391–400 of 468 posts
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A user who is not also a developer has no ability to meaningfully view and modify the code, and thus doesn't care.
And what is your point? It's a freedom that they still have. They can always hire some developer to help them.
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Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person. I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations. The dislike/distru…
Carmack is clearly still in favor of open source, he just wishes he had gone with BSD. And it doesn't sound like it's because he's anti-corporate. It sounds like it's because he works for a mega tech corp and his mega tech corp hates the GPL so he has to do a ton of paperwork to use any GPL code there. (which is the same as working for any tech corp.)
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I apologize for misunderstanding you. I read you writing of commanding less respect as a developer and being "the second class in this picture" as feeling attacked. If I am honest, I did not understand your point, then. Your start-off was that the GPL segments between users and developers and disagreeing with that. What I tried to offer as a counterpoint, is that the GPL does not actually segment between the two, it…
>> I don’t lose sleep over Boeing patching a random library I wrote and not sharing the patch > What you call "permissive" then is only permissive in the short term, because it precisely introduces this segmentation between users and developers in the long term. If you look at this as a tree structure, it's permissive only to your immediate children, because you are granting them the right to take away this precise f…
All I can say is oh well, I guess.
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> Like, I find it intensely frustrating that, when an industry veteran says "I've heard the pros and cons of each approach and I found that in my real-life experience GPL was a net negative", people answer with a 101 on the philosophy of GPL. You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics.
> You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics. Physics, too. I once mentioned on a forum that at least as the fat guy in my group of friends I coasted down a slope faster on my bicycle than did my skinny friends. (It was quite noticeable, too). The number of people who jumped in to tell me I was wrong and attempted to do that math using their first semester freshman physics knowledge to…
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Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person. I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations. The dislike/distru…
Focus changed. The 90's was the rise of the PC, the 00's the rise of the web, and the teens rise of the money making mobile platform. The rise of the PC is what sparked open source as we needed cheaper (free) tools. Once the tools were free it accelerated the growth of the web which was built using said free tools (remember LAMP stacks?). Mobile built on the web and used the same free tools allowing more money to be…
In the eyes of original generation of OSS supporters, the 'lot of money to be made' was what made OSS important, to ensure that people access to software that served them as users, instead of just being made to make a lot of money off of them.
Arguably, despite the takeover of open source, that vision failed.
So, now, rather than opposing "money to be made" with the "interest of users" those opposed to open source (while making a case that they are the ones really more "in the original spirit of open source" than open source itself)... say they are sticking up for the ability of the small entrepeneur to make money not just the big corporation.
That's the change, not that there's a lot of money to be made from software. From the start of the OSS movement there was a lot of money to be made off of software, if there weren't OSS wouldn't have been relevant in the first place. Original OSS said if making sure users have the freedom to do what they need with software reduces the money to be made off of it... that's fine. New line says the thing is to reserve the right of the small entrepeneuers (or those who can convince the internet mob that they are smaller and more deserving than Amazon anyway) to make money off users, and try to prevent big corporations from getting a piece of the pie that rightfully belongs to "deserving" businesses, who are deserving because... they're smaller.
I have some ideas of what the differences actually are, I think it's not about how much money is to be made, but how the actual individual software engineers made money; who their employers were and how those employers behaved. I think it has to do with both greater "austerity" and "efficiency" among large employers, and greater dreams of getting rich as an "entrepeneur" among individual developers.
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It doesn't solve the issue. GPL people would have taken the BSD code, do a minor change, and force everyone to redistribute the source-code under GPL. Really terrible license.
This occurs very rarely and provokes a loud counter reaction from the BSD people.
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I feel like this isn't really framing the issue fairly. The issue isn't that Sony couldn't use GPL code, there is no law preventing them from doing so, they just choose not to (for a variety of reasons, I'd imagine). Just as the could contribute to FreeBSD but choose not to. And OS developers have the choice to prevent Sony (or some other company) from essentially using free labor to make money without any obligation…
Nothing in GPL prevents Sony from using free labor; most of the companies using Linux do precisely that.
I'm still bummed out that for years, GPL was the "standard" go-to open source license. So many projects became useless for any commercial projects whatsoever. GPL advocates say it's so that your code isn't exploited by corporations. But I'd say that choosing GPL means it's more important to you that your code "is not exploited by corporations" than that it can be used for good by people with commercial interests. Tho…
There is an example of 2 projects that started around the same time, one of which used the GPL and one of which used the BSD license. Almost 30 years after the projects started, the one one using the GPL is vibrate and healthy, while the other project using the BSD license has trouble getting companies to contribute their changes back and barely has enough developers participating in the community to survive. This is…
I think that's an important distribution, because the userspace equivalent would be GPL with an exception carved out for dynamic linking (i.e. the LGPL).
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> You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics. Physics, too. I once mentioned on a forum that at least as the fat guy in my group of friends I coasted down a slope faster on my bicycle than did my skinny friends. (It was quite noticeable, too). The number of people who jumped in to tell me I was wrong and attempted to do that math using their first semester freshman physics knowledge to…
Wind resistance should slow down the larger person more.
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Wind resistance should slow down the larger person more.
Ignoring wind resistance is the problem. Undoubtedly mass was accounted for, but they got the incorrect answer because wind resistance has a much greater effect on the lighter rider. The extra momentum of the heavier rider easily overcomes the small increase in wind resistance. Anyone who has biked with someone of significantly different body mass will have seen ample evidence that bigger people coast downhill faster…