Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.
When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.
Comments
GPLv3 on tivoization: good or bad?
When designing the GPLv3 the FSF intentionally included measures to prevent Tivoization. Some people think that TIVO-like companies shouldn't be allowed to create hardware that only runs specific software, because doing so renders modified software useless. Other people feel that TIVO-like companies should be able to do so, that hardware and software are two different things, and that the GPL is stepping out of the software boundaries. What do you think about this? Good, bad, in between or neither?
an unavoidable end
we have to make hardware free also. we need this. manufacturers must consider about. and i think that this is just a modest step forward.
Ali Deniz EREN
I think your question should
I think your question should include a clear definition of "tivoization".
Re: definition of "tivoization"
F***ing Google it
Only time will tell
I voted "don't know", because the truth is that we're all speculating. There are a number of ways in which it can be argued that "tivoization" is irrelevant -- for example, as it becomes easier to make your own hardware and open hardware designs are available, then the move to hardware that fully supports free and open software will be driven by market forces.
On the other hand, there's the horror story of a totally locked-down society with highly-centralized (or monopolized) manufacturing. I do believe there are people out there who want this to happen, but I've never seriously believed that they will succeed -- not in the long run, anyway. It's difficult to create and maintain such a monopoly, and there are far too many motivated people willing to make up the difference. The only way it can really happen is if people are really, really passive (on the other hand, that part is not so far-fetched).
If market forces are such that tivoization will die anyway, then I think that the FSF made a mistake writing this language into GPLv3, because it very well may have unintended consequences. On the other hand, if tivoization and trusted computing were to become truly ubiquitous, then these provisions may be the only thing keeping us out of the fire -- and thus they would be essential.
Of course, as with so many things surrounding IP issues, we'll probably never really know, because we can't turn back history and repeat with a different input (no controls, so no experiment). We'll only know what we did do.
ISTM that GPLv3 is good enough, even if the anti-tivoization language was a bad idea. It'll take years of test cases, though, before we really understand what the implications of all the new language in the GPLv3 are.
Vote
After taking more time to read about and understand tivoization I realize I should have voted in fovour of the FSF doing the right thing.
Lame
So 87 people vote and your email declares:
"An overwhelming 71% of you voted for "The FSF did the right thing in using the GPL to prevent tivoization"... we have a winner!"
Please. Can we try something scientific before we declare GPL v3 anything?
\\uSlacker