(no subject)

[garote]

Yes, frankly, I don't know what to do about this. The only completely renewable method we have for carbon-fixing on a massive scale is the planting of vegetation. But you would essentially need a near-soulless global police force to prevent, for example, the entire continent of Asia from chopping trees in the winter, and burning coal to cook their food.

Instead, I get the creeping suspicion that our generation - yours and mine - is going to bear witness to an absolutely unfathomable amount of human death and misery. We will fry, drown, and starve off this planet until our numbers become harmless again.

Mostly starve.

Comments

[graue.livejournal.com]

Yes, the things you've deployed serve their purposes. That's true. They become less useful over time, though, as technology changes, whereas some of the ideas used in making those things could stay useful forever.

I don't know the name of the department you work in. If you said it here on LiveJournal, I missed it, sorry. You seem to be implying that the code you develop is open source, in which case, I didn't realize that and yeah, I guess I am asking the wrong person.

I didn't intend any market-share comparison, just that open source code tends to be copied by many people in many places around the world, whereas most of Apple's code is presumably kept on developers' machines and their private network. So the ideas contained in it are less likely to survive.

[garote]

You seem to think that distributing source code for free is somehow a means of defeating entropy. But whether source code is free or not, the binary it builds will become less and less useful as long as the computer industry (and it's relationship with others) continues to evolve. Fixing the code to build the binary to roll with the changes requires time and effort. In the case of Apple's applications and most parts of its operating system, the incentive to invest that time and effort would be damaged by making the source code freely distributable. Who cares if the source code to OS X gets picked up by even ten million hobbyists around the world, if the consequence of that is the loss of livelihood of all the specialists, experts, and hackers within walking distance of each other inside Apple who are able to devote 50 hours a week, every week, exclusively to the development of OS X, with all the connections, resources, and influence of a multi-billion dollar corporation at their disposal? The incentive to maintain software is not magically spun from thin air, and dismantling that incentive for Apple in exchange for the hope that a similar incentive would form elsewhere is just plain stupid. At best, innovation of OS X would drag to a halt, and it would take on the ragged, patchwork character that all non-corporate Linux distros have. If that's the price of "immortality" then no thank you.

If think that open-sourcing all of OS X and its applications wouldn't harm Apple, then you need to do some investigation on your own; I'm presently not interested in explaining it to you.

(from dmp:)

[(Anonymous)]

Stop trying to justify your life with an elaborate web of lies and propoganda... you're a sellout, corporate whore and you deserve to get cancer. Working for a corporation that sells closed-source software and DRM technology makes you worse then Hitler.

Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-)

[garote]

ROFL

Nicely said, comrade :D