The irony is...

that GPL and OpenSource are a different walled garden.

Instead of being delimited by cash, they're limited by programming skill. The effect is the same - ordinary users are forced to operate software in the way that certain programmers think they should.

Saying "But you can program the system to...' is useless given that - well - oddly enough, most people aren't programmers, and don't want to (or can't) learn about languages, repositories and dependencies just so they can add some original features to their (say...) media player.

And then there are the licensing and distribution issues associated with GPL.

So the control freakery seems roughly equally distributed.

Jobs scored points over Stallman by creating technology ordinary people want to use. Stallman and Open Source have never understood why this is important. Geek cred is *not* user appeal.

OS has scored is in projects with obvious user benefits - like Wordpress and Joomla (etc) which have become de facto standards for many web projects.

But OS on the desktop has been a history of fail, precisely because OS projects become all about bull geeks noodling around coding useless features because they want something to do, with little thought for the needs of non-geek users.

Thanks to people like that, oss exists.

Forger/Ignore who rms is and look to his CV with the perfect universities, excellent recommendations, published work used by other legendary developers (includlng the ms/apple elite) and highly prestigious labs.

Also try to imagine what kind of connections with such credentials would have. His linkedin page would be fun.

A person like that, instead of swimming in money, having multimillion dollar home, a car fleet and lost track of share options still wonders around and try to stop the ignorant being abused.

I have never shared his views and IMHO they are way beyond today's half human/half animalistic scheme of things but I just can't accept bunch of lifeless people who achieved nothing in life or would do very evil things for money act like he is some sort of freak.

"I was starting to wonder if I was the only one to notice this. "

No, and you're not the only one dumb enough to think it matters either. The world is awash with people using software they haven't paid for, and it ain't all GPL.

People actually mainly pay for software for two reasons (other than fear of legal action): they want support and they want to get new versions when they come out.

The GPL makes no difference to these two key items: pay for GPL software and you will normally expect support and that the money will help create new versions and improvements. No different from any other software.

"There is a reason why the documentation for commercial open source software (which does not have a "sugar daddy" sponsor at least) is often utter shite" Because software documentation is almost always utter shite. Have you read the manual that comes with MS Office? Why waste paper and ink on it, let alone money? Every serious user gets a third-party manual, and the vast majority of mature GPL projects are likewise supported, indeed are generally better supported because the writers of the manuals have full access to not only the code but often to the programmers without any difficulty involving "commercial confidentiality".

By and large, Free Software has had a bigger and more significant effect on the world of computing than anything Jobs did, with Microsoft a close second due, ironically, to Gate's total opposition to the potential of software being utilized by poor people. Those two poles form the axis around which the world of computing hardware and software revolves; Jobs sat in the middle and lifted/stole ideas which he then polished and branded and booby-trapped with lock-ins for the easily bought, but he never brought anything actually new to the table.

"A horribly misleading licence with disasterous consequences for the quality of software using it."

You are a fool and deserve all you get.

sgtrock: Well done for *completely* missing my point.

"Taken a look around your house lately for any new electronic gadgets"

They made their money selling me the DEVICE not the software. Therefore software licencing is irrelevant.

"Tell that to Red Hat. IBM. Amazon. Wall Street. Google..."

Did you miss my point about sugar daddy sponsors? It was even in the bit you quoted. Also well done for mentioning Rat Hat who are a prime example of a company which has had to start obfuscating their updates to prevent third parties taking their support revenue, a direct result of using the GPL.

As an aside, why does an OS need a support contract anyway? Neither myself nor the company I work for has ever needed to contact MS for support with Windows, why should someone pay for support from Red Hat? The very fact people are paying third parties indicates that it is *nothing* to do with supporting the cost of maintaining the OS and presumably to do with (possibly unnecessary?) complexity of the product.

Robert Long:

Thanks for the personal insults. Grow up.

Let me try and explain this.

Writing software is expensive, computer programmers are highly skilled and command relatively high pay. Any software being written outside of their own time needs to be paid for in some way.

If the software isn't of use to a massive company like google, IBM etc then you're very unlikely to get anyone to sponsor it, smaller companies, and particulaly public sector organisations simply do not have that sort of money, therefore you'll need to get a smaller amount of money from a much larger number of people/organisations.

You can do this in two ways, sell it, or charge for support (or a combination). The former is pretty much ruled out by the way the GPL works (even if they deny it), therefore your only way to get money is to charge for support (the number of people who will simply donate is negligable). This has several implications:

a) Your end users must see your product as actually requiring support, and be happy with this. If people do not need support generally they will not pay for it (it's hard enough getting some people to pay for a commercial product as it is!).

b) This support revenue will need to cover the initial development cost and the ongoing development costs. This generally means that someone else will be able to provide support (especially since the source code is available) at a fraction of the price. Most of your customers aren't likely to think long term enough as to what the consequences are of you going out of business.

The general result is that you have to design your product to *require* support, even if it shouldn't really, and still anyone can set up a company and screw you over by providing your support cheaper. If you disagree then I suspect you have a much higher opinion of people's decency than I do (of course, according to the GPL they aren't even doing anything wrong!).

Consider the example of an AAA computer game with a multi-million pound budget. If that has to be released under the GPL (assuming games consoles supported it) how many people do you think would pay the company for support? They would download it and play it for free perfectly legally. The company would go bust and no one would ever write a high budget game again.

The point is that the GPL is *not* suitable for most commercial software but it tries to make out it is, and cretins like Stallman and the FSF are trying to force it on everyone by claiming anyone not using it is evil.

As a side note: I've no problem with source code being 'open' to people that have actually paid for the product for them to read, update, fork or whatever they want to, so long as anyone that uses that code (or things derived from it) has purchased a legitmate copy of the original from the company that *spent the money developing it*.

The fact is, if you were right you would find that most commercial software (talking business software, consumer software such as game etc) is under the GPL. It isn't.

if you bought it you own it

if you pay for a piece of software, you have the right to view and modify the source code.

but why are people willing to pay for software and yet give up this right!!!

Because you only buy a license to use it. If you read the ELUA thats all you got. oh and if by the way it fails to work or junks all your data that's just too bad.

Because end user do not own the software, they lease it from the manufacturer.

Almost everything is wrong, including

that that doesn't demonstrate irony.

My incompetence at programming does not constitute your control.

And there is no wall around the garden of FLOSS.

Because that's not in the terms of the copyright.

You pay for a piece of the software. That let you use the piece of software. But you don't know how it's built just as you don't get the blueprints for the motorcar you drive.

Re: Thanks to people like that, oss exists.

Ilgaz:

The problem is, thanks to people like RMS, many OSS projects have occasionally come close to dying, too. Case in point: GPLv3. All I can say is thank goodness Linus Trovalds put his foot down on that one; I personally know at least one company that absolutely would have migrated from linux to another platform. Put bluntly, RMS spends far more time hurting his case than helping it.

-d

my ignorant gob is well aware of the facts and said greasy wop did in fact male 1 train run on time - and the rest is history

:-)

The Air Force's computer security honestly scares the fuck out of me. I spent a couple of weeks doing penetration testing at a research lab after the AF got its ass kicked at the war games competition while ago, and it was deplorable. Plus they use Java, which I greatly dislike.

Ada is the language ideally used by the alphabet soup, but I've never been required to design anything in it, and I honestly wouldn't be involved as much if I had to learn yet another language just to make them happy. NSA works with Linux a fair amount, although it has in-house distros that are specialised behind all hope in hell of ever seeing light of day in the public.

What are you on?

> it's almost as if the crass insensitivity is deliberate

Like the front-page newspaper stories of indulgent glorification are not just as offensive?

Re: Cups

Yeah, my thought is that CUPS predates OSX, nor is Apple the original developer of it.

In fact it was only made OSX's printing system in OSX 10.2. Apple bought the CUPS source code in 2007, hence why it's now referred to as the owner of CUPS.

Apple didn't write it - they bought it in.

No...

CUPS was in Linux before it was Mac OS X. Apple bought the company producing CUPS after CUPS became the standard Linux printing software.

Well, yes

But Apple hired Matthew Sweet and bought the code.

Why yes

I think you have proven your ignorance quite effectively.

An objective observer might say...

... it's good that where Apple have benefitted from open source software, they've ultimately given back to the community.

A cynic might add that while it is objectively a good thing to have happened, it's likely Apple acted through legal obligation.

Only a partisan would go so far as to claim misdoing. And, in one case above, to just start making things up about the FreeBSD kernel.

That all being said, Stallman is making a value judgment about the overall balance of Apple's business position in recent years. So CUPS, WebKit, Mach, LLVM/Clang, OpenCL, etc are already factored into his conclusion. Apple's contributions to those projects don't 'disprove' him per se.

My take is that I don't agree with him because I think his world view is too simplistic. For example, if you look at what Apple's stance on Flash has done to the market overall, it's probably been positive. I don't suggest Apple had altruism in mind, simply that their acts have been to the community's benefit, possibly even despite their intentions. But Stallman doesn't seem able to distinguish between intent and effect. I also agree with the poster above that speaking out now, in these terms, is likely to be more of a hindrance than a benefit to his cause.

Oops...

...that'll teach me to do a bit more homework - honest mistake. Sorry, all.

That's a bit uncalled for...

With all due respect, Barry: it was an honest mistake on my part. I saw the Apple trademark/copyright note on the CUPS admin pages, and (naively?) took it at its word. I haven't had time to delve into the details of CUPS' history, but now I've received a good solid downvoting on here, I think I ought to...

And by the way: I am not the kind of "Apple Kool-Aid drinker" you imply. Yes, I own one Mac, but I have never bought anything via iTunes (and hope I never will), and have avoided buying any iProducts precisely because of the "walled garden"/iTunes dependency issue.

I'll hold my hands up and admit where I've FAILed on the research front (as here), but I don't think I deserved being painted as some zombified Apple fanboi for it...

@Ben: I'm not even sure it was the mistake people are making out

CUPS was first released in 1999. It was incorporated into OS X in 2002, at which point Apple's contributions started. In 2007 Apple hired the main developer and purchased the code, yet the contributions continue.

So Apple have been contributing for 75% of its public life. They've owned it for 33% but have continued to publish.

The GPL, and all other licences, affect what you can do with code you acquire under that licence. As a general rule, they don't bind the original author. Since Apple bought the code, they've acquired it other than under GPL and aren't required to continue to keep it open source. It's almost certain they don't own the whole thing (as it's very likely that at least one third party contributed something under the GPL and didn't subsequently sell that to Apple), but they've continued to release what they own which is most probably a very significant portion.

So the conclusion that Apple sponsor CUPS, and own a portion of it that they release even though they don't have to is correct and is in their favour. Any assertion that because Apple bought it or because it already existed they haven't contributed anything is just plain false on the facts.

Of course, it's still a question of an overall assessment. If I found out that Stalin was always very good at gardening I wouldn't therefore conclude that he was a really nice guy.

How Rude!

> What 99.99999% of open source projects give us is what the author wants to see, and screw you if you don't like it; write your own and give that away for free you ungrateful loser. They will _never_ get the point of a user interface; they will _never_ 'get' the idea that other people view things differently to them; and they will _never_ value a UI specialist on the team.

What an incredibly offensive thing to say. It may be true that some open source is not user-friendly. I've seen more commercial software like this than I could possibly remember.

Your comparison is like saying "poor have no morals", "rich never steal", etc. The nature of the work (open source or commercial) is not correlated to the "user-friendliness".

You're saying that the only good programmer is the one that requires money to code. You are saying that a passionate programmer wanting to give something to the world out of love couldn't possibly have an appreciation of the beneficiaries of his work.

You should be slapped and slapped and slapped again. And then forbidden from technology.