There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software. Specifically for such users Free Software Foundation developed Guidelines for Free System Distributions and created the list of absolutely free ("as in freedom") distributions. In this article we are going to look at the most recent entry on the list - Parabola GNU/Linux.
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Member since:2006-07-14
Well, now we are down to facts and a reasonable argument. This is progress.
He does, you are nitpicking about the details. He was close enough as much as it matters. It constantly irritates me, that anyone that supports open source will say "well nobody said that exactly".
I'm not nitpicking, it matters. If the FSF were actually saying that selling software should be illegal, I would never use anything they produced. So, it definitely does matter to me, and I would imagine others as well.
Call me crazy, but there is a world of difference between
"Its illegal to do X."
Vs
"Its hard to do X, but legal to try"
And tbh if the differences are this easily misunderstood by people in the profession ... how is anyone outside of the software engineering going to understand the nuances?
Not sure what you are arguing here. Yes the nuances are difficult to explain to people in the profession, that's why they need to be explained instead of ignored. Because they matter.
Member since:2009-08-18
No instead they demand you use a license that makes it more difficult to make money, unless you already have pots of cash. I think it amounts to almost the same thing.
Richard Stallman doesn't like software professionals. Stallman is a professional speaker, I actually applaud him for being able to convince the enough people that he can make a living talking about how the author keeping hold of his source code is taking away your human rights.
Secondly I will say it again, if a software engineer apparently find it difficult to understand the difference, there is no hope someone outside of the professional will understand it, and I don't think they should ever have to be tasked with understanding the value of something they didn't care about enough in the first place to research themselves.
I had problems explaining to people that worked in the same department as me what the problems are (and they are somewhat technically minded but in a different discipline).
Hell half the time, software engineers don't understand how it works. A lot of what a software engineer does is basically completely fictional and is a construct of our imaginations. Then we have imaginary processes and we test these things using another imaginary construct.
That was originally based on maths at some point in time (There was a time when people thought that all software would be written by mathematicians).
I will say it again as you glazed over it. There are many people on the internet demanding the source for this that and the other that have no experience in the software industry and have never written code.
What are they going to do with it? Hang it on a wall? Sing it at Church? What?
To use the old car analogy. Nobody except enthusiasts care what happens when you press the gas pedal. But everyone cares when it goes wrong.
Edited 2012-02-03 18:36 UTC
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PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
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"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2009-08-18
They say that they believe all software should be GPL or compatible.
If you are an independant developer creating bespoke software you are likely to have a contract with a third party anyway.
If the software isn't bespoke, you and you release it as GPL, you won't make anymoney from selling it ... because someone else will just take the source and redistribute it. You might be able to make money from support, but it has to be a pretty large program, otherwise another entity will easy just undercut you on support.
It is about whether they are arguing against selling software, it is that they are campaigning that software must be released with this license otherwise you are infringing on the user's rights, however it isn't easily possible to make money. Even Stallman admits this on the FSF.org
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Except the FSF is run by an extremist.
He does, you are nitpicking about the details. He was close enough as much as it matters. It constantly irritates me, that anyone that supports open source will say "well nobody said that exactly".
And tbh if the differences are this easily misunderstood by people in the profession ... how is anyone outside of the software engineering going to understand the nuances?
Just go to ubuntu Forums, you have lots of new Linux users arguing about freedomz to see the source code ... many of them have never written a line of code.
In 2004 I was admittantly was one of them.