Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
gnu=borg - discuss
Orethrius:
--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez ---Yea I know but I preferred Acorn computers anyway.
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To each his own. :cool:
--- Quote ---I also understand the anti-competitive argument too and yes the GPL would solve this as it doesn't allow for competition to exist in the first place.
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I'm beginning to think that your concept of competition is somewhat skewed. So competition is only fair when one person or entity benefits from it? What about the others? Again, you're conveniently setting aside the argument that you don't HAVE to use the GPL in the first place. Would it be good for sharing your programs with the world? Yes. Do I and others here advocate using it whenever appropriate? Absolutely. But nobody's forcing anybody to use it. That argument is a fallacy on its face, since possibilities do not a problem make.
--- Quote ---Proprietary licenses aren't the cause of the mess we're currently in even though they help keep things the way they are. Competition could still exist if Apple, Microsoft and GNU/Linux had equal market share even though 60% is proprietary (I'll asume the remaining 10% is BeOS, BSD and other stuff very few people use) the market would still remain competitive. Apple and Microsoft would both keep their data structures and APIs open and software development tools free (as in beer) as it would allow them to gain customers from the opposition.
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Yet you argue that if people were to gain in the competition through reinterpreting other people's work - or even compiling source code - that is somehow wrong. By that standard, shouldn't Sun be out of business? Also, don't argue that proprietary licences aren't the problem we're currently facing, that falls flat once one realises that PC adoption exploded before IBM started patenting everything could get their grubby little hands on. The difference now is that Big Blue is Big Billy; though the faces may have changed, the song remains the same.
--- Quote ---Hardware is similar, companies release their hardware but they keep the blue prints secret, in some cases this can keep away competition, (look at waht Microsoft's doing with the Xbox 360 and the controlers), drug and food companies also keep their recipes secret. Companies have being keeping things from us for the last 100 years or more the main differance with software is the law has allowed companies to inforce restrictions on decompilation, but this has been solved in the EU as it's permitted as long as it's for compatability purposes only.
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Define compatibility as anything but interoperability with any known system, or the capacity to be checked for said ability, and see how far that gets you in serious development circles. The funny part is that at least Apple learned from their mistake and used a FOSS backend (just because BSD isn't GPL, that doesn't make it proprietary) ;). Hopefully others will begin to see the mistake in not allowing compatibility checks, which the EU was smart enough to notice before ramming through their own DMCA.
--- Quote ---My last question about whether anybody uses proprietary software was a trick question, in fact I hazzard a guess you all do, the BIOS in your computer probably isn't free software and the same goes for the software in your TV, microwave and car, proprietary software is everywhere there is nothing you can do about it!
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That's hardly a trick question, nor is it relevant to the discussion at hand. Who cares if a microwave's plans are public domain so long as standards exist to provide competing manufacturers? The issue here is that software was traditionally open to reinterpretation on-the-fly, something which firmware just can't handle by design. Again, nobody seems to notice that BIOS and firmware companies directly compete with one another (and yes, even code-share).
--- Quote ---Nowadays the gap between software and hardware is virtually non-existent, even things without microcontrollers have PLAs (programmable logic arrays). These allow circuits that would've previously been built from gates on many separate chips be custom programmed onto one chip by the user, by connecting up gates on a single chip with a (E)(E)PROM or flash memory to store the connections.
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What do PLAs have to do with the GNU? Wow.
--- Quote ---Love it or hate it proprietary software is here to say and there's no way to get away from it!
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Sure there is, use FOSS whenever possible. The problem is proprietary software, not firmware and hardware. Nobody ever faked a security video at a tribunal over a missing ROM chip. ;)
Aloone_Jonez:
--- Quote from: piratePenguin ---We don't get to chose what software goes in them places.
As for BIOSes, well, there's linuxbios. I'd be using it myself only my motherboard isn't supported.
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That's a common problem with Linux in general, and before you start I know it's not the developer's fault.
--- Quote from: piratePenguin ---So there's no non-free software on my harddrive then.
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Well I'm being very pickey here but it has a microcontroller in it and maybe even a PLA so the answer is yes, not forgetting your graphics card BIOS and possibly your sound card, odds on they'll be proprietary sofftware in your PC somewhere, like it or not. :p
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---To each his own. :cool:
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I think it's a shame how there used to be many platforms around then annd now one platform dominates everything, bring back the good old days I say.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---I'm beginning to think that your concept of competition is somewhat skewed. So competition is only fair when one person or entity benefits from it? What about the others?
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You have a very good point, but it's a cut-thoat world out there, it might not be fair but that secret algorthim your company has could be the differance between life and death, the same goes for a drug company's secret ingrediant.
Edit:
There are other ways to compete with other companies other than by having trade secrets in the code, customer service and support are also sometimes considered to be equally (if not more) important. My original point was that if all of the companies opened their code they would no longer be competing on the technical merit of their software since (in theory) each piece of software should have equal capabilities.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Again, you're conveniently setting aside the argument that you don't HAVE to use the GPL in the first place.
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Yes, this is true, I just wanted to convince people that forceing it would be a very bad (if not even evil) idea.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Would it be good for sharing your programs with the world? Yes. Do I and others here advocate using it whenever appropriate? Absolutely. But nobody's forcing anybody to use it. That argument is a fallacy on its face, since possibilities do not a problem make.
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I would also recommend sharing code too, but (as you know) it isn't always good business sense to do so.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Yet you argue that if people were to gain in the competition through reinterpreting other people's work - or even compiling source code - that is somehow wrong.
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Of course it isn't wrong and this it's healthy and can happen in the proprietary world as well as the free. The difference is in the free world people work together and in the proprietary they are in competition - this is the communism argument again.
--- Quote from: Orethrius --- By that standard, shouldn't Sun be out of business?
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The open source model might work for well Sun but it would be a complete disaster for Microsoft, because of this people say "force the GPL" as it would solve one problem but it'd also create many more.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Also, don't argue that proprietary licences aren't the problem we're currently facing, that falls flat once one realises that PC adoption exploded before IBM started patenting everything could get their grubby little hands on. The difference now is that Big Blue is Big Billy; though the faces may have changed, the song remains the same.
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This could be argued both ways, Adobe, Apple and Opera aren't causing any problems at the moment and they all use proprietary licences but Microsoft is, which is to do with their license. I think the answer to this dilema is proprietary licences aren't the direct cause of the problem, the way Microsoft is using them is.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Define compatibility as anything but interoperability with any known system, or the capacity to be checked for said ability, and see how far that gets you in serious development circles.
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This is true, once you've reverse engineered something in order develop your product in a manner that'd make it compatable, you've efectively given your product the same capability.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---The funny part is that at least Apple learned from their mistake and used a FOSS backend (just because BSD isn't GPL, that doesn't make it proprietary) ;). Hopefully others will begin to see the mistake in not allowing compatibility checks, which the EU was smart enough to notice before ramming through their own DMCA.
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The laws are a very big problem here, you can sell someone a TV and you can't impose any restrictions on them reverse engineering the hardware but you can with the software. I think the EU has used the words "reverse engineering for compatability purposes" to keep the software companies happy.
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---That's hardly a trick question, nor is it relevant to the discussion at hand. Who cares if a microwave's plans are public domain so long as standards exist to provide competing manufacturers? The issue here is that software was traditionally open to reinterpretation on-the-fly, something which firmware just can't handle by design. Again, nobody seems to notice that BIOS and firmware companies directly compete with one another (and yes, even code-share).
What do PLAs have to do with the GNU? Wow.
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That was all aimed the free software fanboy crew who keep saying "proprietary software is evil, either open your code or go to hell". They do their level best to avoid proprietary software as much as possible yet they forget it's embedded in to the very hardware they're using whether they like it or not. ;)
--- Quote from: Orethrius ---Sure there is, use FOSS whenever possible. The problem is proprietary software, not firmware and hardware. Nobody ever faked a security video at a tribunal over a missing ROM chip. ;)
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I can see closed proprietary hardware systems being a potential problem in the future - Apple owning the largest market share could cause this. So far Microsoft has been the only company capable of destroying the competition by using their trade secrets and I really hope they won't achieve this with the Xbox 360. :eek:
Kintaro:
Open Source is better than Closed Source because it automatically documents the API's in a format programmers who speak any langauge can understand. However closed source can be terrible, it can be better if the programmers at least document the API's so that it can be interoperated with.
Aloone_Jonez:
Documanting the APIs only makes a differance when you're talking about operating systems as programmers need to know the APIs to write good code, you can't apply this logic to other things like computer games.
Free software is supposed to be so much better because many people have access to the source thus giving them the opportunity to improve it and fix any bugs. Muzzey has proved this wrong before, if open software is much better then this critical bug that crashes FireFox would've been fixed as soon as it was discovered two years ago, go on click here to crash Firefox if you don't believe me.
piratePenguin:
--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez ---That was all aimed the free software fanboy crew who keep saying "proprietary software is evil, either open your code or go to hell".
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Who "keeps saying" that?
That Firefox bug isn't a huge problem at least ATM. I haven't seen it exploited anywhere apart from at that page.
And just because one little bug hasn't been fixed, it doesn't mean the whole development model isn't working.
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