I think the food companies and top chefs would disagree. Food isn't simple it's a complex science a combination of chemistry and biology with some engineering thrown in especially if you're talking about mass production. Cooking is very unpredictable, two cakes made with the same ingrediants and cooked in the same way can taste differant because one batch of ingrediants might have slightly differant properties. For example one batch of cherries might be sweeter than another because they've had slightly more sunshine, because of this the cooks might alter their recipe on the fly by adding less suger to the batch made with the sweeter cheries.
I ain't saying that food is simple; I myself looove cooking and experimentation therewith. What I AM saying, OTOH, is that you don't really see the difference between todays breads and those from a few years ago (although European breads differ from American ones et al. - the Europian types are edible
), there is no simple, linear upgrading.
OK, I now realise this is quite important - and with this I have finally completed creating my opinion on music and movies as well:
In other words, this is indeed the difference between art and science. Open source seems to work very well with some models. It has always been used in general science and knowledge (Newton, Einstein etc.), recently software and knowledge organisation (wiki), possibly eventually in pharmaceutics, chemistry, hardware. All these areas are scientific, and OBJECTIVE. They have progress, they can be written down.
Within those where this doesn't apply, the OS model cannot be used. These are all artistic, and therefore SUBJECTIVE. They depend closely on their creator (musician, director, chef) and are unimprovable (because this is a matter of opinion), unreproductable (no two instruments, ingredients or actors are the same) and THEREFORE UNCHANGEABLE. The OS model implicitly expects the ability to change the work in question, hence cannot be used here. I am sorry for the uncontiguousness of my post - I am making this up on the go, and I'll try to get it a little more organised later. I hope some of you understand what I mean.
The purpose of the ingrediant list on the label is for people on special diets or who have allergies rather than being open source.
Yup. And people who refuse to eat certain things in principle or for health reasons.
Drug companies spend vast amounts on research and development to fund this their products are sold for considerably more than their production cost, if they were made open then their competitors could sell them for much less and they'd loose their investment. Drugs always come down in price when they've payed for their research and development costs because by then a competitor has developed an alternative anyway.
Well this doesn't really differ from the OSS model, except that casual contributors can't (yet...?) work from their home PC. The drug companies wouldn't have to spend the money, because it would be a community effort. Hopefully this would result in an overall faster dev cycle, as it does in some OSS areas.
What's a DVORAK?
Jenda uses Dvorak keyboards instead of Qwerty, for some reason.
No, you use QWERTY instead of dvorak. Read the
dvzine - it's not very long. And I'm VERY happy with Dvorak. All I have to do is find out how to change the layout to include Czech and French characters.
If they are not then someone could set up a wikipedia like site for releasing traced schematics from hardware to allow people to fix it.
Wow I like this idea. Imagine how great this would be for home-brew sautering hobbyists. My friend (who introduced me to GNU/Linux) is such a person - he is making his third TESLA coil.
