On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 03:18:25AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
can stand KDE, Konqueror is probably as good as Firefox now.
and a tad less than Firefox as a browser. The only thing I know that it
won’t do is RSS feeds – for that you need Firefox. I don’t use the
composer and I have better IRC clients, but “Chatzilla” is usable as an
IRC client.
That’s really my biggest problem with something like Seamonkey – most
of
it, I wouldn’t use. I have mutt, irssi, and Google Reader for things
like email, IRC, and feed aggregation. All I need out of my browser is
a
browser.
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 04:03:57AM +0900, Bira wrote:
For what it’s worth, I run Linux and currently use Cream as my editor
of choice. Before that, it was Scite.
SciTE is still my favorite GUI editor. Vim is still my favorite editor,
period.
Cream is actually a special configuration for GVim, which makes its
interface look more like that of other text editors (menus, mice, and
real-time editing), so you can have most of the power without so much
of a learning curve. It has very nice syntax highlighting, and I love
the fact that you can configure it to show a black background and
white text.
I prefer to avoid hiding the power of Vim behind a point-and-click
facade. My opinion is my own, of course.
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 03:05:11AM +0900, aks wrote:
IMHO, the strength of “vi” (“vim”, “nvi”, etc.) are that it is the
best at “word processing” – editing chunks of text, with a minimum of
keyboard input, and without having to use a mouse. While, in
contrast, the strength of “emacs” is that it can easily be extended in
very useful ways to accomplish things that are not normally
accomplished within an “editor”. For example, take a look at “orgtbl-
mode.el”, “table.el”, “calendar.el”, and, most amazingly, the
“calculator.el” mode.
For such things, I tend to use other tools. I want my text processor
for
processing text, and other tools for other purposes. For instance, I
use
irb as my calculator.
on Univac mainframes in the early 70s, before Emacs was even a glimmer
in Stallman’s eyes 
I was around before both – though, admittedly, I wasn’t programming
yet.
Now, perhaps we can discuss Ruby stuff again…
See above, re: irb instead of emacs as my calculator.
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:05:09AM +0900, John J. wrote:
Konqueror/KHTML…
the source, they’d be out of business. So how would they make a living?
Not everything needs to be OSS. It does have merits and makes sense
in many regards, but the question often remains of how do you make a
living if everything is open source without others blindly taking
what you made?
There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.
On Jul 23, 12:20 am, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:05:09AM +0900, John J. wrote:
There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.
What would those business models be? And are they so complex that the
developer must spend a great deal of time devising and testing them
rather than developing software? I am tremendously grateful for OSS
but I have yet to figure it out. It seems that most of it is based on
some sort of patronage which is no business model at all.
On 7/21/07, John J. [email protected] wrote:
TextMate’s big weakness is with non-western languages. Japanese for
example. It can display the characters (if they’re in the font you
are using) but things go crazy when you use the Kotoeri input system.
This is why in Japan many Rubyists are using Jedit or something.
Textmate actually can handle the display and input of Japanese text
with the appropriate font for the former, and Hetima’s Japanese CJK
input plugin.
http://hetima.com/textmate/index-e.html
I have found it to work well enough with a number of different input
method editors, including Kotoeri.
Nonetheless, there aren’t all that many Textmate users in Japan -
though they do exist. Most (hardcore) rubyists in Japan seem to be
emacs/vim users, with a bias towards emacs. There are also a bunch who
use editors such as Hidemaru, RDT/Eclipse, and JEdit (as you
mentioned).
An interesting data-point to note is that most of the ruby core team
seems to prefer emacs, whereas most of the rails core team seems to
prefer Textmate.
Firefox, alas, is the best of a tremendously bad breed. I wish
there was
something better out there, and I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a
GUI web browser of my own just so I won’t have to suffer with what’s
currently available, but it’s going to have to wait on me having more
free time. Lots more.
WebKit is wide open source, and it is what is used by Safari and
Konqueror/KHTML…
As for the OSS issue, I’m in no way against it. I totally support it.
But I also understand the indie devs’ need to make a living without
suffering a corporation’s suckiness. I just use what works best for me.
TextMate by the way, has a VERY kind license, a very dedicated
developer who also responds to individual users directly. I defend
their choice not to open their source yet because their revenue has
kept them providing quality stuff. In their case, with such a widely
popular app that is already being aped everywhere, if they had opened
the source, they’d be out of business. So how would they make a living?
Not everything needs to be OSS. It does have merits and makes sense
in many regards, but the question often remains of how do you make a
living if everything is open source without others blindly taking
what you made?
Rails is open source, but BaseCamp (which is pretty impressive but
pretty expensive) is not.
Alex Y. wrote:
Then you’ve got software that’s so important that the body
behind it can survive on donations (Mozilla and Apache, to the best of
my knowledge, work this way).
I don’t know about Apache, but I think you’ll find that most of
Mozilla’s income comes from referral
fees from Google. Apparently it’s on the order of many tens of millions
each year.
cheers,
mick
[email protected] wrote:
developer must spend a great deal of time devising and testing them
rather than developing software? I am tremendously grateful for OSS
but I have yet to figure it out. It seems that most of it is based on
some sort of patronage which is no business model at all.
There are quite a few different ones. For example, free the software,
charge for service. It seems to work for (at least) Red Hat and MySQL.
Then you’ve got bigger companies (like IBM) who see the benefit of
expanding the market or promoting an open standard on top of which they
then sell a closed-source product. Then there are companies like Neuros
(http://www.neurosaudio.com/) who use open software to sell hardware.
You could argue that Apple have partially done this with OS X and the
tools that are distributed with it, but that relationship is more
tenuous. Then you’ve got software that’s so important that the body
behind it can survive on donations (Mozilla and Apache, to the best of
my knowledge, work this way).
Those are just off the top of my head - I’m sure there are others.
On 7/23/07, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:
There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.
This is a very important point you are making here, I feel however
that it is not simple for businesses to adapt to that and that the
government enforced models (even here in Eurpoe :() seem much more
reassuring – everything is done to this fin.
So I think it is important to say that but it is not the businesses
which are to “blame” – at least not all.
Furthermore – and that hurts a lot – we have to accept other POV
even if we think that they come from manipulation, the “Let me save
you” attitude is Freedom’s greatest enemy.
I just wanted to add this Chad, what you said here and before is very
good stuff, please do not take this as criticism.
Cheers
Robert
On Jul 23, 2007, at 4:27 AM, Alex Y. wrote:
–
Alex
MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Model breaks.
On 7/23/07, John J. [email protected] wrote:
it’s on the order of many tens of millions each year.
Well, there’s another business model, then 
–
Alex
MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Service, training, development of required features, which remain open
Source but are paid by somebody who really wants the feature, this all
pays better than development, maybe somebody can dig up some lines
about this because I would not take my word as granted either;).
But these are the base lines
Model breaks.
Please ask questions about breaks on a HW mailing list or is this
about modeling breaks in Ruby 
Robert
oops too much French
last_post.gsub!(“lines”,“links”)
last_post << “sorry”.upcase
Robert
John J. wrote:
it’s on the order of many tens of millions each year.
Well, there’s another business model, then 
–Alex
MySQL does also sell commercial licenses required under certain
circumstances.
That would be the point, yes. Open source software that’s funded and
supported by purchases of commercial support contracts.
But you still failed to answer for the source of income of the
independent developer.
Model breaks.
No it doesn’t. I wasn’t talking about independent developers
specifically, but what reason is there that MySQL’s business model
couldn’t scale down?
Besides, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like this particular open
source business model. There are plenty of others.
On 7/23/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
cheers,
mick
OK … where does Google’s money come from? The searches are free, and
most of their other “products” are as well.
Most of google’s profits are from advertising, AFAIK.
Aur
On Jul 23, 4:22 am, Alex Y. [email protected] wrote:
[email protected] wrote:
On Jul 23, 12:20 am, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:
On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:05:09AM +0900, John J. wrote:
Thanks for the examples. Could I ask some questions or comment about
about each one?
For example, free the software,
charge for service. It seems to work for (at least) Red Hat and MySQL.
How long did it take these two companies to get off some sort of
patronage and start making money?
Then there are companies like Neuros
(http://www.neurosaudio.com/) who use open software to sell hardware.
Yes, this is a traditional model for hardware companies, even before
the advent of OSS. It may make companies like Digidesign rethink their
model.
Then you’ve got bigger companies (like IBM) who see the benefit of
expanding the market or promoting an open standard on top of which they
then sell a closed-source product.
You could argue that Apple have partially done this with OS X and the
tools that are distributed with it, but that relationship is more
tenuous.
You could even argue that Microsoft with it’s open source Ajax
Foundation Library is using this model. I’d be hard pressed to call
these three companies open source.
Still, let’s say I’ve got this great little editor called TextBuddy I
want to get off the ground. How do any of these models, including the
kickbacks from Google mentioned later in this thread apply to me?
Bob
Alex Y. wrote:
I wasn’t talking about independent developers
specifically, but what reason is there that MySQL’s business model
couldn’t scale down?
Lots of reasons … look up “barriers to entry” in any MBA textbook.
Besides, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like this particular open
source business model. There are plenty of others.
There are plenty of business models. There are many fewer profitable
business models, and almost all of them require that a product or
service exist and outrank its competitors on important non-price
differentiators of quality as perceived by customers.
MySQL is a good example … many database gurus would tell you that it’s
technically lame relative to Oracle, SQL Server/Sybase, DB2, Informix
and PostgreSQL. But both as an open source project and a business it is
thriving.
Red Hat is another good example of a thriving open source business
model. However, in the case of RHEL, I would argue that it is
technologically superior to its competition, with the possible exception
of Solaris. There just isn’t another server OS out there that runs on
commodity hardware with that level of security, reliability and
performance.
Bringing this back to Ruby, I’d say there’s another good example of a
thriving open source business model walking this very forum – Sun’s
jRuby project, and for that matter, the underlying JVM. Remember, I’m
one of those folks who think virtual machines are the tools of Satan and
that real language implementers don’t need them for either portability
or performance.
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
mick
OK … where does Google’s money come from? The searches are free, and
most of their other “products” are as well.
advertising.