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"Open Source" as a term was coined explicitly to serve as a better brand name for Free Software. It was intended to be a more business friendly, pragmatic version of Free Software.

The Open Source Definition found on the OSI site was how the term was introduced to the world. Even if you believe that the term was being used before that and with some different definition (which I haven't seen any evidence of, but it's possible), this is the source of the term as it's currently used.

What's really going on here is that proprietary companies hoping to cash in on the Open Source brand are attempting to broaden the popular definition to include things that aren't really open source.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#History
• http://opensource.org/history
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html
• http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/02/09/213900

OK show me something that is not a header, non obvious, and not found in an open common variant such as BSD. post should be modded ignorant.

Mu: it does not apply. Or more correctly: The facts do not support a decision on the issue at this time one way or another.

(Well, I'm sure there would have to be 'abortion is legal at least in order to save the life of the mother if the alternative is that both the mother and child die'. Widening the decision scope beyond that would be tricky at the very least.)

On both of these they might be able to form a coherent approach if they were given a specific, defined question about the issue. Part of the current problem on both issues is that the various sides have different questions they are trying to answer with their stance.

Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in 'master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its 'privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.

Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official 'level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of 'needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as 'Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.

The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch.

Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.

They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called 'Robin Hood' and 'Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as 'ghost jobs' (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.

One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following:

• Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job.
• Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking drives).
• The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a 'lace card' (card with all positions punched). These would usually jam in the punch.
• The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
• The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually.

Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and killed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:

!X id1

id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
id1: Off (aborted)

id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff
of Nottingham's men!

id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new

What's the matter, you don't like the "free market"?

This is like asking people "what's the matter, you don't like 'free speech'"? when they complain about defamation or incitement of imminent violence.

Pretty much any good and valuable principle can be taken to bad extremes. Which is why even our most treasured rights, like the First Amendment or free enterprise, have a degree of restrictions upon them.

Many libertarians support government enforcing contracts and prosecuting fraud, because without those things freedom descends into anarchy. Thus such basically regulated markets are still considered "free".

It is when the state goes beyond requiring honest dealing, and starts mandating rules on what citizens must or must not buy, what prices must be paid, etc. that libertarians would generally object that such markets are no longer free.

You will find the answer to this mystery in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond [1992].

Basically, Microsoft and Apple are code cathedrals. Using the Cathedral system they can organize the labor of a great many people. In a Cathedral you can do anything that is permitted to be done in that Cathedral - which can be almost anything that brings the controlling powers profit really. But if you want to do something they don't want you to do, then you can't and there's nothing you can do about it but leave the cathedral or accept that you can't do that thing.

Android and the Linuxes are the Bazaar. It's noisy and chaotic. It can be harder to find things. Some of the things you find in a Bazaar are quite crude. But in the Bazaar you can do anything you want any way you want. The Bazaar is run by everybody in it, for each to his own benefit. Almost anything that can be found in the Cathedral can also be purchased in the Bazaar by a man with ready cash. Almost anything.

One thing that can be bought in the Cathedral but not in the Bazaar is the preventing of things you don't want others to do. If somebody wants to prevent the use of VP8 or Flash in the Cathedral, or the development of hardware platforms that don't run Windows, well, anything can be proscribed if the price is right. The Cathedral is run by the head priest, and not specifically for your benefit but primarily for the benefit of the Cathedral - because it's this self serving nature that makes Cathedrals persistent and powerful.

One is not necessarily better than the other. Each has merits, each has uses.

Usenet killed Usenet.

I always thought it was the September that never ended.

Oh, dear Lord, user interfaces. They're tough to write well, and one of the great flaws of oopen source. Try the guidelines at the bottom of http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html.

One thing Eric missed in his rant is "throwing things out". Most of CPAN, for example, should have been flushed down the toilet as incompatible with thermodynamics, much less the last five yearf of Perl releases, years ago. Subversion should have thrown out Berkeley DB as an unstable piece of unusable debris years ago. And password based FTP should have been discarded as a bad idea 10 years ago, but Matlab continues to rely on it for upstream file transfer with no built-in HTTPS or WebDAV.

What are these idiots thinking?

Yeah, I Godwinned it.

You can't intentionally Godwin.

Specifically, Eric S Raymond.

I believe the term is "tits on a keyboard".

I’ll see your Jargon File link and raise you three more.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neat-hack.html, sense 1
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html, senses 1 & 7
and http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html.

I’ll see your Jargon File link and raise you three more.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neat-hack.html, sense 1
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html, senses 1 & 7
and http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html.

I’ll see your Jargon File link and raise you three more.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neat-hack.html, sense 1
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html, senses 1 & 7
and http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html.

Definition of hack, Jargon File

speak for yourself. I read Eric Raymond's guide to getting laid and I'm getting more trim than a barber shop, more ass than the taco bell toilet, more pussy than a crazy cat lady.

Were the requesters in a position to make, alter, or administrate the request?

Why is that relevant? If I've got the root password on the finance box, I've got the password, whether or not I was in a position to blah bullshit blah bloody blah.

Were they knowledgeable enough to know what they were asking?

In my experience, yes, they usually are. You can't ask for something if you don't know it exists. If you know it exists but don't know what it is/does, you shouldn't be frigging about with it. That's basic common sense.

I once had someone request sap_all on a production machine (this is like having root on a unix system; a user can do pretty much anything). He must have known what he was asking for (and if he was asking for something when he didn't know what it was, he's an idiot and he should read this). He was refused by three separate people, tried going over people's heads etc. Eventually he found someone compliant and stupid enough to do it. Even if ignorance is an excuse (which it isn't) any attempts after the first time were intentional and culpable.

Also, most organizations have an acceptable use policy that employees must sign as part of enrollment. If it says anywhere in there that passwords are not to be shared, then how can your excuse stand?

Actually quite often it means that they do end up in the position where they should not be dealing with specifics but rather guiding policy instead.

The "ah, I'm special" excuse.

If you don't have the balls to stand up to a request that is against written company policy then you deserve to get fired

Internet tough guy alert.

I have had one case where the request was one that really shouldn't be carried it out. I eventually carried it out

Then people complain that IT doesn't get treated as a profession. Sure, I'll build this school that'll fall down ... just sign this disclaimer.

What did you say earlier about balls? I'd leave that time at Enron off my resumé if I were you...

Fuck you for pushing Microsoft whitewashing and trying to frame every company, product or service in the context of Fighting the Microsoft. Apple has its problems but you are utterly full of shit to try to claim that Apple's claim to fame is other than a company focused on providing a good user experience with (usually) quality software and (often) quality hardware.

Yes, IBM was the relatively big evil back then. It turned out to be small, very small, compared to Gates who was created by IBM as a side effect of the anti-trust remedies. Talk about Gates being only hated recently is nothing but pure whitewashing. ESR's comments are updated in 2004, but date back from 1998 a time when the views he expresses in the rant are a toned-down version of what was prevalent at the time. Or scroll down to readers' comments in Phil's page. Those are from 1999. You can find material going back to the mid-1970's he's always been perceived as an obnoxious dweeb.

I suspect the original definition evolved from "A person that hacks away at a problem using primitive tools not designed for the purpose, to create an acceptable and sometimes elegant solution."

Good guess, but no.

Here's the best definition available: hacker (from the Jargon file)

Originally, the term meant to someone who creates furniture with an axe. The definition in the Jargon file is probably the closest available to the "orginal definition" in modern use.

I'm worried that it will simply display the MOTD about being a good citizen, reminding us not to violate copyright and then pointing us to our assigned task for the day.

I'm afraid it's too late to worry. I'm just waiting for the day when the MOTD you're worried about is preceeded by scrolling dmesg output and a login prompt. ;-)

Now, in addition to lawyers and accountants, you need computer programmers to invest. This smells like a racket. On the other hand, it can't get any worse than the legalese, and maybe that is the point.

Depends, they could have specified it in Perl (or something really evil). Then legalese would look like Beginner's English in comparison.
Of course I suppose that to most lawyers, any programming language will look like cuneiform anyway.

I'd like to draw a hard distinction here between cases where someone is actually being an asshole (see some of the other responses), and cases where you're wasting someone's time because you couldn't figure out how to just fucking Google it.

I try to be a bit more helpful and offer to Google it for them, but seriously, there are a lot of questions by people who need to follow this flowchart before asking questions.

The attitude comes, I think, from the fact that this is an ongoing problem. There are enough real questions and real problems, and enough real work to be done, that it's infuriating to see dozens of people asking the exact same questions (which are right there in the FAQ)...

Eventually, you end up with a situation where, consciously or not, the community has learned that it's more productive to be antisocial and drive away a few good people (and hopefully get a few people who learn to ask better questions) so we can get things done, than to have to deal with the unwashed masses.

I'm trying not to be elitist here -- again, I present it moderately gently, and I do try to offer an actual response. However, keep in mind that this is not the help desk, but a community. Meet us halfway, and we're generally quite helpful and friendly, though there are obvious exceptions. But if you're not willing to do your homework, don't expect us to go out of our way, either -- in that case, you're the one being rude.

[Microsoft] should put more energy into creating good products. Then they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics.

That method was patented by Hayes. Some modem manufacturers licensed the patent, while others did not. My Rockwell-chipset Supra modems handled +++ properly back in the day, but most of the no-name modems made after the September that never ended lacked this detail.

If I recall, there was also a way to do this using IRC directly, by issuing a command which would cause the remote client to respond (in part) with +++ATH0.

My personal favorite was just pinging folks to death. Their connection would simply degrade, as if (from their perspective) it were line noise. Once their buffers got sufficiently full, the ISP would generally (not always) drop them as latency went through the roof.

It was kind of hit and miss, since it relied on certain (broken-ish) behavior from both the ISP and the user's IP stack. And, you had to have better (less-broken) connectivity on your own end than they did, or you'd just trash your own connection instead. I had no problems knocking Windows and Linux boxes offline using my (then) superior OS/2 machine. :)

Oh. And then, after they log back in, you'd just finger their terminal server to find out their new IP address, before they'd even have a chance to do anything. Rinse, repeat. Lots of laughs, though probably not for them...

This will be quite helpful for Hewlett-Packard (formerly DEC) support staff. Since 1980 they routinely bring their own scratch monkeys on support trips.

A lot of the strong dislike about Microsoft products comes from these strategic decisions to lock in users, move them along to the next product, and prevent uptake of competing technologies. There's a lot here on /. about the persistent security issues that Windows suffers as Microsoft persists in choosing features and ease of use over security.

This whole issue persists and is so hot precisely because knowledgable people in the industry know that achieving compatibility and higher security is absolutely possible because it's done by other platforms like Open Office and BSD. It would never occur to me to claim that Office can't be made compatible, that Windows can't approach Unix in levels of security. Obviously that is possible because anything one program can do, another program can do. But then we read the Comes documents and the Halloween documents and see that these things are not only seen as "not worthwhile," but anathema to the Microsoft monopoly. They are deliberately avoided as a matter of policy - and that's what fuels the frustration - that Microsoft deliberately denies us this great boon because they see it as not in their best interest to do so, and then they field proxies who claim the things themselves are not even possible. That's rubbish.

Now in TFA it appears that some PFY on the Explorer team stumbled across w3.org and they're investigating what parts of this "web standards" nonsense might be worth embracing and extending. That's cool in a way, but most of us just assume that Microsoft will only keep the Explorer team alive (again!) long enough to reverse their market share losses and retain "ownership" of the web in the minds of common users. It's assumed that as soon as they've rebuilt their share they'll extend the standards in non-compliant ways to prevent compatibility by other browers - perhaps defending that turf with patents and patent licensing. This is what that whole HTML5 H264 vs Ogg Theora thing is about. Then once they've got their share built up again and the threat is extinguished, off to the slag heap once more with the Explorer team until their monopoly is threatened by innovation again, as their users languish in an abyss of incompatibilities and insecurities (again!). This is the song that never ends.

To come out in front of God and Everybody and say that compatibility and security are not possible is an outright lie, and I'm going to call out that lie ever time I see it. Maybe I could be nicer about it, but we've seen this nonsense for so long now that somebody who would claim to know something worth sharing should be mindful of it.

Basically, someone once wrote a convincing text which says: Release Early, Release Often.

It's a release in the sense that we wanted to make it widely available for people to see what ideas we are playing with, and to get feedback and participation.

[ disclaimer - I am the BIND 10 project manager ]

The effect is a long-standing and well documented observation about this industry. I guess Moore's Law is antithetical to satori.

One of the reasons I don't ask questions on Slashdot anymore is that instead of answering the question, a good bit of the responses are why you don't want to do what you're asking.

I think it has something to do with ESR's essay "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way": Describe the goal, not the step. People see a smartphone as a step and are trying to reverse-engineer what goal the smartphone solves for the OP.

Hot is also a bad word for picante since it can also refer to temperature, and when talking about food, we need to differentiate somehow.

According to the Jargon File, the hacker slang has a term that means the same thing you called picante. The term is: zapped

I don't know how common it is, but I have used it for years. It's a useful distinction to make and deserves a word.

steveha

This is called a pink contract.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/pink-contract.html

Might as well call it by its name: Internet Death Penalty

All the same, I hope in the deepest parts of my soul that this turns into the most epic GPL compliance battle ever, with RMS wielding his katana and ESR, his many guns.

At last, someone implemented DWIM.

Currently, on Newegg, their Intel SSDs (I singled out Intel as they reportedly make the best) come in a maximum of 160 GB. That is honestly a pathetic amount of storage. When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them.

Either you have a laptop, or you're afRAID to put more than one drive in a desktop PC. Maybe you need to RAID NewEgg and buy three SSDs. Or you can take a step back, realize that a half terabyte is a step toward some goal, and describe this goal. What do you plan to put on this 500 GB drive?

Except he doesn't want your alternate solution. He wants the solution he requested.

And I want a pony. Point is, nobody at all can understand a good reason for doing it, so that tends to make people think he's jumped prematurely to a diagnosis - fussing about "how" before he's really sure "what".

He's stating a half-assed solution, rather than expressing what the problem is - for which the best solution might be entirely different.

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal

...about the Tiger Team in the Patch entry of the Jargon Lexicon: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/patch.html

LART

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/U/uptime.html

You're assuming he's in the US. A reasonable assumption, but you wouldn't have to assume if he wasn't an ignorant horse's ass for not stating where the fuck he is in the first place.

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

and then attempts to refute. Fair enough. Except - the link leads to The Cathedral And The Bazaar - where I cannot find the quote... Hmmm

It's on this page: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html Right after point #8, about halfway down.

Thanks - admittedly I stopped reading after about page 6 and just used search...

Can this guy not even read? Or is he just too lazy to do the tiniest bit of research into Linus' Law actually is? From The Cathedral And The Bazaar:

Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this:

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'' I dub this: ``Linus's Law''.

My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.'' That correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly.

Linus' Law says nothing about how many bugs are introduced into a system, or how well code is generally audited. All it says is that once someone finds a bug, if you have enough people looking at that bug, someone will figure out what the problem is, and someone will figure out a solution, pretty quickly.

That's it. And it is still true.

and then attempts to refute. Fair enough. Except - the link leads to The Cathedral And The Bazaar - where I cannot find the quote... Hmmm

It's on this page: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
Right after point #8, about halfway down.

Bugs are an error in the process, not the code. If you find a bug, you need to find the process error that allowed that bug to occur.

Agreed!

I read, with interest, the referenced article. I was expecting FUD - but I didn't find much, until I reached the Conclusion.

eg.

The many eyeballs argument is neat, tidy, compelling, and wrong.

The article starts with

Eric S. Raymond wrote , “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He calls this Linus’ law.

and then attempts to refute. Fair enough. Except - the link leads to The Cathedral And The Bazaar - where I cannot find the quote... Hmmm

Now this might be relevant if the "many eyes" routine was the only form of audit used in GNU/Linux - but is not the only form of review/audit used. I'm sure other, more knowledgable posters will be able to provide more evidence than I could find in a quick search.

I call FUD

You're absolutely right, and if I had mod privs today, I'd mod you up.

Remember even ESR gave up on the "Everything should be in Ogg" argument in his World Domination 201 essay, and called for a Linux consortium to license H.264 en masse for Linux clients. And that was four years ago. Ogg has made no meaningful inroads since then.

The solution is to do away with the 3 second delay and have a hinged transparent plastic cover over the ignition button,

So we're going to install Molly guards?

Well, there's something reasonably similar already: the microLenat.

Allow me to introduce you to some well know "off the record" documents. "Off the record" doesn't mean nobody knows about it. It means that Microsoft hasn't gone "on record" that they do such things. Prostitutes make money "off the record", but it would be ridiculous to claim that you have no way of knowing that they make money.

You're all brave now that the thread is old and nobody who watches this stuff will read it. That's a clue that I need to be alert to debunk your crap in current threads, so thanks for the heads up.

I made no mistake. I'm quite aware of the "somehow". It's called evangelism. It's a recognized part of the strategy, immoralized in the Halloween documents and the Comes documents.

This mind bending is actually the entirety of Microsoft's value add. Everything else they bought - and ruined. In terms the average slashdotter will understand: it's the dark side of The Force. In more common terms it's Power Selling - the art of convincing somebody that your brand is worth paying extra for when it adds nothing - in fact, when it subtracts much from security, reliability and utility - and in fact actually restricts the freedom of users to use innovations that would benefit them because they are outside the scope of commercial software.

How Microsoft makes the ability of enterprises to maintain their data over the long term a complete impossibility and then sells that as a valuable feature is a ridiculous example of the power of persuasion over observable facts. Yet they continue to do it over and over again, turning my preferred career path into a theatre of the absurd.

Apple products: I'm looking for a mainstream PC product that I can buy that equates in performance, app compat, battery life, media flexibility and utility to my 2 year old iPod Touch. I'm not seeing it. W7 doesn't run on ARM and it never will. WinMo looks like Windows 3.1 and relies on vendors to build the interface because apparently all the WinMo developers with UI experience were let go. They rebooted the WinMo team last March, and it's likely they'll be a couple years before the new team is ready with a product that's worthy of the name WinMo 7. Redmond may come out with a product by that name, but we'll only enjoy a good laugh over it.

And then when our slates, our phones and many of our PCs are "powered by" non-MS technologies and they're powerful, useful and reliable, then what? Every patch Tuesday, every morning while our W7 machines boot, every time our systems freeze or shut down unexpectedly we'll get our hero points by whipping out our iPad, Nexus Two, LiMo Slates and getting the job done under adverse conditions. Big win for those with foresight and a Darwin moment for those without. We'll look back at our PC's with Windows as the slow cousins we have to encourage to finish the race so they can get a trophy in the special olympics.

A search engine is nothing more than algorithms and marketing to get folks to use it and get the subsequent advertising revenue - the hardware and programming involved and its costs are not a factor

Yeah, it's a piece of cake. I wrote one in basic on a zx81 - using my feet.