Slashdot Mirror

Actually, the really smart people don't bother with all of this weblog crap...
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"HORSE."

I just read Monty's rebuttal of the "Ethics of Free Software" article, which was previously on Slashdot. I gotta say, I was impressed. Nice to see that the smart programmers are also able to express themselves in careful, intelligent, thoughtful ways outside the programming realm.

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There are several issues here: peer review, architecture, algorithm and implementation.

Peer Review: At each step in the process (architecture, algorithm, and implementation), you should publish your ideas for criticism by experts. slashdot, Advogato, the Cypherpunks mailing list, sci.crypt, and the Crypto++ mailing list might (or might not) be good places to find such people.

Architecture: You should do a public key architecture where every participant has a public/private key pair and the public keys are used to sign and encrypt symmetric keys that are then used for encryption and authentication of messages. There are three feasible architectures for public key distribution. You have to choose one based upon your threat model. Almost all realistic threat models should be handled using the first option: "opportunistic public key distribution". If you don't have a threat model in mind at all then you might as well use the first option. If you do have a threat model which precludes using the first option then I'd like to hear about it -- you must be doing something very interesting indeed.

• Option one: "opportunistic public key distribution". The first time any pair of people talk to one another, they exchange public keys in an un-authenticated exchange. (Also: you could just do Diffie-Hellman key generation here.) After that, they remember each other's public keys for future use. This is susceptible to an active attack (a "Man In The Middle Attack"), during the first step (though not afterwards). However the cost to the attacker of executing a MITM attack is probably far more than the payoff. This depends on your threat model.
• Option two: make it the user's problem; Each user decides whether to use a given key to talk to another user or not. This is the user interface nightmare that single-handedly prevented strong crypto from becoming standard in e-mail, but for a few applications it might be the right thing.
• Option three: hardcoded; Generate key pairs yourself and include them in the application. For example if you are going to have a single central server in your system which you operate then you can generate a key pair for it, put the secret key on the server, and put a copy of the public key into each copy of the client (e.g. include the public key hardcoded into the client source code). This doesn't work as well if you want to distribute copies of your server for other people to operate, but refer to "Option one"...

Algorithm: You probably just want Triple-DES and RSA (after September of this year, when RSA becomes free of patents) or else Triple-DES and Diffie-Hellman. It should be easy to switch to a different symmetric cipher later after the new ones have been peer-reviewed and tried by fire, but for starters you want the old standbys that have already withstood the test of time. They will be fast enough for you at first and if you need more speed later you can switch.

Implementation: Your first choice should be to use an extant implementation. Don't try to implement it yourself no matter how simple it looks. Satan's Computer is deceptively subtle to people who are used to hacking Murphy's Computer.

I prefer Wei Dai's Crypto++ library, but that is because I'm doing complex non-standard crypto tricks. If you just want simple "encrypt/authenticate a stream" functionality then use a TLS implementation like OpenSSL. By the way, if anyone wants to make Python wrappers for Crypto++ (possibly with the aid of Swig) then I would love to hear about it!

Okay that's my advice. Specific pitfalls to avoid are: skipping peer-review, trying to design a generalized perfect public key architecture to handle all possible threat models, using a newfangled or non-standard algorithm ("In open source hackery, newfangled is good. In crypto, not."), and implementing it yourself instead of using a library.

Please direct all flames and accolades to: zooko@schowto.mad-scientist.com

Weblogs are a cool concept, but ultimately lead to fragmentation -- content, eyeballs, authors, and participants are spread among many distinct islands.

One of the more interesting ideas to emerge from the Advogato / Kuro5hin axis is the concept of syndication. This would cover content, already common -- Slashdot and LinuxToday are essentially content syndication sites, and The Register officially sanctions linking. But syndication could also include a distributed user directory, and potentially (flame on) attributes such as karma or other metrics of merit from various sites.

I see a mix of several models coallescing into the final "product":

• From Slashdot and Blockstackers -- Everything -- a hyperlinked, persistant, discussion/directory. Somewhat like Wiki.
• From Kuro5hin, a well-de signed collaborative moderating system
• From Advogato, the idea of a trust metric is useful, but not sufficient.
• From the IWETHEY EZBoard, active content promotion. Active topics float up in the discussion queue. It's a bit different from a typical weblog, but tends to promote issues of interest and bury (but not kill) those which aren't generating much traffic.
• From LinuxWorld, multiple forum interfaces -- forums can be web, Usenet, or e-mail based.

Still to be worked out are issues of story selection. Various models work -- Slashdot and IWETHEY fall at two extremes, with a dedicated editorial staff on the one hand, and a number of free-form "open forums" in which any topic may be posted and discussed. Kuro5hin's still working out the kinks, though a number of suggestions have been proposed.

The point is that high-quality (and low quality) content are created all over the Net. Mindless Link Propogation (TM) (MLP) is a useful way of aggregating it to key sites. Mindful link propogation might be even better.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Weblogs are a cool concept, but ultimately lead to fragmentation -- content, eyeballs, authors, and participants are spread among many distinct islands.

One of the more interesting ideas to emerge from the Advogato / Kuro5hin axis is the concept of syndication. This would cover content, already common -- Slashdot and LinuxToday are essentially content syndication sites, and The Register officially sanctions linking. But syndication could also include a distributed user directory, and potentially (flame on) attributes such as karma or other metrics of merit from various sites.

I see a mix of several models coallescing into the final "product":

• From Slashdot and Blockstackers -- Everything -- a hyperlinked, persistant, discussion/directory. Somewhat like Wiki.
• From Kuro5hin, a well-de signed collaborative moderating system
• From Advogato, the idea of a trust metric is useful, but not sufficient.
• From the IWETHEY EZBoard, active content promotion. Active topics float up in the discussion queue. It's a bit different from a typical weblog, but tends to promote issues of interest and bury (but not kill) those which aren't generating much traffic.
• From LinuxWorld, multiple forum interfaces -- forums can be web, Usenet, or e-mail based.

Still to be worked out are issues of story selection. Various models work -- Slashdot and IWETHEY fall at two extremes, with a dedicated editorial staff on the one hand, and a number of free-form "open forums" in which any topic may be posted and discussed. Kuro5hin's still working out the kinks, though a number of suggestions have been proposed.

The point is that high-quality (and low quality) content are created all over the Net. Mindless Link Propogation (TM) (MLP) is a useful way of aggregating it to key sites. Mindful link propogation might be even better.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Rob Pike's presentation was discussed on Advogato about a month ago. I'm biased of course, but I think there are some very interesting points.

Of more interest but rejected by slashdot is the story of how Microsoft has frightened virtualdub into removing its reverse engineered support for the asf file format. MS got a patent on its asf file format you see. Now if they do the same for the next release of their MsOffice package or SMB you can kiss interoperability goodbye.

Of more interest but rejected by slashdot is the story of how Microsoft has frightened virtualdub into removing its reverse engineered support for the asf file format. MS got a patent on its asf file format you see. Now if they do the same for the next release of their MsOffice package or SMB you can kiss interoperability goodbye.

Do you have any suggestions for a better way?

I prefer snort. It logs attack attempts, but doesn't do the blocking that PortSentry does. Snort is very configurable, and can log a good deal of information.

The question I have (which I've been thinking of submitting to Ask Slashdot) is what to do with the lists of attacker IP addresses. I'm sure these are mostly just ``innocent'' compromised hosts, but it would be nice if there were some organized way for us to keep track of who those hosts were, so that people who were concerned about security could blacklist them.

Of course, there would need to be a way to ensure that the reported IP addresses are genuinely attackers (otherwise script kiddies could just submit claims that you were hacking them). Maybe Advogato's method for establishing a trust network could be adapted to the problem?

There was a lil typo.. the correct link is here.

most people that are Christians are not true Christians. They do not attend Church twice a week and pray every night

A 'true Christian' (your term, not mine) would go to Church more frequently than twice a week (how about twice a day?), and would pray more regularly than every night. A true Christian would praise God with everything he says and does.

A place where Christianity is taboo has a much larger proportion of programmers than almost any other website I know of.

Christianity is not a taboo on Slashdot, what rubbish. However, Slashdot is a Linux website and discussions of Christianity would be off-topic. In fact, Slashdot gives a free platform from which Christians (such as myself) are able to air our views. Try Advogato and The Stile Project for even less coverage of Christian issues. You will then realise how tolerant Slashdot is to the discussion of Christianity and Christian issues.

Fourth: a farmhand is likely to have grown up in Middle America, a place of strong moral fiber, and to be free from many of the evil influences that the city brings.

Utter nonsense, trollboy. Middle America is a place of very poor moral fibre - it is an inherently racist region and a region ruled by violence. Guns (the tools Satan uses to turn man against his fellow man) are widespread in America, and the majority of Americans worship the ideals of consumerism rather than God. It is down to individual choice whether or not to follow Evil, and in this respect no region is better than any other. As far as "evil influences" of cities, surely cities have more churches per area than small less densely populated villages, therefore cities are intrinsically holy?

Most people with a Computer Science degree are lucky to remain with the slightest few sheds of religion that have not been indoctrinated out of them.

Hello? Computer Science degrees make no attempts influence people's religious views. While they may indoctrinate people that Python is better than Perl, Solaris is better than BSD, vi is better than EMACS and Microsoft is better than everything put together, these are not religous arguments. They are trivial.

Please, think before you post next time.

Advogato is running a fabulous rebuttal to Meyer's rant. It's worth a read, as it contains many interesting ideas, and is written by none other than the inestimable xiphmont of Vorbis fame.

The Darwin project is distinct from MacOSX.

I'm afraid this is completely incorrect. Darwin == MacOS X - Quartz and everything on top. For reference, I suggest you look at: Apple's Public Source website, Apple's MacOS X website, this block diagram and page, and Fred Sanchez's Advogato diary. The gist of all that is that MacOS X kernel developers and Darwin developers use the same CVS sources. The kernel is identical. Also, all of Darwin is included with MacOS X, as the underlying foundation.

Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity

Several people have (rightly) pointed out that DP4 != Aqua. Nevertheless, as the screenshots indicatre, Aqua is coming along nicely. The use of transparency and global antialiasing is delightful - even if some of the widgets are excessively gaudy.

Now that Darwin has been ported to Intel with support for X11, there has been much talk about if/when any of Aqua's tasty goodness will be available in that context. It has been suggested that this will never happen b/c Apple is unlikely to give away as important a crown jewel as its much ballyhooed GUI.

It is important to remember that Aqua is essentially just a widget set - the real power behind the interface is Quartz, the new PDF based rendering engine. If you refer to Wilfredo Sanchez's diary he indicates the possibility of a port of X11 to Quartz! The addition of Quartz's advanced features to X11 could be quite a treat. Although this is mentioned as a means of supporting X11 apps on MacOS X, it is possible that some support of this type might pave the way to supporting graphical Cocoa apps on Intel (it is unlikely that Classic or even Carbon apps will ever be supported on Intel but Cocoa is a whole 'nother kettle of fish).

Given the well known limitations of X11, esp. wrt to antialiasing, opening Quartz would be a much greater gift to the community than Aqua which is just another, albeit pretty, set of interface elements. I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason).

I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe. Out of all of MacOS X's new goodies, I think Quartz is the pick of the litter - not Aqua.

the text clearly lists the limitations of the survey including the small code base used; the algorithm to identify and credit authors is clearly documented - and the source code is available on the site FWIW. of course, the survey is full of errors, some of which i've commented on here, on advogato and elsewhere (e.g. gordon matzigkeit).

the main problem is naturally that this is impossible to do by hand and has to be automated; we did want to look at authorship at a file level (the lowest level of granularity available); and author credits are in no fixed format. they're not even there much of the time, which is why copyright holders such as the FSF get a lot of credit too. the only alternative to listing them as they are is to have a huge "uncredited" portion - at least until authors start consistently claiming credit, using the same name or e-mail address in each file they write.

incidentally it is not possible for us to guess which of many contributors to a single file are more important; as documented, the credit is currently split equally among them.

finally, this is just a start. while we intend to continue working on this, the algorithm source code is available as are all the code bases, so nothing stops you from doing it too.

Since nothing really happend and the article above gives a trivial way to enable the preference. Why was this posted a day later on Slashdot anyway?

Since nothing really happend and the article above gives a trivial way to enable the preference. Why was this posted a day later on Slashdot anyway?

Well, if you recognize Gordon's name, you'll remember what project he is perhaps best known for: libtool. Now, packages that use libtool happen to include some rather long (autogenerated) files in them that have Gordon's name attached. So for every package that uses libtool, Gordon gets credited with about 8 thousand lines of code. What a sweet deal!

The discussion points out some interesting facts about why some individuals are listed as big contributers (such as the author of libtool. Duh.) and why some aren't listed at all. They even have some comments from the developers of the survey.

And I just love the comment of Havoc Pennington:

It shows me as a major contributor to "gnuclear" and nothing else - I don't even know what gnuclear is. ;-)

The discussion points out some interesting facts about why some individuals are listed as big contributers (such as the author of libtool. Duh.) and why some aren't listed at all. They even have some comments from the developers of the survey.

And I just love the comment of Havoc Pennington:

It shows me as a major contributor to "gnuclear" and nothing else - I don't even know what gnuclear is. ;-)

I agree with what you are saying.

HOWEVER, I do not think that is mainly relevant to what this A.C. has said.

The key thing he is saying is that he has noticed that in the current setup it is HARD, if not IMPOSSIBLE, to contribute to the project.

Possibly himself, or at least the others who have already contributed code(9 patches) can't enter into the FixCode() functionality of your implementation(because the SourceForge maintainers have control of the codebase and are throwing out their changes. Did you see the notes on linuxtoday.com/advogato today about how mozilla may be losing its banner-ad-blocking capabilities because of an essentially identical situation in a different corporation?) I really don't think he is saying that they are not 100% open source, and thus must die, but rather that he has noticed that for a group who so loudly proclaim the merits of OSS they are having such a hard time implementing it themselves.

It's not that he's pointing fingers and saying, "shame on them, they aren't practicing what they are preaching"

If anything, I think he is saying, "It's a shame, because people are trying to help and its just not happening(for whatever various reasons)"

YES, we should not critisize without offering to help.

NO, we cannot help if the software,model,or implementation is broken.

I think what may be most important here, and hopefully will not be overlooked, is that this A.C., and others, are trying to support the open source projects(and movement as a whole). These are the people who are contributing to the metadevelopment of OSS, if you will. If I may make a statement that is hopefully not too all-encompassing, these people really care about OSS, and want to see the projects(not just _their_ pet project, but all the oss projects) succeed.

They want to help, but can't. They are ready and willing to code, but their code is being misplaced. Would you rather they go away in frustration, or would you rather hear one or two high-publicity comments on the current situation, so that things get changed and they _are_ able to help?

don't flame him for critisizing them. Flame him when he continues to critisize them(without contributing) after they fix it. Right now its all he can do to criticize them, because he _cant_ fix it.(another thing I think he wanted to emphasize in his message. He doesn't want them punished or bad-mouthed, he just wants them to fix the setup/software)

just another a.c.

Forged source may be somewhat evil

Delays in releasing source may be annoying

This goes beyond evil: AOL orders Mozilla to remove code that blocks adds

When Monopolies believe that it is their right to control open source development that will be the end of the OSS Movement.

mod_virgule, the engine behind Advogato, is written as an Apache C module, a fairly unusual choice for server-side scripting. My experiences with it have been very positive, as have been the other sites that use it (Skolos, a discussion forum for sexuality issues; Jabber.org, the Jabber developer's website; and a couple of others in the works). Advogato has been slashdotted several times now, and the load meter barely moves. That's one of the really nice consequences of programming in C :)

There are a few reasons why mod_virgule was a more pleasant programming experience than your usual CGI script in C. First, Apache's pool mechanism lets you use memory without having to worry about freeing it. It's almost as convenient as using a garbage collected programming language. Second, the Apache module API contains a lot of functions for regexps, tables, lists, and so on. These are the most important features of Perl that are lacking from raw C. It's nice to be able to write code in C that has a bit of a Perl "feel".

Finally, mod_virgule uses XML extensively in the backend, using Daniel Veillard's excellent libxml for parsing and handling. The use of XML makes the code for the site a lot cleaner.

So, I suggest that you not reject C out of hand just because it has a reputation for being more difficult or time-consuming to program than your more popular interpreted scripting languages. For what I was trying to do in mod_virgule, it turned out to be an excellent choice.

Hmm, perhaps somethink along the same lines as Advogato could be applied here. It's a weblog like /. but instead of a moderation system it relies on a "trust metric" where users are certified by other users ensuring that people with relevence to the field are given more of a voice. Of course, it's not a perfect system but it would definitely be more productive than /.'s moderation system for an online journal.

You'd also need more advanced formatting (perhaps a LaTeX to HTML converter since LaTeX seems to be the preferred choice for writing papers) so that equations, tables and graphs could be included in both the paper and responses, a decent search engine with multiple criteria for finding articles/comments.

I think you could do this now, but it would be a very difficult project to code. Still, maybe someone out there's working on it?

Listen twit, it's all done algorithmically based on how much time you spend on slashdot. So anyone can be a moderator provided they don't spend too much time on slashdot (like me) or too little. Secondly what is this crap about moderators pissing you off, there is all sorts of customizability to slashdot that enables people with accounts (like you) to never see scores or simply browse at -1. Why not read all the past articles on moderation?

Moderation Ideas by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 14, @10:11AM EST 328
Slashdot's Meta Moderation by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 07, @01:31PM EST 284
More Moderation Madness by CmdrTaco on Monday September 06, @05:07PM EST 321
Slashdot Moderation Phase 1.1 by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 25, @07:15AM EST 71
Slashdot Notes by CmdrTaco on Monday May 24, @12:25PM EST 208
Assorted Slashdot Notes by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 14, @11:00AM EST 69
Slashdot Forum Updates by CmdrTaco

And to satisfy the moderators who would love to mark this as offtopic. Here's my take on the AMD shortage. The article states that both AMD and Intel underestimated demand. This means that a possible reason for the large demand for AMD chips is less to do with price/performance as some posters have mentioned and more to do with the fact that Intel chips are rather scarce, and there won't be a large influx of them for at least two months.

PS: To all the twits that think slashdot sucks why not move? Go to Advogato or Kuro5hin or any of the dozens of other slash sites. Trying to wreck slashdot does you no good and doesn't do anyone any harm. Most people simply browse at 2 or 3 and never see your rantings and ravings anyway, and even if you did drive everyone away from slashdot, then what?

Why couldn't you have had a sort of mock-interview where the readers could moderate up old comments that should go into the book. The comments came from us and we should have had input as to which ones we felt best represented us!

The only thing that is keeping me on Slashdot is habit. I've been here since the Chips and Dips. Cmdrtaco: You should have known damn well that some of us would be pissed off for you publishing our comments this way. Don't you remember the furor that erupted several years ago when you mentioned you might make a /. compilation CD-ROM?

OH that's right, half the /. staff doesn't even pay attention to what happens on the site anymore. Thank god for places like Advogato. They will take over when /. finally dies under its own weight.

• Why do people play musical instruments (non-professionally) when it's possible to get all the music you want from your Tower Records store, at a cost much lower than the opportunity cost of the time spent?
  
  
• Why do people work as scientists, when it's possible to work as an engineer in the corresponding field, often at a much higher pay?
  
  
• Why do people teach, or write, when it's possible to simply practice the field?
  
  

• Why do people play musical instruments (non-professionally) when it's possible to get all the music you want from your Tower Records store, at a cost much lower than the opportunity cost of the time spent?
  
  
• Why do people work as scientists, when it's possible to work as an engineer in the corresponding field, often at a much higher pay?
  
  
• Why do people teach, or write, when it's possible to simply practice the field?
  
  

Perhaps the Gnome team can eventually take the Mozilla engine and build a decent browser for unix with an interface that works, but they are showing little interest in doing that. Why they haven't does puzzle me a lot.

Basically, Nautilus (the Eazle file manager) will now embed the Bonobo mozilla component. In one step Nautilus has leaprogged Konquerer and Opera in standards-compliant web browsing, and provided a native GTK-zilla without any of that skin bloat.

Of course we'll have to wait a few months for a Nautilus beta. But I guess it'll take that long to fix the memory leaks in Mozilla.

Kuro5hin has a write-up on this here and Advogato has one here. They've had these articles for most of today they have some interesting posts already.

http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html

Arun

In this recent Advogato interview with Christopher Montgomery, he notes that the Vorbis libraries themselves are in the final cleanup stages towards a 1.0 release, and that what they need now are developers to add application support.

#1. Read the story at advogato if you haven't already.

#2. Cordwainer Byrd from the "law firm" representing Andover has an email address from bbmma.com. A simple check at Network Solutions reveals the domain name is still available.

#3. The patent #'s in question(45,487,338,209 and 46,773,228,287) looked a little suspect to me so I checked them out at the patent office. Nope, no patents.

#4. It gets better. PR Newswire"(whoever they are, their website only has an IP address, not a qualified domain name) refers to a different patent, #5,876,324. I won't spoil this part for you. Just follow the link.

Happy april fools day! Good one, slashdot & advogato. I for one am glad there's a day where you can take things not so seriously.

why is /. hiding this from everyone?
Andover.net is suing

I urge you all to spread the word about this heinous tripe, and to boycott this site and all andover holdings until they stop trying to sue the competition out of existence.

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I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.

Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.

Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.

I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.

Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.

Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.

[ hot grits | hot news ]

I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.

Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.

Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.

[ hot grits | hot news ]

My user ID is an order of magnitude lower than yours. It would have been lower, but I was boycotting usernames along with JWZ and many others (anyone remember those days anymore, or did everyone finally leave for Advogato?)

Though I'm a hard core Linux advocate, even I'm beginning to tire of the extreme Linux bias here. I'd like to see something that hasn't already been hashed over two dozen times since Chips and Dips. That is part of the reason I did the Buddying up to BSD series on Linux.com. Some of us really need to get our heads out of the sand. If Microsoft had pulled this XFS thing we woulda been screaming vaporware the whole time, but mention Linux and Open Source and we roll right over.

From what I've heard, people using the developers' preview releases of OS X have had little trouble compiling standard GNU apps (If I recall rightly, ash & tcsh were mentioned). Among the development tools being used are a variation (recently GPL'ed) of gcc and tools like make, etc.

Once there is an X server out for OS X, which really shouldn't take long, you should be able to get X11 apps compiled for OS X as well.

Yes, he wants Darwin in the BSD family, not Mac on Intel. From his avogato diary:

Though Darwin's role in the world is as the guts of Mac OS X, it is shaping up to be a viable BSD platform on its own. It take advantage of some of the great work underway in the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux communities, as well as several of the neat things we're working on at Apple.

For some more informal reports, have a look through some diary entries at Advogato, including mine.

For some more informal reports, have a look through some diary entries at Advogato, including mine.

If there's a tech news site out there that's doing a better job than /. (read: the kind of job /. used to do), I'd like to know about it.

Two promising contenders are Kuro5hin and advogato. Both are slightly different from Slashdot: kuro5hin lets users moderate stories and has stricter anti-spam rules, and advogato requires users to be "certified" by others based on their participation in the free software world. kuro5hin is updated much more frequently, but the tech level of each is much higher than here on /., and the s/n ratio is magnifique.

And I must apologise to kuro5hin, who were the ones who mentioned the M-Net story, not advogato.

According to this advogato article, mostly kernel hackers (including Alan Cox) got offers. Seems some apache folks ago got it.
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Slashdot may say that they represent the open source community, but that is just their limited opinion. Slashdot is far and away from representing the 'open source' community, and getting farther by the day judging by the childish quality of the posts here.

Check out Advogato for opinions that are a lot closer to the open source movement...or even Linux Today.

Secondly, assuming you aren't a big troll, I'd like to know WHY you think that the open source model is going to fade? You missed the point of this article entirely with your example of ESR and BP...the whole point is that even the clashing of two supposed 'titans' of the movement didn't come anywhere close to derailing the movement. Open Source is a LOT bigger than ESR and BP...they are just voices of the many (who happen to have their own web sites). The BP/ESR feud certainly did NOT tear the community apart..did Linux kernel development stop? Did the Gnome/KDE folks all colletively hold their breaths waiting for the outcome? Did Redhat go on full red alert? Hell no...the whole incident was a side show in Rob Malda's Flying Circus, and nothing more. If anything came of it, the community at large realized that such arguments are bound to confuse the less educated media...we became much more conscious of what we were saying and doing. It's called evolution, something closed sourcers know nothing about.

I think your own desire to see Linux fade away clouds your vision (or lack thereof). Sorry to inform you that we're here to stay...

Aficionados of silly patents will rejoice in finding this patent, kneepad and all, in the patent database, just with a slightly different number. It's US Patent 5,993,336.

Also, for those who have browser troubles on the around.com version of the story, there's a stripped down version linked from Advogato.

C.

Unfortunately anonymous posters could quite easily create a user just for a purposes of posting. A user name doen't validate that the person won't want to troll if that's the purpose of the user account.

With the moderation problems of the current system (in that moderat0rs giving their points to topics they don't know enough about but that look authoritive) would be more problematic when they have control over stories also.

Unfortunately I think a human touch is the only current way to see through the shit.

However what I'd like to see is an open possible article list that anyone can post on to help assist/(troll) the editors in choosing good stories - with the final decision being on the editor. Previous articles like the Quake text mode version will then hopefully be known about before posting (ed's can still post it with the backing that it doesn't look so accidental)

Thank you for your time, and may you get breakfast in bed tomorrow morning, champ.

It describes a clueless "suit" at andover.net who apparently apparently needs some lessons on the whole free software idea.It would be nice to get an informed explanation other than "just another clueless marketing droid". Also I think that attitudes like this are rather incompatible with the philosophy behind slashdot.org

Andover.Net and the deep pockets of Wilber the GIMP