Well, I can promise you, I don't use either version of your program.

I'd be interested to hear you address the point brought up earlier: if houses could be cloned for free, people would start 'pirating' houses. Carpenters could start complaining how they ought to get paid, because they built that house. They should get paid any time a person sleeps in it (or any copy of it)! Would that be 'fair'? Should the government then stamp out housing piracy?

Your business has changed. So has publishing, and media creation, and others. I feel for you, but I'm not going to support your efforts to fix your current business model in place. As far as I'm concerned, creation of software and support thereof is a valuable service, and it'll continue to be lucrative. Ownership of ('the rights to') said software, after it's finished, is as valuable as...well, you can even do the equation: (difficulty of making a copy + fear of punishment + guilt). That pool is drying up.

The big number thing...if you don't own that, what exactly do you own? I kind of agree that a number can be many different thing...that just highlights the difficulty of claiming ownership of one. So, you'd rather claim ownership of the 'idea' or something...

See, exactly, and there's your problem. The cost of any person from making a copy is effectively $0. How can you fight that? With laws (i.e. government enforcement), or....?

....Or you could come up with a business plan that works, and doesn't rely on government enforcement.

I manage to get by without a single piece of "professional software"...in fact, I thrive without it, and do my best to avoid having to deal with or support it.

I think you missed his point about the 1's and 0's. It's not that they're easy to put together a certain way; but ownership of what amounts to one big number is hard to support. Maybe you should get paid for organizing them (so to speak) instead of claiming ownership after the fact.

Here's what's going on: in every universe that the LHC works, the earth immediately disappears in a giant black hole, so, by the entropic principle, we must always be in one of the failures. The project will be plagued with failure until they give up! It's proof positive that we live in a multiverse!

Re: NVidia's drivers:

Maybe people shouldn't complain too much about the code not being open enough (though it sucks that I'm stuck with a crappy little Intel, since that's the only really functional driver available in Linux).

But what I remember from that argument was people bitching about the kernel devs not putting the driver in the kernel. There are very good reasons not to do that. Trying to support somebody else's buggy binary code sucks terribly; and the NVidia drivers sure were buggy. Multiply that by the number of drivers in the kernel (because really, who'd open the source if they didn't have to?), and you'd end up with a nightmare. They made the right--and only reasonable--decision.

It seems to me that a lot of Stallman's perceived zealotry comes from the way people see him. He seems like a zealot because...well, he's seen as a zealot.

From TFA:

He's saying, "Hey, look, guys, less copyright is great, but if you think about it, GNU is copyright! And, closed developers wouldn't have to release their source, so we lose both ways! We ought to think about that."

And he's right. Good point, Stallman. I don't think that's crazy at all; that effect of a 5-year limit did not occur to me until now.

He has been a bit crazy at times, and you're right in saying he does kinda claim his list of restrictions is the Only True list. Still, that's a nice counterbalance to the corporate worldview; they also claim that their list of restrictions is the only acceptable one. Anyway, if you RTFA, he says he'd be happy with GPL software going into the public domain after five years...if closed software did the same, source-code and all.

I'm not sure that's a great idea, and anyway it'll never happen, but still...thought-provoking, and not at all nuts. I get a little sick of the off-the-cuff freakouts whenever Stallman's name is mentioned. If he's wrong, either ignore him or argue the points, and avoid the ad hominem attacks.

But he said it would reduce errors, not increase speed...

Kneejerk much?

I've got to say it:

There you go, you've got your damn jobs back!

(In reference to the prevalent attitude that companies ought not to hire 'foreign labour', they should only hire Americans. Well, ha!)

Well, as Balmer has been known to say, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...


(And now a little something to get through the filter...c'mon, it's just not funny in lower-case.)

Well, first, "conservative" in the US doesn't seem to mean what it did before. It's not about taxation and political freedoms, it's about religion, moral righteousness, 'security', etc. I think the GP likely just meant that no position that is not extreme is allowed. I think you're being a little touchy. It's hard to object you you libertarians (or old-school liberals) these days; you're such a minority.

Second, the USA wasn't founded on avoiding taxes, it was founded on avoiding unfair taxes without representation. There's a big difference. "No citizen will be required to pay tax" appears nowhere in the declaration.

No, I'd prefer my cities designed by bored, unionized salarymen.

I've been on Intel ever since, and it's been rock solid. I don't to much 3d gaming, but Intel cards aren't any good for that anyway.

My desktop (Ubuntu, with compiz) is great looking, smooth, solid, and in the last year or so, I haven't had any problem whatsoever with the drivers. That's much better than having to remember to manually upgrade the NVidia drivers every time the kernel updated, or fiddle with X configuration parameters to try to get XV working with ATI. A couple years ago, I spent hours and hours (and hours) tweaking and fooling with video drivers, and I had scripts to reboot the computer in different modes in order to play games or watch videos.

Intel's open source drivers are great. If I can get that, and good OpenGL performance too... Well, I'm biding my time before buying an ATI. For now, I just want a working desktop.

(And the OS drivers for ATI cards has gotten noticeably better since they released the docs a year ago)

So, yeah, it's not a cure-all, and the drivers don't write themselves. But somebody, somewhere is doing some coding.

Well, he's making exactly the opposite point. You should maybe read it first. You're free to disagree, of course, but you should at least know what you're disagreeing with.

His point is that the ability to interact with notifications means that you have to decide, in the two or three seconds that the notification is on-screen, whether or not you want to interact with it. That's distracting, which makes notifications annoying.

Personally, I'm with him. I hate it when I try to switch desktops, close a window, open my IM client, or whatever, and a notification pops up to block my click (or catch it and do something unexpected).

Sometimes, I'm sitting around browsing Slashdot. If a new email arrives, I want to get to it immediately.

Other times, I'm working, and the damn email can wait. I'd rather just ignore it.

The point he's making is that, if the notification is clickable, then I suddenly have to decide what to do in the three seconds that the notification is onscreen. I experience a little mini-panic when one pops up. Then, whether I'm working or not, I lose my train of thought.

If the notification is non-interactive, I can safely ignore it. If I am just browsing the news, I can read it and react appropriately. If I'm working, I just zone it out.

I'm hoping that if my status is 'busy', the notifications won't even show up, or at least most of them won't.

Yes, but, as he says in the blog, that could be handled differently.

When I have notifications on in Pidgin, I have to disable most of them. Otherwise, people signing on, signing off, messaging me, etc, generate almost constant dings and pop-ups. I especially like the semi-transparent click-through-ability of the notifications on display. I hate it when I'm about to click 'close' (or on another desktop), and a popup appears at the last second, causing something entirely unexpected to occur.

I'm in favour!

Yeah, it's been around for twenty (well, 17) years. And it's a hell of a lot better than it was at the beginning.

With the newer versions of Ubuntu...it's really not that far behind, in terms of usability. In fact, in a lot of ways (apt-get, or "Package Manager") it's way, way ahead.

I don't buy that it's not ready for Joe Sixpack. It's been ready for years now. He's just stuck on Windows for the time being. If you gave a Ubuntu machine to a Joe Sixpack who'd never used Windows before, he'd do just fine.