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Reeling in the hackers (Irish Times)
The Irish Times covers
a study about hackers in films. "Also, the vast majority of hackers
in films are actually portrayed as the good guys - a huge 73 per cent, with
10 per cent being somewhere in between, and 17 per cent portrayed as bad
guys. "I was definitely surprised at the number of films showing hackers in
a positive light," [Damian Gordon] says." (Thanks to John Britton)
(Log in to post comments)
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Feb 20, 2010 7:02 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Makes sense.
For most people (those who don't use free software), software is something that does something useful but also spies on them, pops up ads, has features omitted to frustrate them into buying some other version, is purposely incompatible or is incompatible because a competitor purposely made compatibility difficult, or stores their info in an unretrievable way to lock them into staying with that line of software.
In short, the worst aspects of software today come from the intentional acts of software developers - implementations of annoying sales tactics against which users are powerless - take it or leave it.
It's only natural that breakers of these software systems will be mostly seen as heroes. Society will move to free software one day to avoid these negative aspects of being disempowered.
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Feb 20, 2010 23:05 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Software developers generally don't make the design decisions, thats why we have bosses telling us to put in advertising, spyware and so on. Luckily free software generally provides and end to that. I do wonder how the bosses aspect will interact with commercial Free Software, which is becoming more and more common.
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Feb 21, 2010 11:41 UTC (Sun) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
The only viable free software business models I've witnessed are of large IT companies (e.e. Sun, IBM, Nokia etc), where they can do quality middleware and even end-user solutions as free software. This is quite limiting, since naturally there isn't a lot of those companies.
A lot of smaller free software/open source projects, on the other hand, are quite crappy -- since understandably they're done as volunteer work without proper resources to make something polished and finished. So we're generally torn between two options: 1) use the perpetually unfinished software, or 2) suffer from the intentional misfeatures of the proprietary software. Therefore I tend to think the demise of proprietary offerings isn't coming soon. Free software does seem to improve over time, though. Unfortunately, the process takes a lot of it.
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Feb 21, 2010 12:38 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
I think the success stories of free software companies are mostly small to medium sized companies, often they're not even "software" companies. it's companies working on services or integration, or animation studios that hire someone to improve some tool they're using. Software is mostly just a by-product of getting their actual work done.
It's hard to name them because they're not big international corporations. It's companies like iMatix, and the network of companies behind packages like Drupal.
Change is slow, but we're always advancing. The big question today is will we get far enough before the big DRM/Tivisation push closes up all the hardware. Answer: it depends on what we do.
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Feb 22, 2010 7:38 UTC (Mon) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
There are now Free Software Business Models. There are business models that use free software. Some of these include software/IT support, specialized application development (Zope), etc. These are both large and small companies.
software publishers/devs are the bad guys Posted Mar 9, 2010 3:18 UTC (Tue) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
> The only viable free software business models I've witnessed are of large IT companies (e.e. Sun, IBM, Nokia etc)
It depends on what you mean by "viable free software business model". That phrase is basically an oxymoron. But if you mean "make money while at the same time writing open source code", then I don't think big companies have much to do with it.
Most companies who make money and release code are small, not big. (To pick a random example: Memcached by Danga Interactive). The vast majority of Open Source/Free projects are sponsored by small companies.
The big projects (Apache, Linux, Qt, MySQL, GCC, etc.) tend to get funded by the big companies, but only because those big companies are jumping on the bandwagon of projects started by little companies and/or individuals.
> A lot of smaller free software/open source projects, on the other hand, are quite crappy
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.
Since the good projects tend to get big, it makes it look like "the small ones are bad, the big companies make the good ones". But would be a very misleading conclusion.
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