones before the iPhone had external keyboards, at the expense of of screen size, or thickness. The idea of very few real buttons at the time was very foreign to us. And using gestures seemed almost impossible, as many early gesture systems had a lot of complicated gestures to get tasks done.
The iPhone wasn't innovative based on its features, there were other companies that had phones with more features or better hardware. But the innovation was able to successfully make a phone, that the advance feature were accessible and to the end users. The idea of say browsing the web on your phone, or have it as your main method to check for email seemed silly before, today it is quite common.
What happened after the iPhone kicked off, it threw the Industry in catch up mode. It took years for good Android phones to get into the market to start competing, and these new phones all are based on the iPhone.
Now the iPad isn't that innovative, it was easy to realize you take your iPhone and just give it a bigger screen, and fit better processing.
Other innovative products.
ID software 3D shooter. Wolfinstine 3d and Doom. They had some wire-frame attempts, and a few polygon based games. But games before that for the most part where 2d sprite based (Side Platform like Mario, or top down like Zelda), specificity for fast paced action games.
Nintendo Entertainment System. Unlike the Atari and other predecessors it didn't give any allusion that it was a person computer, just a straight game console. Priced more affordable than the others, and focusing on games.
Innovation is very rare. Most of the time it is copying someone else idea and tweaking it so there are different set of trade offs. Now their tweaks may change the market, but not as much as a innovative product.
How you choose to license your product, isn't really that big of a deal. Open Source, sure people can tinker with it coming with some new ideas. Commercial Software will have paid employees trying to come up with something new.
Re:Innovation rarely exists. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, the problem is the misdefinition of the word "innovation".
An innovation is something new. Something revolutionary that changes everything.
The transistor was an innovation. Rounded corners and ultra-thin device form factors are not.
In the world of free software, tools, apps, and other software constructions don't overtly aspire for this goal. They just want to get X task completed. Most tools and products start as ugly assed hacks, thrown together with haste.
The magical alchemy of free software, is that if somebody else expends the energy making that ugly hack, and shares it for free, others can snag up that hack, look under the hood, and either use it as-is, or use the energy they would have used to create their own ugly hack to beautify and refine the hack they just found, and make it better for servicing the unique twists of that person's requirements when doing that task. This could be anything from adding new features, to fixing dirty code work and inefficiencies in the logic. Des not matter. The effect is the same.
Over time, the dirty hack becomes something the original author never envisioned, but increasingly more innovative, as more people look at it, and add clever improvements. It does not come into the world to change anything, just to do a job.
It is an organic, evolutionary process. Something "barely fit" for the function undergoes selective pressure, and unrestricted replication, and intelligently guided evolution. The latter part is why it reaches "innovative" local maxima solutions to problems quickly.
Trying to upset the applecart, just to upset the apple cart and change the world is a monumentally difficult task to "just do". FOSS does this effortlessly, one clever hack at a time. The payment the innovators receive in return, is better employment of their time (for the few minutes or hours of time they invest each, they all get demonstrably better software than they could have produced from scratch in that period of time, and if they improve the software and release under the license terms, then the time they spent adds value to the next person in the chain. It isn't about monetary compensation; it's about time use.)
Proprietary software tries to leverage the time and energy of a small group of talented people, to prduce a product of greater sophistication than an individual software hack can produce in a sensible amount of time, and extort money out of them for the service of providing an already made package that should suit thier needs. (Should). This is done to get a slightly higher amount of monetary valuation of "time" from the customer, and offer a "bargain" in time expenditure vs value to the customer.
(The software company pays their employees a certain financial compensation per hour worked, which is summed to help arrive at a production cost figure for the product. The proprietary vendor then amortizes that cost over an estimated userbase, and arrives at an MSRP, and from there a transaction for the finished product can be conducted. The msrp is higher than the amortized cost per unit, the price of the product for the customer is considerably lower than the valuated figure for the time it would have taken them to mae the product themselves. Both walk away with value.)
With foss, this methodology is disrupted; there is no money seeking middle man. The value added by each small successive evolutionary step improves the software. They get the benefit of many times this investment, the longer the product stays in active development. Linux Kernel alone constitutes millions of man hours of coding time. If you spend 1 hour making a small improvement to current trunk, and have it accepted, you still have over 1,000,000:1 value return on the time. The next person gets 1,000,001:1 return. Etc.
This feedback allows foss to grow and evolve radically faster than proprietary software could ever hope to achieve, especially as the development life of the product increases. Proprietary software has recurring costs in deveopment. FOSS has recurring returns.
FOSS is a true innovation in software development.
Thin screens and gestures pale in comparison.
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> Proprietary software tries to leverage the time and energy of a small group of talented people, to prduce a product of greater sophistication than an individual software hack can produce in a sensible amount of time, and extort money out of them for the service of providing an already made package that should suit thier needs. (Should). This is done to get a slightly higher amount of monetary valuation of "time" from the customer, and offer a "bargain" in time expenditure vs value to the customer.
Yes f
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Now the iPhone (not the iPad) was an innovative idea. Phones before the iPhone had external keyboards, at the expense of of screen size, or thickness. The idea of very few real buttons at the time was very foreign to us.
The 7710 [gsmarena.com] says you're wrong. (As if being 2.5 years earlier wasn't enough, it had more pixels, too. And it's not as though that's some fluke that was promptly abandoned, as its descendants, while not as minimal as the iPhone, were definitely of a piece with the later iPhone/Android/WebOS/etc. "big screen, few buttons" concept. By the time the iPhone came out, the N800 was current, which while not a "phone" as it no longer contained a GSM radios (being made for tethering to a phone), was up to 800x480, and th
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..didn't give any impression of being something else?
you forget about rob? it was a chore for them to invent something so that the usa release of famicom would seem something else than just a games console because "just games" console market had just crashed badly!
and you forgetting touchscreen motorolas, touchscreen nokias, treos.. what was big thing was that the manufacturers of touch tech managed to embed capacitive in thin screens and without too much power use around the time iphone came to market..
i
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You were doing well until you mentioned the iPhone, which was not the first of anything in its class. The closest it gets is being the first commercial product to use a stripped-down version of the full OS on the phone; iOS is derived directly from OSX, but other examples like Windows CE are not. That's not innovative, though; it's evolutionary, and was bound to happen when the phones became powerful enough.
Unfortunately, you mentioned it in your second sentence, which means you went off the rails early.
You
GNU GPL FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
When I write code for personal reasons, I always release it under the Affero GPL v3+ [gnu.org].
It saves me the time and effort of attempting to monetize or control every little snippet of code that I write just for fun or just to learn something.
It also ensures that nobody can commercially exploit the code without A) paying me for a non-GPL license, or B) contributing back to the community.
As a side effect, it makes a great way to show off my coding skills to potential employers.
They can look me up on GitHub and evaluate my code and skills, but they still have to pay to play.
I'm not a libre software zealot. I don't believe that everyone is under a moral obligation to release their source code.
However, I do find the Affero GPL effective at protecting my non-commercial interests and providing an assist on my commercial interests.
That is why I use the license, and encourage other software developers to do the same.
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Oh I'm sorry, did their license break your pilfering concentration?
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How exactly does that work? You provide a package under AGPL3. I pick it up & use it, and run it - maybe on your server, maybe on mine. Everything I do is internal facing - I put it on an Intranet, but not the internet As a result, nobody other than me & my colleagues get to use it, I don't add a thing to it, so your source code is available to anyone who wants to see it - my colleagues, while they run it on as many computers as needed. Instead of paying for a closed source package, I got yo
Partly BS (Score:2, Informative)
Some of your premise is correct - charging for "copyrighted works" is perfectly fine, and even supported by the idea of Open Source. But, your GPL Violations list and general dis'ing of GPL is BS, IMO.
1. GPL does not prohibit commercial use of software. GPL simply states "respect the applicable licenses".
2. Making use of a GPL library does NOT automatically make my code assume a GPL license. If I use libraryX that is GPL'd, then yes, I need to respect the license for that library and ensure I include the
Re:Partly BS (Score:5, Informative)
You are absolutely wrong about point 2. A GPL licensed library does not give you the freedom to license your code "however you like." The LGPL does that. Don't confuse the two.
If you use a GPL library, you're required to use the GPL license for your code as well. This is not an accident or a "mistaken interpretation" of the license. It's clearly stated and has been known since the first version of the GPL license was released.
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There is nothing requiring a library to use the LGPL. That's why it's properly referred to as the "Lesser GPL", not the "Library GPL."
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If you use a GPL library, you're required to use the GPL license for your code as well.
Strictly speaking, the grandparent is absolutely correct and you're wrong. You can pick aaaaaaaaaany license you want, as long as you respect the license of the remaining code meaning you can pick MIT, ISC, Apache, LGPL or any other GPL-compatible license for your code. He's still wrong about the third point though, all of these licenses require you to hand out your code and the distribution rights to your code the moment you deliver a binary to anyone, or else they wouldn't be GPL-compatible.
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From the GPL:
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In other words, you can license your code under as many additional licenses as you like, but it must be available under the terms of the GPL.
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Where it gets real interesting is the recent decision against Oracle over the Java APIs. That ruling says that you can implement a GPL library's interface under a non-GPL license. So if you license your code under terms other than the GPL, people who rely on those other licenses are free to replace the GPL library with a non-GPL library that is compatible with your terms.
However, in such a case, you are no longer using the GPL code. It would be interesting in court to see how that would play out as to
Just read the fucking license, people. (Score:1)
2. Making use of a GPL library does NOT automatically make my code assume a GPL license.
Where the hell does this bullshit keep coming from? The license isn't that fucking hard to read.
Here's a direct quote from the motherfucking license:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
Thus, if your program contains any GPL code whatsoever, it is considered to be a derivative work by the GPL.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, if you use any GPL code at all, the GPL considers your program to be a derivative work, and demands that it assume the GPL license.
Granted, the license doesn't make this as clear as it could, but there's not a whole lot of debate about it. Just go
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1. No it doesn't. It says that users of binaries with gpl code in them have a right to the source upon request. The vendor has the right to ask a small distribution fee for this.
2. Well, yes, it is viral. So are many closed source licenses. This virility protects the freedom inherent in any original code remaining in the program after the changes. You would say this to anyone wanting source access to closed applications, right? For those, you charge money, for GPL the cost is your code, which then kee
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"Christmas" has an H in it, Mr Baldrick. And an R. Also an I and an S; also a T, an M, an A, and another S. Oh, and you've missed out the C at the beginning. Congratulations, Mr Baldrick! Something of a triumph, I think -- you must be the first person ever to spell `Christmas' without getting any of the letters right at all.
Oops... Wrong conversation. Let me try that again.
Congratulations, Mr. Coward! Something of a triumph, I think -- you must be the first person ever to write a GPL troll without gett
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Now, granted, we did not allow GPLv3 based projects to touch our code, and I would argue that GPLv3 can be pretty bad for people who want to integrate i
I don't get it (Score:2)
The bit about developers using "copyleft as a means of collecting ransom,".
This doesn't sound like a complaint from the end user (data center) for all the nice, free software. It sounds like butthurt from proprietary s/w vendors who can't find a way to take open code back into a closed product.
Open source got monetized (Score:2)
What really happened was that new ways were found to monetize open source. Most of them involve advertising. Some of them involve spyware. Others involve making programs dependent on "the cloud", or on an endless stream of patches, so some company can cut off your air supply unless you pay.
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..or they built a business around natural scarcity, such as network presence that requires things like bandwidth, server maintenance, and support. Nothing wrong with that.
Scarcity of access really doesn't work that well with media, software, or ideas...even with a police state.
"Whatever." (Score:2)
I don't see why he's contrasting things that, instead, worked together with synergy. Strikes me as a really short-sighted way to approach the success of Open Source software.
$.02, etc.
-Slarty
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Being able to write good software is a gift that few people possess. We should be paid well to do it
Most good coders love to code. Getting paid is great for putting food on the table and all that boring stuff, but I don't share the "I think I should always get paid for my code". Most would work for free/fun if they could. Good coders should not feel entitled, but they should at least be given the choice. GPL effective forces programmers to drink the Koolaid, or to not participate. Kinds of sucks. Be excluded or be forced to not give out your talent for free. GPL is NOT free, but pretty close.
Kind of fun
fifth freedom (Score:2)
* Freedom to change shitty design decisions by the author(s). *cough*GIMP*cough*