Letters to the editor

A holiday present for developers

Good day, all,
	If you've looked for some way to contribute to the Open Source 
development movement, but are short of time, money or programming skills, 
might I suggest something a little simpler?

	How about a "Thank you"?

	Pick a project * that's been helpful to you and send a note to the
developers mailing list, or the developer him/herself if there is none,
and say "Thank you, Gleem-o-tron has been really helpful because...".  A
short, sincere thank you note can do wonders to developer morale.  It
doesn't even have to be a particular piece of software; an organization
like the Linux Standards Base, a meta-project like the KDE team, a news 
site like LWN, or a particular developer that's done a lot of work you 
admire are all fair game.
	You might want to put "Thanks" somewhere in the subject to make it 
easy for overloaded developers to organize their own mail.

	I'll start right now with a "Thank you" to Jon and the LWN team 
for condensing the Linux News down to relevant bits and pieces for me.  
The subscription was more than worth it.
	Cheers,
	- Bill

* I'm specifically excluding mine from this request so it isn't
self-serving.

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William Stearns (wstearns@pobox.com).  Mason, Buildkernel, freedups, p0f,
rsync-backup, ssh-keyinstall, dns-check, more at:   http://www.stearns.org
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Comments (1 posted)

There still *is* proprietary scientific knowledge

Proprietary scientific knowhow still exists. It is protected by patents
and the examples have included transistors, IC manufacturing techniques,
MRI scanners and optical amplification of signals in optical fibers.
Indeed this knowhow is arguably *more* proprietary than software: even
if you independently develop the same technique, using it still requires
a license.

The fact that most research is not proprietary is primary because the
people involved want it to be free. Publishing something, to establish
priority, is regarded as good thing---and this makes it no longer
patentable almost everywhere except the US. IBM et al publish things
that they think are not worth patenting, so nobody else can patent them.

Mathematics, including process calculi[*] and graph theory, can not be
patented and copyright suits for copying techniques are unlikely to
succeed. Mathematics was free in medieval times too...

[*] Process calculi are theoretical computer science. Almost everybody
without a CS degree has never seen one, and even fewer people have used
process calculus in anger. Process calculus is used in anger in my PhD
thesis and there are definitely other examples.

Comments (5 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet