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Blasting the truth at a deaf liar isn't trolling.

By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

If their products are absurdly overpriced, why do you need absurdly overpriced products? A Ferrari is absurdly overpriced too, does that mean you should illegally acquire one? Do you need a Ferrari? Or do you just want one because it's a damn good car, but you can't afford it?

It's becoming increasingly difficult to get by without a computer, and a computer needs an OS. MS would like us to believe(as anybody in the business would, including, with arguably more merit, the FOSS developers) that their OS is the best one for us.

They've been charging increasing amounts of money for the lowest-level offering. They don't offer an economy Windows, and many Slashdotters would deride them for offering crippled software if they did. Granted, there are heavier-duty versions that are better suited to servers(bear with me here, please) than the consumer offering, but even the consumer offering is getting pretty steep.

Photomanipulation and 3D rendering programs take it to respectively greater degrees. They're niche markets, and are often used by business customers. Thus, the companies set prices that only businesses can afford, and keep individuals from legally getting into the field; thus, only businesses buy the software, and are on record as being the ones that mostly use it...

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, personally, if I ever get into photo manupilation I'm far more likely to try to learn the GIMP or something like that than to pirate Photoshop; ditto if there's a good OSS 3D modeler out there(though I don't yet know what such options may exist).

If I start using the software for profit, I'm likely to either look for a slightly higher-end program that carries a small charge, or send a contribution to the people involved in the tool that I do use(which contribution might or might not be monetary, depending on whether I have relevant skills to the project).

Too, going back to the original topic, don't forget that this act might get weaseled around to apply to perfectly legitimate uses of P2P software. All those people on Bittorrent for Linux ISOs had better watch out... Is it really hard to imagine that, since the program you're using could be used to distribute copyrighted material, the suits(2) will brush aside the fact that you, personally, weren't doing so at the time? You might be able to win such a case in time, but only if the legal fees don't grind you into the ground first.

It's not so much a "yeah, you have to install & setup everything anyway" thing as a "how long, and how much effort, does it take to install & setup everything."

Prime example being the ESR piece :
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

As a follow up, just so you don't think I'm just some luser, see this editorial by Eric S. Raymond, linked in todays Slashback...

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Could be worse, you could be reading ESR's love tips.

However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

----------
Create a WAP server

In software engineering we call it a Schroedinbug [Jargon File]. It happens to the best of them.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Windows NT has its architectural roots in VMS, not MS-DOS.

And since you're in need of a history lesson: the RTM worm spread via email (sort of) on Unix systems, and several Unix/Linux virus and worms have been discovered in the wild - Lion which spreads via a vulnerability in BIND, Bliss which infects ELF executables, Sadmind aka PoizonBox which targets both Solaris/sadmind and Windows/IIS, Staog, etc. Lindose can infect both ELF and PE executables but it's only a proof of concept.

Hell, there were even a few worms and trojans running around on VMS back in the day.

When written by noobs, virus/worms/trojans are a popularity contest, nothing more. When written by those skilled in the art, malicious mobile code is about risk management, engineering costs, and return on investment. Thus endeth the lesson.

*plonk*

(I was going to moderate this guy's post up, but since no one else has educated this newbie, I guess I'll have to leave the positive moderation to someone else.)

Something perhaps like this?

I'll chime in to support the parent. Despite the tremendous strides it has made in a very short time, the Linux desktop is still not suitable for general consumption. Did you read Eric Raymond's rant on the Linux user experience? Gnome and KDE are worthy efforts which I use daily, but as Mr. Raymond points out there is more to creating a productive end user interface then poping up dialog boxes that allow you to type in the same obscure strings that you would otherwise have typed into /etc/foo.conf using emacs.

I'd abandoned Apple back in the OS 8 days because I'd though the OS was languishing, but I just bought an iBook P4, and with OS X Apple really has made a Unix desktop that really is usable by the legions of Aunt Tillies.

nzg Something perhaps like this [catb.org]?

z

Putting together hotmail, MSN, and AOL will create the largest newbie base on the Internet.

So you're saying that September 1993 is still not expected to end any time soon?

Zawinski's Law strikes again.

That's not his point. His point is that no person can comfortably read all that information -- never mind make sense of it all. When the person is the administrator of the box, as is the case with most home users, he or she has the very real problem of eyes glazing over prematurely because the information cannot be understood.

Eric Raymond talks about precisely this problem extensively in Chapter 10 of his Art of Unix Programming.

No, it's a design problem. Thermal overload protection should be based completely on the chip, not off on the motherboard! Intel does it that way, AMD didn't. Don't know about now. But if you leave it up to the motherboard to protect the CPU from overheating, that is just asking to let the magic smoke out, IMHO.

If some CPUs don't protect themselves from permanent failure due to thermal overload, well, that's problem of the greedy bastards manufacturing such crap and the fools tricked into buying them.

For those of you who don't know PHP, just wait a version or two. It already supports VB, C, C++, Javascript and Perl style coding. Version 5 is basically Java. Expect Intercal, Unlambda, and BrainF*** support by version 7 or 8. If you know a Turing-complete language, chances are you'll be able to use it to code PHP by the end of the decade.

What about Intercal(insane paradigm)?

Hence the saying: "Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot." I certainly agree, but as ESR said about CUPS, linux and its applications have a long way to go before they can satisfy even the majority of users, let alone the complete morons.

Something perhaps like this?

If you look in the Jargon Dictionary under DWIM, you will find a much older example of this mis-smartness.

If you look in the Jargon Dictionary under DWIM, you will find a much older example of this mis-smartness.

Ever heard of DWIM? :-)

Perhaps you should look up the definition of bit rot yourself, especially the part about it being "quite rare."

Permanent Denial of Service.

Unfortunately, the proper answer to that question is "Yes, it most certainly can." That is why before testing or reconfiguring, you should always mount a scratch monkey.

ESR - Is that you?

from http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/08/1534249.shtm l?tid=99

don.g writes "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."

"Sex Tips for Geeks"

The UNIX Guru's View of Sex:
grep, touch, strip, unzip, head, mount /dev/girl -t wet, fsck, more, yes, yes, umount, sleep

hmm, not sure how to put this any other way than "check your facts".. you'd be suprised how much firepower the nerds have ;).

Clearly, you have not been paying attention.

Well, there are a lot of people who try to emulate an early 21st century version of the lifestyle they read in those books, and then people who couldn't be bothered to read but found the style and attitude cool. Eventually it spreads out to people who see The Matrix and decide to dress in black leather trenchcoats and sunglasses.

esr's jargon file entry for cyberpunk includes the cultural extension to the original literary definition.

In answer to your question: yes.
If my "blasphemy" offends others, then that's their hang up. I certainly don't see why I should sanitise my language because of some quiche-eating notion of political correctness. If you don't want to be offended, stay the fuck off the internet, and for that matter, off the streets.You never know when someone will utter a dirty word, or maybe even take the Holy Mother's name in vain!

Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.

Oh my God! What a paranoid freak that Darl McBride is! Oh, wait, he's not...

Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.

Oh my God! What a paranoid freak that Darl McBride is! Oh, wait, he's not...

Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.

Nice. I say that we throw him in a locked warehouse (ala The Running Man) with ESR. That seems like a great match.

From ESR's website... "I generally shoot plain-vanilla 230-grain copper-jacketed hardball at the range, but load blue-tip Glaser rounds for home defense. In case they fail to penetrate and I can't make a head shot, the last round in the mag is hardball." I have no idea what that means other than "headshot", but it doesn't sound good for an assailant.

And if we run out of ammo, ESR's apparently also a back belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.

Nice. I say that we throw him in a locked warehouse (ala The Running Man) with ESR. That seems like a great match.

From ESR's website... "I generally shoot plain-vanilla 230-grain copper-jacketed hardball at the range, but load blue-tip Glaser rounds for home defense. In case they fail to penetrate and I can't make a head shot, the last round in the mag is hardball." I have no idea what that means other than "headshot", but it doesn't sound good for an assailant.

And if we run out of ammo, ESR's apparently also a back belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Darl McBride, chief executive of SCO Group Inc., says he sometimes carries a gun because his enemies are out to kill him.

Nice. I say that we throw him in a locked warehouse (ala The Running Man) with ESR. That seems like a great match.

From ESR's website... "I generally shoot plain-vanilla 230-grain copper-jacketed hardball at the range, but load blue-tip Glaser rounds for home defense. In case they fail to penetrate and I can't make a head shot, the last round in the mag is hardball." I have no idea what that means other than "headshot", but it doesn't sound good for an assailant.

And if we run out of ammo, ESR's apparently also a back belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Older quote:

"C is a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language"

Don't be so fast...there could be a variety of women to see if this were included!

(I also recall him advocating some form of free love in Sex Tips for Geeks, but I'm at work and don't want to surf around to find it just now.)

Don't be so fast...there could be a variety of women to see if this were included!

(I also recall him advocating some form of free love in Sex Tips for Geeks, but I'm at work and don't want to surf around to find it just now.)

Okay, you've lost me. How has Eric lost credibility?

ESR is a controversial guy. His recent moves of questionable success/value: asking Sun to open-source Java, picking a hacker logo that no one is actually using, writing a new kernel configuration system that no one is actually using, and revising the Jargon File so that "hacker" now implies "neo-conservative."

His continued abuse of his hacker prominence to promote assault weapons is not entirely popular.

There's some question about how much IBM is paying him to research and respond to SCO.

ESR has been claiming for about six years that cheaper PCs, anti-trust battles, improvements in GNOME, and other such things will be the death of Windows and Microsoft. He even published a timeline once.

And then there's Sex Tips for Geeks and Dancing with the Gods, both of which are more than a little bit disturbing.

Eric flaunts his hacker fame (based on what? intercal and fetchmail?) to push unrelated political-fringe causes, picks fights with everyone from Scott McNealy to RMS for fun, and thinks he channels an ancient Greek sex god. Yeah, you could make an argument that his credibility is running a little bit thin...

Okay, you've lost me. How has Eric lost credibility?

ESR is a controversial guy. His recent moves of questionable success/value: asking Sun to open-source Java, picking a hacker logo that no one is actually using, writing a new kernel configuration system that no one is actually using, and revising the Jargon File so that "hacker" now implies "neo-conservative."

His continued abuse of his hacker prominence to promote assault weapons is not entirely popular.

There's some question about how much IBM is paying him to research and respond to SCO.

ESR has been claiming for about six years that cheaper PCs, anti-trust battles, improvements in GNOME, and other such things will be the death of Windows and Microsoft. He even published a timeline once.

And then there's Sex Tips for Geeks and Dancing with the Gods, both of which are more than a little bit disturbing.

Eric flaunts his hacker fame (based on what? intercal and fetchmail?) to push unrelated political-fringe causes, picks fights with everyone from Scott McNealy to RMS for fun, and thinks he channels an ancient Greek sex god. Yeah, you could make an argument that his credibility is running a little bit thin...

Every few years we hear of another nifty free-space manual input. Again and again folks learn: GUI's and the human body aren't well suited for these, at least not within the contraints of a high efficiency/low physical labor/space constrained way.

Light pens, touch screens, ultrasonic rangefinders, tracker cameras, gyroscopic whatevers - all ignore the fundamental issue of "Gorilla Arm". Simply put nobody wants to be holding out their arms making little precise motions for any length of time.

Keyboards, as awfully designed as they usually are, at least allow one's arms to hang down. The same for mice - there's a reason your typing and mousing surfaces are typically 2' lower then your worktop. Ask any craftsperson - they use worbenches precisely to avoid their arms stretched out in front of them all day.

So unless you're into interpretive dance and don't mind the slowness of big gestures (and are up for the cardio) this whole category of technology is innapropriate for extended use. Particularly for the sedentary cubed masses. Invest in some good ergo furniture and input devices, get some decent lighting, and leave the hand-waving to the PHB's.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

ESR will test only Gnome but will bash ALL open source environments

And once again, a slashdotter is up-modded for inventing lies about an article he didn't even read.

Go to that link and read the 2nd, 28th, or 57th paragraphs to check just how wrong RoLi was.

ESR will test only Gnome but will bash ALL open source environments

And once again, a slashdotter is up-modded for inventing lies about an article he didn't even read.

Go to that link and read the 2nd, 28th, or 57th paragraphs to check just how wrong RoLi was.

You have it *exactly backwards*, my friend. If there weren't so many people in the field, they'd be able to handle less volume, and be much more expensive. Outsourcing would have happened much faster, in greater quantities, than it has.

Well, I don't have it exactly backwards, but I can see your point. Still, the most expensive programmers are the cheapest.

To explain/support that statement, let me point you at This paper about Superprogrammers or, the much shorter Jargon File entry. It is claimed that some programmers are at least 1000% faster than the slowest. I claim a $80k/yr programmer will get more done (and is thus cheaper) than 3x $40k/yr "should have been lawyers". It reminds me of the saying "an engineer can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar". Compare/contrast
This Microsoft site where they think "good tools and processes" will level the field. I've got my doubts. Sounds like Microsoft hired a lot of those lawyers.

Hello? This is Eric Raymond, famous gun-toting loony-anarchist neo-pagan `witch'. If you don't know who he is, go find out.