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Comment Shared Source License (Score 3, Interesting) 85

What you're describing is what Microsoft calls "Shared Source." You want your customers to have access to your source code for their benefit, but you don't want them distributing either source or binary to anyone else.

When you think about it, providing the source code to your customers without the right to share it with others is little different from what you're already doing - providing binaries without the right to share them. You're still asserting your copyright - you would just be providing a bit more copyrighted material.

If you want to create a community around your product's source code, you have to figure out a way for your customers to have the freedom to discuss the code on forums, mailing lists, etc., without your code escaping to the world at large. You could explicitly allow customers to discuss the code on YOUR forum, which they only get access to by being a customer.

If you agree that forums suck, then give your customers access to a private github or gitlab with your source code in it. They could make issues and merge requests, and thereby communicate with each other and with you about the code. Let them make branches, but don't let them touch your branches.

I suggest not providing source to your free (as in beer) users. Make access to the source one of the perks of being a paying customer.

Comment Have a terrific personal project (Score 1) 472

As someone who sits in a lot of interviews and makes hiring recommendations, I find polished, personal side projects very compelling. If you have a recent tech project that you started on your own, for your own benefit or amusement, that demonstrates multiple technical proficiencies, then I start paying closer attention. When it's just your project, I know that you aren't trying to take credit for someone else's work, and anything cool or impressive in the project proves your initiative and value.

Comment WebOS is staying on my TouchPad (Score 5, Interesting) 96


Comment Exaggerated for effect, but mostly true (Score 1) 1365

I found myself nodding with agreement to most of these points as well. Linux developers will do much, much better in all markets if they address these complaints. However, some of the the points are false or exaggerated for effect.

For example:


Completely untrue.GTK and Qt are two rare libraries with strict backwards-compatibility rules. It's most of the other libraries on the Linux desktop which break backwards compatibility. The latest versions of GTK+2 and Qt4 will run applications written against GTK+2.0 and Qt4.0 perfectly.

I also wouldn't call the Win32 API "good". Standardized, yes. Good, no. Anyone who's ever tried to write raw Win32 GUI apps knows what I'm talking about. And if you don't use Win32 directly, then you don't have a standard. Which would you prefer? MFC? ATL? Windows.Forms? Avalon?


Completely untrue. Yes, fewer commercial games appear for Linux, but fewer commercial games appear for the Mac, too, and no one says the Mac is not ready for the desktop. For commercial games, there's all of the Unreal Tournament games, all of the Quake games, all of the Doom games, all of the Descent games, as well as community ports of Duke Nukem 3D, the Serious Sam games, and countless others.

Aside from the commercial titles, the games that ship with either KDE or Gnome are as good or better than the games that ship with Windows, and 90% of the PC population only plays those games. (KNetWalk is a great game that would sap millions of hours of productivity from the world if it shipped with Windows.)

You can have a ridiculous amount of fun on Linux with console emulators. There are great clones of other games too, such as FreeCiv and LinCity.

Finally, it's not fair to discount the games that you can play with Wine. I purchased and played Half-Life 2 from start to finish on Linux, and it worked perfectly. I didn't miss Windows one bit.


And what security model would the complainer prefer? Yes, sudo can be circumvented by social engineering, and Mac OS X basically uses sudo to do admin tasks. On Windows, you don't need to do any social engineering to circumvent the "run-as-admin-by-default" policy.

Redhat-based distros have lots of protection against keyloggers, viruses, and break-ins because SELinux is turned on by default.

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