On Sat, 19 Jan 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > Good! Linux-il is not just about bits, we're also about ideals and > > socialism :) > > I'd like to disagree with you here that there's anything Socialist about > OSS. > > 2. A good and proper way to manage software for the general profit of the > public.
thanks for the contradiction. can I have the honor of ridiculing you in public next time we meet? ;-) > > main developer... please don't play down her part as a mere "support > > person" :) > > I did not. I just say that she is a support person, not only a support > person. so you're the support person for freecell solver? and Arik Sharon is the press officer for the Israeli covernment, no doubt. I know... Bush is the chief pretzel eater at the white house... :) > I did not encounter too many rude replies from OSS developers like that. well, I have tried to deal with Dan Bernstein, and we heard countless examples from Moshe Bar yesterday about Linus, Al Viro and a few others. > But naturally, I expect such things to happen, as OSS software > comes with no guarantee for maintainability. well, can we really trust any software in such a world? are the concepts of OSS and warrenty so contradicting? what I talked about is make OSS more trustworthy, so to speak. > You are right, yet you are also a bit wrong. If the source code to > Endeavour 2 would not have been available, (as well as the sources to > Xmms and FM) I could not have helped out Ms. Milana. yes, it WOULD have hampered the research for you, but not much for her... afterall she had her own code. E2 might have been closed source and the other two open, and you could have still made it work :) > > Nice people will be nice everywhere, though in my heart, I want > > to believe that nice people tend to choose releasing their stuff as OSS, > > given the financial possibility. > > > > I'm not sure I agree with you here. I don't see what makes a person who > distributes a commercial software any less "nice". Friendliness has read again, did I say "less nice"? how about "lacking the financial choice"? we do live in a world that is becoming capitalistic with time, and the choices for spending your spare time on pro-bono work are hampered by the need to earn a living. and so my offer still stands. government support of OSS in the public interest, promotes knowledge, progress of the human kind, and not just the happy individual developer, who gets to do what he loves, etc. sorry for airing my socialist views here on the list, but I'd much rather have my tax money finance kernel developpers rather than Talmidey Yeshivot... > OK, I could have contacted the developer and asked him to add this > feature to this code. And then he would have had to do all the > research on his own. Remember that I helped Taura a bit, by making > some research on my own. yeah, but at the end, did you tip her for the kind help? would you do it had the option been easely available like through a paypal tip jar? > > the moral is: Gratis OSS = no warrenty. > > It was a rather long paragraph which I did not quite understand. so why bother quote it? my point was (and still is) that many people in their heart believe that OSS is good and beneficial, but immediately bend their nose (does this work in English?) in suspicion, because humans are greedy by nature. "if it's good, why is she not selling it? she's ashamed to charge money so it must be a crappy product. if someone writes such a great program of COURSE he would not want to give it away but sell it, and how would he make money if the source is free? so he must close the source aftrerall." what did this spell? greed is in our bones, it's powered by the need to survive, it's what keeps the law of the jungle alive though capitalism. Man's brain and hormones, unchanged for 50K years or more, are tricking humanity into self starvation by eradicating the planet too quickly and inventing laws to further supress the voice of the poor, they also dictate how we do business as a "side effect". sharing knowledge, helping others improve their status and in return enjoy a benefit yourself, is what socialism is about, and this is what your story was about. it's a deep change in grasping the world around us, and people tend to skip that and look at the bits of code rather than the big picture. yes, I know words like "communism" and "socialism" are hard to digest after all the misuse they went through in the last 100 years of human history, but have you taken the communist manifesto(1848) into your hands and read it once? the quote I want to point out here is from chapter two: "if the communist moto could be summed up into a single sentence, it would be 'anihilation of private property'" (Mar. now tell me how is this different from "Information wants to be free" and "share the software"? can you say "anihilation of private Intelectual Property"? sounds like RMS to me... now where do I take this comparison? The Bourgoisie have the production facilities and sell products, the Proletariat have only their working hands to sell, this is one of the central points the manifesto aims at. Now how would Ms. Milana provide you with such a wonderful product if she had only her own software to give? it's only because of the "OSS revolution" that she had Gtk+, Emacs, and indeed gcc and gdb with which she could concentrate of her art without worriying about the basic tools it it relys on, she gets to use production tools not because she owns a big corporation who payed for it, or developped it. > In any case, the way I see it: > > 1. OSS must be developed by choice. (E.g: you cannot force Microsoft to > release anything as open-source) well, I'm not advocating bending the existing rules, I say add to them. you can force them to pay their debt to society by actually donating knowledge to the public, not just giving away free licenses that will have to be upgraded for full price a few years later. when they give a $199 product for free to a school, they don't give up $199 in income. they actually lost the $1 it cost to make the CD and maybe $10 more for manuals, but gained a future upgrading customer of the product and a commited user of the platform who will be forced to buy more of their products. e.g. if they release a free (=OSS) learning system for schools, other vendors can interface to it, schools get better choice, kids get the better education as well, and the whole world benefits. very simplified, I know, but I hope I got the point through. > 2. I don't mind passing a law that software that was developed for a > public institute must be made open-source. For example, this software that > the Israeli Government sells in order to calculate the price of cars, > (after this newfangled pricing system took place). They sell it which is > outrageous. I have no idea what that system is, so I can't comment :) > Of course, software for Military purposes should be excluded, due to > security reasons. well, this is really where the "nimshal" crashes into the "mashal" like a ton of bricks. if communism could indeed be implemented correctly for real (and I believe that is really impossible), hunger and resource starvation could be eliminated and wars would not need to break, therefore eliminating the question of weapons and electronic inteligence. sadly I live in the real world, so I have to agree with you on that last paragraph... and smile hard seeing the random sig fortune picked for me :) -- The man with the golden gun Ira Abramov ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
