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I'm sorry people copy your stuff.

I'm not one to tell someone else how to run their business but could it be that relying on fragile concepts such as "Intellectual Property" are not a good method for gaining the ability to control and profit from your labors?

Personally I've always relied largely on the reputation I've built up for being able to solve the problems of my clients but your mileage may vary.

I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really hard at something and get nothing back for your effort.


"I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really hard at something and get nothing back for your effort."

That implies I could spend a year writing a million godawful poems and it would be unfair not to pay me for them.


I'm sorry you feel that your poetry isn't any good yet.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who said that everyone has about a million words of garbage in them they have to get out before they can write well.


You may find this is the case with a lot of topics commonly considered 'black magic' - the real determinant IMO is whether you enjoy work that requires a high attention to detail! :)


That's true, I just thought the protocol would be more esoteric and with more corner cases than that :)


Cue fond personal memories of living in South Africa in the 80s...

Used to be so bad you made sure to not wear jeans&t-shirt if you were going to fly just so you didn't get pulled off the line by the Uzi wielding thugs and miss your flight.

Then they freed the great terrorist Nelson.

Yeah, that's right... Here in .za we felt exactly the same way about him as you yanks do about the great terrorist Osama.

Fast forward sixteen years later and guns are rarely visible in the airport, check-in is smooth as silk (though we seem to have inherited the idiocy with the water bottles from you) and the last time anything got blown up here was when I forgot an aubergine in the oven for too long.

They're having y'all on. The thing with tyranny is that until someone says "no thank you" it grinds on relentlessly becoming more and more expensive to stop with each passing year.


> Yeah, that's right... Here in .za we felt exactly the same way about him as you yanks do about the great terrorist Osama.

"We" being who, exactly?


Us middle class white folk who didn't understand what all the fuss was really about till years later.


So... the folks who benefited from apartheid don't much like Nelson Mandela? That's /shocking/.


The danger of individuals with vast pools of funding is that they can afford to cause havoc in the community & their bank accounts for years before finally giving up on ideas that are simply unsustainable inside the ecosystem we have grown&cared for for so long.

Something to be said for a profit-imperative to keep conversations honest & feet on the ground.

Canonical has grown a strong brand in huge swathes of previously Microsoft territory.

They would do well to follow RedHat's example and trade on a reputation for competence&quality rather than trying to place their faith in various recipes of secret herbs&spice.


DNS is long overdue for a replacement anyway.


So HN downvoters prefer the current centralized model of Internet name services which are vulnerable to a denial of service attack from technologically illiterate politicians?

I just don't understand the world anymore.

Takes all kinds I tell you.


They're downvoting you because you're not only missing the point of the article with your first comment, but because allowing this to happen would make DNS even less likely to be replaced any time soon. Once the government is involved in attempting to control the flow of traffic to different websites, any backbone essential to their method of control will stagnate and remain in place almost indefinitely. These people still use IE6 out of misplaced fears for security and a general laziness when it comes to updating, remember?


That point which I am making.

You are not getting it.

If we had followed up on proposals in the 90's for distributed DNS this article would never have needed to be written.

Is this so hard to grok?^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Edit:

<singin'> Good night sweetheart... time to go... </singin'>


DNS is not the only place where an ISP can block a website. They could block the IP, or sniff your unencrypted requests. Look at China, they even do keyword filtering! I can see this "feature" being marketed as parental control or whatnot...


If we want to routinely produce global scale startups in Africa we need to concentrate first on gaining sufficient skill to routinely produce continental scale startups.


close the feedback loop between the obstacles of the teachers and the policies of the pencil pushers.


If Greg had started his post with a question along the lines of:

  "Dear Mark, what can GNOME do to help 
   Canonical integrate your  work & devs 
   with upstream?"
Rather than:

  "*omfgroflcopter* you Canonical dudes 
   are all like soooo lame and have never
   done anything for GNOME"
...then maybe his post would have translated to a measurable improvement in my reality.

As it stands all he's created is a distraction from getting code written.

sigh


I've often wondered what it would be like to work on Open Source projects and contribute to something like that, but I've never done it before. This post piqued my interest, so I read it and followed the links and read the comments and, in general, spent more than an hour on reading the discussion.

Which leads me to my question: is this normal, widespread behavior in Open Source? I'm honestly interested in answers, because, frankly, to me this looked like a boatload of politics. I get enough of that at work.


Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

One practice is to be more conscious of when we're not getting what we want and pay extra special attention to how we're reacting to others as a result.

Greg says he wants Canonical to contribute more to upstream.

Mark probably wanted Greg to not badmouth Canonical.

Now neither party are getting what they want so the question is can everyone pay enough attention to their reactions to avoid a full-blown civil war?

Oy vey.


Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

Or in pathological cases, even when we are. :(


It depends on the project. They all have different flavors. And of course if you create a project, you can set the tone.


No, but shit happens.

Update: Added Forrest Gump wisdom.


Canonical also ships KDE/XFCE derivatives. I don't hear those camps whinging on about this.

Canonical packages the Linux kernel along with other F/OSS software and ships an ISO and some updated packages. It's not their responsibility to make other people's wishes come true.


Certainly observed by this African watching both continents.


> Apple has investors like any other company. This move is good for the investors.

Any move that is bad for the customers won't be good for investors.

There is no short term vs long term thinking once you reached profitability and have cash reserves. The short term will inevitably become the long term.

The _responsible_ thing to do for your investors is to solve problems before they get any more expensive to solve. i.e. solve your problems _now_

You have to simultaneously satisfy customers, investors, employees and the community you operate within. If you cannot wrap your head around that you cannot be trusted by anyone because you will always be sacrificing one for the other to save your incompetent ass.

Sheesh. This is not rocket science.


It's a shame you feel that way, but down-voting the truth is not going to fix your economy, un-pollute your oceans nor end your wars.

Feel free to shout once you've had enough and want the beatings to stop.

:-)


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