[Ilugc] Is the proprietary camp winning ?
- From: girishvenkatachalam@xxxxxxxxx (Girish Venkatachalam)
- Date: Thu Oct 12 18:56:43 2006
On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 05:51:58PM +0530, Ramanraj K wrote:
Mano wrote:
<gory details snipped>
What appeared to be originally free is slowly and gradually turning
non-free and could easily become just the usual dull and boring bait and
switch variety of the usual "free" products available in a market place.
Rather than collecting any license fees indirectly or imposing terms and
conditions with trademarks as an excuse, it would be more straight forward
I am a simple man who loves simplicity. To quote Einstein,
" Everything should be kept simple, no simpler."
There is a lot of wisdom in the few words coming from one of the foremost
thinkers of the last century.
IOW, solutions should be simple and not simplistic.
Coming to the point, I find GPL horribly complicated, I wonder if even RMS
understands it properly. :-)
OTOH however BSD license is so simple.
Now, I like to be practical too.
Companies flout GPL left, right and center. (Sorry for this Indian English :-)
If you want to know which company in Chennai does that I will tell you
in private. :-)
And there are many more around the world. Compare this to piracy.
So laying down laws are not the solution.
This is like the practice followed in Tamil Nadu engg colleges to keep boys
from not interacting with girls. Does it help? No, it only hurts.
Or, rather let me put it this way to avoid hurting the academicians in the
list. Maybe it helps, but you overdo it.
Lawmakers should be practical and be pragmatic in their approach.
They should know what will work and what will not work.
For me from purely the perspectives of simplicity and practicality, BSD license
appears more attractive...
Of course, I am the last guy to be talking about these things but well...
and much simpler to have conditions for payment of royalty to the authors.
- Ramanraj K
PS: Anyone who did not figure out what connects logarithms, compound
interest, golden rectangle, google, knuth's metafont, etc could visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
Have fun :)
Well, I am sure you meant it on a lighter note as the wikipedia article shows
only incidental relationships between math and the real world.
But I am increasingly getting convinced as time passes by that no
hacker/inventor is complete until he learns both hardware and mathematics.
Let me give you a few examples.
Ethernet CSMA/CD has exponential backoff and TCP bandwidth computation, NTP's
time correction algos are all filled with real world math.
Very simple, but math all the same.
Google is coined from googol, 10^100 (a lighter note).
And spam combating algos use Bayesian probability theory and Markovian chains..
(Wait for the tech talk by me to learn more :-)
So does Poisson distribution in provisioning telecom equipment and switches.
The cellular phone network gets its name called cell from the octagonal
structure assigned to users in a particular "channel."
Now, the electromagnetic waves from an omnidirectional antenna have a
spherical wavefront and consequently one would expect circles to mark channels
instead of hexagons.
Then why did cellular telephony come up with hexagons?
It is bcoz circles don't tessellate;, i.e., there would be gaps if you arrange
multiple circles close to one another. You could go in for squares or triangles
that tessellate well but then hand over would not work properly bcoz it does
not properly represent electromagnetic propagation models from an
omndirectional base station antenna...
Now, coming to hardware.
It is not only assembly programmers but also driver writers and systems C
programmers need to know hardware fundas.
Today our cellphones have so much software built into them that their
complexity is mind boggling.
And nearly every toy/mechanical device is software controlled these days. Right
from control systems in nuclear reactors to power stations to simple garbage
recycling plants..
Everywhere you have embedded systems doing their work in software.
Since hardware once designed experience little change over time.
Whereas software is constantly evolving. And software designers should be as
aware of the underlying hardware as hardware designers should be of the kind of
software that it should support.
Let us talk of DSP for media processing. It is all math and hardware. And
everything is actually software technically.
Enjoy!
regards,
Girish
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