ɔimoɈɒ

“If you don’t like what they did to you within the terms of your license, choose a different one next time. Thanks, I will. If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, then a GPL advocate is a BSD advocate who has had their code used against them. This is not to say that everything should be GPL-licensed. But don’t come crying to me when you get mugged.

What surprises me most about Open Source advocates is how they can vanish up their own arseholes with the flick of a keyboard.

Sorry to say but the people involved are the #1 reason why I don’t hang with the Free Software crowd. These are the folk who have attempted to hijack and trademark the word ‘free’ to mean something it shouldn’t. Free means free. You can do anything you like with it. Qualifying it to mean ‘liberty’ while demanding that others comply with your vision of ‘free’ isn’t actually freedom.

When developing any sort of content, code or otherwise, you decide what license you intend to use. For a lot of small development houses, this is the commercial download or shareware route because the setup costs are relatively low and the returns can be quite good. If you’re at a slightly later stage and have a few million dollars of someone else’s money then you have some different choices to make (and god help your eternal soul).

If you decide to go with a ‘free’ license then you are spoiled for choice. My personal preference is the BSD license. My reasoning – if you have written some code and want to release it for free, then release it for free. Do not make demands of others in how they use it. Don’t demand access to their code. That’s not the spirit. If you’re giving it away for free under the BSD license, then just take comfort that your audience just got a whole heap larger as many organisations and individuals take such exception to the GPL that they wouldn’t even consider anything GPLed.

If on the other hand you just want it free and yo don’t really care what innovations might be halted by your choice of license, then go ahead the GPL ain’t so bad.

However.

Mark Pilgrim’s equating of using anything other than GPL as ‘mugging’ illustrates that he doesn’t get the meaning of the word ‘free’ in the first place. If he sends you a birthday card, you better place it in the right way on your mantel. If he feeds you, prepare to eat each morsel in the correct, specified manner. And then wait for instructions on how you poop.

That’s what I dislike about the GPL. Free ain’t free.
It’s conditional. It’s litigious. And frankly, it’s full of beardy weirdys.

From the BBC, Bill Gates tells us how it is.

“This whole idea of what I call natural user interface is really redefining the experience,” he said.

It’s fortunate we have visionaries such as Bill to tell us about these things. He calls it “natural user interface”. You heard it here.

“We’re adding the ability to touch and directly manipulate, we’re adding vision so the computer can see what you’re doing, we’re adding the pen, we’re adding speech,” he told BBC News.

It’ll see you, but it won’t judge.

During the interview Mr Gates showed off the Microsoft Surface computer, a large table like machine with a multi-touch interface.

“I’ll be brave, in five years we’ll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organising their lives using this type of touch interface,” he said.

I’m not 100% sure they’ll be sitting at one of your Surface tables and organising their little lives but it’s definite that multi-touch-style interfaces will be prominent for some time.

Citing the success of the iPhone and the controller for the Nintendo Wii game console, Mr Gates said such interfaces were a big hit with consumers.

And it must absolutely make him gag that no-one can find anything nice to say about Vista.

Nick Corcodilos writes for Infoworld:

Companies are madly trying to hire skills, not talent. They want to harvest fruit overnight. Give a smart IT worker some manuals, a workstation, an objective, and a little time, and they’ll come up to speed every time. That requires strong leadership.

But if you leave it to some personnel jockey who relies on buzzwords and resumes, you’ll never hire real talent — and it will always seem there is a talent shortage. What’s difficult to understand about that?

Or alternatively, don’t hire new people at all while you’re haemorrhaging personnel and watch the good people walk out the door while you keep the shareholders happy.

I’ve been here before.

It started snowing around 7 pm and by 10 pm the roads were impassable
to normal traffic.

Not a single car has passed this morning though the Roads Service claims all roads are “passable with care”.

I guess in this case, “care” means “determination, snow chains and a winch”