I was fairly supportive of his thoughts until I read at the bottom that he works for Imagination Technologies, makers of the PowerVR chipset and quite possibly the worst company in the world when it it comes to giving any support at all to open source drivers.
After reading that I was struck by a couple of things -- one is that it is hard to feel bad for someone complaining about a bad actor in the software space when they work for a bad actor in the hardware space; two is that even if I have a bad opinion of an employer already, I still think it is bad form to post an article like this with your employer's name linked right at the bottom.
Even though he ultimately concludes that he won't pirate it, it is fairly easy for bad internet "journalists" to twist what he said and involve his employer since he names and links right to them at the bottom of his rant-post. Rant-posts where you invoke even the idea that you may break the law are best made on blogs that do not mention your employer.
I'm not sure my employer has much to do with my free thoughts on my blog, or how sorry or supportive you feel for me. I'm not IMG personified and neither are they a corporate version of me, so you shouldn't overly couple the two things.
I thought the post was pretty clear on a few points: I won't pirate it, because I'm a programmer myself and just goes against what I believe; I actively wanted to pay for it; I want them to make it easy for me to do so.
Yes I'm frustrated, but no, I won't go against what I believe just to get what I want and I actively want to give them the money they ask for. I want that situation to be simple and straightforward for me to resolve and for them to claim their revenue. That should be quite clear, and it also should have nothing to do with who I work for.
That said, since you brought IMG up and how we are at supporting open source drivers, that's something that's overwhelmingly down to our customers and what they want to do. When a customer or partner does want us to open code up, we work with them to make it happen as much as we can.
I think you're more frustrated at Intel than us. You could argue that we should provide an open driver in parallel to our customers, but that wouldn't help you much because of how the drivers have to glue to the rest of the software running and the SoC's systems architecture. So you'd also need support from our customers, so we just punt to them.
We could do better, but I don't think we necessarily do badly there.
That's no excuse. He may be a great guy but the OP's point stil stands. In general we're all great people until we're not. I'm a nice guy but I've been known to be a total asshole like anybody else. Cool guys act like dicks sometimes and a record of being a good guy doesn't excuse one for doing something uncool.
Bill Clinton left us with a surplus. He also cheated on his wife. Still a good president but cheating is a dick move. See what I'm saying (please don't read into it and focus on the wrong thing now)?
There are lots of things about Bill Clinton that I liked and just a few things about him that I didn't, but seriously, I don't think even the most incompetent person in the world could have left us without a surplus in the era that the internet went mainstream.
The internet bubble didn't create the surplus, the "peace dividend" did. After the former Soviet republics became our BFFs, we promptly eviscerated our Cold War military. Combine that with some good growth in the economy (which obviously includes the tech sector) and some welfare reform that Clinton and Gingrich worked on together, and you got a nice surplus.
Throw in Bush-era tax cuts and two wars, and you can say bye-bye to that.
How much did our defense spending decrease? I know that we must have saved a ton of money when Clinton cut the Army nearly in half and when we decommissioned so many of our battleships. I've heard it said that we still spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, but I'm not sure what the numbers looked like before the cutbacks.
Edit: I did a little research and I was astonished to find out that welfare programs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. I didn't think that something like welfare would make up a significant percentage of the budget. It's over 10% of the federal budget if you include all of the programs that fall under "welfare."
Looking at the statistics, the amount of money spent on welfare didn't significantly increase or decrease during or after Bill Clinton was in office (until our current financial crisis.) I know that he was trying to find smarter ways to spend the money, such as by getting people back to work with education and employment assistance, but how could the reform have added to the surplus if the amount of spending wasn't reduced?
After looking at this site a bit longer, it looks like every category of spending increased each year he was in office. Even though spending increased, there were some areas where he slowed down the rate of increase, which is admirable. But if we increased spending in every area before, during and after his presidency, yet we produced a surplus during his presidency, doesn't that mean the surplus was created by the thriving economy, which was in turn thriving because of the internet boom? I'm not asking to be argumentative, I just don't understand how we can say that our reduced need for defense spending combined with welfare reform caused a surplus when we didn't reduce our spending in either category from 1993-2001.
Edit2: Since I asked a couple of questions. Wouldn't it be more productive to answer them instead of downvoting me? I wouldn't have asked them if I didn't genuinely want someone to explain things to me from their perspective. Why let someone continue to be wrong when given the opportunity to correct it?
Inflation + population growth will result in increases unless you make a conscious decision to cut. So if you leave something alone in the budget, you'd expect it to increase naturally over time. Even if there was no internet boom, and the budget continued to rise, tax receipts would still go up b/c the economy must grow to accommodate all those kids entering the workforce each year. If you hold the line on spending increases, not eliminate the increases but put them below the rate of growth, you'll have a surplus.
I specifically said not to focus on the wrong thing and yours is one of a string of comments that does exactly that. But I am glad you get and agree with my point.
I'll take your word for it that he's a cool guy. And I don't even fault him for working for a company I have a not-so-great opinion of -- it is quite possibly a great place to work for employees and might be the best option to pursue his interests around where he lives. But none of that changes the fact that knowing where he works brings to mind the old saying about people living in glass houses.
> "giving any support at all to open source drivers"
Since when is a hardware company obligated to give support to open source drivers??? Really? Really.
1. A hardware company can choose to sell its products to whatever class of customers it likes. It doesn't have to cater to a particular subset of philosophical adherents, when marketing a product. It might not be realistic to ask a person to pay money for a product, when they can only marshal so many hands from a finite set of costly human resources, to meet the demands of a certain type of customer.
2. It makes sense for a small hardware company to cater to users of for-profit proprietary operating systems, mostly because there's hard incentive for makers of proprietary libraries to support their software in kind (ie: you can enforce an annual contract against Microsoft, but GNU?). This is the exact business model that Microsoft has preyed upon and grown fat off of for years.
3. The open source community has a reputation for taking on all comers. This is to say that when the going gets tough, and there's real demand for something awesome, the open source community will step up and brute force a project into submission. We have a reputation for pulling our own weight when it counts.
I don't think it's correct to frown upon a hardware company because it doesn't cater to open source philosophies. It's not always easy to turn that kind of pie-in-the-sky demand into something that pays the very real bills.
I think it's correct to frown upon a company that espouses vehement animosity towards a hacker community that it could wisely cultivate as a neutral ally, that neither helps nor harms profits. Companies that actively spearhead campaigns of criminal prosecution and litigation against hobbyists that mean no harm (and often increase demand, or frequently support their own demand) ...that kind of behavior is toxic.
In other words:
if people buy your goods, they should feel free to use them as the please, and if they figure out new unintended uses for those goods, great! But that doesn't obligate the maker to now support an unexpected, unplanned emergent behavior, however popular it may be.
They certainly aren't obligated to, but when an employee of a business that does this complains about difficulty using software because of regioning, DRM, or similar, why are you so incredulous that someone points it out?
I used to have a Kyro II. I can attest to not only the complete lack of open source drivers, but also to the absolute crap quality of their Windows drivers. I think I had to reinstall windows after I upgraded it to get the drivers gone. Feels bad, man.
I get that plenty of companies provide decent support for open source drivers, etc., and more power to them, but what planet do you live on where people and/or companies are obligated to just give you stuff?
Shouldn't it be more a case of "ask and be grateful if you get it" rather than "ask and throw a fit when you don't"?
I've personally found that "internet journalists" will twist what you say regardless of whether or not you make any explicit links to your employer. Even if you do the opposite ("My opinions do not represent those of Foobarbaz, Inc."), they'll still do it.
After reading that I was struck by a couple of things -- one is that it is hard to feel bad for someone complaining about a bad actor in the software space when they work for a bad actor in the hardware space; two is that even if I have a bad opinion of an employer already, I still think it is bad form to post an article like this with your employer's name linked right at the bottom.
Even though he ultimately concludes that he won't pirate it, it is fairly easy for bad internet "journalists" to twist what he said and involve his employer since he names and links right to them at the bottom of his rant-post. Rant-posts where you invoke even the idea that you may break the law are best made on blogs that do not mention your employer.