On Thursday 17 November 2005 2:21 pm, Per Jessen wrote:

There will always be more or less specialist applications for which the OSS model doesn't work or doesn't pay.

Income tax programs are a good example. There will never be an open-source version of them because they need a major update every year to keep up with the tax code, and authors understandably aren't willing to donate the immense amount of labor needed for that. Paul

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Thursday 2005-11-17 at 16:29 -0500, Nick Zentena wrote:

It's not the update I think. They all need to be approved by the tax body. They all need a fair bit of insurance in case something gets screwed up.

It looks like the Italian government produces it's own tax program. Outside of keeping the software companies happy I don't know why the various governments don't do the same.

In Spain too. The goverment provides programs for tax return, and some other things. The snag is that it is for windows only, but I heard of a company that makes one for linux. It seems that even if the goverment gives the program gratis, there is a small market for making other versions. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDfRTqtTMYHG2NR9URAh7tAJ9UGs9/ZBug22DrHGeXN1N1a3MEbwCggyzz hk3c+q8hOkSPmJpx+Xhs62w= =uWco -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Saturday 19 November 2005 04:48, Jos van Kan wrote:

In the Netherlands the tax form program has been MS Windows only for as long as I care to remember. But last year it would run on wine except for the very final stage where the electronic signature didn't fit into the input box! :-) Oh, well. But rumor has it that they will have versions for Mac and Linux users next year.

IIRC the Italian one was java based. But even then they managed to have problems. Nick

On Saturday 19 November 2005 16:25, James Knott wrote:

Nick Zentena wrote:

...

IIRC the Italian one was java based. But even then they managed to have problems.

Java or Espresso? ;-)

I think they forced you to download the Microsoft java. So I'd say American -) Nick

On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Jos van Kan wrote:

In the Netherlands the tax form program has been MS Windows only for as long as I care to remember. But last year it would run on wine except for the very final stage where the electronic signature didn't fit into the input box! :-) Oh, well. But rumor has it that they will have versions for Mac and Linux users next year.

The Linux version was published for test in a small test group. Off course a lot of comments/remarks were given, I hope they continue to make a version available. If I'm not mistaken you can get specifications the application has to fulfill, so if you want to create a boring piece of software that is used a lot you can step up. Remember that you need to update it every year.

In eager anticipation,

Best regards from the Netherlands, Aschwin Marsman -- aschwin@marsman.org http://www.marsman.org

On Thursday 17 November 2005 02:35 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:

Steven,

On Thursday 17 November 2005 10:53, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

...

...

Personally, I don't mind paying Wolfram Research to produce a powerful product, and feed a handful of talented Mathematicians. The value WRI returns to the world is far in excess of the money paid for their products.

Wolfram (the man) is an egotistical

I have that impression. I don't believe his contributions to science are quite as unique as he would like to believe. He should certainly tip his hat to Douglas R. Hofstadter. Nonetheless, Mathematica is an amazing product. I really don't know if any of the other computer algebra systems are anything like it. He has full room to be proud of his accomplishments.

tyrant who mistreats, abuses and exploits the programmers and mathematicians he hires.

I'm composing an email right now to one of his programmer/mathematicians. I'm not about to ask for a comment on that subject, but I believe the man is fairly happy to be working for Wolfram (both the company, and the man).

Switch to an alternative. Putting money in his pocket is far worse than feeding Billy boy or any of his hired guns.

Can you provide substance to this accusation? All human beings have faults. One, or even a few episodes of bad behavior do not a tyrant make. I may be knocking on his door soon. WRI have been very generous to me in the past, and I have no reason to complain about their business practices.

...

What do others think about the place of closed source, proprietary software running on Linux?

There's nothing wrong with it (not all classes of software have economics that will support open source, though I'm not claiming that's the case for symbolic and / or numeric mathematics packages).

There are FOSS products in these fields. I haven't seen a "Mathematica" among them.

But as with all commercial endeavors, you should consider precisely what and whom you're supporting by patronizing any particular business.

I do consider such things.

By the way, the same goes for Novell, of course. So far, I'm happy to support them, but it's by no means any kind of unconditional love thing.

I assume you have concluded that I share your postion on this. I have no reason to complain about my dealings with Novell over the years. That is, until they took a swipe at the KDE. I'm dead serious when I say that much of my reason for supporting the KDE for the past 7 years (IIRC) is a direct result of my experience with Novell products in the Windows NT environment. When I saw that Novell execs were double talking about remaining behind KDE development, well... Steven

On Thursday 17 November 2005 03:36 pm, Geza Giedke wrote:

On 11/17/05, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

...

Can you provide substance to this accusation? All human beings have faults. One, or even a few episodes of bad behavior do not a tyrant make. I may be knocking on his door soon.

not that I'd want to subscribe to OP's characterization, but the epsiode of a related in the following review of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (treatment by the author of one of his students, who, it seems, proved the most important theorem in ANKoS) is (to say the least) not nice.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ (The review is worth reading, too, IMHO)

There seem to be a good number of allegations in the review which are unsubstantiated. I don't know the details of Cook's work. Nor do I know anything about the law suit. It may be the case that Wolfram was more concerned with protecting the marketability of Mathematica than his own glory. I find the notion that a person could hold a patten on a theorem in mathematics pattenly absurd. I have ANKoS, and have read some of the introductory material, as well as thumbed through it. I agree that he has a large estimation of the importance of his own work. I suspect there is much of worth in the book, even if there is less there that is original than he contends there to be. The author of the review has certainly ground an axe with Wolfram's name on it for some time. I find the title of the review "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" indicative of the seriousness with which I should take it's allegations. Steven

On Thursday 17 November 2005 06:17 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:

Wolfram has as much right to be personally proud of Mathematica as Bill Gates has to be personally proud of Windows. In both cases, they're managers or executives, not technical contributors (at least not for a long time, now), so in my book, pride of accomplishment is not warranted.

I believe what Wolfram originally contributed to Mathematica is still essential to what it does today. The same cannot be said of the technology Gates contributed to Windows NT.

This makes me curious about who you are or represent,

I'm just a reformed juvenile delinquent who gave up drugs for math, computers and physics.

what has been the nature of Wolfram Research's largesse towards you and / or your organization and why it was granted.

I purchased an upgrade to Mathematica a couple days before the next version was released. They let me get the second $250 upgrade for free. There have been other cases where they have been pleasant to do business with. I will say they have, in the past, been overly proud of their Motif GUI. There was a time when that pride was justified, but the GUI is now among the worst I use. That, however, is merely a wrapper around the improtant stuff. Furthermore, they are now in the process of redesigning it, or so they claim. I believe the Notebook interface can also be improved upon, and have provided significant feedback in that area. But, as it stands today, with all it's clunkyness, it is a very powerful tool.

...

I assume you have concluded that I share your postion on this. I have no reason to complain about my dealings with Novell over the years. That is, until they took a swipe at the KDE. I'm dead serious when I say that much of my reason for supporting the KDE for the past 7 years (IIRC) is a direct result of my experience with Novell products in the Windows NT environment. When I saw that Novell execs were double talking about remaining behind KDE development, well...

I don't know why you'd assume that. I cannot and do not pretend to know how you feel about Novell,

I thought that would be clear from the discussions regarding the KDE, and the fact that I have advocated supporting them, and trying to do what we can to improve their cash flow so that they aren't forced to cut people, and/or projects. Steven

On 18-Nov-05 Randall R Schulz wrote:

Steven,

On Thursday 17 November 2005 15:53, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

...

...

...

This makes me curious about who you are or represent,

I'm just a reformed juvenile delinquent who gave up drugs for math, computers and physics.

Yeah, I suppose there's a lot of that going around... I hope math tickles your brain in a suitably pleasant manner.

A mathematician called Hind Had erogenous zones in his mind. He *enjoyed* the sensations Of solving equations (Of course, in the end he went blind). -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Nov-05 Time: 01:43:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

Just to answer in the context of the subject. I feel that in some cases, a commercial, closed-source product is fine. I would not mind paying for a GOOD product. Some products are the result of a sizable investment in manpower as well as financial resources. Some companies have a mixed model where they have both an OpenSource, free product and a commercial version of that. Trolltech's QT is one that comes to mind. Adobe is primarily closed source, even for their freely available products. I see nothing wrong with a company, like Adobe making their product line available on Linux. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 08:26 -0200, Jose Thadeu Cavalcante wrote:

On Friday 18 November 2005 07:55, Albert wrote:

...

The big problem, I think, is that there is a stigma around Linux that everything should be free and the other that OSS is free.

Because of this, there are some companies who tried there hand at the Linux market and failed. Examples of these are Corel Wordperfect and Borland Kylix. Yes both had design faults (like the Borland Kylix IDE requires a specific version of Wine to run which doesn't work on the newer Kernels but the compiler doesn't). Had these been open source products, someone out there would have been able to fix the problems in these products after they were abandoned by their makers.

Albert

I started to use Linux because Borland launch Kylix in 2000, I was programming in Delphi when use Windows. I purchase all versions 1, 2 and 3, but Borland stoped to update kylix and I love too much Linux that it was impossible to return to Windows. Then I go to C++ and KDevelop, I missing something of Delphi/Kylix, but the bugs of KDevelop is corrected by the community, on the other side Borland simply abandon your users, and in my opinion this is a great problem of closed/proprietary software, there is no compromise with the users.

It has been proposed that all corporate abandonware be made open source so that companies will either support or disclose. I like this concept as it would solve many problems by providing users or companies incentive to maintain good programs. Even on open source there is a process of natural selection for quality. IMHO it may be the purest form of capitolism in that no government or corporation can own it to the exclusion of all others and the innovations they bring to the table. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2005-11-19 at 16:20 -0500, James Knott wrote:

While it may have been proposed, it is still up to the author, whether they want to release it or not, as it should be. You cannot unilaterally take someone's work, "abandoned" or not and declare it open.

Except if it is maken a law. Users of a program abandoned by the company might them claim protection, ie, forced disclosure of the code. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDgNhVtTMYHG2NR9URAjdEAJ9VJVanBu1P5kFtpgKBEo/pxeUKpQCfX4yE XUqPK8/ouxXE2J49DmHwNw0= =4fiD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2005-11-20 at 21:03 -0500, James Knott wrote:

...

Except if it is maken a law. Users of a program abandoned by the company might them claim protection, ie, forced disclosure of the code.

That's called expropriation. How'd you feel, if the govermnent decided to take some of your land, because you weren't doing anything with it?

No, that's not the same. It is as if I'm making "cars", and at some point I'm out of business, or now I make planes. After some time, the patent for "cars" expires, and anybody can make "cars". My goverment, by the way, was thinking of expropiating houses if not in use...

As much as I support open source software, doing what you propose still amounts to theft of someone's property and is extremely offensive.

A law can take into account such things, including payment for the expropriated land as seen fit. I'm not proposing theft. Another example. Suppose that all documents were done in "wordfine". At sometime, that company dies, or refuses to maintain that software. A lot of documentation could be inaccessible, and the damage to the public would be great. It could be contended that in the public interest the "wordfine" code be expropriated. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDgczetTMYHG2NR9URAqAUAKCDLkRoQIVg4HsQhy57QVGiqttTagCgiSrp WwMX2443ZZ/+Qvt1InbJ64c= =gciJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Carlos E. R. wrote:

A law can take into account such things, including payment for the expropriated land as seen fit. I'm not proposing theft.

Whatever the law, it must always be the authors decision, as to the dispostion of the software. If I write something, you have no right to demand that I release it, under *ANY* circumstances.

Bruce Marshall wrote:

On Monday 21 November 2005 08:21 pm, James Knott wrote:

...

Carlos E. R. wrote:

...

A law can take into account such things, including payment for the expropriated land as seen fit. I'm not proposing theft. Whatever the law, it must always be the authors decision, as to the dispostion of the software. If I write something, you have no right to demand that I release it, under *ANY* circumstance

Agreed. But if you are trying to sell it to me for profit, I would be wise to put in a clause "should said James Knott go belly up in a drunken fit and sent to the poor house, he agrees that I shall be allowed to have access to the source for purchased software under <given set of restrictions>.."

If I don't do that, I am at your mercy should you close up shop.

What's included in a contract is completely different from unilaterally taking, long after the fact. In one, the author agrees to the terms, including open source etc. In the other he doesn't even get the chance. Again, if I as an author decide that the source be locked away and never revealed, then that is my right. Please note, that I'm not ruling out the possibility of some extenuating circumstances that may force the issue, but as a general rule, the author's decision should be final.

On Monday 21 November 2005 22:38, Carlos E. R. wrote:

Maybe yes, maybe not. If the law (mind, no such law exists yet as far as I know) decides not to take into account such things as author wishes/rights on behalf of the society needs, it wouldn't matter what the author thought/thinks.

I think this is all quite hypothetical. Given the nature of law, absolutely anything is *possible* - it just needs enough judges laying down enough precedents and a failure of challenges to it for something to become law. AFAIK, you can't currently force an author to make their work public, and should that be true that's all that matters right now. The example of the company having endless critical docs in a proprietary format really just says two things: it's a good lesson for a company nowadays to be using an open format, and there's a market for programmers that can reverse-engineer file formats. J.C. -- John Coldrick www.axyzfx.com Axyz Animation 416-504-0425 425 Adelaide St W Toronto, ON Canada jc@axyzfx.com M5V 1S4 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The world's as ugly as sin, And almost as delightful -- Frederick Locker-Lampson

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 10:27 -0600, Richard Atcheson wrote:

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 08:06 am, John Coldrick wrote:

...

AFAIK, you can't currently force an author to make their work public, and should that be true that's all that matters right now.

Did you ever hear of expiration of copyright? Use to be short term now is life of author +70 yrs or so. Created by Congress and can be uncreated if necessary. What the king giveth he can take away anytime he wants.

Problem is the Congress is owned by the big (wealthy) boys so we're screwed!

I was thinking about this yesterday. It seems equitable that if a company folds, that after a given time (say two years) that it's intellectual property isn't purchased and maintained, that said property would revert to the public domain, which would allow those using the software to benefit, and those supporting the software to benefit.

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 14:09, Carlos E. R. wrote:

There are precedents: the copyrights do expire, classical music, for instance.

Sorry, I still don't think this applies to source code! You cannot pry source code from a programmer's hand(assuming they own it) in the name of public domain! I don't care how old it is. If it's locked up somewhere, it's private property. Music is a completely different beast - it's not "compiled" - if it's played once in public...then it's out there - anyone with a good ear can copy it. The copyright is designed to protect creative ability and does indeed expire. Again, I'm not counting special cases like national security, etc...we're talking about the right for me to claim that because "wordwrite" was written in 1980, I'm somehow entitled to get the source code. It just doesn't fly, IMHO. I think where this might become more relevant is if someone, out of need, reverse-engineers the format and embeds it in their software, and the original coders decide to sue, despite "wordwrite" having been mothballed years ago. That seems like a more likely exercise of this issue. Cheers, J.C. -- John Coldrick www.axyzfx.com Axyz Animation 416-504-0425 425 Adelaide St W Toronto, ON Canada jc@axyzfx.com M5V 1S4 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart. -- Howard Simons, "The Washington Post"

What usually happens when the GOV purchases proprietary software they deem important is, they insist you place a copy of the source in escrow somewhere so that in the case you cannot or will not support it any longer, they can get to the source and have a right to do so. If you don't agree to the escrow accnt, they do not buy it and go else where for a solution. If they buy it without an escrow agreement they are stuck and shit out of luck should you decide to go away. I'm speeking of the US GOV BTW. Mark