One possible interpretation is the decline of the desktop and rise of smart phones and digital consumerism, but note the search term PC is stable in the second graph. Another possible interpretation is that GNU/Linux people are the “early adopters” of the Internet and the decline is expected as the Internet reaches more and more people, but nevertheless I don’t like these graphs at all.
]]>rconsole is included with the rfoo package at http://code.google.com/p/rfoo/.
To invoke it within a script add the following to its code:
from rfoo.utils import rconsole rconsole.spawn_server()
To attach from another shell do:
$ rconsole
rconsole is not a debugger and does not freeze the script. You can think of it as a window into the belly of a long running script. It is lightweight and non-disruptive. You may leave it inside production code and attach when you need to check in on the health of a long running script:
This approach may be inline with views expressed by Richard Stallman in an interesting article on Copyright by the title “Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors” (1). Referring to copyright on software he writes “In my own field, computer programming, three years should suffice”. Stallman does not reject copyright as a concept but is interested in “Finding the right bargain”.
Possibly the most well known scheme for developing Free Software profitably is that of charging for related services. The problem is this model requires business skills most software developers do not have and is often not even applicable.
With Delayed Release, software developers may have easier time developing Free Software profitably, leading to increase in production of Free Software. Once people find that ideals of Free Software can practically co-exist with their realities, those ideals will have easier time spreading.
(1) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
]]>Interface of rfoo.marsh
rfoo.marsh.dumps(expression) rfoo.marsh.loads(binary_string)
Serve RPC method to clients
class MyHandler(rfoo.BaseHandler):
def echo(self, str):
return str
rfoo.InetServer(MyHandler).start(port=50000)
Call method on RPC server
c = rfoo.InetConnection().connect(port=50000)
rfoo.Proxy(c).echo('Hello, world!')
]]>Some notable Free Software projects are therefore:
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.gnome.org/
http://kde.org/
There are of course many others and please comment with your favorite ones, but in fact, if you try to think of a recent notable FOSS project and check out its website you are most likely to find it is an Open Source project rather than Free Software.
For example, Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Drupal, Firefox and others.
For those of you who wonder what the difference between Free Software and Open Source is, I recommend the following article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
There can be several reasons why this is the state of Free Software. I believe one of them is that there is no economical energy behind Free Software.
]]>When I was 16 I wrote with a friend an arcade game for the Commodore 64. It was a beautiful piece of software written in Assembler with heart breaking graphics. I dare to say it was one of the most technically advanced games ever developed for the Commodore but although we negotiated with several game publishers it was never released.
This game is now the software equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat experiment. It exists on a 20 years old 5.25 Inch floppy disk inside a plastic box at my parent’s house. There is a probability that it is still intact, but touch that diskette and it is gone forever.
Such is the fate of all software.
]]>I think this technology is actually being used against the people. You can not use it without being completely exposed. Anyone using it is being monitored and ironically has his/her social network mapped. Once someone is determined to be an organizer or worth the effort of taking down, he/she can be easily arrested.
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