> > companies who make money off of free software don't, they make money off
> > of something else and contribute to free software.. photodex is the same..
> > they give away free beer and dish out a little freedom to go along with
> > it.. give them a chance.
>
> Now, I don't know much about this specific case of photodex, but I'm
> not clear on where this freedom is that they're dishing out. I
> thought it was all 'free beer.'
they're working on open-source contributions.. right now the only one they
have is a replacement for cat, which is pretty cool, called dog.. they're
working on much more significant things, like an image format, that will
be completely opne-source.. they're doing other things I think.. They have
a flagship application that pays the bills, they're willing to open-source
pretty much anything that will not (a) cause the extra trouble or (b)
cause people to stop paying for their software.. that's reasonable..
> > the main point of sale for photodex is it will help bring windows and mac
> > users to linux.. windows and mac users are perfectly happy with free
> > software (beer) and won't care about free software (freedom) for quite
> > some time. I love the free software concept, I also use lots of
>
> Like someone else on this list says, are these the kinds of users we
> really want? I'm sure some people feel that way, and I respect
> differences of opinion, but I don't feel that way. The ideal new
> Linux user is one who came to the platform because of the freedom
> aspect (like me), not the low price aspect or even the stability
> aspect. Not that people who are looking for a bargain in an OS are
> rotten to the core, they are just not "my kind of people."
the stability aspect is not a good reason? people shouldn't be attracted
to linux because it is a good product? low price is not an aspect. if
someone is faced with the choice between redhat 6.0 and windows 98 their
price is about the same.. if you buy a pc from dell with linux it's like
$30 more.. Are we to say that people should not care at all about the
product, but only the freedom of it? that's bullshit.. if Linux was not
better than windows, freedom or not, I wouldn't be using it.
Those of us who work, or plan to work, with computers for a living like
the idea that we will be able to work with linux, and not have to play
with linux and work with NT..
> > two for it. They're out to make money, but not to screw the Free Software
> > community in the process.
>
> I'll agree that they're not trying to intentionally harm our community
> (for all I know.) Their indirect effects are probably, on the whole,
> not so bad either. Each new piece of software ported brings important
> visibility to the platform as a whole, and its concept of freedom.
>
> On the other hand, I think that companies that are "out to make money"
> *only* by selling bundles of bits are eventually going to go the way
> of the dinosaurs, as well they should. I know this is an unorthodox
> view, but I am willing to defend it. It should be clear that I am
> *NOT* advocating forcing this set of beliefs on anyone else. Nor are
> rms or the FSF. If you want to sell your proprietary bundle of bits,
> there will usually be some suckers to buy in to that whole concept and
> I'm not going to stop either of you. (Don't expect me to stand
> silently, however.) That whole arena seems to be more about marketing
> tactics than software engineering. Is it about solving real-life
> problems with computers or putting arbitrary price tags on
> inexaustible bundles of bits?
use the software before condemning it.. There are definitely software
packages that fall into that category, but I don't see compupic being one
of them.. it's actually pretty useful..
Tell me, what do you surf the web with, what office suite do you use?
If your sound card wasn't supported in the kernel, would you consider
buying OSS, or just scrap the sound card?
If your hot new video card only worked with Metro-X or AcceleratedX, would
you buy one of them?
> Even if they give the bundles of bits away for no money, it's still
> just a black box that I am unable to modify or improve, even only for
> my own use. I'm not a GPL fanatic. I don't think it's the answer to
> all of life's problems. I think an acceptable license would be one
> that gave me complete source code, but didn't allow me to copy it to
> anyone else. Perhaps patches could be traded with other licensed
> (paid) users. No, I don't look at 100% of the source code of every
> GNU utility on my system. I look at some of them (and tweak a smaller
> subset of that.) But it's very comforting to know it's there. If I
> upgrade my C library, I can recompile everything else, and not depend
> on a vendor releasing a new version when they feel good and ready.
That's definitely a good point, but what about companis like photodex that
have very important trade secrets? their software is pretty complex, it
plays mpeg-2 on hardware that intel claims is insufficient.
> Closed-source applications are not 100% evil all the time, especially
> for little utilities like whatever this photodex thing is. Where it
> becomes evil is in proprietary operating systems, and most especially,
> so-called "Office" or document preparation software. One company
> controls the standard 100%, and due to network externality effects and
> the desirability of "standardizing", is able to maintain a virtually
> unbreakable monopoly. I see Free Software (as in freedom) as the
> main, perhaps only, bulwark against this particularly insidious
> effect. How many times have you been sent a MS Word document and been
> unable to read it? Without paying hundreds of dollars for a duly
> licensed version of Word, which will of course be released for Linux
> when pigs fly.
I can easily read it, using wordperfect, applixware, or staroffice..
By the way this is an excellent argument for making photodex look good,
considering the afore-mentioned image format..
> I'm all for making money. I want to be rich too. If I get rich
> through my programming abilities, so much the better. However, I also
> feel it is my duty to inform people that an alternative to proprietary
> software exists. It is up to them to make the choice to use it or
> not. It's not purely altruistic either; the more users of GNU there
> are, the more developers there are, and the more likely bugs are to
> get fixed.
>
> Back to photodex; I don't think this particular software announcement
> was the end of the world, or an evil conspiracy to rob GNU users of
> their freedom. It's just like christ said, this particular
> announcement was more suited for Freshmeat. I recently released a
> GPL'ed program (Pagecast; check Freshmeat if interested) and you
> didn't see me posting here about it. Erm, except for this little
> blurb here.
people had asked him to let them know.. it wasn't a major announcement, in
fact he didn't even post it to the other linux groups in town, someone
else forwarded his post to the alg..
> I can understand how some of the previous posters in this thread could
> get annoyed by this. I wasn't personally, but now that it has
> progressed this far, I felt the need to respond.
some people will get annoyed by anything they can..
> > fact that people actually have to make money off of software once in a
> > while, and he knows how free and commercial software can co-exist. We
>
> Again, no one *has* to make money off of software. No one's holding a
> gun to your head. If everyone voluntarily decided they wanted
> software Freedom and nothing else, would there be mass starvation in
> Austin and Silicon Valley? I don't think so. Since you seem to be
> such a big fan of ESR, you're probably familiar with his observation
> that 90% of all software is "in-house" stuff written to do a job and
> not to be sold to the outside world. This software would continue to
> exist and programmers would be hired to maintain it and produce more..
Yes but there is something to be said for commercial software being
available.. can a company with 10 people always afford a custom software
solution? not likely..
> It's that remaining 10% that I worry about sometimes. Most of that
> 10% I could care less about -- dinky little utilities. It's the
> important stuff like oh, say, operating systems, TCP/IP stacks, and
> document preparation where Freedom is vital. All of these types of
> software "want" to standardize on a single, broadly compatible
> specification for interoperability. If a single corporation (which
> has duty to its stockholders, not the public good) controls these
> standards, they can claim that they "giving customers what they want"
> on one hand, while nakedly fleecing them on the other. Would you
> rather have the standards that drive the Internet controlled by solely
> by Microsoft, or open to all the people of the world?
you can have proprietary software with open standards..
> I'm not a Communist in any sense of the word. What I describe just
> above sounds much more like Communisim (Stalinism) that anything RMS
> has dreamed of. To me, open source / libre software represents the
> ultimate in Capitalism. All players are on a level playing field and
> must compete fiercely in all arenas. It's software Darwinism, not
> Five Year Plans handed down from the Microsoft Central Committe.
how is free software capitalism at all? noone is selling a product..
> And finally getting back to the original thread; I'm not trying to
> compare this non-free software announcement on siglinux to the
> imminent resurgence of world Stalinism. I'm just trying to make the
> point that most people blindly accept non-free software without
> thinking of the broader issues. And I'm no holy saint either; while
> all the software I use on a daily basis is Free (mainly Linux, X,
> Gnome, and Emacs [praise be]), I can think of at least one non-free
> program on my hard drive; Quake II.
>
> Justin, you made some decent points in your post. I hope you'll
> consider the other side as well.
I do consider the other side.. free software is a great thing, but it will
probably always co-exist with propreitary software, they serve different
audiences..
Let's take an example of the company I work for.. we're developing a high
availability clustering product, mostly for webservers. We have a kernel
patch for ip routing that is completely open-sourced, and being improved
upon constantly. the other part of our product, which introduces the
high-availability aspect, is the tl cluster daemon.. this is
closed-source, but our plan is to open the source one version behind.. the
first version to go for sale will actually be 2.0, the source for 1.x will
go out, probably with our tl server product.. then when 2.2 or 3.0 comes
out, 2.0 will go open-source.. We are allowing people to use it for free,
but not with the latest features.. we, actually, are looking at making it
where you only have to buy, say, two copies of the cluster server (only
servers running that can failover) and the other nodes can run tl server
with just the kernel patch. You really only need a couple of failover
nodes for the router, the rest can be pure webservers..we're opening the
source to the config tools, the kernel patch, the data replication system,
everything but the high-availability cluster daemon.. Are we hurting the
world by doing this? should this be developed in-house by companies who
want to use clustering, or should someone offer out-of-box functionality?
we're currently competing with solutions that are absolutely closed
source, which would you rather use?
someone has to pay our programmers..
Justin
|--------------------------------------------------
|Justin Ryan
|Developer Relations / Support Associate
|Pacific HiTech / TurboLinux
|http://www.turbolinux.com / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
|WebMaster, PCHelp - http://computers.iwz.com
|[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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