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#26 2004-06-15 03:14:57

kleptophobiac
Member
From: Sunnyvale, CA
Registered: 2004-04-25
Posts: 488

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

Changes that need to be made to arch/pacman:

1) Make going back in time (previous versions of packages) easier
2) Uhhh... uhhh..... uhhhh............ that's about it. tongue

Stuff to do:

1) More packages!! Gotta start sending more beer to the dev team. big_smile

Stuff not to do:

1) Add more default bloat / turn into fedora. heheheh.

Kudos to anyone that has made packages, or worked on the basic arch system. I appreciate your work, and hope to contribute myself to the community.... perhaps with packages in the future (when I get my bearings straight) or at least helping other people out. I can also brag that I have enlightened two other people to the glory of arch, and that word of mouth is spreading the joy. big_smile big_smile big_smile

Oh yeah, I don't give a crap about distrowatch.

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#27 2004-06-15 10:48:23

mcubednyc
Member
From: New York, NY USA
Registered: 2004-03-17
Posts: 120

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

contrasutra wrote:

As for the developers complaining about users, when you make a public distro, expect people to criticize it. If you really meant "I made this distro for myself", you would have only kept it for yourself!

This thread reminds me of the endlessly recurring themes regarding Xnews in news.software.readers.  Xnews is a Windows newsreader, the finest newsreader I've used and probably ever will use, but quirky, especially for a Windows app.  (Oh how I wish there was something even close on Linux!)  Luu Tran, the developer, doesn't just keep a low profile -- he's invisible.  He doesn't participate in the group or answer questions via any other method.  He is emphatic on the homepage about Xnews being something he wrote for himself.  The Xnews homepage refers people to n.s.r. for help, all of which is courtesy of other Xnews users.  Every time people are ready to declare it dead, an updated version appears, though it is never announced -- it just shows up.

So of course what comes up regularly is complaints from users who get frustrated because they can't figure it all out in 10 minutes, which get RTFM type replies, and the predictable flame wars.  And then there are the drive-by posts by people making feature requests, as if the developer is just hanging out at their beck & call.  But amidst that is a lot more people who are RTFMing and are getting much of it but not all of it, and are getting help, and helping others.  It seems to me that's the bulk of what goes on here as well.

The difference is there's no developer to irritate or to take anything personally, whether reasonably or unreasonably or as a result of some misunderstanding or poor word choice.  I really doubt he cares very much whether anyone else uses Xnews or not, and he won't open source it.  That's perhaps a luxury of closed-source development that's little remarked upon -- it's your own project, community be damned.


"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." - S. Jackson

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#28 2004-06-15 14:09:37

Zephirias
Member
From: Pennsylvania, USA
Registered: 2004-04-26
Posts: 179

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

Well, I don't know if anyone cares, but Arch is now at the #22 rank on DW, and is just below Aurox and Desktop L/X. Must've made a huge jump since yesterday, when it was around 25 or 26.


"Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention."

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#29 2004-06-15 15:33:33

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

mcubednyc wrote:

That's perhaps a luxury of closed-source development that's little remarked upon -- it's your own project, community be damned.

sure and the fact that you get money instead of beg for money. if one considers their time and mental energy worth preserving and profitting from then they should be allowed to do so. personally i would hate to work very hard on a novel, for example, or a research paper only to have the ideas and work taken and claimed by someone else - and that is whether for profit or not.

i know many linux people consider closed code evil but i don't i just view it the same way as research or literature. some may not like it but phooey to them. i admire people that become filthy rich from their own ideas. hell i would love it to be me and i am sure anyone would. once that kind of target is on your back lets see how protective you become.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#30 2004-06-15 15:55:27

Dusty
Schwag Merchant
From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
Registered: 2004-01-18
Posts: 5,986
Website

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

sarah31 wrote:

personally i would hate to work very hard on a novel, for example, or a research paper only to have the ideas and work taken and claimed by someone else

That's not what happens with open source though. You do the work and give it away so other people can use it, not so they can claim it. It's like if you wrote a recipe for the best cookies in the world. You could sell your cookies, or you could give the recipe away so lots of people could enjoy them. On top of that, somebody might realize that your recipe would be even better if they added raisins, so there is community improvement.

What if you wrote a novel and nobody ever read it?

i know many linux people consider closed code evil but i don't i just view it the same way as research or literature.

So do I. both of those things should be freely available too. It's not good for research to be hidden away; if more people could work on it, more progress would be made.

I'm having a little trouble on this cure for the common cold I'm working on, but if I published what I know so far, somebody else might be able to figure out what's wrong with it.

I'm also writing this great little novelette about a hacker who wanted to learn about fly-fishing.  I'm going to publish it for free so that more people can enjoy my story. It's no good to me after its written. It's the process of writing it that makes it worthwhile.

i admire people that become filthy rich from their own ideas.

It's those people that get filthy rich off of other people's ideas that you hate. wink

I admire people that could become filthy rich off their ideas but choose to give their work away "for the common good" instead.

Dusty

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#31 2004-06-15 16:30:38

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

well research, scientific research, is "open source" but those individuals whom created it or made a discovery with it are the ones that get all the credit as they well should. sometimes this means money but often all it means is an advancement of their field which they can lay claim to. the ones that often benefit financially out of science research are often the companies that make products off the initial research. which is allowed in all western society and in fact it is hardly evil. many companies output millions and billions of dollars to get the drugs or whatever to the shelf so that their consumers can benfit.

no one can claim that big business investment in research has not benfitted the world. even MS has been a boon for the computer industry. without windows the x86 platform would have been dead (whether the code was stolen or not does not really matter because as far as i am concerned computer people are unscrupulous and are always stealing code from each other for their own benefit. guising it in GPL hardly counters it.

i don't doubt that ots of big businesses basically rob their consumers but this up to government to temper this. regardless, copyrights, patents and other "protective" legislation is not for profit it is for giving credit and creative rights to the individual(s) whom thought it up.

it is easy for many of you to talk of this should be open and that should be free until  but until you are in the environment and realize that it is a tough world a very easy to be screwed of your chance that you realize why protective legislation exists. remember most of it was created not to guarantee financial well being but to credit hardworking individuals for what they put in.

most of science, entertainment and other targetted industries share most of their ideas and creations. most of us in the trenches are here for you not for ourselves. copyrights and whatever else is our guarantee that we are in control of our ideas not you.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#32 2004-06-15 18:07:20

Dusty
Schwag Merchant
From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
Registered: 2004-01-18
Posts: 5,986
Website

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

sarah31 wrote:

most of science, entertainment and other targetted industries share most of their ideas and creations. most of us in the trenches are here for you not for ourselves. copyrights and whatever else is our guarantee that we are in control of our ideas not you.

Hai, yes  copyrights are extremely important. I'm being absolutely certain to clamp one onto every file I write for work because I don't want them to go and close the source on me.

I'm not going to pretend I know much about the world. Getting credit for your work is extremely important in our society, and plagerism is a heinous crime. I'm not talking about stealing work or people losing credit for what they've done. I'm talking about giving the actual results away, not the credit.

The perscription drug field is a favourite both because it is corrupt and because it has billions of dollars. You already described what happens; people do research into new drugs mostly because they are interested in helping humanity. A big company is funding that research. When the new drug is finished, the company, not the researcher claims the copyright for the drug. They make billions off it by charging outrageous prices.

The world would be better if the well-meaning researcher could give the drug's makeup away for anybody to duplicate. The one that does it most efficiently would be able to charge the least and the consumer wouldn't get screwed.

The way things are the researcher and the consumer get screwed.

People will argue that the big company would not have funded the research if they didn't stand to make a killing off it, but that is a flaw in the economic system. If that researcher wants to be working on that particular drug problem, its fundamentally flawed if the only way he can afford to do the research is to sell his soul to some big pharmecutical.

I take a drug every day that totally alleviates the symptoms of hay fever that used to make me incapable. I don't know who invented it. The researchers that worked out that terrific formula are not getting any credit for it.

Trying to protect the person that developed some sort of information (that is, the copyright) is extremely important.  Trying to protect the information itself, trying to keep it from the general public is a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong, I've argued the other side too. I just love to argue, and its no fun taking your side all the time.

Dusty

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#33 2004-06-15 20:09:41

xerxes2
Member
From: Malmoe, Sweden
Registered: 2004-04-23
Posts: 1,249
Website

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

You make me cry Dusty..  :cry:
of happiness. big_smile  big_smile 

I personally want the current software monopoly to go away and never come back. All things MS does have an idea to force users into endless' upgrades of crappy software. Have they done one thing ever that were going into a direction of open standards? Besides this they have killed almost all other mainstream desktop software companys. I think that 90% of their staff are working at sales and legal stuff.

Platforms should be GPL or/and open.

Think of a world there one company owned these things:
W3C stuff,C, C++, Python, GTK and so on. Bad bad world. 

Thank god the dark ages are over. big_smile

ps: I just read that Bergen, a norwegian city, is moving there health and education departments from MS to SUSE. The revolution has only begun. wink


arch + gentoo + initng + python = enlisy

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#34 2004-06-16 16:58:00

mcubednyc
Member
From: New York, NY USA
Registered: 2004-03-17
Posts: 120

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

sarah31 wrote:
mcubednyc wrote:

That's perhaps a luxury of closed-source development that's little remarked upon -- it's your own project, community be damned.

sure and the fact that you get money instead of beg for money.

You might be able to get money if you charge, but I was thinking actually of freeware (Xnews, for example, is freeware).  There's a ton of closed-source freeware for Windows and sometimes, particularly with more popular programs, users and other developers ask why doesn't the developer open-source them.  Wherever I have seen developers answer this question explicitly, it seems almost always to come down to control.  They simply don't want to deal with collaborators.  That's not to say they don't necessarily solicit or welcome suggestions from anyone, but there seems to be an implied difference in how obligated they are to listen to those suggestions.

Maybe I'm mischaracterizing the situation, but it seems to me that open-source development does imply a willingness to collaborate, and perhaps you could say it imposes a certain obligation to collaborate.  It doesn't mean you can't be discriminating about whom you collaborate with, nor that you have to give any and all user suggestions equal weight or can't simply dismiss suggestions you don't like out-of-hand.  But still, there is something more implied by "open" than just redistributable source code.

To get back to contrasutra's comment, I just don't think anyone releases a Linux distro that he really only made for himself, whereas I do think some people release closed-source apps that they really made only for themselves, with the attitude that "this is what it is, this is what it does, if you like it great, if not don't bother me."

dusty wrote:

It's not good for research to be hidden away; if more people could work on it, more progress would be made.

As with any truism, you usually need to be mindful of the other side of the coin ... in this case, something like "too many cooks spoil the soup."   wink

sarah31 wrote:

i don't doubt that ots of big businesses basically rob their consumers but this up to government to temper this. regardless, copyrights, patents and other "protective" legislation is not for profit it is for giving credit and creative rights to the individual(s) whom thought it up.

HA!  That's a good one ... tell me another!  It stopped being that a long time ago, it's little more than a protectionist racket bought and paid for by entrenched interests with the aims of monopolizing markets and subverting fair and open competition.  Furthermore, it's becoming outmoded as a mechanism even for doing that.  Copyright was conceived under circumstances whereby the means of copying were beyond most people; it only functions effectively under those circumstances, and those circumstances are changing rapidly.   Bah to copyright in its present form ... it'll be replaced eventually (and, probably, gradually) with mechanisms than make more sense and function more effectively in a digital age -- possibly even with mechanisms that actually do reward creators and inventors, as copyright was meant to do.  Wouldn't that be novel?!


"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." - S. Jackson

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#35 2004-06-16 20:18:06

Zephirias
Member
From: Pennsylvania, USA
Registered: 2004-04-26
Posts: 179

Re: Let's help move Arch up the ranking at Distrowatch!

It's at number 21 right now, 4 votes from top 20... smile


"Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention."

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