5 ms·

Sorry, but I don't think you get it. To use your car analogy. The analogy would be correct if the only way to legally service your car would be to use the dea

by zach95 14y ago

Sorry, but I don't think you get it. To use your car analogy. The analogy would be correct if the only way to legally service your car would be to use the dealership's mechanic. Any attempt by you to rebuild your engine or use after-market parts would be illegal. Forget about improving your car in any way. That's illegal too. No new car stereo for you unless you upgrade to a whole new car. Most people are fine with this because they know nothing about cars, and only care if they work. You hear them saying "as long as I get to drive it, I don't care. I have better things to do than service my own car." But the restrictions go deeper. You aren't allowed to operate the cars the way you want. It's a huge revenue stream for the car companies to place restrictions on how you use your car. Want to drive somewhere new? Apply to the company and wait for them to hear back. You're not a big customer so you speak to someone in India and the wait is 6 months. Most applications are bungled and you have to resubmit it repeatedly. Still people don't complain saying "most of the places I need to drive are allowed by the car company. Only very strange and extremist people want to drive to some place new." Now suppose you want to lend your car to a friend. You can't, unless they pay a hefty sum to the car company for an "additional driver license." The standard license allows two adults as drivers and up to two passengers, but if you want to carry more passengers, there's a fee for that too. Some people grumble, but they've been taught since an early age that sharing your car or giving unauthorized people rides is immoral. Lots of people don't obey these laws, and there is a huge media campaign to call them "car Pirates" and an illegal movement called "hackers" who want to fix their own cars when they break, and add new features or drive to new places. They are often sued and the media goes nuts deriding them, calling them wackos and extremists. When the car company goes bust and most of them do, you can continue to use the car for as long as it will run, but when anything breaks, you need to scrap the car and buy a new one with a different but equally incompetent company. This is the situation of proprietary software extended to cars.

robomartin 14y ago
The analogy was not intended to be strict. That is impossible. What you want, really, might be akin to the car company releasing the full design files of the car to you when you buy the car. What's the difference between source code for software and source code (the design) for making a car or a refrigerator these days. I fire-up Solidworks and can design a car. I fire-up various compilers and write the embedded code that runs the engine control systems, etc. To create Linux, PHP or any piece of software you have teams of programmers in front of computers typing away. The case is the same for designing a car or a microwave oven. Are you suggesting that Samsung should grant you the ability to download all the design files for that $69 microwave you bought at Walmart? Probably not. Why not? It's the same thing. I have spent years designing products that combine hardware and software. I've done it all in front of a computer. Exactly as I do when I code a website or an iPhone app. No difference. So, then, why treat them any different? Why aren't the proponents of free/freedom also not buying cars or supporting microwave oven makers than don't release their design files. Ridiculous you say? So be it. It may very well be that it is not I who isn't getting it. My world is complete and equitable because I understand, like, support and promote that BOTH points of view are part of a symbiotic relationship. You cannot have free/freedom without paid/closed. Period. I noticed that you neglected to mention my observations about you bringing up that MS was the largest contributor to the Linux kernel last year. You, with that, made my point with absolute precision: The largest contributor to Linux last year could afford to do so because they earn a revenue stream from another paid activity. And, in this case, it happens to be paid/closed software. Again, I propose that the extremist view that ALL software ought to be free or free+freedom is simply not realistic and actually counterproductive. What do you think would happen if someone like RMS came out and said something like: "I've decided to start supporting MS products because they enable MS to make significant and valuable contributions to the FOSS software community" I'd bet you a good cup of coffee that you'd see a huge boost in the amount of FOSS work coming out of MS and others. If you look at what RMS represents you can't help but cringe. He's actually proud of working with a piece of crap computer that is probably a decade behind the times. In his world the millions of people that have gained and continue to enjoy employment due to the evolution and improvements of paid/closed platforms and software would not have jobs. It's a joke. I come from the vantage point of having designed and built my own computers down to the chip level. Having literally wire-wrapped my own boards. Designed my own disk controller cards and written my own OS and applications. So, I'll say that I have some skin in the game. And, yes, I know that a 1GHz machine with very lean software can do quite a bit. I was running AutoCAD on a CP/M system with 64K of RAM and a two-card math co-processor and RAM disk with 640K of memory. And I did a lot of good work with that. But, you know, today, I gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for licenses to programs such as SolidWorks and Altium Designer to get my work done. They are amazing and do a great job. They represent a tremendous amount of R&D and expertise in the field. And, no, I don't care to have the source code and don't really give a shit if they don't want to release it. It's their product and they should be entitled to do with it as they please. My annual license fees get me continued and consistent improvement and support. We might want to agree to disagree at this point.
- zach95 14y ago
  I have no problem with agreeing to disagree, but it's clear you just aren't understanding the word "freedom." So you think you disagree, while I understand what you are saying and can see clearly you just don't understand. I don't think I can disagree with you under these circumstances. To get you to think more carefully, as a computer engineer can you tell me the difference between a computer and a microwave oven or a car as finite state machines? Which regular languages does a computer accept that a car does not? Also, can you tell me the the difference between software and the licensing of the software? I think getting clear on those two questions will go along way towards clearing up your confusion. You might also think about how RedHat recently made a billion dollars.

by zach95 14y ago

robomartin 14y ago

The analogy was not intended to be strict. That is impossible. What you want, really, might be akin to the car company releasing the full design files of the car to you when you buy the car. What's the difference between source code for software and source code (the design) for making a car or a refrigerator these days. I fire-up Solidworks and can design a car. I fire-up various compilers and write the embedded code that runs the engine control systems, etc. To create Linux, PHP or any piece of software you have teams of programmers in front of computers typing away. The case is the same for designing a car or a microwave oven. Are you suggesting that Samsung should grant you the ability to download all the design files for that $69 microwave you bought at Walmart? Probably not. Why not? It's the same thing. I have spent years designing products that combine hardware and software. I've done it all in front of a computer. Exactly as I do when I code a website or an iPhone app. No difference. So, then, why treat them any different? Why aren't the proponents of free/freedom also not buying cars or supporting microwave oven makers than don't release their design files. Ridiculous you say? So be it. It may very well be that it is not I who isn't getting it. My world is complete and equitable because I understand, like, support and promote that BOTH points of view are part of a symbiotic relationship. You cannot have free/freedom without paid/closed. Period. I noticed that you neglected to mention my observations about you bringing up that MS was the largest contributor to the Linux kernel last year. You, with that, made my point with absolute precision: The largest contributor to Linux last year could afford to do so because they earn a revenue stream from another paid activity. And, in this case, it happens to be paid/closed software. Again, I propose that the extremist view that ALL software ought to be free or free+freedom is simply not realistic and actually counterproductive. What do you think would happen if someone like RMS came out and said something like: "I've decided to start supporting MS products because they enable MS to make significant and valuable contributions to the FOSS software community" I'd bet you a good cup of coffee that you'd see a huge boost in the amount of FOSS work coming out of MS and others. If you look at what RMS represents you can't help but cringe. He's actually proud of working with a piece of crap computer that is probably a decade behind the times. In his world the millions of people that have gained and continue to enjoy employment due to the evolution and improvements of paid/closed platforms and software would not have jobs. It's a joke. I come from the vantage point of having designed and built my own computers down to the chip level. Having literally wire-wrapped my own boards. Designed my own disk controller cards and written my own OS and applications. So, I'll say that I have some skin in the game. And, yes, I know that a 1GHz machine with very lean software can do quite a bit. I was running AutoCAD on a CP/M system with 64K of RAM and a two-card math co-processor and RAM disk with 640K of memory. And I did a lot of good work with that. But, you know, today, I gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for licenses to programs such as SolidWorks and Altium Designer to get my work done. They are amazing and do a great job. They represent a tremendous amount of R&D and expertise in the field. And, no, I don't care to have the source code and don't really give a shit if they don't want to release it. It's their product and they should be entitled to do with it as they please. My annual license fees get me continued and consistent improvement and support. We might want to agree to disagree at this point.

zach95 14y ago
I have no problem with agreeing to disagree, but it's clear you just aren't understanding the word "freedom." So you think you disagree, while I understand what you are saying and can see clearly you just don't understand. I don't think I can disagree with you under these circumstances. To get you to think more carefully, as a computer engineer can you tell me the difference between a computer and a microwave oven or a car as finite state machines? Which regular languages does a computer accept that a car does not? Also, can you tell me the the difference between software and the licensing of the software? I think getting clear on those two questions will go along way towards clearing up your confusion. You might also think about how RedHat recently made a billion dollars.