Linux and the GPL, A Hard look at a Leftist Software Development model

Coral Snakes Shock 'n' Awe | 8-31-2003 | Coral Snake

[farmfriend]

ping

[Coral Snake]

The Coral Snake Ping.

Calling all Anti Commies and Anti Pirates

HAY Everybody, IT'S HERE!!!

[Orblivion]

Hahaha. Such foolish things you say. Nothing is preventing you from developing anything you want and selling it. GPL'd software is about FREEDOM u dummy. The freedom to take the software and use it any way u see fit. I seriously doubt Free Republic could afford to use Microsoft products to run this site. It's probably using Apache(FREE). With a MySQL(FREE) backend. And I know it's using some PERL(FREE). And the guy who runs this site doesn't have to renew licenses every year or anything like that. You can't seriously be a software developer and say the things u do.

[eabinga]

And he doesn't like Stallman's hairstyle or legalese (Yeecch!).

Of course Torvalds must be a commie, because his dad was was one. Perhaps that makes Arnold Schwarzenegger a nazi too?

[Orblivion]

Oh, And another thing he doesn't have to worry about because of all the FREE software he's using is all those pesky virii that keep messing with Microsoft users. :P Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it.

:)

[eabinga]

To give him some credit, his recommendations for both open and proprietary software developers at the end are worth reading and discussing.

But the rest...oh, well

[Orblivion]

he wants some kind of universal licensing standard or something? maybe like universal healthcare u know. Licensing varies depending on the situation. A free and open market place is all that is needed. Competition will take care of everything else. Oh, and keeping Microsoft in check. They are some cheating mofo's.

[Penner]

You hit the nail on the head.

[ThinkDifferent]

Placeholder bump, I'll read this tomorrow.

[ThePythonicCow]

After you strip away all the outrageous style of your posts, you seem to be saying that the GPL is pushing software toward being a communal property, rather than privately owned property.

So ... your point is?

Yes, this does make it harder to make money at it. Or at least, one has to be more creative in finding alternative business models, than just straight propriatary software.

But customers love it, because software becomes more common, more sensibly priced, and open if need be to change and maintenance without worries that the initial vendor will go out of business or charge fees based more on extortion than reasonable costs and profits.

Is all communism bad?

Civilizaton has gained greatly over the past few centuries from the work of professors in Universities, who needed to "publish or perish". They did not personally become rich, in most cases, but for our most complex intellectual human endeavors, that require the contributions of many great and minor contributors, over years and decades of effort, public sharing does lead to the best results.

I think your hatred of all things communal is way over drawn.

Now if someone could just explain to me why I have bothered to respond to such spew in the first place, ... I would sleep better tonight.

[Bush2000]

bump

[Odyssey-x]

See communism may finally be practical when things like skyscrapers, spacecraft, food supplies, housing, etc. are as easily and endlessly duplicatable as software is.

[risk]

There's much more going on here than a leftist software development model. It's about innovation, who can do it, when can they do it, and can they share their ideas. Stallman got his start on a university campus (MIT) where OS system software innovation and development was done by geeks and nerds just for the joy of learning and contributing to a common goal of improving a networked environment for *other* research.

A lot of Stallman's ideology is irrelevant. That doesn't make the open source software development model socialist. A community of geeks and nerds researching and developing software is anything but a commune; it's invariably one of the most rigidly regulated meritocracies you'll ever find. Moreover, they often find shrink-wrapped software (a la Microsoft) to be boring and inflexible. They want to do it their own way, and in many cases, they can and do.

The real popularity of open source development emerged later in the context of AT&T's UNIX system software, which was enhanced and extended to support the Internet protocols using millions of dollars in DARPA funding at Berkeley. To keep up with the Internet and to provide a useful environment to a team of researchers, you had to have UNIX. Some people were uncomfortable with the fact that they couldn't share their own personal innovations at one of these "source shops" (a laboratory with a UNIX source code license), so they started casting about for alternatives. XINU, MINIX, and after the big USL court case over the inclusion of a few lines of UNIX code in the Berkeley's NET releases, the unencumbered (unpolluted with AT&T code) 386BSD software emerged.

About this time, Linus Torvalds used what he had learned by hacking on MINIX to implement a clone of UNIX that would be more scalable, and would fully utilize the virtual memory subsystem of the Intel 386 architecture. Someone else added the NET3 Berkeley TCP/IP code (as I recall). The rest is history.

Meanwhile, you can be either a socialist or a capitalist with open source software. The licensing doesn't preclude anyone from modifying it and selling it again, so long as the source is always available. It's actually kind of cool, but it takes some analysis to figure out whether or not your latest idea is going to be legal with respect to basing a product on GPL'ed software. The bottom line: do what you like. It's the free marketplace of ideas.

Stallman is not widely respected outside of a narrow group of people who adore his eccentricities. Eric Raymond, an advocate of the OSS model, is an anarhcist and second amendment rights enthusiast. Does it bother you that some nuts have been attracted to the cause of the OSS model? Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't. In any case, I think it takes both shrink-wrap and open source together to provide users and developers with the freedom they want to compute in the best possible way. It's really and truly a free market like none other.

For those interested in what the scientists at Bell Labs did after UNIX, see http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/

[Coral Snake]

The Linux heads here should be REALLY happy with my next article. It will be about MICRO$SOFT and their history of IP theft "pump 'n' dump" and Anti Americanism. And as you've seen by this one being posted I DO keep my promises in this area.

[Jeff Gordon]

Is there anyone or anything that you do like?

[Coral Snake]

Yes, I do like both Windows and Linux. I just don't like the criminals and lefties running the show.

[Coral Snake]

Actually that's why I may be making my second OS Solaris for x86. All of the Unix advantages of Linux WITHOUT the leftist bilge. ;-)

Also Sun Micrososystems is the only company that has shown a scintilla of HONESTY during this whole SCO v IBM, SCO v Linux, Microsoft v InterTrust MESS.

[Jeff Gordon]

Good. I am glad there is stuff you do like. Personally, I prefer DOS 3.1 for the Apple II.

[Monitor]

That is to END THE SINGLE SEAT LICENSE POLICY and replace it with a by the family or by the business licensing policy.

We allow our customers to install our software on as many machines as they want. However, we use a hardware key. Without the key, the software runs in demo mode. Plug the key in, and it's fully functional again. This allows them to buy one license, install it on many machines, and move the hardware key from machine to machine. If they wish to run two copies of the software on two machines at once, they need to buy another license, which gets them another key.

The key is expensive, cuts into our profit margin, and does occasionally cause installation problems all by itself. But our customers seem to like being able to buy one license, and use it on their desktop machine one day, their laptop another, and their own customers' computers the next.

It must be an odd approach, because we do get questioned on it, as if they didn't hear us right, and they can't believe what they just heard. "You mean I can install this software on more than one computer, and you don't care?" "Nope, I don't care. In fact, I encourage it."