By selling their services to others. Musicians can sell live performances. Authors can ghost write, edit, etc. This isn't a big leap of imagination.

The title mislead me. I thought he was going to argue that Google Wave is like X-Windows. He seems to be saying Google Wave can be used as the transport layer for a display service. There does not appear to be any reason why it can't be X11 on top of Google Wave other than the insane latency requirement.

EDIT: He seems to be more keen on replacing X11. I think a protocol which works with X would be better.

I'm not sure why they decided the display should be the server and the programs be the clients. It might be because the other way around is to have one client, the display, access many servers, the programs. That seems even less right to me. (On the other hand, that would make it easier to let a friend over the network look into one of your windows.)

Commercially speaking, X11 was a great success. It is the de facto windowing system for UNIX and UNIX-like systems despite all of the horrors it brings.

Being the defacto windowing system for a platform that has very little desktop market share isn't a great success.

Being the defacto windowing system for the most popular operating system family is a great success.

And if you believe Windows is the most popular OS family, then being the defacto windowing system for the second most popular OS family is still a great success.

Actually the defacto windowing system for desktop Unix is OS X's window manager, based on Quartz Compositor.

I wasn't referring to desktop systems exclusively, but if I were then you'd have been right.

When a company does something stupid, its competitors stand ready to benefit. I love this tweet: http://twitter.com/CJAhearn/status/2822810506

It seems to calculate the image's width to construct indentation. I think it would be easier to just enclose the comments with <dt></dt> and the child trees with <dd></dd>.

Why in the world would you use definition lists?

Oops. Too late to edit it now.

cut -d ' ' -f 2

casual vs ambitious?

The first could always turn into the second.

Marry a native speaker. Failing that get friends who are willing to converse with you exclusively in that language. Since it's Spanish, that shouldn't be very hard.

I'd change that to "Marry a native speaker who doesn't speak English." It's too easy to revert to the common tongue.

You know they make catalogs for that sort of thing. I believe you can even order through the mail.

At my university, Intro to Prog. is in C and C++ (yes, both), and the course that immediately follows is in Scheme, some made up language (we had to build an interpreter for that language in Scheme) and Haskell (for the motivated students).

This article is difficult to understand because it is written as a flamebait rather than an objective critique.

Here is what I understand so far. His primary point is that for a FOSS project it is not easy to have it economically self-sustainable. I believe he is almost correct on this point and counter arguments exist elsewhere in this thread and on the internet. As for whether FOSS is useful or not or how to solve the problem described, he gives no suggestion. However, he does take many cheap shots at RMS and FOSS supporters.

Anyhow, my counterpoint, which I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is the contribution of FOSS is beyond direct monetary compensation. For organizations FOSS provides cheap, commoditized off-the-shelf parts for internal software projects. For consumers, FOSS allows independence from software producers and system lock-ins. These benefits are real in economic terms and can not simply be waved away.

Further, the funding of a lot of free software has already taken place because a company needed to scratch its own itch. After that, the question is, "Does keeping this software closed source provide us a significant competitive advantage?" If the answer is "no," then there's really no point in not sharing the source. Anyone that thinks shrink-wrap sales of their pet Lisp dialect are going to make up the cornerstone of a viable business model is freaking deluded; these things are dime a dozen, and the market is next to non-existent.

Pretty much all of the open source stuff that comes out of Google comes out for this reason; they're not in the software sales biz, so if they develop something neat that helps them get things done but is not core to their business, they give it away. Economically speaking it's neutral to positive for them (helps PR quite a bit, and gets programmers invested in the Google ecosystem), and positive for everyone else.

My immediate response to the article: no shit, software takes time to write, even the most hardcore FOSS advocate wouldn't claim otherwise. But once those costs are funded (which they will be if you need the functionality yourself), if there's no money to be made by keeping the results a secret then you should be indifferent to opening it up. Yes, this means that FOSS is driven more by big companies than by basement programmers, because they generate a lot more code, but nobody ever claimed otherwise, except when constructing strawmen to knock down.

I was going to bring up the obvious point that most of the Internet runs on FOSS software (convenient not to mention Apache in a rant like this, arguably the producers of the most successful FOSS in existence), but upon checking, I can't call him out for hypocrisy - check out any non-existent url (for instance, http://www.lambdassociates.org/doesnotexist), at least he's actually drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid as he rails against the poor quality of open source.