237 karma · joined November 3, 2011
[1] Don't be surprised. Take for example Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and large parts of Kashmir. It is an entirely artificial language, based on Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by the British Raj <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Origin> as a political decision to submit the local population.
Really, you need to actually go out and meet the world around you. It isn't all wine and roses I assure you, but it is better than living in a bubble, those burst, you know. If you decide to travel to South America and go by Bogotá, contact me and I'll show you around the good, the bad and the ugly.
Just walk into an alley at night in Manhattan or Chicago or Boston or Los Angeles or (surprise!) San Franciso and you'll know... Seriously, read the newspapers of any more or less poor third world country and you will find many notes about people mugged and killed, stabbed or shot to death, to steal them some US$75 chinese MediaTek shitphone you can find in Amazon.
I'll give you some newspapers in Latin American cities that range from 6 to 25 million inhabitans:
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/
As always, Google Translate is your friend.
http://raganwald.com/2014/12/20/why-why-functional-programmi...
The original paper by John Huges mentioned in the posting:
Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20070323095313/http://www.math.c...
PostScript, PDF and the BibTeX reference.
Time to die.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130728075247/http://mywiki.woo...
But I do agree. There is a in inherent higher barrier of entry when you force your users to install third-party libraries or even your deliverable from an outside ("fourth-party"?) distribution source. Be it ruby gems, CPAN, Pypy, cabal, whatever.
Linux has, eventually, started to fulfil the promise: technologies like cgroups, dm, uevents, kdbus, alsa..., and the respective userspace: systemd, dmraid, lvm, udev, pulseaudio, show that GNU/Linux is not UNIX but better in some respects.
This "the GPL gives developers power" is pure FUD that showed up in the 90's as part of the reactionary trantrums throw down by some BSD groupies and by ESR and his gun-toting friends who wanted to sell Free Software to the corporate world, so they corrupted the term and invented Open Source. It just so happens that developers are users too.
So, if you want to strike it rich with open core, sure, you choose a lax license, say MIT or Apache, or even better BSD 2-clause, and when the suckers have implemented all the features and ironed out the bugs, you run away with the code, sell your startup and more power to your bank account in the Caiman's. Right?
So, no. The reason why the corporate world uses the GPL instead of the BSD license for the really important stuff is because it creates a level-playing field. It is the same situation as the Cold War (perhaps you are too young to remember its lessons?): "If you and I can blow each other to bits and take everybody else with us in the process, let's stop and rather do some conquering and plundering together, shall we?" And that's exactly why the mobile space is a nasty, miserable world of patent lawsuits: There are no mutual assurances of total, generalized annihilation if someone doesn't want to play by the rules. Patents are just not it; ask the Chinese.