Victims of Military abductions surfaced due to Writ of Amparo
Full text of the writ of Amparo can be found here

Printed copies available, email rbahaguejr [at] gmail [dot] com

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Qoutes from Bruce Perens: "...programmers are like artists"

I have admired developers like him for the rigid adherence to freedom. Below are some qoutes i've got while browsing the net.

What about the balance of power between software users and the industry that develops it? The industry has been in the driver's seat for so long. Will that change?

There will be a shift to customers having more of a voice in what happens to their software than they do now. Today, we take an extremely vendor-centric view of the software industry. Propose a new software product, and the first question you get is, "How will you be the next Microsoft with this?" People don't even stop to think that you can make a healthy living without being the next Microsoft, or that the function of software is to do a job for the customer, primarily.

Why is it necessary for open-source supporters to get involved with governments?

Because the other side does. We've seen a very strong and well-funded thrust, which is run by Microsoft. They say they are asking for fairness, but then they say, "Let's have software patents with royalties in standards," and thus open source would not be able to
participate, and it's not fair at all.

The community is obviously made up of people who have wide-ranging views about software. Who do you think is going to win out, the pragmatists or the philosophers?

I think that the ideas of the philosophers are very much to the benefit of people who call themselves pragmatists. The pragmatists just don't realize that...If you use something that is less than open source, it comes back and hits you. You often see people who come in
as pragmatists, and a couple of years later they're writing "(Richard) Stallman's right about a lot of things, and it took me a while to realize it." At the same time, Richard is his own worst enemy because he is very bad at dealing with people who do not believe the way he does. If you're too far in your viewpoint away from Richard, what will happen is that Richard will simply become infuriated, and I have seen it happen in embarrassing public ways.

ref: http://news.com.com/1200-1070-975446.html

Q: It seems strange that social and psychological factors are more important incentives for creating open-source software than money.

A: I worked for Pixar for 12 years. During those 12 years, every piece of software I wrote, except for one, hit its end of life before I left the company -- the projects were canceled or never deployed. Nothing survives. Now, programmers are like artists. They derive gratification from lots of people using their work. Writing software that just gets put away feels like intellectual masturbation. All of the good comes from someone else participating.

What might limit or threaten the open-source movement? Some people worry that Microsoft, for instance, could wield its software patents to sue Linux developers who might infringe on Windows patents.

A: Software patents are a threat. Microsoft could mount a software-patent prosecution. They can afford to buy up patents. They could conceivably do this not with intent to collect damages but with intent to restrain open-source developers. Those developers could probably stay in court about a day before they have to settle.

Is Microsoft going to sue IBM and HP about Linux? It doesn't sound like they really can. HP is their biggest customer today. Would they sue their own users -- some company that's already making use of Linux and Windows -- as well? I don't think so. That would just drive those people away from Win

http://www.businessweek.com/@@iBLGQ4UQuCuwUxAA/magazine/content/03_09/b3822619_tc102.htm

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